Short Horror Stories

The Place

2239 Morningside Place was easy to miss.

It was tucked back from the street, the chainlink roller gate shrouded in overgrown briar bushes so people driving by on the busy through-road wouldn't even notice it.

Unless you were deliberately hunting for it, you'd easily miss it if you walked right by outside.

You might not ever see or take note of the darkened front entrance.

An old red door crammed in against a small garage, covered with a rusted sheet metal roof for an awning.

Ugly, old, rusty and unassuming.

Set on a rather large lot, overrun with summer foliage, it was a quiet, sleepy-looking little place.

Pushed back far enough as it was, and with the busy road, people passing by never heard the screams of the victims inside.

Not even from the alleyway that ran behind the place,  of which transients and teenagers often frequented.

Unfortunately for the victims, the people that could've stood a chance of hearing them best were the alleyway traffic, and the vast majority of them were either drunk for the first time or ten years a meth user.

In this way, 2239 Morningside Place went overlooked for years.

No one in the fairly nice, if somewhat older neighborhood noticed anything awry with the place, other than it was unkept and ugly, if they noticed it at all.

The lotalso happened to be set right on a curve of the road, directly across from a prominent turnoff, so those driving by were usually focused on the road.

The majority of people walking by out front were little old people with their little old dogs, most deaf as a stone and half-blind.

Hidden perfectly in plain sight.

So no matter how throat-wrenchingly loud Sarah-Beth screamed, wailed, or shouted for someone's attention, she got none.

Out of 64 victims, she was the only one to ever get out of the garage house.

One day her captor was careless. He had grown lazy, and cocky, one could say, and he had left the cellar door unlocked behind him when he left on a midday errand.

Sara-Beth had long since played at picking the insidious locks of the place, including her shackle locks.

That fateful day in midsummer, she used all of her power of play to try and get away.

And she made it out into the daylight, for the first time in three months. It felt a lifetime ago since she had felt the sun on her face.

She was a different person now, at least 20lbs. thinner, with deep, sunken black eyes in a pale face she hardly recognized.

Barefoot, she ran across the gravel in the drive 'til she reached and was clinging to the chainlink gate, pulling and shaking, thrashing on it, and screaming. Screaming until it felt like her lungs were on fire.

It was a Tuesday, the weather was fair.

A few cars passed by, but no one saw her. Nobody stopped.

She clawed at the lock, but she had dropped her hoarded bobby pin somewhere back behind her and so couldn't hope to pick it.

Sobbing, she started to climb the chainlink, but she had lost a lot of her strength from being sedentary for the last few weeks. Her movements were slow and faltering.

Just as she reached the top of the gate, she slipped and tumbled back down.

Then she spied the gatecode box, half-obscured by the bushes, and stumbled over to it.

What could the code possibly be?! The address!

She knew she had seen it before, but now couldn't quite think of it.

2231? 2234? 3343?

With fingernails broken and bleeding, she feverishly typed in sequence after sequence, each one earning her only a rude BLARE noise in negative response.

She screamed and hit the box with the flat of her hand, then somebody grabbed her from behind.

A large, rough hand clasped over her mouth and dragged her backward, kicking and thrashing, back into the dark little building.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Edwin Cover kidnapped and killed over 64 women, and was never caught.

The bodies weren't recovered until after his death.

They had been hidden in the walls when he had run out of room to bury them out back. Sarah-Beth was among them.

2239 Morningside Place was easy to miss.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Thanks for reading! Happy #spookyseason #spookyreads #horrorshorts and happy Halloween weekend, Minions!

HRH