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The night was the sort of eerie Halloween needed to feel complete - dark and nearly cloudless, cool without being chilly except for when the wind blew, and lit by the cool white glow of a perfectly full moon.
“I can’t remember the last time we had a full moon on Halloween,” Lance said, gazing up at it with a grin. “Totally pulls the whole night together, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Keith grunted, hefting the fence’s broken cross bar higher, “Come on, hurry up.”
“Sheesh, I’m hurrying,” Lance shot him an annoyed look, but ducked under the crossbar quickly, turning to help hold it so Keith could follow him. Carefully they replaced the crossbar, and turned to take in their surroundings.
Directly around them were several large and scratchy bushes, the remaining dry leaves rustling ominously in the wind as it picked up. Trees loomed before them, their naked branches snaking, gnarled and twisted, overhead. The remnants of a path could be made out a few paces ahead, smooth paving stones sticking out from the dead weeds and soil that had nearly covered them.
“Oh this is so cool,” Lance grinned, fixing his hold on the backpack he had slung over one shoulder and leading the way through the thicket to the path before them. Keith followed close behind with a similarly excited grin, winding between the reaching branches of the bushes.
“I can’t believe you found a legit haunted house this close to campus,” He said, falling into step next to Lance on the path. He took hold of Lance’s free hand in his own, their fingers twining together.
“It was easy,” Lance flashed Keith a winning grin, “One mention of “haunted” and Hunk was listing every single spooky story he’s heard since the semester began. I could barely keep up with taking notes.”
The path they took led between the trees, their branches cutting through the moonlight and casting wildly dancing shadows on the ground before them. As they took a curve around a particularly thick and tangled bush, the wind gusted suddenly and strongly, and from just ahead a loud and mournful wail rose that sent a chill down their spine.
For a moment they both froze mid step, eyes widening, as the sound grew louder and louder, until just as suddenly it cut off with barely a whisper, and the wind settled again.
“That…” Lance began, but his voice caught in his throat, and his fingers shook a little where they gripped Keith’s tightly.
“Probably the wind through a broken window or something,” Keith offered, and Lance nodded enthusiastically.
“That’s what I was going to say,” He agreed, a steely determined look coming to his face. “Just some wind… We should probably get moving then.”
It was Keith who took the first step, however, and he had to give Lance’s hand a tug before his boyfriend got moving again. The path didn’t grow any clearer as they went, though the trees thinned out until they could finally see the house between the gaps in their branches.
It was two stories tall, an old Victorian maybe-mansion straight out of a haunted-house-hunter’s dream. The front porch looked rickety, the window shutters hung at odd angles, the siding was cracked or completely missing in parts, and if you looked close enough it seemed that the original curtains still hung, and shifted curiously, in the second-story windows.
Keith loved it. While the pulse of thrill-seeking adrenaline had been there, low and nearly unnoticeable, since the moment Lance had mentioned the excursion, it woke fully now, pulsing in his veins and setting his excitement skyrocketing. He just… loved the unknown, the mysteries, the possibilities. The paranormal as something mystic and possibly just-out-of human reach, the cryptic and haunting as something that existed within, and yet at the same time, apart from the mortal plane.
The wind rose again, a gust that set some of the shutters snapping against the siding and had the tree branches above head shaking. Lance started suddenly, pressing closer to Keith with a yelp.
“Did you see that?” He asked, voice barely above a strained whisper.
“See what?” Keith asked, glancing about. Nothing out of the ordinary caught his eye, however, and he turned to look at Lance curiously. “What did you see?”
“Nothing, must’ve been just like, the moonlight or something,” Lance said, clearing his throat. “Come on, we going inside or what?”
He set his shoulders and pulled Keith along as he headed purposefully towards the front porch. Keith almost tripped over his own feet at the sudden start, only almost, and rolled his eyes as he followed along. Where Keith was fully on board with haunted houses and the supernatural, Lance was somewhere on the borderline - he claimed he wasn’t scared by creepy things but Keith had been a human shield more than once during scary movies to believe him. He made the effort, though, he really did, like right then - shoving his jitters aside in order to stomp up those shaking front steps and onto the dilapidated front porch, shooting a challenging look at the front door as he announced,
“All right ghosts, we’re here to see whether you’re up to snuff or not.” He looked at Keith with a smirk, eyes glittering, “We’ll see if this place deserves to get called haunted, or not, huh?”
It was cute, that bravado, Keith thought. Ridiculous, but cute.
“Yeah, yeah, let’s get inside,” Keith said, walking out onto the porch. The boards shifted underfoot distressingly, and under the sound of their footsteps there seemed to be another sound, something softer and harder to hear. Keith frowned, tilting his head, but the sound didn’t become any clearer. It seemed scratchy, a scratching and a shifting, but as he slowed his steps and tried to keep the boards from shifting it quieted as well.
Probably nothing, he decided, focusing on the door again. It was wooden, no window panes, with weather-grayed paint peeling off of it in long strips. The handle looked like it hadn’t been used in decades, dirty and hanging with loose cobwebs.
“Ready?” Keith asked, glancing at Lance from the corner of his eye.
“Ready,” Lance replied, a determined set to his jaw and glint in his eye.
Keith reached out, took hold of the handle, and turned. It resisted the pressure at first, then gave way slowly. The latch unlocked, and as Lance slid closer Keith gave the door a firm push. It swung inward a few inches before stopping, and Keith pushed it again, harder. The hinges squealed suddenly and loudly, and they paused on the threshold, blinking owlishly into the dark depths of the house inside.
“Flashlight,” Lance whispered, and Keith heard him fumble a second until the light came with a soft click. The entryway of the house came into view before them, starkly lit, and they took it in a moment before moving - the crumbling carpeting, the low decorative table set against the wall with an empty vase atop it, a grime covered mirror hanging above. To the right and just ahead was a set of stairs leading to the second story, the railing intricately carved and now covered in dust and spiderwebs. To the left was a doorway they couldn’t quite see into, though something glinted from its darkness when Lance moved the beam.
“Come on,” Keith said, grin growing on his face as his excitement grew. This was exactly the type of spooky adventure he’d always wanted to go on for Halloween, and finally he was getting his chance. Who knew what they might find inside the house? Maybe nothing. Maybe the ‘haunted’ part of the haunted house wasn’t real - but did it matter? Part of the adventure was having it and he was going to enjoy the hell out of this one!
He dragged Lance inside behind him, glancing up the stairs towards the shadowy second floor landing as they went. There was a window up there, but it seemed to be blocked, or the curtain drawn on it, as barely a sliver of moonlight gleamed from it.
“Do you want to explore down here first or go upstairs?” Keith asked, turning on Lance. His boyfriend had the flashlight still pointed generally forward but was giving the mirror an odd look, and it took a moment for him to turn his attention to Keith.
“Uh, what?” He asked, looking a bit distracted.
“Upstairs or downstairs?” Keith asked again, leaning a bit to take a look at the mirror himself. “What were you looking at?”
“I dunno,” Lance admitted, forehead wrinkling a bit. “I thought I saw something like, move? But like, inside the mirror…”
“Well, this place is haunted,” Keith said with a shrug, “It was probably a ghost.”
As he expected, a nervous look came to Lance’s eyes.
“Y-yeah,” Lance chuckled nervously, swinging the flashlight away from the mirror and towards the dark hallway to their left. “Ghosts, obviously. Obviously this place is super haunted, ha ha. Let’s go here! See if we find more ghosts!”
Together, still hand in hand (as if Lance’s death-grip would allow Keith to recover his hand any time soon) they headed through the doorway. The curtains were drawn in all four windows, casting the room in shadows so dark it was only thanks to the flashlight that they could see where to put their feet. The floor was wooden, covered in a thick layer of dust in which their footsteps left neat outlines. There was a small table in the center of the room, and a couple of armchairs set behind it. On the right was an ornate fireplace stood, charred sticks and ashes still littering the hearth.
“I think there’s bones,” Lance whispered loudly, stepping closer to the fireplace.
“What are you talking about?” Keith sounded skeptical, eyeing the ashes as Lance focused the light on them.
“There! Those whiter pieces, they’re totally bones,” Lance said with certainty, practically stabbing the flashlight light at the fireplace to emphasize his words. He turned to Keith, eyes wide, and said quietly, “Something died here.”
Keith laughed at that, giving Lance a shove, but before he could respond the wind gusted outside, setting shutters banging against the house sides louder than before - and from somewhere, seemingly very near, the same mournful wail from before rose. It grew louder, and louder, and both of them stumbled backwards as Lance cast the light around.
They caught sight of bits and pieces of the room - another mirror, on the far wall and covered with a grimy cloth; several bookshelves, cobwebs obscuring the books and bric a brac lining their shelves; a chandelier hanging from the ceiling; a pile of something unrecognizable in the corner.
The wail cut off abruptly. The flashlight had ended up pointing directly at the fireplace, and for some reason, now, Keith could see the small, pale pieces that littered the hearth along with the ashes. They might’ve been pale porcelain, grayed by the soot. They might’ve been...something else…
“A window?” Lance asked in a whisper, drawing closer to Keith.
“Might’ve been a window,” Keith replied, straining not to sound as rattled as Lance did. “Might’ve been… might’ve been a ghost.”
“Haunted house,” Lance said.
“Exactly.”
They stood there a moment longer, silence falling over them and the room as the wind outside died down. Only the sound of their breathing remained, and it seemed to echo in the shadows, seemed to bring the darkness in closer and closer around them, like a smothering blanket.
“We should go,” Lance said, a wobble in his voice. A pause, and he continued, “Go explore more, I mean. That’s what we’re here for.”
“Yeah,” Keith agreed, shifting towards the doorway. His heart was still beating a little fast, and a slight, small part of him was warring with itself - believing in ghosts and wanting to find them fighting with the hope that the wails really were just the wind blowing through a broken window and no such thing as ghosts existed. “Maybe we can go upstairs.”
“Sure,” Lance agreed. He directed the flashlight beam before them again as they made their slow but steady way to the stairs. “There’s probably windows upstairs. Maybe uncovered windows, it’d...it’d be cool to like, take a picture of the full moon. Through a window. Like, proof we were here? Right? It’d be all - all aesthetic. Halloween Aesthetic.”
Some of that bravado from before seemed to be returning, or maybe he was trying to match what he assumed was Keith’s nonchalance in face of the paranormal, either way it had Lance moving ahead with purpose again, taking the steps steadily and resolutely. The carpeting on them shifted and came apart underfoot, and as Keith trailed his fingers on the banister cobwebs bunched up around them, growing thick and sticky. He grimaced, and noticing Lance wasn’t paying attention to him at the moment, he wiped the cobwebs off on the back of his jacket.
“There’s a window right at the top of the stairs, I think,” Keith said, pointing over Lance’s shoulder at the sliver of moonlight just barely visible there. “Let’s try opening the curtains on that one.”
Lance nodded in reply, and directed the flashlight beam at the window. The curtains came into clear view, lit brightly by the beam. They were of a deep burgundy color, though it was faded with age and dust, and hung heavily from the curtain rod set into the wall above the window all the way down to the floor below.
Lance let go of Keith’s hand to reach out to grab one, fingers clutching around the edge, but when he pulled the fabric tore from the curtain rod, ripping and falling apart in long streamer of disintegrating fabric.
“That’s gross ,” Lance hissed, trying to shake off the remaining bits of fabric from his hand.
Keith didn’t respond, partially because he wouldn’t have responded with more than a snort and rolling his eyes anyways, but mostly because when he looked out the window that had been exposed by the disintegrating curtain, he didn’t see the moon. Or the trees. What he saw instead was a brick wall, situated only inches behind the window panes.
“That’s not right.” He said, the uneasiness that had his inner self warring earlier rising again. “That… you saw it. Before, right, you saw the light? Between the curtains?”
“Uh, I’m not sure…” Lance replied, just as dumbfounded as Keith as he stared at the bricks behind the window. “Maybe you just thought you saw it?”
“Maybe…” Keith repeated, but he was quite certain he’d seen it before, the faintest glimmer of moonshine between the parted curtains.
“Come on, let’s see what else is up here while we’re, uh, here,” Lance offered Keith his hand again, and Keith didn’t hesitate to take it. It was something of a comfort in the strange and foreboding house, to feel the warmth of Lance’s fingers around his own. Enough of a comfort to quell a little of the unease.
They headed onwards across the landing towards the side hall. Windows dotted it, facing the front of the house, and doorways led off to rooms towards the back. An odd smell pervaded the hallway, growing as they headed towards the first door. Keith tried the knob, turning it several times, but the door wouldn’t budge no matter how hard he pushed against it. They left it to continue onwards, pausing only at one of the windows so Lance could take the picture he’d mentioned. The moon wasn’t visible from that side of the house, but it lit the grounds well enough that they came out decently well on the picture.
The second door they reached they didn’t even try to open - it looked like it had been battered and then reassembled, long splinters missing from the edges of the cracked wood with smaller planks nailed across it to keep it together. It was the first object in the house that didn’t look ages old and covered in dust and spiderwebs - in fact, the planks looked relatively new, the nails still a bit shiny when the flashlight beam hit them.
The two young men shared a look between them - there was that uneasiness again, and if Keith was starting to feel it more it was more than apparent that Lance was too. But they’d decided to explore the house, after all, and neither of them wanted to be the first to give up. So even though they looked to each other nervously, they still headed on down the hall way, past the broken door and towards the last doorway at the end.
The smell grew stronger as they walked, changing from slightly uncomfortable to cloying and off putting. It was hard to describe it - mouldering and mildewy, but also rotting, with a hint of wet sawdust and something musky that made them want to gag when they breathed in too deeply. And still it grew, more and more potent with each step, as they neared that final door.
“That’s rank ,” Lance huffed, coughing a little, as they neared the door. Keith nodded in agreement, mouth screwed shut to try and keep that rancid stench from reaching his throat. It was already beginning to burn in his nose, though he was trying not to succumb to the urge to cover it with his hand. Lance wasn’t covering his face, after all, and Keith wasn’t going to be the one to do it first.
“All right, I’m gonna open it,” Keith said finally, barely able to keep from gagging the moment the air hit his throat. Lance only nodded, flashlight held at the ready, so Keith reached out for the knob and gave it a turn.
It moved easily - far too easily for an old, abandoned house - and when he pushed the door it moved smoothly on its hinges, pivoting into the room. There was a window on the far side, only partially covered, and between the moonlight and Lance’s flashlight beam they could get a decent, quick look at the room.
It was big - bigger than they’d expected. The house was by no means small, but the room looked like it was bigger than both the entryway they’d been in, and the room downstairs, and then some. Most of it was filled with bookshelves - the entire wall just beyond the door was lined with them, and several more stood just to the side of the window, row after row projecting into the room proper.
“That’s… that’s not right, I think,” Lance said as he turned his flashlight to the left. Outside, the hallway ended at the door with a window looking to the south, but in the room the wall to their left continued on for at least fifteen feet, lined with a couple desks and piles of fabric. “That shouldn’t be there.”
His voice pitched high on the last words, and Keith couldn’t blame him - there was no way the room should be able to extend that far to the side. He couldn’t help it, he took a step back to the window at the end of the hallway and peered outside, trying to convince himself that it was just an odd sort of architecture, that the walls of the house kept extending out past the hallway to explain the strange layout of the room beyond the door.
Outside the window the walls ran straight back, however. Cold raced up his spine and then down into his veins, sending a shudder racing through him, as he looked outside and saw absolutely nothing where the rooms outside wall should be.
“I think…” Keith started, heart beating wildly in his chest as he turned back to look inside the room. It looked somehow more foreboding, somehow more strange and fantastical than it had a moment earlier. He was noting things he hadn’t in that first moment - that there were jars on the shelves at the back of the room, half murky with liquid and other, unrecognizable things. That the moonlight glinted off of rows of things that looked like large, metal trunks standing between them. That directly in the middle of the room stood a large table, an assortment of instruments laying neatly ordered on top of it, and behind it, something large and bulky stood covered in a large, stained sheet.
“I think…” Keith said again, but his feet were already moving, taking a half step back, but Lance was still standing there, flashlight beam shaking as he moved it across the room, as if he didn’t hear Keith, as if something stronger was drawing his attention.
“Lance, I think we need to-” Keith said, voice rising, pulling at Lance’s hand just as the flashlight beam fell fully onto the sheet-covered object behind the table.
The wind rose, again, in a gust so sudden it set the house shaking. The shutters on the windows behind them banged against the siding with a sound like a staccato of gunshot, making them both jump and causing Lance to drop his flashlight. It clattered to the ground, beam waving wildly about, and from the room in front of them, the low, and awful, and mournful wail sounded again.
It came from so close it seemed to be right in front of them; it almost felt like a physical object, filling the air before them, and as it rose in volume the stench rose again, sour and cloying and rotting and disgusting.
“That’s not a window!” Lance cried out in shock, and the wail suddenly changed in tone, growing almost deeper and much more guttural - where before it was wordless it now became garbled with inflections, like something trying to make words out of the noise.
“We have to go,” Keith said, surprisingly cooly. Inside he felt a mess of emotions, fight-or-flight pinging off of every neuron in his brain, the shock of fear flooding every muscle and sinew of his body. He felt like he was going to shake apart, like the tension was going to send the myriad parts of his body flinging out in every direction.
“The flashlight,” Lance insisted, leaning over to try and grab it from the room’s floor.
The wail changed again, the inflections much more purposeful even if they were no more understandable than before. Something shifted in the room - the sound of something heavy moving over the floorboards, something...something taking a step.
“What...what was that.” Lance asked, fingers finally grasping the flashlight handle.
It wasn’t a question - the sound had been unmistakeable, and as the wail settled down, as it fell into soft huffs and grunts, another step sounded - heavy, setting the floorboards creaking.
“Let’s go,” Keith grunted, clutching at Lance’s shoulder and pulling him back bodily from the threshold. The movement sent the flashlight beam angling upwards, inwards, and in the split second that it crossed the center of the room they saw what had changed.
The object covered in the stained sheet was closer to the table than it had been before, much closer, and it had turned towards the door. It was… they’d only seen it for a second, but it looked like…
“Keith!” Lance whispered urgently, even as Keith continued to tug him down the hallway. “Keith that looked like - did you see what that looked like-”
“Shut up,” Keith grunted, unwilling to stop or look back. They had to get out, they had to get out, they had to-
The wail came again, no inflections, just one long drawn out wail, and suddenly the steps that had been so slow and ponderous before grew quicker. The ghastly smell wafted down the hallway with them as they ran to the landing, and maybe it was the fear and maybe it was their over-excited senses but it seemed that each step of whatever it was following them shook the floor beneath their feet, each guttural bark that accentuated the wail seemed to come from directly behind them.
“I can’t believe-” Lance huffed as they ran, an incredulous look on his face, fear mixed with absolute bewilderment coloring his words, “I can’t believe this is happening - an actual haunted house - being - being haunted-”
They hit the steps running, nearly slipping and sliding on the disintegrating carpet. Keith hadn’t glanced at the window as they passed, but halfway down the steps he realized a sliver of moonlight was cutting down the banister and across the floor towards the door, like a little tiny silver road directing them towards their escape - a sliver that shouldn’t have been there, that had nowhere to come from.
He didn’t think about it too much. The thundering steps from the hallway had reached the landing just as they were reaching the ground floor, and now they headed down the stairs after them.
“You get the door, I’ll…” Keith began, shoving Lance in front of him.
“You’ll what?” Lance spun to face him, blue eyes wide, and Keith wanted to tell him not to worry, wanted to tell him everything was going to be all right, they were going to be fine.
“I’ll have your back,” Is what he said instead, fighting back the wave of fear that felt more instinctive than realistic to turn around and face the thing that was chasing them.
That might have been a mistake.
As Keith looked up, the stench wafting down towards him, the wailing filling his ears, it felt as if time had slowed to a near standstill. The darkness of the house didn’t seem to matter anymore - everything before him stood out in stark and vivid clarity. He could see everything, from the spiders on the ceiling to every grimy specks on the mirror on the wall to the very real and horrid monster coming down the stairs towards them.
It was almost more than his mind could comprehend. Humanoid, maybe even human at some point, it would’ve towered over them even if they were standing level with it. It’s body was a criss-cross of stitched cuts and scars, limbs colored in various shades, puffed and purplish in some places and sickly white and slick with unknown ichor in others. It’s left arm was a mess of bloated masses of skin and popped sutures, and its face was one giant jigsaw held together with straining stitches. Its eyes gleamed almost yellow, and as it neared the final steps it opened its mouth wide, straining against stitches and skin, to reveal broken and sharpened teeth.
“Oh my god what is that thing? ”
Keith couldn’t turn to face Lance, not when he had to keep his eyes on the danger before them, mind racing to try and figure out a way to stop the thing.
“Lance!” He took a step back towards the door, hand reaching for the hunting dagger he always carried in a sheath on his belt, “Door!”
“I’m trying but it won’t open !”
There was a thud, then another, the knob rattling as Lance made his attempts. The creature was taking its first heavy step off the stairs by then, its maw twisting oddly as the guttural grunts gave way to a louder wail again. Keith pulled his knife out, held it at the ready, determined to stop the damn thing any way possible.
“I think-” Lance grunted, and the sound of the knob being hit by something reached Keith, “I think I can get it open if I just- If I knock the knob off-”
The thud again, and now Keith could make out the sound of metal on metal - but the monster was stepping closer, step by floor-shaking step.
“Keith-” Lance said, and his tone was odd, in the way where it sent a shiver down Keith’s spine. “Keith, listen-”
Another thud as the flashlight met the knob. Another thunderous step from the monster. Keith held the knife out, hand steady but heart racing, and Lance continued on as if the part of his mind devoted to speaking was running on a different track than the part devoted to survival,
“If we don’t make it out of here-”
“What?” Keith hissed, brain backfiring as it tried to function on two fronts
“- I just want you to know that-” thud “-I love you, like I love you so much -”
“Shut up!” Keith cried out, maybe a little desperately, maybe because it was almost painful how much it hurt to hear those words from Lance. “We’re getting out of here, so shut up and just - just get that door open!”
Lance didn’t respond, but Keith heard the flashlight hit that knob again, harder and with more force. Before him the monster took another step forward, it’s arms swinging out slowly before it as it came closer - and it was so close, too close for safety, too close for a reliable escape! Keith reacted on instinct - with a cry, he dashed forward and stabbed his knife straight into where he’d expect the monster’s heart to be.
For a full second, the monster froze. Keith was so close to it he could see every pockmark on its skin, every wrinkle where a stitch was pulled too tight. He was so close the stench of it burned not only his nose but his eyes, his face, everywhere it could reach. So close, he could see that the glow of its eyes wasn’t just a reflection, but a real glow, projected from eyes that underneath it were a dull, cloudy amber.
For a second, he thought he might’ve stopped it.
But then, slowly as if it had only just realized itself that his attack did nothing, the creature twisted its misshapen maw into a semblance of a smile. Those sharp and broken teeth glinted, spittle dotted its lips as it began to huff low and choked.
It was laughing, Keith realized dully, fingers frozen around his knife’s hilt, knees shaking as he stared up, up, up , at it - it was laughing .
Suddenly, something was grabbing his shoulders and pulling , and - suddenly, they were out the door, the monster screaming after them as it swung its arms out to grab at him - but they were outside and they were running for the fence with all the energy their bodies could muster. The trees reached down to them with clawed branches, the bushes seemed to move to get in their way, tangling around their feet and scratching at their legs. The air was filled with the creatures cries, wails of anger that followed them all the way to where they vaulted the fence, unwilling to waste time fussing with the cross bar again, only fading away once they reached the main road.
The moon still hung, full and brilliantly white in the star studded sky, overhead as they hurried to their car. The road was dark, and empty, and the trees that lined it all seemed far too dark and suspect now. Without a word, they clambered inside, Keith at the wheel and Lance collapsing into the passenger side.
“That…” Keith started, stopped, unable to think of what to say that could encompass all they’d just experienced. His breath was still coming fast, his heart still pounding, and in left hand he was still clutching his knife, its blade covered in a rotten-smelling and off-colored ichor.
“That was something,” Lance replied, or maybe agreed. He was just as out of breath, eyes still wider than usual, a shakiness in his fingers as he ran them through his hair. Keith held out a hand, wordlessly, and Lance took it without hesitation, and they twined their fingers together tightly, as if to squeeze the shakiness out of them, as if to reassure themselves they were still real.
“Time to go home?” Lance asked after a long moment.
“Yeah,” Keith answered, reaching back over the headrest to drop the knife behind his seat. Outside the world seemed quiet, the moonlight filtering down across the car’s hood peaceful, calming. “Let’s go-”
A sudden, shockingly loud grunt sounded from the trees on their side of the road, and for a second they both froze, eyes wide and bodies chilled. The sound faded as soon as it was heard, but Keith thought - thought, maybe, maybe it was just a trick of his mind, but maybe - thought he saw something reflected in his side view mirror.
Maybe.