I hit the ground hard. I remember feeling sharp pain in my legs and looking up and seeing Peter at the top of the step. I turned over to Heather who was laying under me, not moving. I looked back up and Peter was gone. My legs were broken so I crawled using only my arms to the phone. I remember calling the police and telling them about Peter and how I thought my daughter may be dead. I blacked out.

The next time I woke up I was in a hospital bed. I started screaming to see my daughter; the doctors and nurses ran in to try and calm me down.

“Ma’am we have bad news.” One of the nurses said to me after they calmed me down a little bit. “Your daughter did not make it. She suffered dramatic trauma on her way down the steps.”

I did not believe it at first, but once it hit me that she was not living when I checked her right after we fell down the steps, I began to freak out again. They injected something into my arm, causing me to black out.

The next time I awoke there were police standing over me. “Can we ask you a few questions?” one of them asked me. I nodded and lifted up my head. “ Tell us what happened.”

“Peter pushed us down the steps.”

“Who is Peter? A boyfriend or a husband?”

“No! Peter is the boy who lives in my attic.”

“Your attic? Did you put him up there?”

“No his parents did.”

“His parents? What are their names?”

“I do not know but they locked him up there in the 1800s, and he tried to kill us.”

“The 1800s? Then the boy would be dead.”

“I know. Did you think he was alive?” They stepped back and looked at each other. They called the doctor into the room and whispered something to him, frequently looking back at me.

“You think I am lying? I am telling you the truth!”

They would not listen to me though.

A few days later I was questioned again. I told them the same story. I told them the truth. Before I knew it I was on my way to a mental hospital. They thought I was insane. I told them to talk to the clerk at the corner store, but he denied everything I told them he said. They also never found any evidence of Peter and his belongings in his room in the attic.

Now I sit, old and grey, in the Slippery Rock Mental Institution, still mourning the loss of Heather, wasting away in this facility, and constantly taking medication for my aching crippled legs.