Short Story

2009-02-23T02:22:03Z

Title: The Stain

The house at the end of this street sat empty for years, the Realtor is a nice, comely looking man with a comb-over and honest brown eyes. He tells her the previous owners had lived there for fifty years before dying on a cruise on their anniversary. Their son put the house up for sale and it has sat there for almost a decade.

The house sits on a tidy quarter acre plot of land, the grass is unusually green and the exterior walls are a faded lilac. The flowerbeds have long since grown over with weeds and various angry looking plants that she is sure will put up a fight. The floors are a faded, scratched hardwood, deep cherry in color and with a few coats of wax will gleam happily.

The walls are either paneled in rich, deep natural wood, or painted a cheerful yellow. The windows wide and letting in all of the late afternoon light.

It is a single floor, with a cellar she decides immediately she dislikes because unlike the rest of the house the cellar is dirt walls and flickering lights.

The electricity is not up to code and the water heater is finicky, but she decides to buy it and for three months the house undergoes renovations to bring it up to code. She moves her furniture in and for a few weeks everything is fine.

However there is a stain on the wood paneling of her bedroom wall. it is strange and creepy and oftentimes keeps her from falling asleep. The moonlight pours in from the bedroom window and illuminates the stain in a spotlight of faded, milky silver.

She stares at it at night and thinks maybe it is just a discoloration, and scowling at her stupidity she will roll over and fall asleep.

She does this every night the first month she sleeps in the room, until one night she is awakened. Her clock blinking an angry red 2:15.
It is tic-tic-ticing with the steady, algorithmic recreation of the ocean. Every wave electronically designed to crash at random into a beach that probably does not exist anywhere. The gulls that echo from the speakers are distracting enough that she does not notice the whispering.

With an unbearably put upon sigh she closes her eyes and begins to drift away, and unbeknownst to her; the stain begins to move.

She wakes up the next morning facing the wall, and it's odd stain streaming further up the wall, and in that place between not quite awake and still mostly asleep she notices that the stain has inexplicably gotten larger.

She measures her days by the growing stain on the wall, counting each panel that is slowly being darkened and morphed.

Eyes appear first and the first night she awakens to this realization her clock is tic-tic-ticing with waves crashing into invisible beaches.
The eyes glow angry red like her clock numbers and her screams wake the neighbors down the road.

Ostensibly, she calls a contractor and as he inspect the wall he informs her it is merely a discoloration of the wood. It happens in old houses sometimes he says, don't worry about it too much, the wood is just fine.

She puts the glowing eyes down to a reflection of her clock and put it from her mind for several days, and the hours pass in a rush of tic-tic-ticing and crashing waves.

It is mid-December when the trains come through town, and the long, keening wail of a horn wakes her from a dead sleep in the middle of night. She is facing the wall, and for several horrified minutes she watches arms extend across the panel. The eyes begin to move and the stain scrambles across the wall towards her bedroom door.

She is petrified and cannot move and so she lays in bed and watches the stain make it's way in and out of the doorway until finally, with the sun rising through her window, it settles back into it's place on the wall and stills.

She calls the local Minister, who calls the local Pastor, who gets in touch with the Priest who lives three towns and 75 miles away.

She sleeps on the couch for four days waiting for him to arrive, and when he does he takes one look at the wall and laughs at her before directing her to a good therapist and a painter friend who will give her a good deal.

She throws away the therapist's card; but she hires the painter, and the next night as she settles into bed. The walls are a glaring white, reflecting the moon and casting the room in a milky glow, she breathes a sigh of relief.

The tic-tic-ticing of her clock lulls her into sleep, and as her eyes drift closed the waves stop crashing.

It is the silence that awakens her that night, and the walls gorge and distend and there is whispering next to her ear. She scrambles from her bed and rushes for the door, slamming it closed behind her and finding herself on the street, halfway to her neighbor's house. Her breathing is heavy and labored and she realizes she is being ridiculous. The room is different, of course it is different. It is painted white and therefore something she is not used to.

Having spent months in a room with wood panels, the sudden glaring white will be strange to her. She turns around and returns to her house, makes herself a cup of tea and returns to bed. She does not notice the silence.

She awakens some minutes or maybe hours later and the room is completely black, and the silence is so oppressing that she has difficulty breathing. She does not realize she is screaming until she has kicked out the glass of her bedroom window, and is kneeling in the side yard in a mosaic of broken glass and bleeding skin.

From the window, red eyes watch her quietly.

She calls the Priest back to the house the next day, white bandages winding up her arms like war wounds, and brings him to the bedroom with it's terrifying, white walls and the dark stain that has grown into a creature pushing up through the layers and layers of paint.

The Priest frowns, and then jumps as first one eye and then the other blink over at him, glowing faintly red. He tells her he will stay the night in the room with her and cleanse it.

The next morning no one emerges from the house, and it is not until several days later that her neighbors realize the house has been eerily silent that they send a police officer to check on her.

The officer, who is the man who also sold the house, finds bloody hand prints and dragging stains across the walls and ceiling and an oddly sinister shape; two-dimensional and eerily life like on a wall in the bedroom.

He reports nothing unusual and the house is put back up for sale.

Random though

2009-02-15T08:04:56Z

There is something seriously wrong in the world when my hysterical cackling and flailing has finally ceased in startling my cat.

No seriously, we have 3 cats and a dog, all of whom jump and flail and become generally disgruntled at loud noises or when startled, but apparently my reading and hysterical giggling and flailing has finally forced them to get used to it.

Tonight for instance, I've been reading some really awesome fanfic. (All of which I may have to rec at some point because it is just that fantastic) And I burst into hysterical laughter at one point and my cat just sort of gnawed on my big toe and went back to sleep.

It's insane and kind of funny to think about, but hey, what can a girl do right?

Welcome to LiveJournal

2009-02-05T22:53:59Z

dbuijlevwh uhm..hi...this is my lame first post. More to be added at a later date.

noite_bela

Short Story

Random though

Welcome to LiveJournal