Our House
Lightening sparked like flash bulbs of a camera, each brilliant flare a snapshot in the time line of a most morbid scene indeed. Enhanced by the silver blue of the lightening, the walls looked more like a fun house portrait as the skins of bodies hung in sinister poses about the room.
My mind was raped of all coherency. How could anyone look upon the macabre spectacle and form anything resembling human thought? Instead I fought to pull my eyes from the ballet of blood that stood before me. Animal passions raged in the very core of my soul. The revulsion was complete.
One may ask how did I come to this place, to this sight which stood before me? It was quite by chance and the most conspicuous of luck…
The storm had bore down on me in a temper tantrum brought on by the changing of seasons and natures only true wrath. I was soaked to the bone, cold and aching, wondering why I had even ventured out into the storm to begin with.
By nature I loved the rampant fits of the mid western storms and did all I could to be a part of them. However on this night, my car had suffered the most from the pour and died on the road from too much water on and in the engine.
I know I should have stayed in the vehicle, but the radio had urged people to get off the roads and into shelters as the storm was growing worse and there was a chance of a tornado. So, I abandoned my ride in search of a house or barn I might take up shelter in.
Miles from any real town, I walked through the storm for nearly two hours before I found a dilapidated house setting just off the road, dark and ominous but dry and I needed shelter. I remember looking up to the towering brick structure thinking how spooky the place looked, joking to myself that I had come across the only house in miles and it was haunted. A gust of ice cold wind and the sting of the rain ended my musings and forced me inside.
The house had been abandoned for years. It was empty and some of the windows had been broken out. The wall paper decaying on the walls and the walls themselves were falling apart.
I had entered into a huge room in the center of the house. The high ceilings and hard wood floors dusty and damp and a large stair case stood on the far side of the room. The kitchen lay to the left of the big room and it was made to look like a small homesteader’s kitchen from the Wild West.
To the right was a smaller room that looked as though it were a sitting room of some sort. In a corner of the room farthest from the window stood a small fountain made of polished stone and had a small cherub in the center. My mind began to wander on about who might have built the place and when. Who could have had the money to afford such a blatant luxury this far in the country? And why would this house have been abandoned?
I then decided to look over the rest of the house. There was another smaller room just behind the sitting room for what looked like hanging coats in. it had a door leading back out into the rain storm at the front of the house and the door was decorative, thick glass.
I went back through the sitting room to the big hall and up the stairs. The upper level was a long hallway with five rooms. Four of them were nothing special, two on either side of the hall, but the fifth room at the end of the hall stood glowing a soft blue, even in the moments when the lightening was not present.
I walked drawn to the room, the soft glow welcoming and strangely exiting. My feet stepped lightly on the floor boards, fearing that one wrong step would send me crashing to the floor below.
I stood for a moment at the doorway looking in. my heart told me not to enter. It pounded fiercely on my chest begging for attention. My mind told me not to listen to the childish ramblings of superstition.
I stepped into the room washed in the heavenly blue glow of the room. The storm seemed to melt away into nothing more than a random strobe of light. I could hear nothing but my breath as I stood marveling at the genius of color use.
The room was directly above the coat room and the only window in it was made from thick glass lined by lead bars. I could see the rain falling in buckets outside but there was still no noise.
A brilliant flash of lightening caused me to step back from the window. Even though I was in this strange house, there was still a chance of injury if lightening were to crash through the pane.
Satisfied with my discovery I turned to exit the room. There was a small girl of about eight years old standing right in front of me, her face gray and shallow, her hair oily and flat against her head. She was dressed in a white nightgown covered in mud.
Her lips parted and a black greasy mud poured out her mouth and in my head, louder than any fit of the storm I heard the word: “Daddy.” She took two shaky steps towards me as I fell backwards into the room.
The night sky lit bright as day and behind the girl I could see hundreds of children standing in the hall, all corpses standing looking to me as their fathers. When the lightening faded the apparition was gone, as if it had never happened.
“Fuck this!” I spoke aloud as I regained my composure and bolted for the stairs. There was no way I would spend another second in this house. None what so ever!
I looked back as I made the top of the stairs there was a shadow in the room behind me. I turned just as the lightening flared again and the girl was standing on the top step her hands held out to me as though she wanted me to pick her up.
I tripped over myself tumbling down the stairs. The house spun and rolled and with a bone jarring thud I landed head first in the great hall. My head spun, dizzy from the fall and the experience. I felt blood running down my forehead and staggered to my feet.
Again the lightening blazed through the room. The great hall was filled with the sight I had seen in the upper level; hundreds of children standing in the hall, all looking at me with their dead, hollow eyes. Hundreds of voices burst in my mind, all begging the word “Daddy”.
My knee’s buckled under the strain of their silent cries. I clutched my head wrestling with their voices, my shattered faith in the world as I knew it crashed in on me as a tidal wave and finally, in slow motion I fell to the floor unconscious.
A crack of thunder so ferocious and so close snapped me back to the world. I scrambled to my feet wild with fear. The door to the house only a couple of yards from me and I was hell bent on getting out of the house!
I burst out of the house like a bullet from a gun only to find a man standing in the downpour right in front of me. He was dressed in old fashioned farming garb and wore a hat with a wide brim.
I stood wild eyed trying to discover if he were real or another macabre figment of the house. He never moved, just standing in the downpour. I couldn’t see his face. He had to be another thing of the house.
I looked around me for a way around this specter. The road was a stones throw away. All I had to do was clear this last obstacle.
“Slow down boy!” The black vision yelled over the storm.
“I ain’t one of them!”
“What the hell is this place?” I screamed from the porch.
“Come on down before it’s too late!” He called back.
I could feel the children of the house on the back of my neck. I had no choice but to get off the property and with no clear way around the farmer I had to run to him.
“Get back to bed!” He yelled to the house.
“There’s nothing for you here tonight!”
I looked back to see the fading shapes of the children as the lightening burst in it fury.
“We need to go boy.” He smiled at me with an old tired face.
“No shit!” I gasped trying to keep the water out of my face.
We walked as fast as we could to the massive barn standing behind the house. The thing stood buckled over in the storm. The sight of it made my blood run cold and I stopped in mid stride feeling as though my first instinct had been betrayed.
“Don’t even think on it boy! They’ll get ya before you could make it halfway down the drive! This is the only way!” The farmer said grabbing my arm and pulling me along.
His grip was real enough and I had little choice but to follow. I knew in my soul that if I didn’t I would surely be dead.
Once again the storm braced for a violent tantrum as the door to the barn slammed shut. The old farmer shed his wet coat and hat nearly as quickly as the door closed and lit a small oil lamp.
“Here, go light those lamps over there.” He barked and handed me a long slim stick lit with fire.
I turned with the stick to see three lamps on hooks behind me and lit them, as he lit three others. The barn slowly began to glow with a dim light and I could make out shapes in the darkness. It was the usual barn stuff, tractors and hay laying everywhere.
“What the fuck is with that house?” I said turning to see the farmer setting on a hay stack reading the bible.
“You believe in the hereafter?” he asked looking up from the good book.
“What?” I asked in utter confusion.
“Do you believe in ghosts, spirits, the wandering dead?” He asked closing the book with one hand.
“Are you saying that’s a haunted house?”
“Do you believe it’s a haunted house?” He cried again.
“Right now I have no idea what to believe.”
“Let’s try this then, see what you think. The house is H-A-U-N-T-E-D!”
“How? Why?” I tried desperately to understand.
“About sixty years ago a parson settled down here just before the village of Lincolnville popped up. He took in stray kids to teach the way of the lord and good Christian values. The land itself didn’t want any part of it.
“See there used to be a tribe of Pottawatomie Indians lived here. They used the land to tell the future. When the future became bloody they left the land. It seems the good preacher built his house dead center of this cursed earth.
“He went insane. He would beat the children mercilessly, claiming that god told him to do so. Then it began, late at night he would single out a child, bring them here in the barn and skin them alive. The skins still hang here on the barn walls!”
Lightening sparked like flash bulbs of a camera, each brilliant flare a snapshot in the time line of a most morbid scene indeed. Enhanced by the silver blue of the lightening, the walls looked more like a funhouse portrait as the skins of bodies hung in sinister poses about the room.
How could anyone look upon the macabre spectacle and form anything resembling human thought? Instead I fought to pull my eyes from the ballet of blood that stood before me. Animal passions raged in the very core of my soul. The revulsion was complete.
One may ask how did I come to this place, to this sight which stood before me? It was quite by chance and the most conspicuous of luck…
“Oh my god.” I sighed in disbelief.
I turned ever so slowly to see the farmer was dressed in the clothing of a preacher. He was swinging a shovel towards my head. It was the last thing I saw for some time.
I woke to find my hands nailed to the heavy beams of the barn. The pain was more than I could take. My screams were blotted out by the raging of the storm.
The preacher stood before me smiling in the lamp light. In his hands he held a massive knife. The blade gleamed as he held it to my face.
“Trust me boy, this is gonna hurt you far more than you think!” He said as he slid the blade into my stomach.
I howled in pain as fire sprang from my loins and slid up to my rib cage. Never had my ears been filled with such wretched and pitiful sounds than when I tried to call out in the agony that must only be familiar to hell itself.
Slowly the blade drug its tooth down my back and across my legs. I was being skinned alive. One last time the blade slid across my arms setting fire to every nerve in my body. And my torture had just begun.
He dropped the knife dripping with my own blood to the floor and reached up to my hair. I saw him wink at me once then he pulled down. The sensation cannot be described as he pulled the skin from my body, like a towel from a rack.
Blood filled my eyes, nearly blinding me as I saw him pull my own face away from me. Stunned beyond all humanity I looked down to see my guts falling out of place and spilling to the floor. Blood sprayed as violently as the raging storm outside and I could find no voice to bring, that could compare to the devastation of body and soul.
The preacher walked behind me now. Again he pulled from my head the back half of my skin. Acidic torment of nerves exposed to air, the ripping sound of flesh being torn from its place, muscles grinding with complete destruction as my body now hung devoid of flesh.
There was a sort of percolating sound in my breathing as blood filled my lungs. So much blood had filled my eyes that all I could see was a dancing spot of red light from the oil lamp. I wanted to close my eyes, but I no longer had eyelids and I knew I would face the last moments of my life wide eyed and forever corrupted, just like the children he had done this too so long ago.
I felt my body fall like led to the floor. I was covered in some strange cocoon as I lay there trying to determine just how long I had before I died. I could hear the sounds of a train whistling its lament far in the distance. I could hear the sounds of my wife’s snoring droning on like it had for so long…
Snoring?! SNORING! I wrestled my way free of my cocoon only to find myself in my bedroom! I had fallen off the bed wrapped in my orange blanket!
It was all a dream! A stupid fucking nightmare! I ran to the bathroom to check myself in the mirror, all my skin was where it belonged, where it had been for 38 years! OH MY GOD, I WAS ALIVE!
I went to my computer room and lit a cigarette, writing down this dream as fast as I could, not wanting to miss accounting a single moment of a living nightmare conjured up by some distortion of my constitution. My heart raced not with fear but with joy. The things that still ran through my mind forced my blood to congeal in my veins and still my soul flew like a bird.
As I sat in the glow of 200 watts of light, smoking, trying to scrub the ugliness out of my mind, I heard my wife wake and go into the bathroom. I wanted to share with her the nightmare and hope that she could comfort me.
I sat and listened as the door opened. I called to her and heard her walking into the room. I sat staring at the screen of my computer and said to her;
“You’re not going to believe the nightmare I just had.” I turned to look her in the face.
It was the face of the girl in the blue room of the house! Her dead little hand touched my arm and my head was filled with the word; “Daddy.”
I woke screaming and flaying at whatever was in my way. My wife leaped out of bed and turned on the light screaming about how I had woken her from a good night’s rest.
I told her of the nightmare, unsure if I was truly free of the thing. My eyes darted to the dark corners of the room. I shook violently trying to calm myself.
“Let me go get you a smoke.” She said trying to calm me down.
“NO!” I pleaded. “Don’t leave.”
It took nearly an hour for me to get the idea I was in the really real world and I finally let her lay down to sleep. I took her hand in my hand and lay staring in the darkness for anything that would be out of place.
I lay there convincing myself that I was fine, it was finally over…
”Daddy”
It rang in my head. The little whisper of a memory of something that didn’t exist and it kept me awake for seven days…