tickling birds

jessica and the house.

Jessica grabs her phone, a flashlight and her water bottle before closing her car door and locking it behind her, shoving her keys down her pocket as she walks away. She takes a sip of her water, taking a good long look at the house as she looks for good angles to snap pictures from on all sides. She enjoys the warmth of the sun on her skin, but is irritated by the constant swarm of bugs that seem to tease her. She keeps a close eye on the ground, watching for Rattlesnakes and other dangerous animals that could be lurking about as she walks, and eventually finds a good place to snap a picture. She holds her cell phone up to take the picture, and snaps several shot of the same angle. She studies the pictures for a moment, deleting ones she didn’t like and continues to walk around the perimeter of the house.

 When she makes her way around to the front, she takes multiple pictures from several angles, trying to capture the entire image of the house, and as many smaller details as she could. 
“And to think I make money doing this.” She giggles, checking over all the photo’s she’d taken. She deletes a few from her phone, then continues inside. She stops to look around for a moment and whistles, “Wow. This must have been quite a nice place back in its day.”
The entry way was a large open room with several hallways leading off in two directions on each side of the room. There was still some old furniture scattered about the room, but it was entirely worthless. Debris was littered throughout the house, and only two animal heads still hung on the far wall, though slightly slanted. She took several photos of the first room, trying to fill as many angles as possible before moving on. 

The next room she enters looked to be an old dining room. There were remains of a long dining table with multiple ruined chairs lined with it. Old pots, pans and shards of glass plates littered the floor. Even a few toys had been left behind.

 “Gosh. I wonder what the history of this place is. It’s like everyone just up and vanished a long time ago.” Jessica says as she snaps some more pictures. 

She wanders around the room, looking for anything interesting, and continues to the next room. The rest of the first floor was just a bunch of hallways that want to rooms that had already collapsed. She quickly snaps several pictures of each hallway, and goes back to the entrance of the house. 

 “Hmm…should I do the cellar or the upper floor first?” She ponders. Eventually, she makes her mind up and starts for the cellar. “I guess I may as well get this over with. It’s usually smaller.”

When she reaches the stares, Jessica stares down the staircase to its pitch black bottom. Having done this before, she thinks nothing of the darkness, and readies her flashlight. She points the light at the bottom of the stares and sees the floor is unsurprisingly concrete. When she reaches the bottom, she finds the basement was a lot bigger than she was expecting. Several rooms were sectioned off the main one, which was a large and suspiciously empty room. Still, she thinks nothing of it and starts taking pictures of the large room. After words, she moves to one of the smaller side rooms and finds it’s completely empty. She shrugs her shoulders and moves to the next one. She slowly opens the door, but jumps back screaming as a bunch of wild cats come running out of the room.

She watches the cats scamper around trying to find a place to hide and laughs nervously, “Okay. That’s certainly a first.” She checks the room again, only to find a rather suspicious pillar in the middle of the room. “Well that’s…ominous.” She closes the door, and continues on.

 As she reached the third door she could hear what sounded like somebody breathing. Her eyes widen a little in fear, and she takes several steps back. “There’s definitely someone in there.” She whispers. She backs away slowly, and covers her mouth as the sounds of scratching on the walls comes from behind the door.