Forgotten House (Part Six)

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

Audio Recording

It was a Saturday afternoon, and I had nothing much to do. I was sitting around the house, glancing at my laptop’s monitor, when I noticed what time it was. It was then that I made my decision.

I had to explore that house again. There had to be explanations hidden within those walls.

After packing a few things into various pockets, I stepped outside, and saw the house down the hill, leaves settled onto its metal roof. I had no one to call, no one to alert about my destination. That’s a whole different story, but I’ve always ended up alone. Even now, I had no one to go to, no one to walk those hallways in that house with me. I’d do it on my own.

The walk to that house, mostly downhill, didn’t take more than five minutes. There was no one around, no cars driving past, no lights visible around the neighborhood this early in the evening. I stepped carefully over debris cluttering what was once a driveway, making my way to the backdoor. Leaves, twigs crunched underfoot, and I half-expected to hear some voice call out to tell me to stop where I was, to not approach that house. No voice did.

The backdoor was still unlocked, and I saw the same refuse in the kitchen as I saw last time. No more, no less, actually. I even saw the path I had cleared out through the kitchen to the living room, so I followed that.

It was unnervingly quiet within that house. I brought from my pocket the letter I’d received from “Melissa”, and read through it again. She said I had delved deeper into the house than even where she resided. I assumed that meant she lived in the basement, which explained the arrangement of furniture I had noticed. That would be my first destination, I decided, so I hurried along through the house to the basement stairs.

I found the lights switched off when I approached that door. My mind worked through things I had seen, and things I knew. I had never turned the lights off when I was in the house last. I had entered the basement, turned the lights on, then proceeded downstairs. My path had taken me to the lowermost floor then, somehow, back to ground level, bypassing the floors I had traversed downward. The geometry for that eluded me, but I wasn’t going to worry about that right now, not when there was the possibility of answers awaiting me at this moment. Still, the fact that the lights were off concerned me. Then again, perhaps the light bulbs had died in the time since I was last here. That was very plausible, but disproven the moment I flipped the switch on the wall, and their yellow glow illuminated the stairs leading downward. Someone had switched the lights off since I was last here. I became a bit nervous. Starting down the stairs, I heard a faint sound, as of static from a radio or television set. Someone was down there, I was convinced. I pressed on.

At last, my feet fell on a stone floor, after the thin wooden steps I had been descending upon. I saw the same singular light bulb dangling via a thin cable from the wooden beams above that I had noticed last time. The basement was cold. Looking at the water pump in the corner to my right, I noticd that it wasn’t exactly connected to anything. It looked to be in working order, albeit covered in layers of dust, but there was nothing physically connecting it to the inner workings of the house. It just stood there, bolted to the floor.

I looked around the basement, and realized that I was not alone. A figure sat unmoving on the sofa, eyes focused on the light bulb. I waited for a response, but noticed none, so I approached.

Suffice it to say the figure was not alive, and hadn’t been for months, at least. The figure, a young man, had skin that had since turned dark with rot, melting downwards to the fabric of the sofa. Eyes had since turned to mush and dissolved, leaving dry cavities in their absence. The underlying bones of his skull were obvious.

It was a revolting sight, but I couldn’t help but study it. How long had that corpse been there? The skin looked fused to both the clothing and the sofa. It had to have been there for months, yet I did not remember seeing it when I was here last.

I turned away, noticing the television set was on, showing a grey screen and emitting the static drone I kept hearing. I hit the mute switch, then noticed the cassette tapes scattered around on the floor in front of the set. None of the tapes were labeled. Some were in their original boxes, others weren’t. Apparently they were all bought as blank tapes.

There was a remote on top of the VCR, so I picked that up. One quick look at what was on one individual tape, I told myself. Just to see, just to state my curiousity, I decided. I switched the VCR on, and the screen switched to blue. I hadn’t played with a VCR in at least a decade, so that blue screen, replete with static, brought a sense of nostalgia.

Then I hit play.

The blue screen switched abruptly to dark grey, the frames of which shook slightly. This continued for about ten seconds, then a face filled the lower half of the screen, in an inverted silhouette. The face was out of focus so much as the features couldn’t be deciphered, besides that the head was bald. A hollow circle marked the eye, staring off into the distance. This image remained for another ten seconds, then an abrupt edit cut to a view of the basement. I could see the stairs I had descended, the single bulb in the room switched on. There was a timestamp in the lower-right corner, which marked the footage as having been recorded two weeks ago.

I paused the video, and studied the perspective. Where in the room was the camera for this shot? My eyes followed a line from the stairs to a distance away that would capture the same area that I saw on the screen. I stopped on the corpse, and scrambled towards it, looking towards the stairs. My view from that point matched the image on the screen enough that I assumed the footage was filmed from this point.

I resumed play on the video.

There was no sound, even though I had unmuted the television. Nothing was happening, the basement remained empty. I hit the fast-forward button, and still nothing changed on the scene. The tape continued at it’s doubled speed, and as I blinked, something changed. I stopped, rewound a bit, and hit play.

A figure walked down the stairs and into the frame. It was a young woman, with smooth, shoulder-length dark hair in a thin layer around her face. She was thin, and wore a blank, blue, short-sleeved shirt, denim jeans, and a pair of black shoes. Somehow, she looked familiar. She took a couple steps forward, away from the stairs, and paused, a worried look on her face. She was staring to her right. I paused, and followed where she would’ve been looking, which turned out to be the water pump, and the door beside it. I resumed the footage.

The young woman stared at the off-screen wall for another ten seconds, then walked towards it, disappearing from the frame. I waited for something else to happen, and didn’t have to wait long. Soon enough, she returned, holding a hand to her nose, and clearly panicking. She fell to her knees, looking towards the wall she had come from. She moved her hand away from her nose for a moment, and I could see a good amount of blood before the replaced her hand over her nose.

A moment later, an arm reached from off to the right of the frame, and grabbed one of the young woman’s arms, the one held up to her face to be precise. She was pulled forcefully forward, off the frame. I was left with a view of that room of the basement. There was no audio at any point during this footage, and I double-checked to make sure I had the television unmuted and the volume rolled up.

I hit fastforward, but nothing more happened. It was just an empty room. I finally reached the end of the tape, and playback stopped. I switched both the VCR and the television set off.

I stared at the door. I remembered what was beyond it, those stairs, those hallways, those rooms. What happened in that tape a fortnight ago? Even when I entered the house a while ago, I wasn’t eager to explore those floors. Now, I was even less eager.

I ran for the stairs that led back up to the main floor.

(continued in Part Seven)