The Complete Crimson Forest series

Bryxx: Chapter 2

I wake up to complete darkness and sit up with a short gasp. It takes me a minute to put together where I am, but I have no idea what has woken me with such a start. I gaze around my old bedroom, squinting through the darkness. All I can make out is the shape of the two dressers, the nightstand, the doorway, and the closet. Maybe aunt Betty had to get up to use the washroom and has wakened me. She is old, and she always insists that her bladder is shrinking with old age. I don't know if that's something that actually happens or if she's joking, so I usually just giggle and muster a grin.

I lie back down and close my eyes. After all the cleaning we did today, I'm exhausted, and if we're going to have to do it all again tomorrow, I'm going to need to be rested up. Just as I'm falling asleep again, a loud bang, like the one I heard upon my arrival here, sounds again, only this time it's closer, louder, and definitely not something I am expecting to hear in the dead of night. I jump in surprise and leap out of bed, determined to get to the bottom of this.

I race to the light switch and flick it on before peeking into the hallway and scampering to the spare room where aunt Betty is staying while she's here. I press my ear to the door carefully to see if it's her banging around, but the light is off and I can hear her deep breathing. Stumped, and still a bit enthralled by adrenalin from the surprise, I continue surveying the house. Maybe there's a bird or a bat stuck up in the attic or something is banging against the house in the slight wind. I never inspected the outside of the house when I got here so that could be the case.

I sigh in annoyance and decide to head back to bed-I'm being ridiculous-but just when I'm climbing back under the covers, the bang returns with a vengeance. I swear it's getting louder each time. How is aunt Betty sleeping through this? How am I supposed to fall asleep with this noise? That's it.

Throwing my covers off to the side, I get up again and head to the far end of the creaky country house where the stairs to the attic sit. We used to use the attic as a playroom when we were little kids, but as we got older, it slowly turned into a storage room, much like the cellar-like basement.

After climbing the steps to the attic, I find the door locked. My mom used to lock it to keep me from rummaging through all the neatly stored boxes in search of things that I told her she could put in storage but I then soon after changed my mind and wanted it back, like my frilly pink quilt that I thought I'd outgrown as a teenager but then decided it'd look nice on my bed and I missed it. She wasn't too happy to find my banging around up there and tearing open boxes in search for it.

I jiggle the knob and push my weight into the door to no avail. Losing my patience, I run back to my bedroom, grab the keys, and then return exasperatedly. I swallow hard when I see the door cracked open before I have the chance to put the key in the lock. Am I losing my mind? I know it was shut and locked. I know it was. Is someone else in the house? I can't help but let my imagination wander and wonder if someone is living in the attic. This house has been abandoned for nearly a decade, it's not unfeasible. I glance back to my aunt's room, my heart pounding erratically. Her door is still closed, light off.

I debate my next move. Do I continue into the attic alone and unarmed, do I wake aunt Betty and explain what happened, or do I grab some sort of weapon and do this armed? Deciding that I might be half asleep or losing my mind like my mother, I decide against waking up aunt Betty. There's no reason to make her think I'm crazy like my mom and have her worrying. Also, like I noted earlier, there were no footprints throughout the dusty house when I arrived. Someone can't just be hiding in the attic without food or water.

Just in case, though, I grab a mop from the hallway that we were using earlier and use the hand to gently push open the attic door. It creaks eerily as it slowly swings open. The small of mothballs hits me like something else. God, I hate that smell. It's darker than hell in the attic since there's no way for the moonlight to get in, not even a little bit. I pull the string that switches the light on and the room illuminates immediately. I quickly turn in a full circle, looking for any danger, but all I see are boxes piled atop each other. Clearly, I'm losing it. There is nothing up here that shouldn't be. Maybe it's returning to this house that has me all jumpy. Maybe this place is cursed. I'm not superstitious, nor do I believe in anything paranormal, but this place is seriously just awful. The longer I stay here, the more I want to go back home.