kTPFpissue 6

KTPF Magazine Issue 6 - Oct/Nov 2015
He then jokingly suggested that they should come up with a code word to refer to the thing, so that
they could talk about it in front of others without being hauled off to an asylum. He chose a word that
rhymed with ghost, but was still silly and meaningless enough to pass unremarked. From then on, the
thing occupying number seventeen was referred to as “The Blost.”
Reluctantly, the family left the restaurant after dinner and returned to number seventeen. When Red
pulled the Jeep into the parking lot, they all looked up at the master bedroom window in unison. The
shades were still open and the lights were still on, though the blue haze was no longer apparent. Lois
noticed that there was something different about the window—almost as though an invisible hand was
in the process of writing in the frost—but at that distance there was no way to tell exactly what it was,
so immediately upon entering the condo, they huddled together in a tight clump and went upstairs.
“We went directly to that window to see if we could see any kind of evidence of anything strange,” Tom
says. “I stood there at the window, and my uncle was behind me. We were looking at the windowsill
and the shades and the lights. And I noticed something on the window.
“It was a clear mark, like scratching,” he continues. “I looked closely at it, and it was like a child’s
scribble. It said, ‘Go.’ It was clearly written, but it was done in a primitive hand. It was a clear smudge.
And then I looked right down below the window, and there on the carpet was a folded twist tie, one of
the old-fashioned twist ties for a loaf of bread. I picked it up and I made a line on the window right next
to the word, ‘go,’ and it made that same smudge.”
Tom showed the twist tie to Red. “Look. It wrote it with that,” he said.
The family was simultaneously amazed and terrified. Was their “blost” now trying to communicate
with them? Was the phenomena escalating to a point where they would no longer be able to deal with
it? And what did the alleged entity mean by writing the word “go” on the window?
“We were trying to interpret what it meant,” Tom says. “Did it mean, ‘Go, get something to eat, it’s
going be all right,’ or ‘Go, get out and never come back?’ The way it had been behaving so far, it really
could have gone either way.”
He points out that until then, the blost hadn’t seemed particularly hostile toward them, the savage
breaking of the front door chain notwithstanding. But that was part of the reason that the seemingly
commanding tone of the writing was so confusing for them. “It didn’t usually communicate, it just did
things. They weren’t, for the most part, intimidating things. You could read into it if you wanted to, and
it would be spooky. But it was best not to read into things. We tried not to let our imaginations run
away with us. We just kind of accepted it. It said, ‘Go.’”
But of course, they were still snowed in on Mammoth Mountain, and couldn’t go anywhere.
You can listen to our interview of
Tom and Jenny on our YouTube channel
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