One Day, We Will

A short story about two boys visiting an abandoned house.

Maurice told Robert to meet him on Old Lake Road by the abandoned building; said it was time they went on their journey through it. Maurice was sitting on a dirty white brick wall waiting for Robert to show up, fishing through the dead twigs and trash beneath him with his sword. When Robert came up, he was eating a sandwich.

The sun was just setting and the winter air began biting into our skin through our coats. We came up to the house finally about a quarter-mile up. The screen door hit against the frame in the light wind. Black outlined graffiti was painted on the outside wall reading PISS OFF. Upon entering the house, you would see garbage and debris all over. Nothing was in a single piece. A bucket lay against the wall, a broken bookshelf on the ground, a dead raccoon in-between a pair of shelves, probably dead two days now, its fur pulling away from its skeleton, dolls with smudged faces, paper, empty cans, boxes, darkness growing the more steps you took away from the entrance.

The next room was pitch dark. Maurice turns the light on his phone, slides it left and right across the room. When he runs the light over the corner, though, it flashes, and he tries to see what's in the corner again, and again the light fails to show him.

They turn around to leave the room and hear an mmm, mm, mmm, mm, as if like a song, a chant from behind them. They quickly spin to stare directly into the corner; Maurice tries to see what is there again. The light flashes twice and nothing is in sight. Suddenly they spot a group of humans? Creatures. Eyes deeply sunken into their skulls, skin-thin that their bodies appear to be entirely made up of their bones, their fingers webbed and on each other's backs; their colour, though, a gruesome pale. They bear no clothes, instead their bodies are morphed, their crotch down to their knees with an elongated backbone.

All this in a second for, as soon as the boys make eye contact, the light flickers again. All that is seen is a monster coming forward with its jaws apart displaying its sharp and rotted teeth.

Robert ran to the front room, out the swaying door, and sat outside, his back to the PISS OFF wall. He endured the screams of his friend; there was nothing he could've done for Maurice. Robert heard a terrorizing scream become smothered in a throat of liquid, he figured blood. He rubbed his eyes in his sleeve to get rid of the image.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

He cried in his arms and waiting for the silence to come back. He knew he couldn't tell anyone what happened...

Before he stood up, he noticed Maurice's sword on the brick wall. He went and fetched it, wiping away another tear.

He read the carving in the blade, "One day, we will."

He looked up at the sky. "One day, we will."

Glancing back at the house one more time, he walked home.