Foolish Dare

Little Billy waked in through the door, the whirls and whorls of the rotting wood screaming oaken faces back at him, staring at him with maggot-ridden sockets. He wasn’t afraid. Charlie was about to lose ten bucks to him, nothing could scare him. Nothing at all.

Not the strange tree outside, with hanging fruits that upon closer inspection, weren’t really fruits. Definitely not that.

Neither was he afraid of the corpse sitting at the dining table, looking at him with its head twisted about its neck. In fact, he found it comical, hilarious even. He must have. He walked by without a second glance.

He wasn’t afraid when the lights went out, and the windows clouded over. The change in the scenery outside, twisting, distorting beyond the looking glass portals fascinated him, the slender shadows that danced about outside the house, or simply stood and stared, reminded him. About something. But he couldn’t remember. It was no matter. He wasn’t afraid.

It wasn’t scary when the walls began to talk. Whisper sweet nothings, offer promises of sleep everlasting, of screams and torture and bliss, the slight hisses invading his ear canals, rebounding and bedding within his mind. He wasn’t startled when the mouths formed out of the wallpaper, warping the smooth wood into life-like openings, dripping with a strange saliva-like liquid. He began to wonder, in the back of his head, why did he not feel the fear?

He didn’t feel spooked at all, not when the toddlers began crawling out from the cracks in the corners, from behind cabinet doors and beneath broken floors, flooding the room about him as if they were four-limbed spiders, fat human flesh squelching amongst each other as tiny hands and feet began to grope at him.

He could have run as the shadows in the room began to warp, the toddlers’ shade casting and growing, creeping into the windows and sliding them up, a creaking smoothness followed by the thump of wood hitting glass. He could have turned and fled when the slender figures standing outside, waiting, began to climb in, their unnaturally tall frames indistinct in the darkness.

He could have struggled when they grabbed him, dragging him up, his feet knocking against the steps as his unmoving body was brought higher and higher, higher than any floor the house could have seemed to contain, until he was brought into darkness. He stared out of the lone window, of what seemingly was the attic. And that was when it hit him. When he saw the small figure, hauntingly familiar, strung up across the unnatural trees from which hung strange spherical globes, that in closer inspection turned out to be eyes, numbering in the hundreds, staring back at you. The small figure was hanging from the cords, strangled coldly across the tiny neck, swinging, swaying slightly in the autumn breeze.

Then he knew, why he felt no more fear. Looking down, he saw his own flesh, his dark form roiling and churning, a darker black than the simple darkness of the attic about him. He was part of the house now.

Fear was a luxury meant for the living.