James walked on the side walk, draped with a fresh, thin layer of snow. It was 5:42 AM, not a single soul in sight. He noticed that he was the first to leave footprints as he made his way through the snow. With each successive step, he both felt and heard the layer of snow beneath him succumb to the sheer weight of his bulky, black leather boots with a soft squish. Left behind were dark voids where the boot threads once stood.
The air outside was eerily still and cold. He could observe the warmth escape his mouth into the morning air as if siphoned from his body, much akin to death reaping a soul. This very thought made him shudder and sent a cold chill down his spine. Despite wearing the think brown fur parka his late grandmother had given him on his birthday four years ago, the sole Caldwell heir could feel the morning air penetrating through the jacket and into the core of his bones. The jacket was filled to the brim with goose down that his grandmother had collected. The inner lining delicately fashioned from the felt of a trapped coyote. The parka's headdress consisted of its long, coarse fur, still emanating the natural beauty of the animal. But even colder was the patch of his pale, white skin exposed from ripping his trousers on the barbed wire fence he had climbed over earlier. It was now numb and seemingly frostbitten.
"It's all worth it," he thought.
He would finally uncover the truth. Why was the town isolated and fenced all around? Why did he fail to see a single soul throughout the years, yet all the lawns were crisp and freshly cut?
As he walked down the street of the old town, he noticed all the uniform houses. They looked akin to the military community houses his cousin Eric had lived in during his time as a serviceman. He was proud of him and his service to the country. What beautiful children Eric and Danielle had. It was a shame what happened to their family, a tragic incident indeed. No one deserved to pass away at such an early age, let alone to the fiery hands of an unexplainable house fire.
The streetlights blared through the jet-black night like shining bright stars. The air was silent, lacking the expected chirp of crickets or the sound of the occasional scampering animal one would expect.
He quickly glanced around the neighborhood to see the detached townhouses, each with their brown, degrading roof shingles. Atop the front porch of each house, there was what seemed to be a rolled-up newspaper. They looked fresh, surrounded by a layer of snow but without any on top of them. It appears they had melted a faint rectangular figure around the papers.
"Strange," he thought. He had been watching the town all night from high on top of the neighboring hill to the west.
James looked on further with mixed feelings of amazement and fear as he noted the freshly painted wooden doors. There, fastened to each dull green door, was an obnoxiously large chrome knocker. It was adorned with a serpent's gaping mouth with a silver ring right below the sharp, pointed fangs. The bottom of the knocker ring had a massive sphere attached to it, proclaiming its sheer density.
"Why a snake's head?" James pondered. Walking around the town seemed to have only piqued his curiosity further. It started to fill his mind with countless more thoughts; the possibilities were endless.
At the end of the street, he could see the entrance to the woods that engulfed the town's eastern border. Surrounded by darkness, James could see a flickering light at what looked like the center of said woods.
"What could it be?" he thought as a pang of curiosity shifted his attention to the dark, foreboding center of the woods. He couldn't understand this sudden attraction; something had overcome him. The streetlights had stopped quite a few paces behind him. To overcome walking in the dark, James reached into his pocket and pulled out the bright lemon-colored flashlight he had brought along with him.
"Scriiiitch!" the flashlight sounded as it turned on with a narrow, dull beam of light, piercing the darkness. It didn't last long; the beam quickly disappeared once again. He tapped the flashlight hastily, hoping that it would come on, and waited as patiently as one can in the cold morning air. Nothing happened. Disappointed and with a heavy heart, he carried on regardless into the heart of the woods.
As he walked on, he could hear the snapping of twigs beneath him and the subtle albeit firm "thwap" of the branches as they assumed their original positions from being pushed past. The source of light was becoming brighter as he walked on until James could see a house similar to the ones he had encountered on his way here.
But this one was different; the roof required mending, paint was chipping off the dull green door, and the front porch lacked the newspaper he became accustomed to seeing. The light emitted from a rusty oil lantern sitting on the porch on the flat yet paint-chipped railing of the stairs. He walked up the creaky, wooden stairs, indifferently picking up the lantern.
He slowly approached the door and raised the knocker horizontal to the serpent's fangs. Upon its release, it fell back down with a tremendous boom that ripped through the trees and shrubbery. The door creaked open ever so slightly, revealing a long, dark corridor. James held up the lantern to his face. A sinister smile crept onto it as he blew out the lantern and slipped inside. He shut the door behind him. A bloodcurdling scream punctured through the still air and cut off abruptly; it didn't belong to James Caldwell III.
Image Credits:
https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/343329171578016637/
