December 15th, 2012

It's been years and years since we left that house. Wow...The kind of memories that an old journal can drudge up. I'm 21 now, and as I look back on my entries, back upon the practically blind thoughts of a naive 1 year old girl. Reviewing it all as a college student, studying psychology and theology, sitting at the big wooden table that then served as the center of my life after all was said and done. Her at Aunt Reesies house. the same spot where my mother cried over the lose of my father all those years ago.Or more so, crying over the the event that resulted in that...thing....taking over my fathers free will.

All in the house that we hadn't even lived in for a full summer.
The police found my father, a year later  in the same spot he had been in when we left. In the same clothes. All around his body, all around the house were those greasy smudges, which now revealed themselves a little more clearly as footprints from some unknown animal. All of the wallpaper from waist level down was shredded and scratched with such force that it left scoring on the wood beneath.

Puncture wounds were found on my fathers inner thigh, as though some creature had drained him of first his will to live, then his blood. They cremated him, and my mother dared not sell the house,  for fear that the creature still lived within its walls.

Eventually, Aunt Reesie sat Anne and I down and told us the truth that our mother could not bare to say.

Reesie had recognized the signs of otherworldly influence straight away. She warned my parents not to buy the house. Reesie knew it's story. But my parents had already fallen in love with it, and refused to listen.

Reesie offered many times to take us in before things escalated. But my Mother had believed that she could defeat the scurrying menace that flitted about our home. When Anne fell sick, Reesie was the one who found the marks on her thigh. When doctors overlooked t. We went back today...To close this once and for all.We knew the thing was evil, malicious, and homicidal judging by it's many actions. But what still bothered me, was that I had never found my scrap book. To think that that thing may have taken something, that had followed us since before we moved, something so personal and close to me. It unnerved me.

So we armed ourselves with charms of protection, for what they were worth against what we knew was a menace. Reesie, Anne and I entered the weathered front doorway, the door long gone. My mother observed in fear from the edge of the property. The living room was torn to pieces. there were gaping holes in the drywall, and the attic door was hanging from a single hinge. The entire house reeked of death and decay. Anne quivered by my side as she had done so long ago. We eased the attic door open, the rusted hinge screaming in protest. The stench multiplied beyond that which anyone human has ever smelt.

The stairs creaked shakily as we nervously made our way up into the attic. We prepared ourselves mentally, knowing full well the type of horror we might find. But we never could have prepared ourselves for what greeted us at the top of those stairs.

Splayed out in an orderless fashion, was pile upon pile of crudely disemboweled corpses. Both human and animal. There were bones strewn all across the room. my old bed frame sat just as it had been left, the mattress stained brown with dried blood. all of the drywall had been ripped down, allowing the spaces beneath the lower sections of roof to gape openly, like caves into terrible worlds. There amongst all of this carnage, between my gagging sister and my steadily paling aunt. I saw the scrapbook. Perched open upon the ribcage of some poor soul. The makeshift book stand made my throat go dry and sweat break out even more heavily than before.

There, beneath a picture of my family. were the words "kill them, absorb them, become them". my fathers face was blacked out with the same grease found everywhere. Grease that I now recognized as thick, sickly, dried blood.

We all stood there, in a state of shock. The horrors of our world coming nowhere close to the scene that lay before us.

The scurrying started. The scratching began. Just like before it was all around us. But this time there was something else. It was like a million voices all saying the same things in their grotesque rasping, foreign tongue "kill them" some said "absorb them" others said "become them". Like the most horrifying choral group they repeated these words over and over again.

Our feet hit the pavement outside before our minds had processed the fact that we had begun running.

between gasps and hyperventilation, we all doubled over around my mother, who I realized was staring up at the house with a look of pure terror on her face.

I followed her gaze. And there, grinning back at us from the window overlooking the garden, was a little face, and a pair of eyes.

Reviews

Absolutely fantastic ending. Great wrap up. You brought in all of the elements you used through the chapters. Excellent