A Grave Mistake

This is a story I've been working on for a while. I am trying to enter it in a contest on this website, so I hope putting on here doesn't mean I can't use it again.

A Grave Mistake

 

It was nothing but a cottage. A sort of shabby but quaint little cabin. A perfectly innocent, safe, non-threatening cottage.

            Hah.

            But that was really what I thought when I first saw my new summer home. It was my own little safe house, plenty of emphasis on the word safe. That was what I needed right now.

            I had been in hiding for months now. Not from the cops, those guys are supposedly on my side. They’ve been trying to help, but they don’t know much. After I had narrowly escaped death, I begged them to just put me in a safe house. I guess they agreed, because now I was in my little cottage. They had left me completely alone, because they were sure no one even knew about the cabin’s existence but them and the FBI, although they assured me they would check on me ever week or two to get me more food and help with anything they could.  Not even my only family, my mother I hadn’t seen in months, knew where I was. She thought I had died in a car crash. That one kind of hurt, but as long as she was safe, it didn’t matter. Besides, thankfully, blissfully, I was safe.

            Supposedly.

            Ok, let me slow down a bit. The truth is, I’m on the run from a major drug dealing group. I accidently stumbled into one of their major operations.

            It all started when I got my new job. It was safe too, about as safe as that stupid little cottage.

            In other words, it wasn’t safe at all.

            Oh, sure, it seemed safe. After all, I was just a secretary. What I didn’t know was that I was the secretary to one of the biggest drug lords in the U.S.!

            Well, in layman’s terms my boss started getting some pretty weird mail and calls. I am a curious girl--you know the type--the one that always got the detective kits for her birthday? Yea, so I started getting suspicious. One night he had a very big meeting. He was all stressed and angry, so I knew it was important. It was at a shipping dock.

            I wonder how stupid he thought I was. I know I was blonde, and maybe he had some pretty dumb secretaries before, I don’t know. Anyways I, being an idiot, decided to go check it out, and in so doing, proved him right.  

            I knew the dock where they were supposed to be. I decided to go in sneaky like with my mad ninja skills.

            Yeah, that didn’t work.  

            I was doing pretty well until I ran into the guard with the machine gun.

            I have no idea how I got out of there alive. I seem to recall it took a lot of swimming, very wet clothes, and very cold water, plus a lot of water up my nose. Yeah, not exactly what you see in the cop movies.   

             Somehow I did manage to get away. I knew my boss was after me, so I hurried to the closest police station, while calling the cops about ten times to tell them all the details and ask directions. 

            When I got there, I tried to explain and remember everything. It was difficult then to remember, especially while I was sneezing every ten seconds. The police went to catch them, but of course they were already gone. They collected all the evidence they could, but I was the keystone. I had the names, the information, everything. All I asked for in return was safety.

            Apparently they didn’t care.

            No, they did. They just couldn’t watch me all the time. They set up guards all around my apartment, but that just wasn’t enough.

            They came from the roof.

            Why the roof was not being guarded, I had no idea. But one second, I was enjoying a dinner of tomato soup and bread, and the next, some one had a gun to my head and was telling me to not move.

            Luckily, someone came in to check on me. Luckily, he was a policeman and knew better than to jump in and point his gun at the guy and tell him to drop me. No, he was smarter. He came slowly, creeping up next to him until he was close enough to never miss.

            After that incident, I was sent to my cottage. My abandoned, safe, all alone, in-the-middle-of-no-where cottage.

            I loved it.

            From the minute I stepped inside I loved it. It was nice and quaint with all the things I thought it wouldn’t have, like running water, a TV, and a bathroom. Thank goodness on that one.

            My bedroom was small, but I liked it. It had a TV and an open closet. That was good. Closed closets make me nervous. I was quite claustrophobic and can dream of nothing more frightening than dying by slowly running out of air in some little closet or locker. But back to my cottage.  My bed was large and soft, again unexpected. I guess I was important enough to spend a little money on.

            The kitchen was nice, with a fridge and cupboards stuffed with all kinds of food. They even had a fancy ham in there, and twenty packages of bacon! Besides that and the other meats, there were all kinds of canned and refrigerated foods with plenty of cheese and milk, two of my personal favorites. I decided to just have a sandwich and searched the cupboards for bread. I was surprised to find they even had tuna, which was also my favorite.

            I was going to like it here.

            I went to another door. It was in the middle of the living room. It was large and black, a foot or so higher than most of the doors in the house. It certainly looked mysterious, and I had no idea what it was to. A second bedroom? A study? A library maybe?

            I sat for a moment, conjuring up enough excitement to make this seem like it was a very big deal. This is the sort of thing I like to do, make a huge deal about nothing to make it seem super exciting. Kids love me. Adults, not so much.

“And, behind the mystery door is…” I paused dramatically before finally throwing open the door.

            Or at least, trying to.

            The door was locked. In that second as my hand tried to turn the handle, all my excitement drained out like water through a strainer and I suddenly wanted to cry.

            That door, it seemed, was a reminder to me. A reminder that no matter how badly I wanted to know, how badly I wanted to be safe, it would never happen. The door would be locked to me, and I would be stuck outside of the haven in a world of terror and turmoil. That I would never be safe.

            Crazy, I know. But suddenly I realized it. I had to open that door.

            I tried. I really did. I tried to pick the lock for over an hour, and I even tried a screwdriver on the hinges, but they were too old. When I cut myself, I decided to leave the dangerously rusty door alone.

            For  tonight.

***

            All night I tossed and turned. The door kept going through my head. How to open it, how?

            You see, I’m what people might call a regular Pandora. My curiosity always gets the better of me. Somehow, deep down I knew, it would now too. I would find someway to open that door.

***

            The next morning I awoke tired and grouchy. I stumbled into the kitchen for coffee, trying to ignore the looming black door. I ground the beans and then slowly poured them in. I went into the living room to read, my back to the door. I sat fidgeting.  My book was a mystery, Ten Little Indians by Agatha Christie. It did little to calm my nerves, so I put it down and sat there sipping my coffee. Finally I gave up.

            “What do you want?!” I turned, screaming at the door, my sanity leaving me for a moment.

            It  loomed there, silent, dark, mysterious. That’s what it was, a mystery. A mystery it seemed I would never figure out.  It was like being the sleuth to Amelia Earhart’s case. There was just no solution.

            Now, I am stubborn. Ask anyone and they will tell you that. I was not about to let that door get the better of me. I got my old screwdriver out and tried again, wishing desperately for a crowbar.

            I tried, I really did. For over an hour I attacked that door. I even tried to take off the handle, but that failed. I screamed and hit it, and tore at its face with my screwdriver. I was glad there was no one there to witness my tantrum. That door became my ultimate rival. I tried over and over, pausing sometimes for a rest, or a quick drink, but for the remainder of the day I attacked the door before finally slumping over, sliding down its smooth surface to the floor. I was absolutely exhausted. A whole day’s efforts and still it stood, hardly scratched. It seemed to be smiling at me, my own scratches and tears seeming to my exhausted but frantic mind to make an evil face on the door’s surface, grinning at me as if gloating.

            Oh, how I hated that door.

            I screamed at it. I cursed it. Finally, my mind at the peak of madness, I began to talk to it.

            “Why won’t you let me in?” I asked. The door, of course, did not answer, but I imagined it did.

           “I can’t. Whatever is behind me is not for your eyes. This is a warning.” Its voice was deep, deep and vibrant. It wasn’t raspy like I thought it would be, but full.

“What do you mean, a warning?” I asked it.

            Again the door answered in my imagination. “Whatever’s behind me could hurt you.”

            I had not wanted it to say that. My imagination was running wild, making the door speak nonsense to me, telling me things I knew weren’t true, couldn’t be true. The door was lying. Or, rather, my mind was lying. What could be behind the door that could harm me? Nothing. It was probably just an empty room, maybe once where a baby slept.

“No,” the door said.

            I started. I hadn’t done that.

            Now I was frightened. I scurried back from the door, turning to stare at it. There was its face, staring at me. My mind was running crazed. I had to sleep, to eat. Then it would be fine. I was just imagining all this.

            The air was odd. There was something wrong with it. I couldn’t seem to get enough of it into my lungs. I glanced frantically around the cabin, shocked by how suddenly dark it was. The stars twinkled through the window. Had it been that long?

            My breathing was shallow, and then I couldn’t breathe at all. I was gasping, black spots danced into my vision. They grew larger, completely blocking my vision of the grinning, hated door. I recall falling down, then…nothing.

***

            I awoke to, not bright, welcome sunlight, but the darkness of night. Whether I had slept the whole day or a few minutes I was not sure, but it was night again. I looked at the door. The hideous face was gone, replaced by random scrapes and scratches. My head hurt terribly, but my mind was clear. Well, clearer then last night…or this night. Anyway, my vision and thinking were still a bit fuzzy.

            I stumbled into my bedroom, tired beyond imagination. I gratefully fell into bed.

            Then I gave a bloodcurdling scream.

             Why? Because I had just fallen on something large, metal, and very pokey.

            I leapt up, rubbing my tender back and whirling to face my adversary. To my surprise, there was simply a crowbar, lying in the center of my now quite disturbed bed. How it had gotten there I still do not know. With trembling hands, I slowly picked it up.

            And just like that, I lost all reasoning.

            I floated out to the door, my mind not thinking of anything but opening it. Not thinking about how the crowbar had mysteriously appeared on my bed when I am quite sure it was not there before, not thinking about who might have placed it there. All my mind focused on was the door.  I dreamily stuck the crowbar into the crack in the door, then threw all my weight on it. The door fought for a moment, then relented, creaking open. I fell to the ground, so great was my thrust on the crowbar.

            It had seemed too simple. The door hadn’t fought, hadn’t resisted. I thought it would have taken at least an hour. But it opened with ease.

            I thought I heard somewhere in my mind, in the darkest realms of my inner lobes, the devilish, cruel door murmur, “I warned you.”

            I blew it off, telling myself I was overreacting, doors couldn’t talk, I was just tired.

            I wish I hadn’t.

            I did though, and I slowly stood and walked into the room.

            It wasn’t a playroom, or a bedroom, or a study. It wasn’t a library, a billiard room, or ballroom. It was like Clue. What room was left? It wasn’t a hall, a kitchen, a dining room, or a conservatory.

            It was a coffin room.

            It was. There, in the middle of the floor, on a long table, was a coffin. It was long, and black, with gold lining. It had a tiny keyhole just under the lid that I almost didn’t notice, and a silver symbol imbedded into each side. The symbol was a snake, stretched into a round shape, as if circling something. In the center of the circle was a rat, destined to die in the snake’s hoop, its face looking terrified as if it knew death was coming.

            I knew. I had seen the symbol many times.  

            It came on every envelope my old boss had received.

            It was in the place of the return address, a snake circling a rat. Always. It was their gang symbol, I knew that now. It had haunted me through many dreams that swiftly turned into nightmares, like a man into a werewolf, starting out fun and loving and turning all too quickly into a beast of awesome power and horror, killing all in its path, leaving no happiness to trail weakly behind it.

            “What’s a coffin doing in my cottage?” I asked weakly, hoping the sound of my own voice would give me courage. It didn’t.

            I waited, bizarrely enough, for the door to answer my simple but overwhelmingly frightening question, but it remained silent, transformed at last into what I had wanted it to be until this very moment. An ordinary door.

            Not comforted in any way by its stony silence, I slowly advanced to the coffin. I moved closer and closer until, finally, my fingertips brushed its cool surface. I stared at the coffin as my fingers traced the gold letters I had not noticed before on the top, running along the edge. The letters my mind refused to comprehend for a moment, as though I had forgotten how to read. The letters that seemed to be laughing at me with their twinkling gold surfaces. The letters that sent cold, horrified shivers down my spine.

            The letters that spelled my name. 

            There was no real logical explanation for it, besides the obvious, that my boss had found me. Maybe he had broken into the police records or bought or tortured my whereabouts out of a policeman or agent. I shudder now to think what he might have done to the poor creature that suffered his wrath. Somehow, he had found me in my little safe house. But that thought never once touched my mind. All I could think was, the coffin has my name on it. My coffin.

            I began to back away slowly. I had barely taken a step when the coffin, as though it had sensed my retreat, suddenly sprang open, revealing the satin creamy material inside. I froze, staring at the beautiful and terrifying whiteness of it, the cushiony surface, the width and length exactly the right size.

            It was my coffin, and it was beckoning to me.

            The voice was so sweet and subtle I didn’t hear it at first. It said no words, just sort of hummed. I have no idea if the voice was in my imagination or really was there. The coffin called to me. The very light around it seemed to shiver with its wanting.

            And really, how could I refuse?

            I took a cautious step towards it, almost waiting for someone to cry out a warning, but none came. The door had abandoned me and now the coffin took up its silence, calling softly to me. I came closer until I was again touching it.

What was I doing? I started to back away once more, but the coffin’s hum intensified, and, as though I couldn’t resist, I moved back to its side.

The song really was hypnotic. I found I couldn’t refuse its beckoning and slowly, ever so slowly, I pulled out a single chair that seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, although it could have been there the entire time and I would not have noticed. The chair was firm unfortunately, for if it had wobbled it might have broken my trance. But the chair did not wobble or teeter at all, so I remained in my sleep-like madness.

Once on the chair it was only a small step up onto the table, and I kneeled beside the coffin for a moment, staring at the white blanket of fabric. My mind trembled for a moment on the edge of sanity, then I refused to grab the ledge and fell into the abyss of madness.

In a moment I was in the coffin.

I laid down calmly, my hands resting lightly on my stomach. I waited in a terrifying, nerve-racking moment for something to happen.

            Nothing did.

I gave out a sigh of relief and my trance was abruptly shattered. My sanity came back and I realized what I had done. I scolded myself soundly for my foolishness and began to move so to lift myself out of the coffin.

Then, abruptly, the door slammed shut, throwing me into complete blackness and, with utter horror, I heard a key turning in the hole.  Then nothing. Absolutely nothing. I listened for footsteps for what seemed like hours, but heard none.

I swallowed, trying to dispel the horrific panic that was rising in me, clutching my heart in my chest with cold steely fingers. I tried to calm myself, but my distress rose until I could no longer contain it and a frantic scream tore from my cold lips.

After that, I could not stop, and again all reasoning left me as I screamed and pounded on the door to the coffin. I cried desperately for help, but no one answered my call. Whoever had closed the coffin had departed. Or had anyone? Or was the coffin alive, trying to silence me, to grip me in its warm interior? No that couldn’t be! I tried to convince myself, but my panic-stricken mind would believe and hold vehemently on to anything it could find to comfort or terrify it in any way. 

Again I pounded the lid, my force doubling along with my desperation. For a moment I paused, hoping vainly someone or something would hear and come to my rescue, but the sound I wanted desperately to hear, the small click of a key in the lock, would not come to my panicked ears. Another sound reached them though, that seemed to be emanating from the very depths of my mind.

The sound was a satanic laugh, such I had never heard in my life. Whether it came from the door or the coffin or myself, I did not know. The laugh was so dark, so cruel, that it frightened me to such an extent that I could not move. My head swam and I couldn’t get enough air. The remaining oxygen in the coffin was quickly disappearing and I found myself dying in the way that had haunted my very dreams for my entire life.

I was suffocating.

I tried to scream, but my lungs refused, too busy trying to find air to waste time with screaming when they knew better than my brain that no one would hear me.

It didn’t take long. Not long at all. Not long at all before the gripping, mind-numbing terror set in, my brain refusing to function, my lungs no longer expanding, my horrified mind freezing, my heartbeat quickening to an unrealistic tempo then slowing abruptly to a walk, then a crawl, then nothing.

Nothing at all.

Then, in an ecstatic, thrilling moment, I realized. I was free! I had left my coffin cage and had somehow reached the room! I gave a deep sigh of relief and turned to look for my rescuer.

And failed in both attempts.

There was no one in the room (although the door was now shut, whether by its own doing or someone else’s I do not know) and I realized, with utter and complete horror, that I could not draw breath. My lungs would not move! I waited instinctively for my heartbeat to quicken and sweat to trickle down my forehead, but I felt neither. In fact, I felt nothing at all.

The terror of my last moments in the coffin came back to me tenfold, but the things that had comforted me slightly in that dark prison were gone now, and my world made absolutely no sense. I tried to move, and I quickly crossed the small room to a window I had not noticed before, but felt no floor beneath my feet, or my feet at all. My mind jumped to insane, unreasonable solutions.

Then, to cap all my horror, as I turned in a panic away from my own ghastly, frighteningly white reflection, I looked down to where the murderous, demonic coffin lay like a closed door to the underworld, ready to spring open and release all the demons and monsters of my nightmares to my suddenly unrealistic world, and realized, in a mind-numbing moment, that it was still closed.

Every thing then made sense with an off-kilter sense of logic. I had not escaped the coffin. Or at least, not entirely.    

But, if the inevitable has happened, and I am gone from this world, then who in this grey house of the dead, this stony house of the silenced has the mind and memory to write my story in my own words?

I will not try to explain that, for I could no sooner tell you why I still feel the terror of those last moments in my coffin cage most vividly, or why my cold, dead heart still beats in my unhearing ears.

No, I will not explain it except to say that no one has entered the cabin again since that night but the wicked police, who mocked me by trying to take my coffin. They left quickly enough, yes, after I had taught them a lesson, punished them for tricking me, for making me believe I was safe. Still, sometimes, the small boys, the daredevils, fancy they can stay a night with me in my prison. I see them from a ways off or sometimes near a window, come to disturb my peace, or what peace I may have with the horror that still haunts my mind. But what horrors do those that catch a swift, uneasy glance into my room see that haunts them in turn? What disturbing sights await them there?

A haunted cabin, with a closed coffin that no one has ever opened, for it is said that the ghosts guard it and speak to it and allow no one to come near.

    

Author's Note

You can comment whatever you like on here, I don't mind, but try not to swear.

Reviews

[magenta24uk]

I liked this story but I would have liked to have a slower build to her insanity, the door mocking her until she can not take any more and then starts trying to get in. A very nice viual story, I enjoyed it. thank you.

[Aarea]

Thanks for reviewing!

[Jacqui]

I enjoyed this story. You have a flair for the dramatic and I liked the urgency of your short sentences. You kept me guessing almost up to the end - will she get away or not? Thank you for reviewing the 1st chapter of my own book "In the Cards". This book is complete with 35 chapters which I plan on releasing a few at a time. I would be honored if you could read further into my story with my next chapter releases.

[Aarea]

K I will try when I have time :) Thanks for reviewing!

[Wolfwind]

I liked the story, it was catching, it had a great plot and pulled me in, making me want to continue reading until the end. The only thing that kinda made me frown and go. Huh? was when I first found out the main character was female, the tone of the dialong from the main character and what was going on didn't fit a female's basic personality twists in my opinion. But that's just me.
Overall I really enjoyed the piece.

Great Ink!
Aaron

[Aarea]

Thanks for reviewing Aaron! I thought once or twice about making it a boy, but then I would have had to change a lot of things. So I kept her. :)

[The Violent Wolf]

that was interesting. i think you were in her head too much though, and that can get a little tedious to read sometimes. i like how she becomes a ghost in the end, but does she have a name? i think it lacked a little in detail, so you kind of lost me towards the end. but otherwise it was pretty good

[Aarea]

Thanks! :)

[The Violent Wolf]

no prob ;P

[Aarea]

Oh you're on right now! I just sent you a message! :)

[Mizo4]

Ok I'm reading it now so i shall comment how i find it. First of all I have to say this is a good prose and this is of a high writing quality. it has subtle comedy which illustrates sophisticated writing, the way your building tension is superb. It's spooky and powerful. Thank you for entering the contest.