Super Shorties

Back to the Bone House

I opened my eyes knowing what would greet me and moved forward down the long hallway. Shadows danced across the walls cast by the flickering flames perched atop tall candles whose red wax had melted down in sanguine rivulets over the skulls in the alcoves frozen in silent screams of terror.

My steps echoed through the dead space, the pressure of each foot landing on the floor cracking and crunching as the dry interwoven bones snapped beneath me. Farther down the hall and the blanketing silence was broken by a soft buzzing like the static on a TV growing louder as I drew closer. A few more steps and the frenzied dancing of the shadows changed, leaping over piles of what from my standpoint seemed to be dirty laundry. Another step and a great cloud lifted.

Flies, thousands of flies rose off the lumpy masses allowing the candle light to illuminate the bits of gleaming bone and planes of fat white wriggling maggots. They filled mouths and cascaded from empty hollow eye sockets. The nearly paper transparent skin crawled and shifted as the magots inched their way through the decaying flesh.

Once I turned screaming here and before that, when the floor broke beneath me. But now I had seen these horrors so often that it almost bored me. I had almost become desensitized to this gore. Maybe tonight I would finally meet the demon.

At the end of the hall was a room that held the answer to all my problems. There was a demon in that room who beckoned from the darkness every time I started down the hall. Why it chose to take my form I had no clue.

I was close to the end of the hall, just fifteen feet maybe twenty.  One of the corpses fell sideways spilling its bloated intestines across my bare foot in a slithery putrid mass. My gorge rose and I fell to my knees vomiting onto the corpse while my hands grasped at the bones that made up the floor and my pj pants soaked up the juices leaking from the chest cavity. Bile burned my throat and the sickly sweet smell of decay choked me. I had failed again. Damn it all. The hallway tunneled before me as I was sucked backwards from the house into a spiraling abyss.

I opened my eyes to my ceiling grey with  the light of the coming dawn and whimpered I was still too weak. At this rate I would never get to the end of the hall. It has taken me three years just to get halfway to the door at the end. I started having these nightmares when I was fifteen after my mom remarried to a total asshole with two kids from his last wife left him. I did not blame her one bit,
Jarred was an abusive piece of shit but my mother was blind to his faults.

“He's just under a lot of stress.” She’d say. Or “You shouldn't bother him so much.” And when he raised his voice or threw his beer bottle at me my dear sweet mother ignored it. She pretended that he didn't hit me or that his kids didn't walk all over me. Jessica took my phone last week because she liked it more than her own so I was stuck using the landline if I wanted to talk to my only friend.

Kylie and my therapist were the only people who listened. My psychiatrist was more interested in my dreams and what they meant.

I knew what my dreams meant. They offered an out from this hell. I just had to get to the end of the hall and I would be safe.

I sighed and rolled out of bed shivering slightly. My room had been moved to the attic where the heat never quite reached in the winter and where it settled in the summer like an oven. I pulled on sweats and a long sleeve shirt under the jacket getting ready for my morning run. There was an old cherry tree growing close to the garage which one of my two windows overlooked. This provided me with the way in and out of the house whenever I wanted to in perfect secrecy. I didn’t want to deal with twenty questions every single time I wanted to go somewhere that wasn’t work or school.

After lacing up my battered tennis shoes I shoved a pair of gloves in my pocket and pushed open my window. A cold breeze brushed the last traces of sleep from me as I sucked in a deep breath letting it out and plume. A small bell rang in the branches of the tree, Kylie was waiting for me. I stepped onto the roof and close my window then hopped down to the garage and scrambled down the tree into Kylie’s waiting arms. “Hey boo.” I greeted hugging her.