Short Horror Stories

Home Sweet Home

Trigger warnings: discussions of animal abuse and murder.

"What is it, girl?" Harriet asked the snarling brown Cocker Spaniel like she could reply and inform her of all of her life troubles. "Did you eat something bad in the night?" She still got no response, only low deep growls from her bedside. "Well, alright then. I guess I'm going to check the chicken coops myself,"

Harriet defeatedly sighed, swinging her feet out of bed and onto the cold carpetless floor several inches away from the hackle-covered dog. She couldn't understand what was wrong with Sam this morning. She only ever got this way with strangers.

Harriet got up and stretched beside the closed bedroom curtains. Through the crack, she could see that several feet of snow still coated the forest earth. Thankfully, it hadn't appeared to have gotten deeper overnight, or she'd surely drown in the whiteness.

"Do you not want to go out in the snow? Is that it? Because I sure as hell don't blame you!" Harriet joked, but Sam wasn't amused. She was now baring her teeth with such ferocity that her lips receded. Harriet shook her head. "I'll leave you to it."

Venturing into the light of the bathroom, Harriet let out a gasp. Her knuckles were specked with little dots of crusted blood. "Did I punch the wall in my sleep?" She shakily asked herself. "No, that isn't possible. The bed is nowhere near the wall."

The most frightful sight of all was revealed when Harriet looked into the mirror. There were three deep-red raw scratches adorning her face, from the top of her forehead to the bottom of her left cheek. She racked her brain, trying to remember what she had done last night, but nothing came to her.

Harriet shakily pulled on the wet glistening maroon wellies stood by the bath and the khaki-coloured parka that had been hanging on the back of the bathroom's door. The coat's outside was still damp, meaning she had been out in the snow last night.

"I'm not going insane," Harriet repeated aloud as she washed her face. She looked straight into the mirror, her mouth a hard line. "I'm not insane," she said again, despite feeling like a stranger in her own body.

Walking down the dark staircase, Harriet immediately knew something was wrong. The temperature downstairs was starkly lower than the temperature upstairs. This was further confirmed by the sight of a white cloud each time she breathed out. The front door had to be open.

Reaching the bottom of the staircase Harriet's fears were confirmed. Someone had kicked the door in. The part of the frame where the lock used to be was splintered and jagged.

Harriet fearfully swallowed. Someone had broken in. She tiptoed into the kitchen. Her body's hair stood to attention as she sourced a weapon. She happened on a kitchen knife. Her shaking hand fished in her pocket, but the cellular device was not inside. "Shit," she whispered, looking around to ensure the intruder wasn't in sight. "I'll have to go to a neighbour."

Stepping outside into the morning darkness, Harriet's piercing blue eyes immediately fell to the snow floor. No retreating footsteps were in sight, only a single pair leading to the house. They had come from the trees behind the chicken coops. Knowing the intruder was inside, Harriet stepped into each footstep to disguise her fleeing ones. Every noise of the forest caused her to stop her disguising dance as she feared that at any minute, she'd be attacked. But the attack never came.

Upon reaching the rotting chicken coops, Harriet poked her head into each front door, knife in hand. She was surprised not to hear the hens, but once her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, it quickly became apparent why they had taken a vow of silence. Each one of the hens had been violently disembowelled. Their feathers and blood had completely redesigned the interiors of the coops.

Harriet brought a chilled hand to her mouth to stop herself from gagging at the bloody murder sight. She tried to imagine who could do such an inhumane thing while the warm tears cascaded down her cheeks. "I'm sorry," she muttered, finally pulling her eyes away from the stomach-churning sight.

Harriet began following the footsteps again, half-wanting to scream at what she had just witnessed. It would soon be her if she didn't get away more quickly.

The sun was beginning to rise in the distance. She could tell from the orange and yellow hues in the sky just over the tree line. "Just a little further, Har-"

Suddenly, the snow-covered ground came up to greet Harriet's cheeks, sending the knife flying from her grasp somewhere into the frozen water vapour surrounding her. She lifted her now chilled face and turned slightly to see what she had tripped on. "Oh, my God!" Harriet screamed, forgetting about the madman half a mile away.

She crawled through the snow half-getting back to her feet, half-stumbling as she reached the sides of the two bodies.

"No, no, no!" Harriet wailed, bringing a trembling hand to the blue neck of the lifeless man staring wordlessly at the sky. He had no pulse. Deep down, Harriet knew he wouldn't, given that his and his female companion's intestines were littering the ground like crude bunting.

Upon retracting her hand, the contents of Harriet's stomach pushed up her oesophagus and out of her mouth onto the whiteness beside her juddering form. She was in shock. How could this possibly be happening?

Regaining some composure, Harriet wiped her cold, chapped, sick-covered lips. Finally, looking at the bodies again, she saw something glistening amid their side-by-side corpses. It was a wallet. Harriet leaned slightly over the man, careful not to harm his body further, as her fingers reached and grasped the leather square case. She emptied the contents onto the floor, desiring to identify the John and Jane Doe beside her. A couple of pennies, pounds and notes fell out, with an unsatisfying clatter and a Polaroid photograph. Harriet picked it up between the gap of her thumb and index finger. She collapsed backwards into the snow as she realised what she was looking at.

In the photograph was the man and woman before her alive, smiling. A brown Cocker Spaniel sat before them, panting happily, posing in front of the house Harriet had just fled from. At the picture's bottom in black Sharpie were the names Adam, Julie and Brownie.

It hadn't been Harriet's home. She was the intruder and the couple's killer.