The Collection
Original Horror Story by Bess Goden
Cursing her lack of flashlight, she raised her pilfered candle with a shaking hand and surveyed what she could of her surroundings. Everything seemed quiet in the old house. The dim glow cast dancing shadows on staunch, somber portraits that lined the endless hallway. Fear bubbled up in her stomach. But as she visualized herself returning to the sorority house in glory, defiance surfaced and she mentally chided her heart for attempting a jailbreak.
She started down the hall. Each foot fall erupted in serpentine swirls of dust from the antique, tattered carpet. Her sisters’ disapproving faces flickered through her mind in time with the small flame in front of her. ‘Hell if I’m going to prove them right by freaking out!’, she thought. Taking a deep breath, she turned to the nearest portrait and forced herself to stare him directly in the eye.
“See Cheryl, he’s not so bad. It’s just an old, fat fart squishing a yappy lapdog.” she giggled nervously. With a timid raspberry, she turned and continued down the hallway, gaining confidence with each cautious stride. She forced herself to focus so intently on her sisters' jealous faces, that she hardly noticed the fat man’s shadowed eyes squinting in cold rage as she passed.
A small gust of dusty wind blew past her ear and she paused. She distinctly remembered closing the door behind her. It blew again but her candle flame was as still as her now leaden feet. Gulping back her adrenaline, she prodded herself forward and insistently disregarded the low moan that was just within detection, (even though it definitely came from behind the same ear.) A sudden iciness creeped down her spine and she stopped short, fear returning in a flood.
She felt something behind her. A large, person-shaped coldness. It was almost a ... negative body heat. Swallowing hard, she tried to turn around and found that she couldn’t. It felt as if someone had sewn her pants to the rug. She glanced down. The dust emanating from the carpet had solidified to form tendrils that had quietly twined around her ankles.
From behind, she felt a meaty hand land on her shoulder, so cold that it sucked all her warmth to the spot. Her heart was railing at the icy bars of her ribcage. Slowly the hand massaged her shoulder and with each squeeze, sapped more warmth from her body. Her knees stiffened. Her skin hardened. She watched her hands, still illuminated by a small circle of candlelight, turn a stoney shade of grey. The large figure slowly moved in front of her and if her brain wasn’t drowning in fear, she would have wondered how he could appear both transparent and inexplicably solid all at once.
The fat man’s face moved halfway into the light, making his white eyes flash in the shadows. His lips morphed slowly into a devious smile, his raspy voice issuing from behind it without disturbing his placid, yet maniacal visage.
“Welcome to our little ... collection.”
Choking with fear, she struggled to wrench her lips apart. They felt like they had been cemented shut. She tried desperately to cry out in fear, to fling a threat or even to cry for help. But there she stood, unable even to whimper, and was forced to watch as the fat man gleefully licked is fingers and snuffed the candle out. As her consciousness slowly ebbed, the last thing to fall on her hardened eardrums was a morose laughter that crescendoed in chorus. It washed over her like a starless winter’s night which would only prove to dawn on a lifeless statue, in just the position Cheryl had been standing.