It all started with an inconveniently timed thunderstorm. It was Friday night, and my friends and I were hanging out by the old wooden footbridge that spanned across the lake. The bridge had gone into disrepair over the years and since they built the new, sturdier concrete bridge closer to the lakeside playground, barely anyone used it anymore. It became a haven for us teenagers. We would gather and drink pilfered booze and smoke joints with barely a thought of getting caught.
So there we were, passing around a bottle of spiced rum Jeff smuggled from his dad’s liquor cabinet between the four of us when the sky suddenly opened up and the rain poured down in sheets. We all scrambled underneath the bridge, ducking for cover and trying not to get dripped on through the cracks and missing boards.
“Well, this is just great.” CeCe grumbled, tucking herself under Randy’s arm.
“I didn’t know it was supposed to rain tonight.” Randy said as he tried, and failed, to relight the soggy joint between his lips.
I pulled out my phone and checked my weather app. Eighty percent chance of rain from now until five AM.
“Looks like its not gonna stop anytime soon.” I said, showing them my phone. “What the hell are we gonna do now?”
“Let’s just jump in Jeff’s car. Have a party on wheels, like old times.” Randy suggested with a wink.
“No way, dude.” Jeff told him, wiping a strand of soaking wet hair from his forehead. “Last time we drank in my car, you spilled half the bottle and it reeked like vodka for like a week. My dad almost beat my ass.”
“Is there anywhere else we can go?” Asked CeCe, shivering. “It’s not even eight thirty yet. Way too early to pack it in for the night.”
“What about your house, Jessie?” Randy turned to and asked.
“Hey, my mom’s cool and all, but you know she’s not down for underaged drinking. We can go there to chill if you wanna ditch the bottle and the smoke.”
Randy snorted. “Yeah, that’s a no from me.”
I sighed. It used to be so easy to find something to do on the weekends, but ever since sophomore year when we added booze and pot to our extracurriculars, finding somewhere to do those things were few and far between.
Jeff turned to us, a smirk slowly spreading across his rain-soaked face. “We could always hit up the creep house.”
“Hilarious.” I rolled my eyes at him, dismissing the idea entirely.
Every small town has that one house that everyone talks about. You know the one. Maybe it’s down the street, or maybe it’s right next door. It’s the house that every kid grows up hearing scary stories about. The one they all dare each other to walk up the front steps of. The one that gives you the creeps just to look at. Maybe the legends say it’s haunted, or someone was killed there. Maybe rumor has it a serial killer buried all his victims in the basement. Maybe it was used for satanic rituals. Whatever the story may be, the truth is usually something much less sinister. But sometimes, it’s something much, much worse.
47 Rosewood Lane was ours. It was known around town as the creep house, though no one really knew much about it or its history. There were just the rumors and stories. As long as I’ve been alive, no one had ever lived there, and my mother says it was vacant even when she was a child. It seemed like such a waste to me. The house was beautiful, maybe a little dated, but it was well built and hardly showed signs of wear after all these years of being an empty shell. It stood tall and proud on the corner of the street, two stories high, with white shingles adorning the outside of the second floor while the entirety of the first floor was wrapped in the most beautiful cobblestones. The blue shutters hung off haphazardly in some places, the white shingles graying slightly with age, but for the most part, the house stood firm and unbroken.
Despite its beauty, the house gave off a certain aura that gave everyone in town an aversion to it. People crossed the street instead of walking directly in front of it. Though there was room on the street in front of and on the side of the house to fit six cars or so, no one ever parked there. I’ve seen people drive around the block multiple times looking for a spot to park their car instead of taking a spot there. To my knowledge, no one had ever been as far as the front steps of the house. And I, for one, had never planned to get anywhere close. Even looking at the house for more than a few seconds gave me an uncomfortable feeling in my chest, made my skin prickle. So the thought of actually going inside the mysterious structure sent my stomach doing flips.
“Oh, come on, Jessie. You’re not seriously still afraid of that place.” Jeff shot back at me, nudging my arm playfully with his elbow.
“No, Jeffrey, I’m not afraid of it. I know all those stories are bullshit. But God knows what could be lurking in there. I bet there’s rats. I feel like I need a tetanus shot just walking by that place.” I crossed my arms and shivered, not entirely from the rain.
“I’m with Jessie. Besides, that place gives me the heebie jeebies.” CeCe said, backing me up.
“It’s just a suggestion. Not like we have a lot of options right now.” Jeff shrugged. “At least it’s somewhere dry. And we know nobody’s gonna come barging in there and bother us.”
“It’s not that bad, guys. I’ve been in there once.” Randy said.
I turned to look at him just as CeCe and Jeff did the same. “What?”
Randy just laughed. “Last year, me and Greg Cummings snuck in there to smoke when his parents were home and we couldn’t do it at his place.”
CeCe shook her head at him. “No way. I’m calling bullshit.”
“Seriously, I’m not lying CeCe. It’s closed up pretty good so its not as dirty as you’d think, just old and dusty. It’s the perfect spot, no one ever goes in there so its not like we’d get busted or anything.”
No one said anything for a long moment. CeCe and I looked at each other, and I could see that she was feeling the same hesitations that I was.
“Think about it, guys. I mean, unless you just wanna go home.” Randy smiled as he leaned over and kissed CeCe.
“I don’t know…” I said, looking over at Jeff. He looked back at me and that little smirk crawled across his face.
“Tell you what, how about we check it out and if it seems super sketch, we’ll get out of there. Sound good?”
CeCe sighed. “Okay.”
“Jessie?” Jeff pressed.
Even as every cell in my body was screaming at me to say no, I felt the peer pressure soften my resolve. “Okay. Yeah, I guess so.”
When there was a short break in the rain we sprinted out from under the bridge and up the small hill to where Jeff had parked his car. As we drove the short ride over to Rosewood Lane, I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that had settled in my chest at the idea of going into that house, but I didn’t want to seem like a baby so I kept it to myself.
As Jeff pulled over to the side of the street and parked a few houses down from 47, a chill ran down my spine. “Are you sure about this?” I asked Jeff hesitantly.
“Come on, Jess. What’s the worst that could happen? You know I’d never let anything happen to you.” Then he flashed me that million watt smile of his. And just like that I relaxed into the idea.
That was the thing about Jeff and me; he could talk me into just about anything. When he told me something was okay, I always trusted him. It had been that way forever. Jeff and I had been best friends for as long as I could remember. We lived just three houses down from each other, and he was the only other kid my age on our street, so it was only natural that we gravitated towards each other. Even as we got older, into middle school and high school, and made other friends, we still stayed really close. Jeff was handsome, sweet, and charming, so he became very popular with ease. I was shy, reserved, a little awkward even, but because of Jeff, I was accepted amongst the popular crowd. Like I said, he was always taking care of me.
That’s how I found myself sneaking through the wrought iron gate and stepping up the stairs onto the back porch of 47 Rosewood Lane. I hugged my sweater closer to me as a chill ran down my spine, despite the warmth of that spring night. Randy slid open the window to the right of the door and I scanned the backyard as we waited for him to open the door for us. The shadows seemed deeper amongst the untamed landscape, darker, wilder somehow, though we were in the middle of suburbia. My stomach did flips as my eyes played tricks on me, finding sinister shapes in the darkness, leaves moving from the pounding raindrops taking on an eerie quality I couldn’t explain. When Randy finally let us into the house, I felt like I was going to be sick.
“You okay?” Jeff turned to me, concern lacing his eyebrows together as he stared into my face.
I nodded and tried to smile. “Yeah, I’m fine.” I lied. He handed me one of the lanterns he brought with him, the ones he always kept in the car for those dark nights down at the bridge, and I followed him into the pitch blackness of the house.
We entered into a very basic looking kitchen, a little dusty and dated but otherwise no worse for wear. It looked old but in good condition, as if the stove and refrigerator were taken out of their boxes, installed, and simply left here never to be touched. Randy led the way down a wide hallway to what looked to be the main living area. It was very much the same as the kitchen; fully furnished and unused. An ornate looking floral sofa sat perpendicular with a matching loveseat, arm chair, and a wooden coffee table, all coated in a thick layer of dust. Despite all of the furnishings, I noticed that there were no other objects of décor. The white walls were bare of any pictures or photographs, the mantle completely empty of knickknacks. Something about that fact left me feeling unsettled, though I wasn’t sure why.
“This place is sick!” CeCe exclaimed as she walked around the room. “We should’ve been partying here since freshman year!”
“We ready to get this party started again?” Randy asked with his goofy grin, holding a fresh joint in one hand and the half empty bottle of rum in the other.
After dusting off the furniture and putting some music on CeCe’s phone, we spent the next couple of hours drinking, smoking, and laughing by lantern light. We were having such a good time that I could almost forget about where we were. Almost. After a while, Jeff got the grand idea that we should go explore the rest of the house. It was around then that I heard a nagging voice in the back of my mind, telling me to get out and stay away from this place.
“Hey, you know maybe we just head out? I mean it’s already eleven. I’m getting kind of tired.”
CeCe threw her arm around my neck. “Aw, come on, Jessica. The night is young! Besides, we’re already here. We might as well take a look around and see what this place is all about.”
“Yeah.” Randy said. “We’ll just do a quick peek upstairs and then we’ll get going.”
I looked pointedly at Jeff, waiting for him to chime in. “Fifteen minutes, tops. Then I’ll get you home. Deal?”
“Fifteen minutes.” I said firmly. He smiled and grabbed my hand, pulling me with him as he made his way toward the staircase.
The upstairs was much the same as downstairs. Two small bedrooms and a master suite, all fully furnished and unadorned. There was nothing very exciting about it and I found myself becoming impatient as my friends poked around each mundane room. There was something nagging at me, some invisible nuisance telling me to get out of that house, that we had overstayed what had not been a welcome in the first place. After they had explored the tiny half bathroom I finally rallied up the drunken troops and we headed down the stairs toward the door.
We stepped into the kitchen and I practically ran the last few feet to the back door. I placed my hand on the doorknob when Randy exclaimed from behind me, “What the hell?”
I turned to my left to see him staring dumbfounded at a large, ornate wooden door that seemed out of place in this house. “I didn’t see that when we came in?” Jeff said, but it came out as more of a question. I didn’t recall seeing it when we entered either, though a door like this would be impossible to miss. Jeff lifted the lantern up to illuminate the door. It was made of a dark solid wood, with wrought iron hinges and an elaborate wrought iron door knob. Intricately carved designs looped in circles and curves across the thick wood. It reminded me of something medieval. Much like the rest of the house, the door was beautiful but made me feel increasingly uneasy. I felt a shiver run down my spine as Jeff reached for the doorknob.
“Jeff, don’t” I pleaded. He looked back at me with a reassuring smile and a shrug.
“Come on, Jess. It’s not like we’re gonna find the boogie man in there.” Then he turned around and pulled open the door.
We all gathered around Jeff at the mouth of the doorway. A stair case disappeared down into a darkness that was different from the rest of the house. It was more than just dark; it was a void. A complete absence of anything. There seemed to be a source of light at the bottom of the staircase, an unnatural red glow emanating from somewhere just far enough away from the bottom of the steps that we couldn’t make out where it was coming from. Randy whipped his head around with a grin on his face, looking at each one of us. “We have to go check this shit out.”
A sinking feeling hit me in the gut as soon as we started descending those stairs. It was like when you eat something bad and it hits your stomach in just the wrong way to make it lurch instantaneously. I swallowed down the bile that started to rise into the back of my throat and held onto the rail with shaking fingers as, against every instinct in my body, I stepped down the few remaining stairs and onto the concrete floor of the basement.
The first thing, really the only thing, to notice when we stepped into the large room was a giant, gaping hole in the center. The hole seemed to be the source of the strange light we had glimpsed from above. A deep, glowing red radiated up from its depths, like the last burning embers of a fire that was just on the cusp of being extinguished.
“What the hell is that?” I asked, barely a whisper of wonderment and fear.
“That’s pretty cool.” CeCe said with excitement. “Maybe its an old fire. I watched this documentary once about this town where a hole opened up in the ground like this. It turned out to be a fire in an underground mine that they thought they put out but really it just kept burning, fueled by all the coal that was down there.They didn’t even know about it until a sink hole opened up and nearly killed a kid. It’s actually still burning. They had to evacuate the town and everything. They say it could take hundreds of years for it to go out.”
“Yeah, but there aren’t any mines around here, CeCe.” Randy told her.
“It looks pretty deep.” She said, leaning over slightly to look into the hole. “I can’t even see the bottom from here.”
Randy uncapped the bottle in his hand, poured the measly remains of it down his throat, and stepped closer to the edge. “Let’s throw this down there and see how long it takes to hit the bottom. “ He said, shaking the bottle in his hand.
“Guys, I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Maybe we should just-“ Ignoring my protests, CeCe took the bottle from Randy and threw it in. We all waited a long few seconds and heard nothing.
“Huh. Do you think its still falling?” She asked.
I shrugged. “I didn’t hear it hit anything. Could be.”
“That would mean its really deep.” CeCe leaned further over the side to get a better look into the hole. Suddenly, two thick black tendrils shot up over the side of the hole and slapped down a foot in front of her with a loud, wet THUMP. She jumped backwards.
“Wh-what the actual FUCK are those things?”
They almost looked like tree roots, but wrong somehow. They were pulsating, covered in a viscous black substance that resembled tar, with thousands sharp spines running along the length which tapered down to a razor sharp looking point. As they slithered across the ground toward CeCe, the sides of the hole began to pulse, changing from red to orange to yellow and back again. CeCe crouched down and reached her hand toward one of them.
“Don’t touch it!” I yelped.
She looked up at me. “Oh, don’t be such a baby, Jess.”
She touched it briefly and pulled her hand away to look at it, spreading her fingers as the black goop webbed between her fingers. “Gross. This stuff feels like melted silly putty.” She put her hand down toward it to touch it again, and as soon as she made contact this time, she screamed and ripped her hand away. “Ouch!” She brought her fingers up and I could see the black spike sticking out of her pointer finger at an angle. Randy held her hand and grabbed the spike with two fingers, yanking it out as she whimpered in pain. As he pulled it out, something we thought would be mere centimeters long came out covered in her blood and was almost six inches long, stiff like a porcupine’s quill. CeCe’s eyes bulged in horror as Randy held it up for her to see.
It all happened so fast then. While we were all staring in amazement at the thing that had just been pulled from our friend’s flesh, the second root crept slowly closer to CeCe. Then, without warning, it reared up and wrapped itself tightly around her leg, jerking her backwards. She lost her balance and fell down face first onto the floor. The other one wrapped around her other leg, and she was pulled, screaming and clawing, towards the hole.
“Get it off me!” She screamed. “Help me!”
She caught the lip of the opening just as the thing pulled her over the edge of the pit. We all rushed to her. Randy and Jeff each grabbed one of her arms, pulling with all their strength to get her back up to safety as she screamed. She gripped their arms so hard, frantically clawing at their skin to gain her grip. I saw blood start to drip down each of their arms.
“Help me, please! Oh, God! Let me go! Let me go! Let me GO!”
I stared on in horror as my friend fought for her life, feeling useless and terrified and utterly rooted in place. CeCe screamed on for what felt like hours, but was in reality merely seconds, as Jeff and Randy played tug of war with this monstrous black tentacle from the depths of hell. Slowly, I was aware of CeCe’s voice beginning to change.
“Let me go!” She continued to yell, over and over again, but her voice changed from panicked and desperate to an almost dreamy, wistful shout. As I watched CeCe let her grip fall from the boys’ arms, I realized she was no longer yelling at the thing that had captured her. She was now telling Jeff and Randy to let her go. She pushed herself away and slipped from their grasps, falling backwards into the pit. And I swear, in that last moment, I saw her smile.
Not wanting to waste even a moment more, I grabbed Randy and Jeff by their shirts and hauled them up off the ground “We need to get the fuck out of here, RIGHT now.” I yelled. Randy stared numbly down at the pit for a moment, then turned on his heel and raced up the stairs. I grabbed Jeff’s hand and made for the steps, practically dragging him behind me. We were just two steps away from the door when I felt Jeff pull on my hand before his slipped out of mine.
I turned just in time to see one of the tendrils had followed us up the steps and had wrapped itself around his leg. He writhed and screamed, trying to fight it off, but the harder her tried the tighter it seemed to wrap around him, like a boa constricting its prey. I could see the many spines boring deep, deep, deeper into his skin.
He looked up at me in agony. “Jessie, RUN!”
Without thinking, I raced back down the stairs and grabbed both of his hands in mine. As I started to pull him, his cries became even more pained.
“Randy!” I yelled up the stairs. “Help!”
I knew that it was a long shot. He was so far ahead of us, he was probably down on Main Street by now. It was just me and Jeff and this thing slowly curling its way further up his body, and it was up to me to find a way to stop it.
Letting go of his hands, I wrapped my hands around the writhing black root that had taken hold of his thigh and pulled with all my strength. I felt the small spikes stab into the soft meat of my palms, and still I pulled.
It was then that I remembered the knife Jeff always carried in his pocket. Holding the root with one hand, I used the other to dig into the pockets of his jeans until my hand closed around the lump of metal. I pulled it out and in one swift motion, I opened the blade and severed the tendril just below Jeff’s sneaker. More of that black tar came shooting out of the severed end, and the piece that was wrapped around Jeff’s leg recoiled almost immediately and retracted quickly back toward the hole in the ground.
“Come on!” I yelled, wasting no time. I grabbed Jeff up off the floor and pulled him along on injured leg toward the stairs. Before we could even make the first step, the other tendril shot out and wrapped around his torso. Jeff let out an agonized scream. Blood immediately pooled across his light blue shirt in too many places for me to count as the spikes dug into his flesh. The other root, the one I had severed, shot forward from the pit and pierced through the back of his head, poking out of his socket where his right eye had been.
I yelled his name as he was ever so slowly lifted up off of the ground. “Jess, go.” He cried, black mixed with blood oozing down his face. “Run!”
I shook my head. “No, no, I can’t leave you. Jeff, I-”
“I love you, Jessie,” he sputtered thickly, coughing up the thick substance. Then his expression began to change. His lips pulled into a serene smile, and he looked into my eyes one last time. “It feels… better now.” He said dreamily. I looked on in horror as he was slowly pulled backward into the pit. The edges of the hole glowed bright red, and the Earth seemed to contract around it as the hole grew a little smaller. I swear for a moment I heard Jeff laugh as he disappeared into the abyss. And then he was gone.
Everything was still. Quiet. I fell to the floor, unable to scream, unable to cry. I just sat there and stared at that pit that just swallowed up my best friend. I never got to tell him that I loved him too. That I had been in love with him for as long as I could remember.
It wasn’t until I saw that thick black rope inch its way back out of the depths that I found my feet and ran up those stairs, taking them two at a time, like the devil was on my heels. I ran down the hallway and out the front door. I barely register the rain beating down on my skin as my sneakers hit the pavement and I kept on running. I ran without seeing what was in front of me. I ran with Jeff’s final moments dancing in front of my eyes. I ran until I reached the front door of my house. I slammed the door shut, locked the deadbolt, the handle, the chain. And then I collapsed into a heap, a mass of drenched clothes and wet hair, covered in blood and black and dirt, and finally, I cried.
My mother hurried to the front door and found me there, curled up in a ball. She sat down beside me and wordlessly pulled me into her arms. She smoothed back my sopping hair as she hugged me and rocked us both back and forth. After a while, I calmed down enough to tell her what had happened. She sat and listened to me as I recalled every detail from that night. Every single thing that happened from the moment we decided to check out the old cursed house, to the minute I ran through our front door. She looked at me at first with concern, then with sympathy, and by the end of my story her face was laced with utter confusion.
“Honey, they knocked that old house down years ago. There’s nothing but a vacant lot there now.”
“No, Mom, what are you talking about?”
“The Morris house? That thing was a hazard after someone set fire to it. The thing had been abandoned since I was a girl anyways. Whoever lit it up did us all a favor as far as I’m concerned. The house was nothing but a haven for drug addicts and delinquents. Good riddance.”
I shook my head, eyebrows furrowing in confusion. “Morris house? No, 47 Rosewood Lane. No one has ever lived there. It’s still there. We were just in there. I told you. Me, Jeff, CeCe, and Randy Lundstrum.”
Her eyebrows rose in surprise. “Randy Lundstrum? What on Earth were you doing hanging out with that boy? He’s always causing trouble.”
“CeCe and him have been together since eighth grade mom. He’s one of Jeff’s best friends. He’s been over here a million times!” I exclaimed, exasperated.
She looked at me like what I was saying made no sense to her. “Who are Jeff and CeCe?”
After that, I told my mom I had a headache and needed to go lay down. What the hell was happening? My mom had known Jeff since he was born. She knew CeCe since we started preschool together. When I got up to my room, I pulled out my cell phone and called Randy.
“Um, I’m fine… who is this?” He asked after he answered and I asked if he was okay.
“It’s Jessie.” There was silence from his end of the phone. “Jessica Whelan.”
“Oh?” He replied, sounding even more confused than before. “What’s, uh, what’s up?”
“Randy, where the fuck did you go? It got Jeff too. I tried to save him but, I…” I let out a shaky breath, on the verge of tears again. “And now my mom is acting like she doesnt know who Jeff and CeCe are, I don’t know what’s going on but I feel like i’m losing my mind here.” I ran my hand through my hair, gripping the phone tightly to my ear.
There was a long pause before I heard Randy let out a breath and chuckle uncomfortably. “Look, I uh, I gotta be honest here. I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. Is this like a joke or some shit? Because i’m really confused dude.”
I hung up the phone and sunk down to my bedroom floor, paralyzed. I didn’t know what the hell was going on but I felt like I was going crazy. How was it possible that no one remembered them? That no one remembered anything about two people who had been a part of my life forever. It had to have something to do with that house. I wish I never set foot in there, I should’ve just went home. I should’ve suggested that we went anywhere else. Now i’ll have to live with this pain for the rest of my life, mourning the loss of a wonderful friend in CeCe. And mourning the loss of a love that never got to see the light of day.
Jeff had been with me through everything, every single memory in my 17 years of life was touched by him. Jeff holding my hand as we walked into our first day of preschool together. Jeff carrying me home as I cried in his arms after I rode my bike without training wheels for the first time and fell off. Jeff breaking up with Jenna Branson, the most popular girl in our sixth grade class, because she made fun of my haircut and made me cry. Jeff holding me as I cried when I caught Ronnie Hopkins cheating on me at a party sophomore year. That one I’ll never forget. We walked down to the Longfellow Park afterward and skipped rocks across the pond while sharing a bottle of cheap vodka. The night started with me a mess of tears, and ended with us both crying from laughing so hard.
Jeff always took care of me. That is how it had always been. And the one time he needed me, really needed me to help him, I failed. I would have to live the rest of my life with a gnawing, crushing feeling of guilt inside of me. And I would have to do it alone.
Something is wrong with that house. Something evil and sinister lives in the bowels of 47 Rosewood Lane… or at least it used to. You see, I walked over there this morning, hoping that investigating the house in the light of day would give me some clarity on what the hell happened last night. But when I got down to the corner, to the place the house has always stood, tall and foreboding, all I found was a vacant lot.
Update: narration by TattooedB1k3r