The House
Jul 30, 2012 13:24:44 GMT -8
Post by Penny Royals on Jul 30, 2012 13:24:44 GMT -8
Something was wrong.
I didn’t know what. I didn’t know how…. But SOMETHING was wrong, and I could feel it like a two-ton boulder. My head was pulsing; my mind was reeling- it couldn’t be just from the plane, could it?
“Bees!” A familiar voice called my nickname (my real name was Belinda). I turned around wildly to see a tall, light-haired man- my father, Harvey.
“Daddy!” I squealed. I hadn’t expected him to come here and get me. We ran to each other, and he lifted me up into the air.
“How was D.C?” He asked, setting my giggling self back on my feet.
“It was great!” I chorused, “I met the president!”
“And the match?”
“Oh… it didn’t go so well…” I lied, feigning disappointment.
“Dang… what happened?”
“Oh nothing… just me getting fifth place!” I sang, excited about my accomplishments. Of course, he didn’t need to know just YET about the prize money being sent to us and my school.
“That’s fantastic!” He agreed, taking my hand and leading me out of the airport and to the car- an ancient Ford he’d had since he was a kid. Seated back in the same orange seats of my still on-going childhood, I forgot why I felt so horrible. Nothing could be wrong now, could it?
We drove several miles out of the main city. I fell asleep around dusk, the lights from the streetlamps scanning across my face every few moments. I was pulled awake by a sudden jarring. Confused, I looked out my window, and got even happier than I had been. In front of my window stood a small, quaint niche of a building, white brick with two stripes of red and blue wrapping around the middle horizontally. A glass door and floor-length windows revealed a pink and white checkered floor and baby blue wallpaper inside. Cabinets with see-through tops displayed sweets of all sorts, and a huge neon pink sign above the doors proclaimed ‘Jenine’s,’ with a pair of roller skates formed perfectly beside the ‘s.’
“Dad!” I gasped, “Really?”
“Yep!” He said, “You deserve it, Kiddo.”
“Best. Day. Ever!”
We got out, rushing inside. Dad got me a milkshake, and himself an apple fritter. We sat down.
“Where’d you get the money for this, anyway?” I asked. “Did Mom send more money?”
“No…” He got serious then. I began to feel my stomach drop again as he took my hands in his. “Listen, Babydoll… I’ll be blunt, okay?”
“Okay…” He hadn’t called me Babydoll since he told me he and mom were divorcing, and that was nearly ten years ago.
“While you were gone… Grandpa Wallace took a turn for the worst. A few days after, he… passed away.”
Grandpa Wallace was my dad’s dad. Dad was his only child. He was rich as sin, and had disowned Dad when he married Mom, whom he really disliked. Then I came along and that was forgotten for the most part, but it wasn’t until the divorce that Dad was put back into the will. Even so, we were never given much, if any, financial help, mostly due to Dad wanting to make it for himself. He had such a strong will for independence.
So… I wasn’t really sure what to say. “What does this mean? What happens now?”
“He left everything to us. The estate, the finances… everything.”
“So that means we’re moving in?” I asked. “Out of the apartment?”
“Yes. I’ve… got most of it in already, but there’s enough things left at the apartment for us to stay there another day or two.”
I nodded. This was all going on so fast. My life was being turned upside down.
“You know what word I lost on?” I said, trying to diffuse the awkwardness by changing the subject, “Cymotrichous. C-Y-M-O-T-R-I-C-H-O-U-S is how it’s spelled really. Means ‘having wavy hair.’ I spelled the ‘c-h’ part as ‘k…’”
“Oh… don’t be so hard on yourself. That’s a hard word! If I didn’t hear you spell it, I’d never know what it meant.”
My attempt at making conversation had, however, fallen flat after that. We both went home.
Over the next few days our apartment was cleared out, my father and his friends lugging everything to the mansion my grandfather lived in. I stayed home. I was a bit afraid to see what it’d look like now that all our stuff was in it and all Grandpa Wallace’s stuff was out.
It was the second day I was home that, while my dad was gone, there was a knock at the door. Elijah- my best friend since practically birth- had come over. With a dorky smile underneath a mop of dark hair, he was four years older than me. Our dads were good friends, and as such we grew up together. He came inside, ruffling my hair.
“I heard you got fifth place, Bees!” He exclaimed. “That’s awesome!”
I grinned. Elijah always knew how to make me happy, or at the very least happier. We went and sat down in my bedroom, and I pulled out a game of Kalah for us to play together. He lay on his stomach, and I sat cross-legged.
“So you’re moving into that mansion of your grandpa’s?” Elijah asked, dumping a marble into his ‘home base’ and ending his turn for me to go then.
“Yeah. We’ll be in it tonight, I think. Just got a little bit of things to pack up last… as you can see.” My room was bare- not even the bed was inside anymore. Just a few games and Teddy were left. “It’s gonna be really weird being so far away now.”
“Understandable.” He said with a shrug. “Not to mention to your grandpa’s house. I mean… that place is a damn labyrinth…”
“I know, right? I’ll get lost in it probably.”
“Well, you can’t call me to come and save you out of that one, Bees!” He chuckled, before growing suddenly serious and stiff-lipped.
“Why not?” I asked, lifting an eyebrow.
“I don’t really trust the place. We can still hang out and all that… just… not there.”
“Really, Elijah?” I raised my eyebrows. “Really? You act as if the place is cursed or something.”
He had to laugh at that.
“No, no, it’s not like that. I just really don’t trust the place. Like… the foundation and stuff.”
I shrugged, finishing the turn. We put the game back then, as Elijah’s mom called his cell phone for him to go home. I waved him out of my sights, and went back to the bedroom.
What if there WAS something wrong with the house? I did remember weird things from holidays when I was a little kid. Something tugging my braids during an Easter egg hunt in the basement. Shadows moving around upstairs when grabbing presents to take to the living room. Noises from the pipes in the bathroom during one particular Thanksgiving when I got sick and had to be taken home. But I guess I’d always chocked it up to being a really old house.
Soon, Dad came home. We packed up the rest of the things in the apartment together, turned in our keys to the manager, and started the drive.
To get to Grandpa Wallace’s house, we had to go across town and up the hill. The paved roads eventually gave way to dirt, kicking up behind the truck in huge clouds of dust. It stayed this way for about three miles, before we came to Watson Bridge. Watson Bridge was a small, rather rickety bridge, suspended over a small amount of water called the Crick River. We crossed it with minimal problems, going slow, the music turned off and the windows rolled down like a bus going over train tracks. The other side of Crick River was a legitimate forest- dark as night, cold as ice and scary as all hell. The forest was thick, and only patches of light came through during times such as now, when the trees were full of heavy green leaves slapping the top of our car. During Fall it was almost a cacophony of colors, the leaves gorgeous shades of scarlet and gold. They’d cake our car by the time we were home, so the day after we’d visited we always had to gently scrub the leaves off the car. The winter was probably when the forest was at its worst, though- with no leaves of any sort around, the heavy branches themselves would hit the car, screeching across the windows like banshees. The forest would continue on for what felt like forever, for millions of miles- but really it was just about ten miles, and twenty or so minutes. It was 8:30 PM and dusk when we finally pulled up to the gate.
The gate towered above the car- black wrought-iron, it stood about eight feet high. Dad got out and unlocked it, driving the car forward and then closing the gate again before driving the rest of the way up to the house. We parked the car in the driveway outside the house. I grabbed some of the boxes, and went to the stairs that lead to the front door.
Something moved around the side of the house, beneath the stairs. I jumped slightly and looked down. There didn’t really look to be anything there, except for the tunnel of doors leading to the basement and other parts of the house. Those doors were the main reason Elijah and I considered this place to be labyrinthine.
I finished my way up to the door after my dad, entering into the house. My room was on the second floor, so I headed up there.
My room was small, but rather long at the same time, with wooden panels for walls and blue carpet. My bed was at the left side of the room, the foot facing the opposite wall. There was a single window, right across from the door. My boxes lay across that wall, so I went to work. Soon, my things were all set up the way I wanted them- the shelf across the room with all my dolls and stuffed animals but Teddy, my games across from it in the corner, my lamp beside my bed, and my TV across the room with the VCR and DVD hooked up to it. By then it was nightfall, so I got dressed in my pajamas and went to sleep.
My mind was plagued with visions. I dreamed of being young again- I couldn’t have been more than five or six at absolute most. I was dressed in a frilly lilac jumper, with jeans underneath. Elijah was there too, standing a bit above my head, dressed in jeans and a green tee shirt. It looked to be about Fall, misty and gray all around. The ground beneath our feet was soft, a grayish brown. We were treading underneath the house, the doors to our left.
I rushed to one, a blue one with two big, square indents in it. It took me a few seconds while turning the black handle before the door sprung loose, and I ran inside. Elijah followed me. We closed the door behind us, rushed down a small flight of stairs to rest on ground again, a draft wisping around us. I looked up to him.
“You go that way,” I said, pointing, “And I’ll go this way!” He nodded excitedly, and I sprinted to the left path. The ground gave way to some bricked pavement, before a quick step up onto a wooden platform. I went around in what felt like circles, before seeing a small light. I went to the light, and wrenched a hold of the knob of the door the light was behind, and came back into the outside. “Haha, I won!” I giggled, closing the red door behind me. I went and sat down underneath the stairs, cross-legged, waiting for Elijah to get back. A few minutes of waiting later, I began to get worried. I went to the blue door, and opened it. “Elijah? Elijah… Elijah? Are you here yet? Did you go?” I furrowed my brow. “Don’t make me come after you, Elijah…”
It was then I heard a loud noise, a crash of glass. I ran back to the main area, shoving the blue door closed. A small pane down by the bottom, big enough, however, to easily fit me, laid on the ground. Elijah was trying to pull himself up out of it, screaming at the top of his lungs.
“BEES!” He was hysterically shrieking my name. “BEES!” It was falling into a sob. His hands were covered in blood from the window pane. I gasped, and fell to my knees, trying to pull him out. He kept wailing my name even as I set him on the ground.
“Sh, sh! I’m here now!” I kept telling him. “Elijah, I’m here! You don’t need to be scared! Elijah!”
He kept howling. That was all I could hear now, just him screeching my name, falling into demonic tones as I woke up with a start. I rubbed my head, and turned on my lamp. That was terrifying… but the worst thing about it was that it felt so real.
I went off the side of my bed, putting on my slippers and going to my nightstand. I dug around for a second, and finally found a flashlight. I flicked the switch and started out of my bedroom, going into the kitchen. My bedroom was relatively close to it, luckily enough for me.
I got into the fridge, pulling out some string cheese and sitting down at the table in here. I unwrapped it and started munching. All was rather quiet, I suppose… except for that damn droning noise. Part of me had gotten used to it throughout the years I’ve been here, since I can’t remember a day in my life when I hadn’t heard it. I rested my head on my shoulder for a moment, closing my eyes- only to fall back into dreamland for a few moments to go back into the dream of Elijah screaming my name over and over, only now as the teenager he is. I wrinkled my nose, rubbing my eyes again. I needed to do something, to have some sort of closure before we lived here for so long.
In the immortal words of… some dead person, it was time to dry my tears and face my fears.
I went and got a jacket, tightening my slippers and fixing my clothes a bit. I grabbed my cell phone I’d gotten from Mom so I could go to D.C (even though it had zero battery power), and I went outside.
The flashlight lit my pathway. I walked softly, gingerly down the way, looking at the doors. There were so many, of all different sizes, shapes, colors… but finally I found the blue one. I gripped the handle, and started inside.
Everything seemed so much… smaller than it had when I was little. I suppose that was supposed to be that way, though, since I’ve grown up. The droning sound was a bit louder down here, though still not all that loud. Instead of going down my way from my dream, I took the right path, casting my flashlight all over the path so I wouldn’t run into anything. The path gave way to bricks faster than the other way, and for longer. Again, the droning grew. Stepping onto the inevitable wooden platform, the flashlight went out. I shook it a few times, but it wouldn’t go. I took a few more steps into the room. The droning was deafening now, and I could almost pick out individual instances. I fumbled for my phone. It slipped. I dropped down to pick it up, and then, finding it, grinned beside myself. I blindly groped for the button to turn it on, and, upon finding it, pressed. The familiar ditty appeared underneath the buzzing. The sudden light from my phone filled the room, and momentarily I couldn’t see anything. I aimed my phone high, with eyes watering. I looked through the tears to see the source of the humming.
All around the room were huge hives of hornets.
And now I was alone with them.
In a place I couldn’t be heard.
In a place I couldn’t be seen.
In a place where no one would find me for months.
All I could do was scream.
It was no use now.
I didn’t know what. I didn’t know how…. But SOMETHING was wrong, and I could feel it like a two-ton boulder. My head was pulsing; my mind was reeling- it couldn’t be just from the plane, could it?
“Bees!” A familiar voice called my nickname (my real name was Belinda). I turned around wildly to see a tall, light-haired man- my father, Harvey.
“Daddy!” I squealed. I hadn’t expected him to come here and get me. We ran to each other, and he lifted me up into the air.
“How was D.C?” He asked, setting my giggling self back on my feet.
“It was great!” I chorused, “I met the president!”
“And the match?”
“Oh… it didn’t go so well…” I lied, feigning disappointment.
“Dang… what happened?”
“Oh nothing… just me getting fifth place!” I sang, excited about my accomplishments. Of course, he didn’t need to know just YET about the prize money being sent to us and my school.
“That’s fantastic!” He agreed, taking my hand and leading me out of the airport and to the car- an ancient Ford he’d had since he was a kid. Seated back in the same orange seats of my still on-going childhood, I forgot why I felt so horrible. Nothing could be wrong now, could it?
We drove several miles out of the main city. I fell asleep around dusk, the lights from the streetlamps scanning across my face every few moments. I was pulled awake by a sudden jarring. Confused, I looked out my window, and got even happier than I had been. In front of my window stood a small, quaint niche of a building, white brick with two stripes of red and blue wrapping around the middle horizontally. A glass door and floor-length windows revealed a pink and white checkered floor and baby blue wallpaper inside. Cabinets with see-through tops displayed sweets of all sorts, and a huge neon pink sign above the doors proclaimed ‘Jenine’s,’ with a pair of roller skates formed perfectly beside the ‘s.’
“Dad!” I gasped, “Really?”
“Yep!” He said, “You deserve it, Kiddo.”
“Best. Day. Ever!”
We got out, rushing inside. Dad got me a milkshake, and himself an apple fritter. We sat down.
“Where’d you get the money for this, anyway?” I asked. “Did Mom send more money?”
“No…” He got serious then. I began to feel my stomach drop again as he took my hands in his. “Listen, Babydoll… I’ll be blunt, okay?”
“Okay…” He hadn’t called me Babydoll since he told me he and mom were divorcing, and that was nearly ten years ago.
“While you were gone… Grandpa Wallace took a turn for the worst. A few days after, he… passed away.”
Grandpa Wallace was my dad’s dad. Dad was his only child. He was rich as sin, and had disowned Dad when he married Mom, whom he really disliked. Then I came along and that was forgotten for the most part, but it wasn’t until the divorce that Dad was put back into the will. Even so, we were never given much, if any, financial help, mostly due to Dad wanting to make it for himself. He had such a strong will for independence.
So… I wasn’t really sure what to say. “What does this mean? What happens now?”
“He left everything to us. The estate, the finances… everything.”
“So that means we’re moving in?” I asked. “Out of the apartment?”
“Yes. I’ve… got most of it in already, but there’s enough things left at the apartment for us to stay there another day or two.”
I nodded. This was all going on so fast. My life was being turned upside down.
“You know what word I lost on?” I said, trying to diffuse the awkwardness by changing the subject, “Cymotrichous. C-Y-M-O-T-R-I-C-H-O-U-S is how it’s spelled really. Means ‘having wavy hair.’ I spelled the ‘c-h’ part as ‘k…’”
“Oh… don’t be so hard on yourself. That’s a hard word! If I didn’t hear you spell it, I’d never know what it meant.”
My attempt at making conversation had, however, fallen flat after that. We both went home.
Over the next few days our apartment was cleared out, my father and his friends lugging everything to the mansion my grandfather lived in. I stayed home. I was a bit afraid to see what it’d look like now that all our stuff was in it and all Grandpa Wallace’s stuff was out.
It was the second day I was home that, while my dad was gone, there was a knock at the door. Elijah- my best friend since practically birth- had come over. With a dorky smile underneath a mop of dark hair, he was four years older than me. Our dads were good friends, and as such we grew up together. He came inside, ruffling my hair.
“I heard you got fifth place, Bees!” He exclaimed. “That’s awesome!”
I grinned. Elijah always knew how to make me happy, or at the very least happier. We went and sat down in my bedroom, and I pulled out a game of Kalah for us to play together. He lay on his stomach, and I sat cross-legged.
“So you’re moving into that mansion of your grandpa’s?” Elijah asked, dumping a marble into his ‘home base’ and ending his turn for me to go then.
“Yeah. We’ll be in it tonight, I think. Just got a little bit of things to pack up last… as you can see.” My room was bare- not even the bed was inside anymore. Just a few games and Teddy were left. “It’s gonna be really weird being so far away now.”
“Understandable.” He said with a shrug. “Not to mention to your grandpa’s house. I mean… that place is a damn labyrinth…”
“I know, right? I’ll get lost in it probably.”
“Well, you can’t call me to come and save you out of that one, Bees!” He chuckled, before growing suddenly serious and stiff-lipped.
“Why not?” I asked, lifting an eyebrow.
“I don’t really trust the place. We can still hang out and all that… just… not there.”
“Really, Elijah?” I raised my eyebrows. “Really? You act as if the place is cursed or something.”
He had to laugh at that.
“No, no, it’s not like that. I just really don’t trust the place. Like… the foundation and stuff.”
I shrugged, finishing the turn. We put the game back then, as Elijah’s mom called his cell phone for him to go home. I waved him out of my sights, and went back to the bedroom.
What if there WAS something wrong with the house? I did remember weird things from holidays when I was a little kid. Something tugging my braids during an Easter egg hunt in the basement. Shadows moving around upstairs when grabbing presents to take to the living room. Noises from the pipes in the bathroom during one particular Thanksgiving when I got sick and had to be taken home. But I guess I’d always chocked it up to being a really old house.
Soon, Dad came home. We packed up the rest of the things in the apartment together, turned in our keys to the manager, and started the drive.
To get to Grandpa Wallace’s house, we had to go across town and up the hill. The paved roads eventually gave way to dirt, kicking up behind the truck in huge clouds of dust. It stayed this way for about three miles, before we came to Watson Bridge. Watson Bridge was a small, rather rickety bridge, suspended over a small amount of water called the Crick River. We crossed it with minimal problems, going slow, the music turned off and the windows rolled down like a bus going over train tracks. The other side of Crick River was a legitimate forest- dark as night, cold as ice and scary as all hell. The forest was thick, and only patches of light came through during times such as now, when the trees were full of heavy green leaves slapping the top of our car. During Fall it was almost a cacophony of colors, the leaves gorgeous shades of scarlet and gold. They’d cake our car by the time we were home, so the day after we’d visited we always had to gently scrub the leaves off the car. The winter was probably when the forest was at its worst, though- with no leaves of any sort around, the heavy branches themselves would hit the car, screeching across the windows like banshees. The forest would continue on for what felt like forever, for millions of miles- but really it was just about ten miles, and twenty or so minutes. It was 8:30 PM and dusk when we finally pulled up to the gate.
The gate towered above the car- black wrought-iron, it stood about eight feet high. Dad got out and unlocked it, driving the car forward and then closing the gate again before driving the rest of the way up to the house. We parked the car in the driveway outside the house. I grabbed some of the boxes, and went to the stairs that lead to the front door.
Something moved around the side of the house, beneath the stairs. I jumped slightly and looked down. There didn’t really look to be anything there, except for the tunnel of doors leading to the basement and other parts of the house. Those doors were the main reason Elijah and I considered this place to be labyrinthine.
I finished my way up to the door after my dad, entering into the house. My room was on the second floor, so I headed up there.
My room was small, but rather long at the same time, with wooden panels for walls and blue carpet. My bed was at the left side of the room, the foot facing the opposite wall. There was a single window, right across from the door. My boxes lay across that wall, so I went to work. Soon, my things were all set up the way I wanted them- the shelf across the room with all my dolls and stuffed animals but Teddy, my games across from it in the corner, my lamp beside my bed, and my TV across the room with the VCR and DVD hooked up to it. By then it was nightfall, so I got dressed in my pajamas and went to sleep.
My mind was plagued with visions. I dreamed of being young again- I couldn’t have been more than five or six at absolute most. I was dressed in a frilly lilac jumper, with jeans underneath. Elijah was there too, standing a bit above my head, dressed in jeans and a green tee shirt. It looked to be about Fall, misty and gray all around. The ground beneath our feet was soft, a grayish brown. We were treading underneath the house, the doors to our left.
I rushed to one, a blue one with two big, square indents in it. It took me a few seconds while turning the black handle before the door sprung loose, and I ran inside. Elijah followed me. We closed the door behind us, rushed down a small flight of stairs to rest on ground again, a draft wisping around us. I looked up to him.
“You go that way,” I said, pointing, “And I’ll go this way!” He nodded excitedly, and I sprinted to the left path. The ground gave way to some bricked pavement, before a quick step up onto a wooden platform. I went around in what felt like circles, before seeing a small light. I went to the light, and wrenched a hold of the knob of the door the light was behind, and came back into the outside. “Haha, I won!” I giggled, closing the red door behind me. I went and sat down underneath the stairs, cross-legged, waiting for Elijah to get back. A few minutes of waiting later, I began to get worried. I went to the blue door, and opened it. “Elijah? Elijah… Elijah? Are you here yet? Did you go?” I furrowed my brow. “Don’t make me come after you, Elijah…”
It was then I heard a loud noise, a crash of glass. I ran back to the main area, shoving the blue door closed. A small pane down by the bottom, big enough, however, to easily fit me, laid on the ground. Elijah was trying to pull himself up out of it, screaming at the top of his lungs.
“BEES!” He was hysterically shrieking my name. “BEES!” It was falling into a sob. His hands were covered in blood from the window pane. I gasped, and fell to my knees, trying to pull him out. He kept wailing my name even as I set him on the ground.
“Sh, sh! I’m here now!” I kept telling him. “Elijah, I’m here! You don’t need to be scared! Elijah!”
He kept howling. That was all I could hear now, just him screeching my name, falling into demonic tones as I woke up with a start. I rubbed my head, and turned on my lamp. That was terrifying… but the worst thing about it was that it felt so real.
I went off the side of my bed, putting on my slippers and going to my nightstand. I dug around for a second, and finally found a flashlight. I flicked the switch and started out of my bedroom, going into the kitchen. My bedroom was relatively close to it, luckily enough for me.
I got into the fridge, pulling out some string cheese and sitting down at the table in here. I unwrapped it and started munching. All was rather quiet, I suppose… except for that damn droning noise. Part of me had gotten used to it throughout the years I’ve been here, since I can’t remember a day in my life when I hadn’t heard it. I rested my head on my shoulder for a moment, closing my eyes- only to fall back into dreamland for a few moments to go back into the dream of Elijah screaming my name over and over, only now as the teenager he is. I wrinkled my nose, rubbing my eyes again. I needed to do something, to have some sort of closure before we lived here for so long.
In the immortal words of… some dead person, it was time to dry my tears and face my fears.
I went and got a jacket, tightening my slippers and fixing my clothes a bit. I grabbed my cell phone I’d gotten from Mom so I could go to D.C (even though it had zero battery power), and I went outside.
The flashlight lit my pathway. I walked softly, gingerly down the way, looking at the doors. There were so many, of all different sizes, shapes, colors… but finally I found the blue one. I gripped the handle, and started inside.
Everything seemed so much… smaller than it had when I was little. I suppose that was supposed to be that way, though, since I’ve grown up. The droning sound was a bit louder down here, though still not all that loud. Instead of going down my way from my dream, I took the right path, casting my flashlight all over the path so I wouldn’t run into anything. The path gave way to bricks faster than the other way, and for longer. Again, the droning grew. Stepping onto the inevitable wooden platform, the flashlight went out. I shook it a few times, but it wouldn’t go. I took a few more steps into the room. The droning was deafening now, and I could almost pick out individual instances. I fumbled for my phone. It slipped. I dropped down to pick it up, and then, finding it, grinned beside myself. I blindly groped for the button to turn it on, and, upon finding it, pressed. The familiar ditty appeared underneath the buzzing. The sudden light from my phone filled the room, and momentarily I couldn’t see anything. I aimed my phone high, with eyes watering. I looked through the tears to see the source of the humming.
All around the room were huge hives of hornets.
And now I was alone with them.
In a place I couldn’t be heard.
In a place I couldn’t be seen.
In a place where no one would find me for months.
All I could do was scream.
It was no use now.