What They Found in the Attic

just another one i whipped up over a few study halls, not too horrific but pretty long

 

            “A monster?”

            “Up in the old barn across the field. He’s supposed to live in the attic and kill people who get too close.”

            “You guys are such idiots,” sighed March, covering her eyes with her sleeve. “Let me go back to sleep.” Eighteen-year-old March turned over onto her stomach on the old suede sofa to try and block her cousins out. Three more days, she thought hopefully. Three more days until Thanksgiving break is over and I can go back to my dorm, away from my loud, obtrusive cousins.

            Eight-year-old Lizzie perched on top of the couch, her feet kicking March’s back. “Come oooon,” she crooned, “It’s sunny outside and we want to go see the monsterrr!” As her sneaker hit March’s head, the older girl grabbed the shoe and pulled it off, throwing it to the floor.

            “No! Let me sleep! It’s bad enough that I have to cook for you guys,” March complained, trying to hold a pillow over her ears.

            “You’ve been asleep for like half an hour,” insisted twelve-year-old Greeven, already wearing his favourite faux-leather jacket. “Come out with us!”

            “No,” said March firmly. “You don’t need me. Go by yourselves.” She pulled her long hair over her face like a curtain.

            “We do need you, though!” said Eve, fifteen years old, as she parted March’s midnight-black hair. “What if there really is a monster?”

            “Then I’d rather not be there.” Finally March got up off the couch and straightened her black denim skirt. She got her soft black coat from the closet and pulled it on over her navy wife-beater. As she was zipping up her black leather boots, Lizzie chimed in:

            “You’re coming with us?” she asked delightedly.

            “Just to shut you up, let me make that clear.” March sighed again, putting on a fresh coat of her dark red lip gloss. “I’m not making you any dessert tonight, just so you guys know.”

            Her last sentence was drowned out by her two younger cousins cheering and stampeding to the door. Kids, she thought with disdain.

            It was sunny outside, but unfortunately it was also about forty degrees. March pulled her coat tighter around her thin frame and made a cursory check of her cousins outerwear to make sure they were adequately clad for the chilly weather. Almost automatically, she complained, “I can’t believe you guys are making me go out in this frigid weather,” to distract herself from the cold itself. The long grass was yellow and crunched in the deader areas when the three sets of sneakers and one set of boots trekked over it. The only things visible before them were the hills of dead, khaki cornrows and the cloudless, photo-blue sky extending forever above them. The telephone wires cast shadows on their faces, skittering across in pairs as the group of them walked up from the house.

            The incline became steeper as they started to walk in between the rows of dead stalks, the abandoned farmhouse and barn coming into view across the field. March’s cousins were talking loudly, probably about the haunted barn they were going to see, but March remained silent. Not only could she care less about some country legend her kid cousins had picked up, but ever since they had left the house, she could just barely smell something on the air, a scent that seemed familiar but was disconcerting in that she couldn’t place it. Even worse was that it was drawing her towards it; if there was one thing March hated more than kids and noise, it was someone messing with her free will.

            Two crows perched on the telephone wires cawed and flew off together when the three children passed below, laughing. Already March was a ways behind them, delayed while trying to figure out the scent in the air. She was starting t get paranoid, checking over her shoulders when a shape seemed to move among the dead husks of corn. The lack of wind meant that March could hear everything, every rustle of a squirrel or rat sifting through the expired vegetation, every little footfall, every car on the highway, which was only a vessel of glistening marks from such a distance. She eventually even had to stop walking, the need to detect and analyze every sound finally halting her. She became hyper-alert as even the tiny crunch of her static boots on the ground was a distraction.

            “March!” This was Eve calling from the top of the hill. March turned to face her, and the younger girl motioned for her to hurry and follow.

            March jogged to catch up with her cousins, looking t the yellowed ground to avoid seeing the shapes she sensed shifting around her. At the hill’s crest, lined with small trees- only March’s height and dripping with dark red berries- abruptly gave way to a concrete barrier which dropped off to the next field about thirty feet below. Eve and Greeven stood precariously on the edge, and March had t hold Lizzie’s shirt collar to prevent her from doing the same. “How do we get down there?” she asked, hoping that it was impossible and they would have to turn back.

            “We slide!” exclaimed Eve, clapping her hands together. She kicked at the top of a lead pipe that ran from the top of the precipice about twenty feet down, then cut off.

            “Oh, come on,” said March, “You’re not going to make Lizzie do that.”

            “She can go on my back,” said Greeven, already on one knee and waiting for her.

            Before March could protest again, Eve had grabbed onto the pipe and slid down the wall. There was a thump as she hit the lower field on both feet. “Come on down, you guys!” she called back up to the ledge.

            March twisted her hair around her finger nervously as Greeven sat carefully on the edge and, toting Lizzie, went down the same way as Eve. Lizzie laughed all the way to the bottom.

            March sat on the edge for a few moments, drinking in the air and searching her brain for the memory that was trying desperately to surface. Unable to sieve through the extraneous matter in her mind, she gripped the pipe and steadied her feet on the concrete on either side. Her black nails clicked against the metal as she bided her time. Goaded by an impatient yell from Greeven, she let got and slipped, seemingly out of control, down toward the ground. At the end of the pipe, she panicked and scrabbled at the wall with her feet. Her hands kept a hold on the end of the pipe, but only until her feet slipped and she fell to the side, hitting the wall with her shoulder and hip. She plummeted the last eight feet to the ground, landing flat on her back.

            “Oww…” she moaned, as Eve came to give her a hand up and the younger two laughed.

            “You okay?” Eve asked as she helped March to her feet.

            “Yeah…” answered March uncertainly, and Eve started off to lead the procession again. March reluctantly followed, hand massaging her sore neck. She noticed a hole on the side of her jeans where she had hit the wall, and beneath it a small scrape from the concrete starting to bleed a little, but didn’t pay it any mind. She could fix it up later.

            Greeven was the first to reach the old, hollow looking barn. Its white walls were stained with age, part of the tin roof had collapsed inward, and the window toward the top of the structure was shattered, jagged pieces of glass left in its maw. Greeven promptly ran up and gave the barn’s rusty metal door an enthusiastic kick, causing it to give an eerie, resounding clang. “Greeven! Knock it off!” exclaimed March, running up and pulling him back by the back of his coat.

            “What?” he asked in irritation, pulling away from her grip.

            March couldn’t answer. She could now feel an insistent, almost magnetic pull coming from the barn; when her cousin had kicked the barn door, she had felt a strange anxiety, as if he might wake someone who was sleeping. Despite March’s concern, Eve came for her and she was dragged inside.

            The barn was silent inside. Golden afternoon light drifted lazily in, in streaks from the gaps n the warped walls. Dust motes floated across, perturbed by the foursome’s entrance, and probably by Greeven’s kick. The three youngest cousins wasted no time in heading straight for the decaying metal stairs. March followed voluntarily to avoid being pulled along by her wrist by Greeven or Eve. As they rose to the barn’s second level, the air became noticeably colder, and the light entering through the broken window they had seen from outside had no golden hue, but instead an icy grey one. The three initially eager children finally slowed down, suddenly aware of the sharp chill of their surroundings.

            “Still think this was a good idea?” March asked sarcastically, keeping her hands in her pockets to keep them from touching the dirty walls and any insects that might be crawling there. They now stood in a thin hallway where only two people, even her smaller cousins, could stand abreast. The way ahead curved to the right along the outer wall of the barn, and the raw wood floor was caked with dirt.

            This was when March started to notice that some of the details were wrong. What she had originally taken to be peeling paint sometimes curled diagonally across the walls, which meant it had to have been cut away, not beong in the direction of the wood’s grain. What looked like a mud spatter near the floor didn’t make any sense indoors, especially not upstairs. Then of course there was the colder air on a higher level…not to mention that same inscrutable scent now wafting enticingly from down the hall. Why was something attracting her to this place?

            Even her cousins, so eager for adventure before, seemed hesitant to continue at this point. Eve pushed Mach forward a little by her shoulder. “You can go first, March,” she said, in a playful voice that didn’t match the look on her face.

            March didn’t need to be told twice. By now her curiosity was insatiable, strong enough even to dominate her gnawing fear. She strode to the end of the hallway and, finding a closed door in her path, nudged it open with the tip of her boot.

            Eve and Greeven screamed. Lizzie shover her face into Greeven’s jacket, and March flinched back, covering her eyes with her hands on reflex. But, wait…

            “Wait!” she called back to her cousins, who had begun to run down the stairs. She looked in the door way again, and sure enough, what they had all thought to be a dead body hanging from the frame was nothing more than a long satin dress, in a sickly beige colour, apparently being used as a curtain. “It’s just a goddamn dress,” March muttered in exasperation at her wasted fear.

            Eve rolled her eyes and leaned on the wall; everyone else sighed in relief. “You guys want to just go home?” asked Eve, finally developing some common sense.

            “We can’t go back now,” insisted March. Then, to cover up the emotion she thought she heard in her voice, “We have to go see the monster!” mockingly imitating her cousins’ earlier pleas. Without waiting for them, she turned around, carefully held the grimy dress aside, and entered the room.

            The only light was from the hall’s window, and a dim glow from this room’s bay window. The full daylight here was blocked by at least twenty random pieces of clothing over the panes, seemingly held up with rusted, sometimes crooked nails. No one person would logically own all these clothes; a plaid skirt was stretched over the window’s corner, but it was overlapped by a man’s sportcoat and a blue women’s blouse. The room was only about twenty by twenty-five feet and it swarmed with the smell that had bothered March since they had left the house. Now, as she inhaled it, it brought back harsh flashes of memory in a slideshow like a broken movie reel; underlit and mottled pictures of an anonymous embrace, a hand brushing against her side, dark hair intertwined with her fingers. She shook her head to dislodge the disconcerting pictures.

On the cold room’s far side were two wooden crates, grey from age, and a large pile of still more miscellaneous clothing. The true horror of the room was on the walls. Written in surprisingly artistic calligraphy and graffiti, in what was clearly blood, were phrases in a variety of languages. Ringing the window was a list of names, separated by fingerprints, inked in the same medium. The far wall held only four words, each letter larger than one of March’s hands. It read: ARE YOU AFRAID YET? Inscription along the floor and ceiling appeared to be pieces of poetry.

            March turned around, trying not to aggravate the creaky floor, and drew a finger across her lips, signaling her cousins to be quiet. She shooed them out with her hands. After only Lizzie and Greeven made it through, the door quivered and slammed shut. Eve screamed again but quickly clamped her hand over her mouth, and the younger two could be heard yelling and pounding their fists on the door, which had locked upon closing. March ran to the door and tried desperately to open it, unsuccessfully.

            “Run!” March yelled. “Run back to the house!”

            “March.” Eve’s voice was weak and wavering. She had to call her cousin again, louder, to get her attention. March stopped trying to open the door and looked to her cousin. Eve’s face had gone pale, and she stood frozen, staring wide-eyed at the room’s far wall. Slowly, March turned around.

            It appeared that the man had been beneath the floorboards, as several were pulled up and cast aside. When she saw him, March’s heart skipped a beat and a scream rose in her throat. He wore a long black coat, torn in many places, and his dark brown hair was ragged and reached his shoulders. These in combination covered most of his ghastly white skin and thin face and body. There were red stains in the cracks in his lips.

            Before the scream reached her lungs, March saw something in his face…something that she recognized. “Wait…Felix?” she murmured, unsure and still terrified.

            The man’s thin mouth cracked a dark smile. “March.” His voice was rusty and cracked, as from disuse. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

            March laughed, high-pitched with relief. “Felix!” She started toward him. “I can’t believe you’re alright!” Missing for two years, he had been presumed dead by everyone, including his girlfriend, March. Looking up into his eyes, she recognized him instantly as the man from her hazy flashbacks.

            “March, don’t-” Eve tried to warn her cousin, but her voice came out hoarse and barely audible.

            March wrapped her arms around Felix, ignoring the film of dirt on his clothes and skin. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

            “I’m sorry,” he said, his spindly fingers running over the fresh wound on her hip. “It wasn’t safe for me to see you for a while.”

            March’s eyebrows cinched. “What do you mean? What happened?”

            He gently, carefully stroked her face, his fingertips lingering on the delicate rise of her cheekbone, the curving angle of her jaw. “Do you remember…when you said that if I ever found a way to cheat death, that you’d stay with me forever?”

            Confused but honest, March answered, “Sure I remember.”

            Hesitantly, he nestled his hand in her soft hair. He caught her gaze and held it fiercely. “Do you still feel that way?”

            Leaning into his touch, she answered, “Well, yeah, as long as you haven’t changed.”

            Just a little, and very quietly, he laughed. “Don’t worry, love. I’m still the same on the inside.” And he placed a hand on her shoulder, and he placed a hand on her neck. “This won’t hurt for long.”

            Eve’s lips were frozen. Her eyes were stuck open, though she saw the scene before her in a blurred tide of particles, as from a fishbowl looking out. Her hands trembled with the need to intercede, but the rest of her was caught in an immobilizing, arthritic grip, stopping her advance, stopping her escape. She could see as clearly as day what this man was, and what he was doing to her cousin. At the sight of his white, glimmering fangs, she slumped to the floor, unconscious- the picture before her finally became too much for her reality.

            From the solid hold of Felix’s arms, with his hot breath caressing her neck, March wondered briefly if all this could be real. She felt this become a moment of drastic change and wild, undiscovered horizons…but at the scrape and press of his dry lips against her neck, she closed her eyes and succumbed to the twin pinpricks of enlivening pain, the grasp of bony hands, and the swathe of wintry air laced with the prickling of venom. The world fell away betwixt the silk of blood in her veins and a curtain of black.

 

“Death be not proud, for though some have called thee

mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.”

Author's Note

i'm aware that the fact that Felix's identity is kind of abruptly realized, it's undergoing some revision, but otherwise review away!

Reviews

[Rowanna]

Thankyou for entering my contest Daleth. I apologise for not reading the contest entries earlier but there have been other things on my mind.

[Matthew]

P:retty good story and premise. I would kill the adverbs though. If you woule like a little off the record on it send me a message.

Great start!