Dave and I stood outside the abandoned two storey farmhouse, looking up at its broken windows and crumbling red bricks. The two of us took a deep, trembling breath, and went inside. Whether we were trying to prove something to ourselves or to someone else, I still don’t know. But it was the biggest mistake I’ll ever make, stepping inside that house. And I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.
“Man, Steve was right. This place just has that feeling. Y’know what I mean,” Dave said. “It feels like there’s something in here with us. Like it’s staring at you right from the front door.”
He raised his camera up and took a few pictures, the flash-bulb so bright in the dark space it felt like sacrilege.
“What the hell is that,” he asked, looking at the viewfinder.
This was back in the early 2000s, so he had a digital camera, but the quality wasn’t great. Still, I could see what he meant, even from over his shoulder. There was a strange glow on the tiny screen, like a wisp of light hovering above the staircase to our right.
The two of us looked over at the spot where the light appeared on camera, but there was nothing. Except of course for that feeling like something watching us. An intense tingling which covered my skin from head to toe. Every part of me wanted to leave this place, and to run. But that would look cowardly.
“It’s probably just an artifact,” I heard myself say, even though it was very obvious to me it was something more than that. Maybe I was trying to convince myself otherwise.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Dave said, taking a few more pictures.
That feeling of being watched grew stronger and stronger, and we pressed further into the house.
It was dark and dilapidated, the floors and walls peeling and cracked, exposed to the elements for too long.
The house had been abandoned for years, after being forsaken by its previous owners. They still lived in town, but said they couldn’t stand to live in that house anymore - and no one else had ever purchased it. Instead, it had fallen into ruins.
There were rumors about why no one wanted to buy the place, and they all came down to the same thing.
It was haunted.
Ever since the Weathers family had died inside, all those years ago, in a terrible fire. Someone had purchased the land and built a new house at some point, but then they decided they didn’t want to live in it. They said it felt possessed. And after that the property changed hands dozens of times over the years before being totally abandoned. Whoever owned it now wanted no part of it. They had simply cut their losses and run.
Dave was still taking pictures on his camera, and the white glowing dot kept appearing in different places, as if it were following us.
“Man, this is so weird,” he said, pointing at it. “It’s like it’s getting closer…”
We went into the next room, maybe just to keep moving away from the glowing aura following us on Dave’s camera, and found a living room. There was a battered couch at one end of the small space, and newspapers were littered all over it, as if someone had been reading it before getting into an argument with the sports section.
“Huh,” Dave made a noise like something was simultaneously surprising him and scaring him a little bit.
“What?” I asked, trying to get a glimpse of the small viewfinder.
“There’s another one in this room,” he said, showing me the camera.
I looked and saw there was another orb, this one pale blue, hovering just above the couch.
“Okay, that’s fucking creepy.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. And then the orb leapt towards us, stopping a foot or so away.
“You wanna get out of here?” he asked with a fearful quiver beginning to creep into his normally steady voice.
I nodded my head and looked as he repositioned the camera, pointing it towards the first orb, behind us. It was even closer to us now. But we had just enough room to sidestep past it and leave.
I was starting to feel very uneasy, and more and more on the verge of panic. There was a weird sensation being in that room that’s hard to describe. It was like an overwhelming weight of doom and dread, sadness and guilt, fear and hate and all the bad feelings in the world rolled up into a ball and jammed down my throat. I felt jittery and lightheaded and nauseated.
I felt fingers crawling up the back of my neck suddenly and spun around, a cold rush of air pressing in on me with a heavy weight behind it. There was no one there, and yet for an instant I could see a flash of something dead and rotting, a face pockmarked with holes and open sores from which millipedes crawled and worms probed with curious blind visages.
I gasped and began to run, feeling sick to my stomach.
Dave was right ahead of me, racing for the door, which hung open allowing a beam of hopeful light to pour in.
Just as we reached it, though, the door slammed shut with a loud BANG! And all the light in the world disappeared as we were plunged into total darkness. The heavy wood door almost took off Dave’s fingers in the process, as he tried to stop it from closing, but I pulled him back at the last second to prevent that.
“Shit!” Dave screamed. “It’s locked!”
He was twisting the door handle with one hand, holding the camera with the other, and I took it from his hand quickly to look around.
“Can you unlock it!?” I yelled back at my friend, wanting more than anything to leave this horrible place. It had been a bad mistake coming here, I realized now.
“I’m trying! I’M TRYING!” he screamed over and over again.
I looked at the camera’s viewfinder to see that the orbs had multiplied again. Now there were five of them. Three were coming down the stairs from above, and they were smaller, but just as terrifying and evil as the others. Just looking at them made me grit my teeth and clench my toes, as I tried to grapple with their existence in such close proximity to my own.
There was no doubt in my mind who or what they were. Ghosts. The Weathers family, who died all those years ago in a fire, and were jealous of anyone else who stepped inside their home.
As if to confirm this, I had another one of those flashes, a subliminal message speed blip, an abhorrent frame in the existence we call reality, which showed a mother and her two daughters coming down the stairs with rageful faces, teeth bared like dogs about to fight, their skin peeled and melting, charred and black in places from an intense inferno which they could never escape, even in death.
I must have begun to scream at some point, because Dave turned around and looked at the viewfinder and did the same thing. They were practically on top of us now, rising up above us and emitting a buzzing, electrical sound which filled me with dread and made the fillings rattle in my molars. It was like chewing on aluminum foil. Like gargling battery acid. Like dancing in a grave filled with vipers while your mother watches laughing and clapping from above.
It was all wrong, is what I’m trying to say. It felt terribly, awfully, indescribably wrong just standing there, and there was no other way out but to run past them, up the stairs and away from them, deeper into their unholy territory.
We got to the second floor and I don’t remember much of what happened after that. I remember racing up stairs and crashing through a door into a child’s bedroom. It was decorated with darkness, and horrible, gap-toothed clown wallpaper with bubbling, water-damaged edges.
I remember racing towards a window, with Dave just in front of me. He crashed through the glass first, and that must have been when he cut himself.
I went through second, sustaining only a few gashes.
Breakaway glass only exists in the movies, I found out that day. The real stuff is not to be toyed with.
We landed hard on the grass outside, and I lost consciousness a second later. I only had that brief moment to look over and see Dave’s bloody throat, a shard of broken window protruding from it.
When I woke up I was in the hospital. Teens like us had been smoking weed outside the Book Road House for years, and luckily somebody had happened upon the scene. They tried to save my friend’s life, but he was pretty much dead by the time we got to the hospital. Blood loss from a gash to his carotid artery was the cause of death.
I tried to tell people what had happened, but of course nobody believed me. And Dave’s camera was toast, completely destroyed during the fall.
So it’s up to me to prove what happened, and to put a stop to this, once and for all.
Tonight, I’m going back in, armed with recording equipment and a few other items. A big tank of gasoline and a lighter. And a sledgehammer in case that door decides to give me trouble again.
Those ghosts are gonna pay for what they did to my friend