That Stephen King Feeling

I've adopted bike riding as my sport for this summer. I found a nice old fashioned, nothing fancy bike with shiny chrome fenders and I started peddling. I think I might be naturally nosy, because I am enjoying riding around the town I live in, snooping into other peoples lives. I mean, driving in a car you really don't notice a lot of what is happening in your neighborhood, but on a bike, well that is a whole 'nother story.

I live in a town that has a lot of homes, in fact, most of them, built in the 1800's, including my own, built in 1895. All the main neighborhoods are that old, occasionally I go off into a side road neighborhood and they may be late blooming developments from the 40' and 50's, nothing more recent. Among the older homes are scattered homes from the 20's, a large sprinkling of craftsman style cottages and other past years infill building.

I frequently also ride through the main cemetery. Many of the headstones are worn smooth they are so old, and I have found birth dates back to the early 1700's. Anyway, I lose track of time and distance when I'm riding around engrossed in the neighborhoods.

Oh, number 26 has a big cat on the porch! That old junker in the backyard of 365 is gone..., I see "miss circa 1808" is getting a new coat of paint, I can't believe how much junk is in the back yard of that blue house. I wonder why it looks like no one lives in that place, and why hasn't the car at # 1902 moved in two weeks? I start to make up stories to go with the houses. Old Aunt Mildred lives here and does not want to open her curtains ever because she is afraid of the aliens living next door. Sometimes I just get a feeling from the house, I mean, you can kind of tell if a home is happy or not just by looking at it, right?

Example- Picture the home in Leave It To Beaver, or My Three Sons- got it? OK, now picture the home in Alfred Hitchcock's ground breaking classic movie Psycho. See what I mean? Ya kinda get a feel for what's going on inside. Any hoo, I don't have a run away imagination or anything like that, but I have to tell you, almost all the homes in my town look like the one in Psycho, only nicer. Some of them even have paint to rival San Francisco's famous painted ladies, but still, they are those kind of psycho style houses.

So maybe that explains what happened the other day, maybe at the heart of the matter is my life long fear of that movie Psycho, honestly, I still can't take a shower with out getting nervous.

But, as I was saying I was riding around town, being nosy and looking at all the houses and gardens and all and I had the feeling that something was watching me back. I was in the neighborhood with the three huge homes built by the first doctor who lived in town. He built a huge home on the top of the only hill in town, then, he built two homes for his two daughters, one on each side of his own. Guess he wanted them to settle nearby.

I got the feeling that those eyebrow trimmed windows were raised at me, and those houses were whispering back and forth about me. I wondered at the fact that most of the homes in this town are older than anyone who lives here. Really, it's their town. We humans are just passing through. We are temporary maintenance persons for the lumbering hulk of these Victorian and Gothic revival beauties; we are not that important except in our role to make sure they survive another generation. Then I got that creepy Stephen King kind of feeling. What if they were watching? What if they didn't like me snooping around all the time? What if...