She Comes in Darkness
I thought the house was ugly, but I bought it anyway. Actually, ugly is not the right word. Awkward is more like it. I bought the house to impress a girl, if you must know.
The girl’s name is Becky. Becky likes all of that dark, twisted nonsense — goth music, horror movies, black lipstick, and the like. So I bought this big ugly (I mean awkward) house to impress Becky. I suppose the house is Victorian. It even has one of those “widow’s watch” thingamajigs above the roof.
I slept the first night in my new house alone. Becky wasn’t there because she was having a “girls’ night out” with her twin-bitch sisters. They are identical twins. When I have to stare at their clone-bland faces and their four dreary brown eyeballs I wish I could magically create a trap door in the ground so I could disappear into the earth’s crust forever.
Every house seems haunted when you spend your first night under its roof. New or old, it doesn’t matter. Every house has a soul, and that soul is trying to decide what exactly it wants to do with you, the newcomer.
This house had a brightness that was mighty offensive. Light would always find a way to shine through the walls, regardless of the night’s powerful darkness. That first night, I turned off the lights, shut the curtains, and lay in bed. A harsh uneasiness quickly gripped my insides. The brightness appeared like a lightning bolt ripping through ice water, flooding under the bedroom door and seeping straight through the drywall.
Eventually the brightness faded just a bit and I drifted into a deep sleep. Hours later, I opened my eyes. I was neither awake nor asleep. I was just there, unable to move and physically mummified. My body wasn’t just paralyzed, it was completely numb from the tip of my bald head down to my toenails.
That’s when SHE appeared: a lovely young woman with long red hair and pale, buttery skin. She held an empty black picture frame inches from my face. “Watch,” SHE whispered with peppermint breath and a sinister sneer.
I watched an image of my elderly self, with gray hair and a cane, shuffling through an empty park covered in winter’s dead grass. A folded copy of the New York Times stuck out of my back pocket (somehow newspapers managed to survive our technology apocalypse). I grimaced in pain with each movement, and there was a noticeable hunch rounding out the back of my torn sweater. I slowly sat down on a bench, alone, feeding stale bread crumbs to aggressive geese.
By the end of the twenty second preview of what my life was to become, tears were streaming down my face and my mouth had formed into the shape of a pine knot hiding within a dying tree. I had no idea what to make of my future, pitiful self.
SHE disappeared quicker than a handful of talcum powder in the desert wind, and I never saw her again.
THE END
Enjoy another horror tale by J. Lender here:
© J. Lender 2019
