The KaraMelik

From: Anonymous
Story type: Angel
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio
Source: Form Submission

(Possibly related to "Interesting Encounter" dated Sept. 26 1995. The event described below took place in 1983. similar events have been reported to me by the mother of one of my employees (an event which took place in Gainesville, Florida) and another of my employees (an event which took place in Sarasota, Florida)

(I"ve named my visitor the "KaraMelik." The name is two Turkish words: "Kara" meaning "Black" or "Dark", and "Melik" roughly meaning "Spirit.")

I had just moved into a new house on the hills above the Ohio River, in Cincinnati. I shared with home with several others. I"d changed the lock to my room off the bat as a means of securing my privacy; I alone had the key. My life in the house was pretty normal, except for a few unexplainable events; I seemed to have the ability to walk from my room, down a flight of stairs and out the front door to retreive the morning newspaper forgetting to turn off the motion and entry alarms installed in the house. I found myself, several times, standing inside the foyey, having retrieved the paper and realizing the alarms hadn"t gone off, only to have my next movement set them off. Several experiments latter proved that neither moving too fast or too slowly would guide me though the motion detectors. No experiment could be conceived to even attempt rationalization of having opened the door without triggering the alarm.

That kind of weird, I"ll say, "non-plused" energy seemed to surround me there. Having just read James Merrill"s poems on use of the Oui-Ja Board, curiousity drove me to the Board and introduced me to a voice which claimed that I did not exist. Concerned that the voice might be that of someone who once lived in the house, I concluded research on the history of both the house and its former occupants. Tracing their history proved rather easy. I worked at the local historical society which maintained a complete history -- including a full compliment of photographs, letter-books, and diaries -- of the house and the family, the lineage, which had built and occupied it from 1853 to just a year or so prior to my arrival in 1983. The only thing unusual in their history -- for their time -- was its matrilinial succession. And, nothing gave me cause to suspect the voice or the tale I"m about to tell were related to a haunting. I finally set the Board aflame in the fire place. The voice had become increasingly insistent upon my non-existence and sputtering broken words about a death it claimed I suffered -- stabbed -- and claims of "death is what the tower begs" -- autosuggestions, if you will as I suspect the voice might have been my own, of suicide, leaping from the tower -- a kind of widow"s watch -- which among other architectural details gave the house its character.

Days later, the door to my room securely locked, I was awakened at 2:30 a.m. by the sound of the door opening. The sound was theatrical, it seemed, as its hinges had never made sounds before. Entering the room and closing the door, a dark being stood looking in my direction as I lay still as the figure of death itself in my bed. The being was dark indeed; it seemed an outline filled with absolute plenum. The outline was broad and towered, almost entirely obstructing my view of the door in front of which it stood. As it approached my bed side, I noticed that the figure had what seemed wings, but not wings as one often sees angels depicted. Rather, a description of a diver wearing two large air tanks strapped to his back might be more appropriate. It had no other discernable features.

As it stood by my bedside, I felt no malevolence and it made no gestures. The being stood passively, seeming to look down on me. -- I couldn"t really tell; as I"ve said, I couldn"t discern features. Its eyes, had it any, must have been as black as the darkness out of which it seemed to have been made. A short while passed after which it stepped back from the bed, turned, and left opening and closing the door. The same curiousity which weeks earlier had driven me to the Board now compelled me out of bed. Slipping on a robe, I listened at the door for footsteps and hearing none turned the door knob. The door was still locked, so I groped for the key, still in the lock inside my room.

I stepped gently from my room into the winding hall which connected my room, an addition, to the rest of the house. The hall was so dark that I seemed formless and, as the voice from the Board had said, might not have existed apart from my thoughts and the silence otherwise. There seemed nothing ahead of me, until footsteps of a being that might too have stopped to listen for me, could be heard ahead, making their way toward the tower.

Now, inside the old house, I could see the dark spirit, the "KaraMelik" as I"ve come to know it, waiting on a rise near the key pad which controled the alarm. I recall the alarm signaled with its red light that the motion detectors and entry alarms on the floor below were armed. Neither it or I would test those alarms as, having taken note of me, it turned and continued toward the tower. The dark spirit disolved into the darkness of the stairwell that led to a small room one flight up. The steps moaned beneath it as they had moaned beneath me in past visits to the room in the tower. There, it must have continued up the remaining flight of stairs to the roof of the tower. I didn"t follow too closely for having been noticed.

I waited for a time in the tower room before building the courage to make the last flight of stairs myself. As I waited, I looked out the tower windows -- facing north and south -- fearing, against even my wildest dreams, I"d been visited by an alien and all connection to the Oui-Ja Board might have been coincidence, that death -- after all -- was not "what the tower begs." From the north window, I could see the long empty semi-circular drive to and from the house, meandering lonely from out of and back into a dark wood where nothing moved. From the south window, I looked out over the tin roof of the house. Dried leaves from this September"s early fall congregated in the gutters between the cathedral roof over the upstairs library and the living room below where I"d fed the Board to the flames just days before and the flat roof over the master bedroom. Beyond the roof, I surveyed the Ohio River and the low hills of northern Kentucky. The sounds of night trains which passed on the rails at the foot of the hill where vacant. Even the river barges whose horns usually cried into the night like widows for lost lovers were silent. There silence and the stillness of leaves convinced me it would be safe to approach.

As I slid open the trap door to the tower"s roof, the stars in a clear sky beconned. No one, nothing was there. The dark being had vanised, it seemed. Kentucky captured my gaze. Its lights twinkling like stars, it seemed a heaven I might reach. It was no wonder, I thought, scrutinizing its promise, the Indians who"d once lived here considered it a sacred land, a place of hunting for the dead. I allowed my lips to form around the words taken from the Board, "You are not real. You do not exist!"

I am interested, of course, in sightings of the KaraMelik. Unlike the encounter described in "Interesting Encounter", the KaraMelik seems to have been more corporal and not in the least malevolent.