Dark Rose ✔️

It Had Dying Roses

That old house down the block? Everybody said it was haunted. The grandeur of its age and awful appearance fueled the rumor well.

It was a house with chipping paint and busted windows. The closest neighbors swore they could often hear screams and unsettling laughter coming from it. Often the wind whistled in from one dilapidating plank of wood and out the other, causing passersby to mistake the breeze for disturbing whispers.

Me? I only ever focused on the life sprouting around it. The vines of its ivy held tightly onto their sprouting white petal flowers until the breath of Autumn came by to rustle them away. The petals would fall onto the dirt like wedding confetti. Its surrounding grounds were also blessed with flowers in soft yellow and pink. The grass was evergreen, but it was overgrown.

Despite the ghastly exterior of the house itself, the bit of blooming life around it gave it so much semblance of hope. The hope of a new start, which I so desperately sought back then.

The only thing strikingly odd about the house to me was its rose bushes along its porch. They were the only plants withering and succumbing to death when I first moved in. It hurt my heart to see them like that.

Seeing such beautiful things turn black and lifeless rubbed me the wrong way. I hated seeing death, period. More so since my wife passed away. She left me after fighting cancer for five years. Back on moving day, it was only a year since I'd buried her.

I bought the house despite its reputation over the phone, much to the pleasure of the realtor. Of course, I didn't buy it because I'm a ghost hunter or a mad man for the occult. I bought it for my late wife, Lila.

We always passed by the house whenever we went for walks around the neighborhood. Personally, I had never felt dread looking upon it. And Lila- Well, her being who she was, she always saw things differently than others.

My 'gurl' was a funny person. She would point at it and say, "It just needs love."

I once asked, "Oh, you mean it needs you?" It was a rhetorical question, but she answered anyway.

"Yes. It needs me. I would love it. And if there is a spirit in there, then I'd win it over with love and morning muffins." Her smile was infectious.

As I've said, I bought it for her. Back then, it was the only way I could grieve. She said it needed love, and I made it my mission to be the one to give it some. A month after the buying concluded, I had already started some renovations to show commitment to my mission. It was only little things like rewiring the outlets and updating the insulation.

Moving day was rainy but pleasant neither-the-less. I stood outside my new abode, admiring the work still needed to be done. Every now, and again I would see a shadow move behind the dirty windows. I couldn't have cared less about what they were or who they were, or why there were shadows in the first place. Ghost didn't scare me because I gained back a companion in a ghostly way right after making up my mind to buy the house.

Out of the corner of my eye, I'd catch Lila's side profile now and again. Only to turn around and see no one next to me. At some point, I learned not to turn around anymore. That way, I kept her next to me every day. Foolish? Perhaps, but I would've done anything stupid or sane to keep her with me.

When I stepped into the house, I noticed that the inside was far worse than the outside. Its walls were water-stained, and its shaggy carpet was matted. When I inhaled the air in the hall, a rather odd thing became apparent to me right away. It should have smelled like mold and dust, but instead, it smelled like rose petals.

I went to the kitchen, and that's when the air smelled drastically different. It was foul by comparison, like something rotting away. The smell was so awful I choked and had to retreat to the hallway. Why the realtor had forgotten to tell me about such a stench over the phone was a mystery to me. The thought of backing out right then and there crossed my mind. It was Lila, my wife, that held me back. I remember seeing her laugh at me out of the corner of my right eye.

In turn, I laughed too. The matter of the house was already settled. For better or worse, the house was mine. So, I went back to the kitchen to tackle the stench. Only to find I ended up in the living room instead.

I remember feeling the strangest feeling in my chest as I took a step back. I mean, a moment ago, I took the same route to get away from the kitchen.

Instead of it leading me back to it, it took me to the living room?

What an interesting development, right, Roger? I swear I could hear Lila's voice in my head, but it pained me that it was only a remnant from our time together. I caught a grin on her profile from my left and shook my head in disbelief.

Me, the skeptic, held a reservation in my tone, "Interesting? Like the time you found out your class was room 124, but you had stayed in 165 for a week straight before finding out."

My shoulders slumped, "It's been a long day," I muttered, feeling exhausted, "either that or I'm losing the plot." I shook my head and walked up the stairs to the master bedroom.

The week before, I had our bed delivered at least. Immediately I went to it and laid down. I hadn't been able to shake this habit of looking at the ceiling and watching the shadows sway. So, for an hour or two, that's all I did. Like always, I wished to find Lila's face staring right back down at me somehow.

Time was a blur at some point. Deeper and deeper, I fell into the past. I remembered the late-night-outs, the passionate releases, and the shared peace between my wife and me. And just when I stopped at the memory of her sunken face the moment before the flatline- I heard a knock at my door.

I bolted up. The half-dead heart in me nearly leaped out of my chest. My senses, for some reason, waited for another knock, yet it did not come.

It's an old house, of course, it's going to make strange sounds. It must have been a wood board expanding. Nothing more. I thought to myself as I relaxed. I shut my eyes for a second and rubbed my temples with my fingers.

The relief didn't last long, though. Once I opened my eyes, I heard the knock again. My eyes wandered to the doorway, and my breath stilled as the door began to open. Soon there stood a pale woman with a hideous smirk on her face. She was clad in 1920's flapper fashion that must have seen better days, for it was caked in blood and mud at that moment. I scrambled backward and rubbed my eyes, thinking I must have dozed off and gotten lost in some nightmare. But the sweat dotting my brow and the hammering of my heart told me this was pretty real.

The young woman started to laugh, but it was like she was on mute. I closed my eyes, thinking I was seriously going crazy, only to open them and see her by my bed, hovering. Her diamond blue gaze bore right into the marrow of my bones, and the scent of dead roses filled the room. Once again, I could swear she was laughing, but it was like she was out of sync. Within a frightened heartbeat, she jumped on me out of nowhere.

A feeling of dread came furiously. I felt like I was drowning. Although the flapper was skinny, she was heavy and weighed me down. I panicked.

What could I do? Run? Push her off? What was happening? Was this real? I kept questioning myself. I mean, not being afraid of a ghost was one thing, and not being afraid to die was something entirely different.

Faster than I could stop her, the woman snaked her arms around me and buried her face in the crook of my neck. That's when I felt it – a burning pain that began where she bit me and seeped to every screaming cell. I didn't know what else to do but call the name of the only thing that ever brought me a sense of security.

"Lila!" In a fury of light, a familiar hand pulled the manic woman off of me.

Before I could grab the hand of my savior, I woke up to an empty room. What had happened turned out to be a nightmare after all.

Then why had it felt so damn real? I didn't answer the anxiety. I was too scared too.