by Cyle James
The bed was queen sized with a wooden box frame that sat on four posts about a foot off the floor. The posts seemed to have some of the same slashing marks on them that had destroyed parts of the wall. On top of the mattress sat a large blanket patterned with intricate cross-stitching that would have looked good in any home décor magazine if it wasn’t for the extensive tearing and the burn marks from many dropped cigarettes. There was a dirty, full length mirror hung on the wall across from the bed encased in a thin frame of pale pine. There was a window to the left of the bed across from the doorway that seemed to have some sort of writing in another language sprawled across the dirty glass surface. It seemed to have been written in the same paint as the drawings on the wall in the other room.
Violet stepped into the room first, walking immediately over to one of the two large off-white dressers that stood on opposite sides of the room. Both of the dressers had all of its drawers pulled out to various degrees with varying contents inside of them. The one in front of Violet seemed to be filled with clothing, most of it old garbs for an averaged sized man while others seemed to be clothing for a child. All of it dusty and stiff with caked on dirt.
“Who the hell lived in this place?” she asked as she picked up a pair of faded pink kid’s pants.
“Evidently it was a parent and child”.
“You think that woman...Poya or whatever was the mothering type?”
Riley began scanning through the other dresser, “I can’t say much about her. But by the look of the other room the place might have been inherited by another family member like an uncle. Or based on the artwork perhaps a psychotic lodger”.
The drawers that Riley riffled through were filled with scattered trinkets. A lot of which seemed like nothing more than junk such as a plastic handheld mirror or a few stray cigarettes, a broken harmonica and an empty whisky bottle. But there was one item that was clearly special. Wrapped in a snowy silk handkerchief was a silver necklace and locket garlanded with intricate floral designs, which contained a small black and white photograph of a baby.
“I think I found the owner of that scary doll at the end of the hallway,” Riley said as he passed the necklace to his wife.
She rocked it from hand to hand as she examined it, contemplating what to do with the curio.
“So,” he started, “are we sleeping in here tonight?”
She looked up from her examination and scanned the room with distaste, “As much as I’d prefer not to, I don’t think we have much of a choice, do we?”
Without much thought Violet dropped the locket onto the dresser top with a metallic thud.
“You could always go and sleep in the lake. Just float on your back and hope you don’t get taken away,” Riley advocated with a smile.
Violet mocked his eagerness with the sloppiest face she could muster, “Isn’t that where I pee? What sort of woman do you think I am?”
With a laugh he said, “You want to stay in this bear habitat, don’t you? I’m pretty sure you bearly qualify as a woman. Get it? Bear...ly?”
With an even bigger laugh she responded, “I hope you remember my lack of femininity when you want to roll on top of me this week. You’ll have better luck getting off with an actual bear”.
Chapter 4
Riley awoke with a start, dripping in sweat despite the cold air that engulfed his sleeping body. His mind raced to remember the nightmare that was rapidly running from his memory like water from a cupped hand. He recalled something about blood. He remembered that he was dreaming something incredibly violent but nothing more than hazy vagueness returned to him. Riley ran his hands over his goose bump covered arms as he looked down at his still sleeping spouse, who like Riley, slept in her underwear with her clothes as a cover instead of the filthy, cigarette stained blanket that was provided to them.
He slowly inched his way out of bed so not to wake his wife, figuring it would be a while before he could clear his mind and calm his nerves enough to get some proper shut eye. It was miraculous that either of them was able to sleep at all. But after the day that they had, death would have come had they not gotten some rest sooner rather than later. Riley examined through one of his bags on the floor by the doorway and looked at his stowaway watch; it read 3:44 in the morning.
With the quietest grunt he could manage he lifted himself up to his feet and out of the room and into the hallway. Without the light radiating from the living room lamps on the ground floor, the second floor hallway was nothing more than a wall of darkness. The faint light that was seeping in from the window was just enough to cast a beam into the hallway, resting in front of the rocking chair before the stairs. The button eyes on the doll seemed to glow in the dark even though they still basked in the shadows. Riley couldn’t quite put a finger on why but the toy made him even more uncomfortable than he was before. Perhaps before he woke he was dreaming about being mauled by killer dolls.
Riley walked to the end of the hall and picked up the toy with a tight grip.
“You are a creepy little thing, aren’t you?”
He contemplated putting it back into its seat almost apologetically for having disturbed its slumber, but after a moment he thought better of it. He wanted it out of his sight and out of mind so he didn’t have to keep thinking about it all week every time he got up to use the toilet. Riley turned around and walked over to the room that was arguably even creepier with the paintings on the walls with the intent of hiding the thing from the rest of the world and most importantly himself.
When the door was opened he was surprised to find that the light was still on. He could have sworn that they had turned off the lamp before they went to bed.
“Did you put this on?” he asked the doll with a raised eyebrow.
It didn’t respond.
“Fine, keep your secrets,” he said as he tossed the toy against the wall.
As if in response a loud hiss of wind came down from above.
Slightly taken aback Riley looked up at the entryway to the attic and the gaps that seeped air. He had the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that he wasn’t alone in that cramped room. He didn’t consider himself a paranoid man, but for some reason he felt that he wasn’t safe. It took a few seconds of staid deliberation before Riley decided to take a look in the attic. As uncomfortable as he might have currently felt, he didn’t suddenly believe in the monsters of the dark.
He reached upwards and gently tugged the cord that hung from the ceiling downward, which opened the attic door with a whimper and a falling cloud of dust. There didn’t seem to be any way to climb up such as a hanging ladder. Nor was there any sort of light source to break into the dark, as the floor lamp wasn’t nearly strong enough to reach the attic. Riley cursed himself for not bringing along his cell phone, which could have provided enough brightness to let him explore without fear of slamming his skull into a support beam. But then just as he was having second thoughts he remembered the collection of junk that rested underneath the bed. He bent down and grabbed one of the candles and box of matches. With a few failed strikes he had himself a colonial era flashlight.
With his free hand Riley grabbed onto the ledge above and stepped onto the bed, using it like a foot ladder. He poked his head into the attic and waved the candle in front him, but even with the flickering flame the attic was too dark to see very far. He could only make out approximately two feet in front of him, which only revealed a few crumbling cardboard boxes and pink insulation resting on the flooring.
“What the hell am I doing?” he asked himself as he rested the candle on the ground surface where it wouldn’t set any of those fluffy pads around him alight.
With more struggle than he had expected Riley heaved his out of shape body up and into the attic proper, resting his tired behind on the ledge with his feet dangling into the room below.
“Reminder for later, I need to eat more vegetables and less ice cream,” he muttered to himself as he lifted the candle back into the air to find his way.
It was one carefully laid step after another as he explored the cavernous room, cautious not to fall through a rotten floorboard or step on any rusty nails. With every inch further from the safety of the light below, Riley realized that he wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or pleased that he wasn’t discovering anything in his foray into oblivion. While he was curious as to what else that the strange house might hold, his nerves weren’t exactly ready to find anything truly horrific. The creepy doll was enough to alarm him, his heart probably wouldn’t survive finding a human skeleton.
His luck soon changed when he spotted something on the edge of his peripheral vision, something small and dark low to the ground resting against a structural partition mostly hidden from view. With a deep breath Riley bent down and inspected it closer. The object was rectangular, about the size of a VHS tape, covered in what appeared to be a black garbage bag and wrapped in razor wire.
With wary fingers Riley grabbed onto a part of the wire that wouldn’t splice him open and picked up the object that seemed to weigh less than its appearance suggested. A small shake revealed nothing in terms of its contents. Turning it at all angles in the light helped just as much. It was then that he heard a shuffling sound from somewhere behind him, quiet and low as if not to gain his attention. Riley’s mind raced as to possibilities. It most certainly was some sort of vermin that had woken up by his presence, or even a sleeping bat.
Surely it couldn’t be anything more dangerous. And yet his pulse quickened and his breath became shallow as he debated turning around into the dark. What if it wasn’t a small, furry critter? What if it was something far more sinister?
“What on Earth are you doing up here?” asked the voice raspy and weak, much to the instant relief of Riley.
He turned around and spotted the head of Violet barely sticking up from the hole to the tiny room below, her face contorted in the way that only the sleep deprived are able to manage.
“Um. I’m not really sure. Exploring I guess” he said as he stood up with the object still in hand and began his trek back to the world of the normal people who don’t hang around in peculiar attics.
“I woke up and you weren’t there. I figured you were in the bathroom, but after a while of you not coming back I got worried,” Violet said as he stood above her trying to figure out a safe way to get down.
“What would you be worried about?” he asked, handing her the mystery item without any sort of explanation or warning.
Riley blew out the candle and proceeded to hop back down into the room, using the cot as a safety net.
“I don’t know. I...I was having a bad dream. And I guess it got to me a bit,” she said, flipping over the package to try to figure out what she was just handed.
“I found that up there. Didn’t get a good look if there was anything else...thought I heard a bat. But I figure it will be easier to look around there again during the day with the sun shining through the cracks” he explained as he tried to pry it back from her hands.
Violet playfully yanked it away, exiting the room and heading back to the master bedroom, “I’m assuming that we’re opening it? It feels like Christmas with the Manson family”.
“Of course we’re opening it,” he said as he trailed along, turning on the lamp by the door, “Where would my sense of adventure be if we didn’t?”
Violet chuckled as she plopped down on the bed, trying to find a way to get the wire off without cutting herself, “Sense of adventure, huh? Where has that been for the past couple years?”
Riley chose to ignore the slight, as it likely wasn’t meant to really offend despite its stinging effect. Instead he chose to focus on the package and the secret that it held inside.
The wire was tied tightly on one side, untouched for so long the metal almost seemed to have been fused together. It took a few minutes of prying and a layer or two of epidermis from his thumbs before it came unconnected. Slowly he unravelled the line until the wire fell loosely to the floor, leaving nothing but the object in a slack plastic bag.
Riley paused with a sly grin to look at his wife, who had an expression of delight that he hadn’t seen on her face in a long while. Her eyes tired from the lack of sleep and yet wide eyed in anticipation. He was amused that all it took to make her that happy was some junk that he found in a stranger’s attic. He was even more amused that he almost had forgotten how nice it felt to see her like that.
With a quick pull the garbage bag tore with a squeak, revealing a small notebook no bigger than the average wallet. It was remarkable how it looked a lot bigger when it was padded by the puffed up bag. The book was auburn and grey in colour, and seemed to be made out of some unknown texture that prompted a comparison of broken rock and petrified bark. The book was held closed by a strayed twine string wrapped around it and tied tightly on the back.
“That’s it? All this fanfare for a journal?” Violet asked, the expression of joy stricken from her face and replaced with one that was all too familiar to her husband.
He shrugged, “What did you expect? A bar of gold? It probably belongs to the kid that lived here. Maybe as the baby got older it got all teenager-like and full of angst, the kid wrote a bunch of its melodramatic demon poetry and hid it where the parental figure couldn’t find it. Hell, maybe the kid is the one who lived in that room. The kid grew up and got into a goth phase, drawing figures on the wall and masturbating to nu-metal”.
Violet huffed, “Your insane rationale isn’t wanted at this particular juncture, Riley”.
He took that as her not-so-subtle hint that he should stop talking and proceed with opening up the book. Yet he found himself hesitating. Suddenly he felt that pull on his stomach as if it was being jerked from all sides. It was the same feeling he got before he found himself in the attic. Riley suddenly felt like they were in danger.
“Maybe this isn’t a good idea,” he said with a thousand yard stare, his fingers gripped tightly on the book to ensure it suddenly didn’t fall open.
“What are you talking about? What happened to Mr. Adventure? It’s a book. Let’s just open the damn thing and be done with the mystery so we can go back to sleep,” Violet said with annoyance while looking at her husband as if he just started speaking in tongues.
“I know. I know. It’s a bit of a quick 180. But I’m just getting this feeling that we shouldn’t be doing this. Let’s just toss it back up there and forget about it?” he said, posing the last bit as a question instead of the statement it should have been.
Violet leaned forward and placed her hand gently on his leg, “Hun. You’re holding a book. It’s not even a particularly well-made book. Nobody is going to pop out of the closet room and kill us to get it back. You’re freaking out over nothing”.
He smiled uncomfortably, “I never said anything about anyone killing us. It seems like you’ve got a few ideas running around in your head, too”.
It was Violet’s turn to smile uncomfortably as she peered down to the journal, “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit nervous right now. But I also just had a pretty freaky nightmare that I woke from, so you’ll have to excuse me if the haunted looking house and the strange journal have me a little jumpy. I do know that none of that actually matters. The house isn’t haunted and the journal is going to be nothing but ‘dear diary’ entries. But it is the possibilities that have my stomach all aflutter”.
Riley didn’t say it aloud, but as he grasped the book and braced himself to open it all he could think about was the fact that he was willing to do almost anything to make Violet flutter like she once did for him.
Without another word and a pathetic notion of wanting to appease his spouse he cracked it open, turning the stiff cover to the first page. The paper bound to the book seemed to be old and almost brittle, as if it had been wet and dried out repeatedly. It was tan in colour with streaks of light black ink running down the pages in multiple places.
Neither of them could quite make out what was in front of them. It mostly looked like som
e sort of black blob, roughly humanoid in shape similar to what might be found on a Rorschach test. It had been carefully painted in a vaguely watercolour style but without any colour; it was devoid of any distinguishable features amongst the mass of ink. Across it in thinly painted red lines was a seemingly random assortment of shapes and letters, none of which looked remotely like English. Turning to the second page was more of the same, words in the mystery language with what appeared to be a close-up of a monster-like face which seemed to be growling out from its paper prison.
Riley scanned through the book, looking at nothing but page after page of comparable artwork to what came before and to that of which was scribbled on the wall in the bedroom below the attic.
“Do you really think that the owner of that silly room was also our author?” Violet asked, stopping Riley on a particularly violent looking tableau as he flipped through.
He shrugged, turning the book askew to see if he could make better sense of the assortment of body parts that it seemed to depict, “It’s as good a guess as any. I certainly wouldn’t want to meet the kid, he seems like a bit of a nutcase”.
Violet sneered, “Or it could have been a girl”.