Markimash: I'm Afraid to Believe

Chapter One

"Alright Yami. New house, new town, all new possibilities."

The two-story house was located at the end of an aptly named Desolate Road, which led from the center of the town a mile or so north, where it ended in a dead end turn-around.

The house itself was painted a depressing grey and the windows were foggy from years of neglect. The lawn had been recently cut, but the grass was a sickly green and had a few bare patches.

The fence had fallen over in several places and looped around to the back of the house, where it enclosed a small patio and a decrepit shed with peeling paint. The only nice thing about the house was the fact that the other houses around it were in worse shape.

As Yami was pulling into his new driveway, he couldn't help but wonder why his neighbors kept their houses in such disarray. He had originally wanted to move in and start meeting people right away, but now the thought of knocking on doors and saying hello seemed like a horrid idea.

As he turned off his engine, Yami looked back down the way he had come. In the distance, he could see the local general store, barely visible behind some bare trees that were losing their leaves to autumn. It was getting to be late afternoon, just when the bugs were coming out and the sun was making its way to the horizon.

"I have to meet people eventually," Yami reminded himself, fishing in his pocket for his new house key.

It had been given to him by a quiet, elderly woman dressed all in black who had shown him the house a few weeks before. She explained quietly it was the only house for sale in the whole town and with that, she had presented the key. She didn't ask if he was going to make an offer on the house: she already knew he was.

It wasn't the best house in the world, but Yami decided he could make something out of it. The idea of moving anywhere else gave him a dizzy, nauseous feeling. He had been wanting to move for a while, but this town seemed to have the strongest attraction, like an invisible force was pulling him to live there.

Despite the fact that the town was twenty miles from the nearest civilization with an actual hospital, Yami had a truck bring in his furniture right away. He supposed the ominous mountains and miles of forest around the town could be soothing in the summer when things greened up a bit.

With a little restoration, even the house could become pleasant, perhaps with some flowers under the windows and a little paint for the interior that wasn't peeling.

Jokingly, Yami had asked the elderly woman if the house was haunted. She gave him a dry smile and said no, that as far as she was concerned, ghosts did not exist. Then she changed the subject quickly, pointing out the chandelier in the dining room, rushing on to say it was left by the previous owner.

Of course, Yami had tried to bring up the topic of the previous owner and what exactly had happened to him, but the woman either didn't know or didn't want to say, she never made eye contact with Yami when he asked. She always stared at some distant point over his shoulder.

In truth, that disturbed Yami a little more than he wanted to let on. What's more, the two men who had unloaded his furniture mentioned as they were leaving that the town scared them to death and they couldn't wait to get out.

"I've moved myself into a horror movie," Yami had muttered as he was returning to his apartment one last time to get some boxes of fragile items he hadn't trusted the truck to transport. He had considered that a lot, especially with his love of all things horror, but somehow this town didn't seem like the set of a horror movie. There was certainly a creepy feeling, but he didn't think a demon was hiding under his bed or anything.