Chapter 3

After cleaning the opossum up, Sarah and her Dad started unpacking their things into their new home.  They went about it with an easy way that seemed practiced, almost a normal routine to them.  Sarah thought about how easy it was for people to give up their homes and move on, and wondered if that was sad.  Your home should be special, she thought, but here she was building a new home without a second thought.  

Dad tried making small talk while they unpacked, and Sarah replied whenever she thought it was necessary, trying to pay attention but not really focusing on the conversation.  They sky overhead was graying again, filling with bloated thunderclouds again, looking as if to warn the ground below that they were about to empty themselves again.

It was nearly dark by the time they had finished unpacking, and Sarah had just enough energy to get herself back into the house without collapsing.  The front door opened to the main hallway, with the living/dining room on the left and the staircase directly on the right.  the hall led back to more rooms, which had been left unexplored thus far, but they held little interest to Sarah.  Instead, she walked back into the room where the vandalism had been.  The room was now clean, but the image was still there in her mind, with the rotting corpse still dangling from the ceiling freshly imprinted in her memory.  She struggled to make the image go away, and eventually moved on upstairs.  Two bedrooms and a bathroom shared this floor with a twisting, narrow hallway, crowded with photographs from the previous residents' on both walls.  The faces in the pictures stared back at Sarah as she claimed the guest room as her own, taking her few positions into the fairly large space.  She thought she would be comfortable here, but it didn't really matter.  She didn't plan on spending much time in her room, or in the house at all for that matter.

Sarah could hear her dad downstairs unpacking and setting up their belongings, and the sound of his stereo tuning in to a local station, playing All American Rejects singing Swing, Swing through static, filling the house with their pleas for love.  She fell back onto her mattress, a comparably clean and comfortable choice when put up against the old, soggy one she had found in the room.  She fell almost instantly asleep.

And dreamed.

She was driving with her dad again, but this time out of the valley.  

She hoped it wasn't a dream.  She was glad to be leaving the valley.  The valley was bad, she thought, they never should have come here.

It was night time and it was raining, and there were fires burning on both sides of the road.  Peoples' faces streamed past, angrily yelling for the vehicle to pull over, and swinging garden tools and pole-arms at them in the air.  She was shuddering, sweating, breathing heavily, her eyes racing to and fro, trying to looking at her dad, in front of the car, and behind the car all at once.  

Something heavy hit her window and cracked the glass.  She screamed, drawing away.

"It's okay!  We're almost through," her dad yelled, as he stepped on the gas.

Someone stepped into the road ahead and she screamed again as their vehicle slammed into them and their body flew over the hood into the darkness.  

More people ahead started stepping in front of the vehicle, and as much as her dad tried to veer away from them, he kept hitting them, one after another.  The noises their fragile bodies made when they thumped across the hood and windshield made her sick, and cracked the glass a little more each time.

In an instant, the vehicle flipped, and the next thing she knew she was caught upside-down in her seat, still screaming, looking at her dad whose eyes were limp, blank and staring at her.  

The crowd gathered around the wreck, and dirty, wet hands came clawing at her, grabbing at her hair, her face, her clothing.  She fought back, still staring at her father.  And in another instant, her father's face turned from his normal, human features into the same dirty, rotten, sickening face of the opossum that had been hanging from the ceiling the day they arrived in Feller's Glen, complete with maggots writhing in and out of his eyes, nostrils and teeth.

And still those rodent's eyes stared at her, but at the same time they were her father's eyes.  And she screamed again, staring back as the mouth croaked at her, spraying black blood at her and haunting her with these words:

"Welcome home, Sarah.  Welcome Home."

And with that, the opossum/her dad's hand/claw reached out and shoved itself down into her throat as she screamed, strangling her and grabbing at her tongue, pulling it out.  She could taste the death on its hand/claw, and felt the maggots on it squirming down her throat, into her stomach, as she retched, trying to force them back up.  The taste of vomit joined the hand/claw in her mouth, closing her throat from any chance of breathing she had had before, and that was all she knew before she stopped knowing anything but fading darkness.

Sarah bolted upright in her bed, the aftertaste of vomit in the back of her throat.  

Home, she thought.

There's no place like home.

Reviews

[xCasper]

I'm at work right now, so I don't have time to read the entire thing and give very hood constructive criticism.. But the second line of the first paragraph should say 'her dad' to open instead of just dad. Since in the first paragraph you wrote 'her dad' instead of just dad..

[Taylor H.]

It was night time and it was raining----nighttime

trying to looking at her dad----look



Sarah bolted upright in her bed, the aftertaste of vomit in the back of her throat. ----really enjoyed that line. Great chapter!