Creepypastas

The House with the Painted Doors

The doctor told me it was a figment of my imagination. A hallucination. A phantom limb. Cut off, but the ghost of a feeling remains. The doctor tutted and prescribed me a different pill. I've lost count of how many pills I've tried. There was the yellow one. And the red and white capsule. And the green one. They have succeeded in giving me incontinence, nausea and hair loss. But they haven't taken my girl away.

My doctor told me to talk about it. Tell people. Who the hell am I supposed to tell something like this? My last friends abandoned me when Sylvia left. It's late here..

Where to start, when there is so much to tell? At the beginning I suppose, it's always a good place.

—

We thought we'd had it made when we moved into the suburbs. We had well paying jobs. Fluke or competence had saved us when the waves of cuts hit around 2010. For once in our lives, money wasn't a problem. Eight years earlier, we had Annabelle, Belle for short. She was our little angel. Parents out there will know. A child shifts the centre of gavity of your life. The move was good for her. Good for us. Away from the hustle and danger of the city. Busy streets, missing children, the sticky hands and staring eyes of sexual predators.

It wasn't the house of our dreams, but it was close enough. A lawn for the balmy summer months. Fireplace for the chill of winter. Space for us to grow into, especially for a young girl. It came fully furnished. And it was a steal. A distressed sale, our agent called it. At least a tenth off what a similar property would set us back.

The euphoria and novelty lasted me till the first night.

—

Sylvia was asleep next to me. The moonlight sparkled off the fine hairs on her bare shoulder. We shared a celebratory drink after dinner. And then another after that. I was lying in bed, basking in the warm glow of alcohol when I first heard it. My first thought was rats. That was exactly what it sounded like, the little tap dance of tiny claws on hard wood, coming from the walls.

The delicate snoring from next to me told me that Sylvia was undisturbed by the scratching noise coming from the walls. I flinched as my bare feet touched the cold floor. The floorboards groaned in protest as I padded across the room like an overweight ninja. The tapping paused at the first creak of the floorboards, then resumed. The rough weave of the wallpaper under my palm as I leaned in to track the pitter patter behind the walls.

The scampering sounds eluded me. Every time I attempted to track the rats, the sounds seemed to come from another part of the room. My knees grew sore from pressure. I wasn't some young child at a playground. I was a grown man and my weight pressed down on the bony points of my kneecaps. Out of desperation, I put my ear to the wall, hoping that the source of the little noises would reveal itself to me. I was only met with a stubborn silence. Or almost a stubborn silence. On the edge of my hearing, so quiet that I had to strain my ears to pick it up. A child's laughter from inside the walls.

—

I did not speak of the incident. I spent more time trying to convince myself that there hadn't been that childish giggle. Wind, perhaps. The rattle of a toy. Not a rattle, maybe one of those new fangled dolls with those soulless eyes and microchip voice.

There was a change in her. Like the heavy air you can smell before a thunderstorm. She was a little quieter than usual. A strange environment will do that to a kid. A little withdrawn. Sylvia didn't really notice. I suppose I'd always been more observant than her. Belle started looking tired, dark crescents appearing under her light hazel eyes. She wasn't getting much sleep.

My first instinct was to blame the rats in the walls. Who wouldn't? They got louder and louder as the days went by. The damn things were keeping me up at night. It seemed that the sounds progressed from simple scratchings to thumps, almost as though the cursed rodents were hurling themselves bodily against my walls. The thumping started sounding eerily like footsteps. I was not about to be defeated by a group of jumped up rats in my own house. Fuelled by testosterone induced rage, I waged war. I tried glue traps. I tried poison. I tried cages. Nothing worked. I asked Sylvia about it, but she seemed oblivious to the late night disturbances. That woman could sleep through a hurricane.