A Series of Shorts

The House

There's a house at the end of the street. It's roof caved and it's walls crumbling, yet it remains still and standing. The imperfect visage of the house cries dirty tears. Mud splatters trickled down from the windows once, and stained the peeling walls that would forever hold the memory of the vandals that wrecked it. You may take this melancholy house for granted, for behind the chained front door lies a whole other story, one that no one lives to tell the tale.

Tales are passed around like a twisted Chinese Whisper of a stooping man who lives behind the crooked doors. Some say he preys on the innocent and takes them through the doors, blind to what's inside, and that beneath the floor boards he keeps them, silent and trembling, quaking with fear. No light touches their calloused skin, no spring breeze brushes past them, no sweet smells work their way to their noses; only darkness, stillness and a stale stench of mildew.

Others believe that they hear a faint satanic laughter coming from the inside and thuds and scrapes of metal being hauled along the hard wood floors. No one has seen what is hiding within the house. So perhaps the tales, and all the sounds are pretend. Just a horror story for children to keep them away from what hides within.

- 2017