a.n.// okay so i attempt to write a horror story and then... idk man, i'm just a natural entertainer. i promise the others will at least be more serious than this. hopefully.
who am i kidding lol
tbh this isn't that great, i kind of lost where i was going with it. but anywayyyy. it's pretty long, so strap in. feel free to leave any time you feel bored by the disgusting monotony of my trying to be creepy c:
- eden
- - -
"You should only play a game if you're going to win. Any uncertainties you may reserve guarantee your failure, and there's always a cost of failing."
That's what it said on the box. Should have left the damned thing where I found it. I wish I could just walk away, but I have to finish the game I began.
This whole thing started ten years ago. I was fifteen, and messing about in my brother's room with a friend, when we discovered the box under the bed. It was a plain box. Nothing interesting. Just that warning: "You should only play a game if you're going to win". Obviously, we didn't pay any heed to that message, instead choosing to open the box and play the game.
It was a... strange game. Just a scrap of old paper with small, spiky writing on it, and a set of cards. The writing was instructions; instructions and rules of the game. There were only three rules. One, if you open the box, you have to play. Two, if you play, you have to finish. And three, if you lose, you have to pay.
We thought it meant we had to pay with money, and laughed naïvely at the stupidity of a person making a game you could cheat so easily.
The game went like this. You take a card randomly from the pack, look on the picture on one side, say out loud what it makes you think of, and replace it. You don't have to be honest, but it affected the outcome of the game. Then you do this twice more, so you've seen three different cards. Finally, you take one more card from the back of the pack, and look on the opposite side of the card. There's a picture of something, like a tarot card, and there's a specific meaning to go with each picture.
The interesting thing was, what you said in the game affected the what the last card showed. I didn't know how, just that these cards said I'd live a rich and long life.
My friend, we'll call him Dominic, didn't want to play at first. So I did. How noble of me. We agreed (he proposed, I got dragged along) that I'd play and we'd see what happened.
The first future card I drew told me I'd encounter incredibly good luck in the coming month. And I did. That month, I aced all my tests by accident, found a twenty pound note on the pavement, and fell out of a window, landing on a mattress a foot to the left of a pile of rusty bed skeletons, narrowly escaping contracting tetanus.
So after his initial doubts, Dom took his turn. The cards predicted he would find the love of his life, which he did. She was called Amelie, and, fortunately, she was beautiful.
Unfortunately, he found her in a history lesson in which we were covering the domestic lives of families during the Great War, and so she's either dead or ugly now.
(I think he lied to the cards).
For some reason he got super hung up over her. Kept moping because "He'd never love again". Bullshit if I ever heard it.
The next time, Dom and I both played. This time, I think he was honest, because we both got good predictions. I ate a whole ice cream without brain freeze or a stomach ache ("You shall be alleviated of that which troubles you for a time" (I'm lactose intolerant)), Dom put a penny in an RSPCA charity box and got pulled out of the way of a fast driving van by a St Bernard ("Kindness pays in equal"), and it was a whole bunch of other menial, innocent predictions like that for a few weeks.
Then... not so much.
I had an off day, okay. My cat got hit by a car, and all the cards I pulled looked faintly like roadkill. I didn't fancy reliving the end of my beloved pet, so yeah, I made a few answers up. My final card was "You'll be surprised".
And boy was I. My aunt was diagnosed with late-stage testicular cancer. Turns out she was transgender, MTF. Quite recently too, apparently. My parents never talked to her when I was younger, so I didn't see much of her, but I always assumed it was because she was a nudist.
Turns out my parents are just flaccid-spined transphobic assholes.
But anyway. She died, and left me her collection of Steve Buscemi-themed memorabilia. Socks, notebooks, door handles, you name it. It's there. It is there. Boy, the things... I've seen... Ergh. Anyway.
It's safe to say I was surprised. And a bit scared, if I'm honest. I actually thought that because my deception was trauma-based the cards would give me some leeway, but years of stubbing my toe on the coffee table without any sign of apology or regret should have taught me that inanimate objects don't care how you feel.
It carried on like that for a while. To be honest, I don't know why we never stopped. I guess the highs were too thrilling, the lows too sparse, and we just kept coming back.
Eventually, it got... really bad. For some reason... God, I don't know what happened. Dom's predictions just kept getting worse; darker.
And then...
Nothing.
All the future cards he drew had nothing on the back. They were completely blank on one side. Mine were still working, and benevolently, so he figured he just had to keep going until it stopped.
I warned him. I told him it didn't feel right. He thought I was being selfish, that I wanted the game for myself. But I didn't, I only started playing because of him.
He went crazy. Became obsessed with the cards. He was over at my house every day, up in the attic, where we'd hidden the game.
If I'm completely honest, I didn't mind so much. I should have, but he was choosing to be around me, even if it wasn't me he wanted. I actually looked forwards to his visits.
Then they stopped. Abruptly. Two months of him coming over every day immediately after school, itching for his next game like an addict looking for a fix, and then one day it ended.
It was a Monday; I remember pretty clearly. He hadn't been over on the weekend either, which I didn't think much of, 'cause he didn't usually come over on the weekends anyway. But he wasn't in school, he wasn't on the bus, and he wasn't at my house.
I figured he was ill at first. Made sense. I found it almost funny to muse that Dom had to be at Death's door before he stopped playing. He'd played when he was ill before, so I assumed it was a more effective illness, like tonsillitis or a bad flu.
I would later come to wish I hadn't joked about him being at Death's door.
He wasn't seen on Tuesday. His empty seat drew my eye in every class, with some sort of arcane gravity, the same way people orbit around those that act on the edge of the law. For some reason, the lack of his presence was more suffocating than it being there in all its stupid, obnoxious glory.
None of the teachers said anything, which lead me to strengthening my theory that he was ill. I thought to myself, if he's not in tomorrow, you can call round and take him a get-well-soon present or something.
He wasn't in on Wednesday.
- - -
When I went to his house, no one answered the door. His mum worked late some days, so that didn't seem so odd. He lived in a row of terraced houses, built from a pale yellow brick, with warped wooden window frames and dark blue-grey roofing tiles.
I knew where his mum kept the spare key (in the crack between the smooth stone doorstep and the paved path). Years of my childhood had been spent here, and I'd retained some key details about Dominic's home life.
Upon entry, the house was stagnant. I thought Dom had a pet of some sort, but there was no movement, no sign of life other than myself. I proceeded along the hall to the kitchen.
A stack of used dishes sat beside the sink, their previous contents coagulating on their glazed surfaces. A large fly buzzed lethargically against the grimy window, and the tap at the sink dripped irregularly into an already-full greasy saucepan.
The kitchen looked like someone had left in the middle of their normal life; there was a mug still out on the table, and the window was on the half-catch. A newspaper with a coffee-ring on it was dated from last week. His mum was pretty tidy, and liked to keep up to date with the news, so it didn't make sense for a relatively old paper to still be around. Still, I thought nothing of it. Who would? It was just a newspaper, no biggie.
I went back into the hall, and called up the stairs, "Dominic? Dominic!", but there was no response. I walked back into the kitchen, worn floorboards creaking beneath my feet, and shut the window properly, then returned to the front door.
Maybe they'd just... gone shopping. For three days. Maybe five.
A slow creak from upstairs halted my hand on the door knob.
The house was empty, wasn't it?
Apprehensively, I stepped on to the stairs. I have no idea why the fuck I did that. Curiosity and a slight protectiveness? I guess? Of my friend's home? I think I convinced myself that it was just another open window and the weather outside wasn't getting any better, so it made sense to go and shut it if I was there.
Anyway. I climbed slowly up the stairs, like an idiot, stepping around the assorted domestic debris that littered the way up. When I reached the top, I waited a moment, to see if I could work out where the draught was coming from. I couldn't feel any breeze, and the creaking had stopped. I frowned, really fucking confused and quite a bit unnerved.
The silence rattled me, and I felt like I could feel the house moving beneath my feet in the wind. Despite the weather outside, the air in the house was completely undisturbed. Heavy. I felt like if I weighed any less, I'd just float up through it, bobbing along the ceiling like a forgotten balloon.
The whole atmosphere of the house felt wrong; Dominic didn't have any siblings and I'd never been in the small house with more than three other people at the same time, but it still always felt alive. There'd be music on in the living room, or the smell of cooking from the kitchen, or creaks on the floor from where someone was moving around somewhere else in the house, or even just water rushing in the pipes. But it felt as dead as a tomb, silent and sepulchral.
I was startled when I heard another long creak from above my head. I jumped slightly and frowned, looking up. The attic? That's... where Dominic's room is.
It never struck me that it couldn't have been an open window if it was coming from under the roof, which had no openable windows.
I walked towards the rickety ladder at the end of the landing that led through a hatch in the ceiling, up to his room.
My eyes took a moment to adjust to the low light level when I reached the top, and even then I couldn't see all the way to the other end of the attic; he'd made a series of chambers by making walls out of curtains and his wardrobe and dresser.
The attic stretched the whole width of their house, but the sloping ceiling reduced the accessibility to the extremities of the room.
He had the tiny section the ladder came up in, which had nothing in it but a waste paper basket and a pile of dirty laundry. Next, separated by a curtain, was his desk and computer, with messy stacks of DVDs and books littering the floor. Finally, his bedroom, sectioned off by his dresser and wardrobe.
I forgot how dusty it got up here. Normally there'd be vents at either end of the room that provided a bit of air circulation, but their familiar quiet clattering was missing.
The small dormer window at this end of the room provided a bit of light, but it mostly just highlighted the dust particles hanging in the air.
The creak came again, drawn out and sounding awfully like the stereotypical door opening in a horror film. It sounded like it was coming from the final section, where his bed was.
Picking my way carefully through the minefield of discarded socks, wrappers, and occasionally books, I made my way through the middle section, and paused at the opening to the last bit.
The curtains at this end were drawn, and I struggled to make out the outlines of the contents of the room in the extremely faint light that had followed me from the ladder.
I sighed, figuring it was somehow the window making the creaking noise, and felt my way along the wall to where I could just about see light escaping into the room below the curtains. Completely forgetting that this window had been stuck shut for as long as I could remember.
I drew the curtains and pushed the latch on the window, and when it didn't move I remembered it was sealed. But that didn't explain the creak. I tried the latch again, and felt it wiggle slightly, but if anything this only demonstrated how definitively shut it was.
I frowned.
Then I heard the creak again, from behind me.