Storytime: You look up at the stars, wondering why you’re here. Not generally, but specifically here. In front of this house. This house that has been just outside your vision; something that can’t quite be seen. Sitting behind the cemetery, it looms up over the forest, like a statue above a mausoleum. Its boarded up windows seem to stare into your soul. You recall the call that brought you to this point. “The house. The house on the hill. The house all but forgotten. The house no one thinks about. The house. The house,” a voice rasps in your ear. “Who IS this? What do you want?” “Go to the house. Curiosity killed the cat but satisfaction brought him back. The house will know” Click You were left staring at your phone. You tried to ignore it you really did; but curiosity got the better of you and now you’re standing here wondering why? Why here? Why you? Moving toward the house, you wonder what you honestly expect to happen. Arriving at the front door, you try to look in through the boarded windows. Seeing nothing but blackness, you grab the handle, sort of hoping that it will be locked so you have an excuse to leave. But of course, it opens. You enter the room, chiding yourself for coming at night, for not bringing a flashlight or something, for being here in the first place. You’re sure there’s a reason no one notices this place. Do you really want to find out why? Feeling along the wall, you find a light switch. You try it. Nothing happens. Great. Just Great. You think. As your eyes finally begin to adjust to the near total blackness, you notice stairs in front of you; a set leading up and a set leading down. To your right you see a partially emptied but otherwise normal looking, from what you can see, living room. To your left, you see what appears to be a dining room. Moving to your right, you stumble through the room. It feels like you hit every piece of furniture in the room despite that it’s sparsely furnished. CLANG! You jump, startled. Reaching down, your hand lands on a lantern. You find the switch and try it. The sudden burst of unexpected light momentarily blinds you. While you can’t see, you could swear you hear something. You can’t tell where its from or quite what it was, but it feels familiar somehow. It itches at the edges of your thoughts, like a rat in the walls. When your sight returns, you look around taking note of the dark, dank, damp decay that perverses the house. The light from the lantern somehow seems to create more shadow than light. You continue through the floor, passing an emptied bathroom into a gutted kitchen and on into the dining room. You notice the dust covering everything undisturbed. But, the rooms seem to have an occupied empty-ness. That intentional removal of things to make people think there’s no one and nothing here. The dust and decay seem intentional as well as if the house is saying “There’s nothing here. Nothing at all. But all the same you’re not welcome here” There it is. That noise. Only this time you realize you’re not actually sure you heard it. You almost think the sound bypassed your ears and went straight into your head. Not letting that unnerving thought fully form, you decide to continue your search. Unsure which direction to take, you walk through the rooms again slower, opening any drawer not already in pieces on the floor, hoping something, anything, will catch your eye to keep from having to make a choice. Not finding anything you… Wait, there it is again. What is that? A sort of sneaky silence, the sort of noise that isn’t noise but the planned silence of someone, something, trying their best to not to be heard. That “too quiet” noise. That unnatural silence. For some reason it reminds you of the voice on the phone. Shaking the unease that thought brings, you rifle through your pockets for a coin. Pulling one out you decide heads for up and tails for down. Ting. Flpt. Plp. Phew. Heads. You head upstairs. Arriving at the second floor, you notice another set of stairs to your right leading further up and beyond it a doorway that obviously used to have a door but that is no longer the case. In front of you dim light pours in through a glass door that’s surprisingly intact. You move toward it, looking out. The door leads out onto a small balcony. Behind the house, you see what looks like a shed and more forest stretching out into the distance. You find this door locked, securely, like someone was worried someone else was going to jump; but you weren’t really planning on leaving this way anyway. You head back toward the stairs deciding to save the doorway for last since you will have to come back this way anyway. You come to an empty room that could have been almost anything. This room looks more like it’s always been empty. Ignoring it, you move on. The next room is as picked clean as the first, although this one seems like it was cleared out later. You pass another balcony. This one has double glass doors set over the entrance. The last room though, has pictures and newsclippings all over the walls. Thumbtacks and string connect pictures and stories in a seemingly random pattern crisscrossing and entangled like a web of lies. There are sleeping bags on the floor, and it looks like someone has been living here recently. Within a couple of days anyway. This seems like this room was chosen because it overlooks the entrance. It feels more like whoever was here wasn’t trying as hard to hide their presence in the house; like they only wanted people outside not to know they were there rather than for the place to seem abandoned. Looking closer at the walls, you notice that most of it is about the town below the house and the house itself. The rest seems to be random folk stories and legends. There it is again, that noise. Only this time you feel the air move. Not nearby but somewhere in the house. A subtle change that if you were somewhere else during the day you wouldn’t notice, but you’re here and it seems drastic despite its minuity. Trying to ignore the goosebumps rising on your arms, you leave the room and head back to that first doorway. The room is surprisingly bare but the closet doors are intact and shut. This room has the same occupied empty-ness as the rest of the house. You open the closet doors to find stacks and boxes of paper. Glancing at a few, you find them to be mostly letters, the kind sent between family members, the kind with useless talk of things no one else would care about. Leaving the letters, you head upstairs. You find yourself in an attic with sloped ceilings and a window letting in the dim light of a moonless night behind you. You discover trunks of old clothes and books, both too moldy and old to make out any details. And more letters. A lot more letters. All over the floor like a gust of wind blew them out of place a long time ago and no one was around to bother with picking them up. In the middle of the floor, you find a picture of you, obviously taken by someone taking care not to be noticed by their subject. thud. You look up from your shock, realizing that must have come from the one part of the house you haven’t checked. thud. thud. You move downstairs to the second floor… Thud. …To the first floor… Thud. …You hesitate at the top of the stairs headed down to the basement… THUD! …You move carefully down the stairs. Something flies past you as you reach the bottom. THUD! You see a figure off to your left that somehow seems not quite there, but more like they’re fading into the foreground rather than the background. Something catches your eye just outside your vision. You look away from the figure for a moment. Looking back you realize it’s gone. You hear footsteps running up the stairs. You look; nothing there. The front door slams. Silence. Not that unnatural silence from before but the creaking, chirping natural silence of a house on a hill in a forest that isn’t actually silence. Looking around you see even more letters scattered across the floor. You pick several up and in trying to read them, you realize they make no sense. Deciding that either they’re in code or so indecipherable that the words have started to look like other words, you ignore them. You move through the space noticing the light from the lantern now seems slightly more like light and less like something to make the shadows more noticeable. You discover a door on the far wall. A big, dark door. The sort of door small children and books would say leads to another world and not necessarily a good one. You grab the handle and turn it. The door opens to blackness that not even the lantern can penetrate. …. … .. . .. … …. Bring-bring! You wake up to the sound of your phone going off. Sleepily you crawl across your bed to reach it. “Hello?” “The house. The house on the hill.”
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 00:50:01 +0000
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