This Old House...
I.
The old house was eerie to the new occupants. It had a strange smell and feel to it. They did not know why. They could not quite place their finger on it, but there was something unmistakably sinister about the place.
They were a family of six; the mother and father, three daughters and a son. They were an average lower-middleclass family, and had recently bought this old house, when the father decided to move the family closer to his new work place. He was an IT-technician by trade, and had recently acquired a position at a large company in this part of town.
They lived in the old house for about a month, settling and moving in their furniture, when shortly thereafter strange things started to happen about the old place. The large garbage can outside in the yard disappeared one morning filled with refuse, and never reappeared. The pool turned a dark green, and could never be recovered to its former state.
There were strange noises, especially at night. And then there were foul smells emanating from the drains from time to time. The place grew stranger by the day, and then it happened; the murders…
II.
It was dark in the attic when the couple went in early one Saturday evening to clean it up. They packed the old discarded boxes the previous occupants had left behind, neatly in a corner, planning on taking it down later. A swirl of dust covered the small room for a moment, and it was then that the mad-man leapt from the shadows like a deranged beast, brandishing a large carving-knife.
It was a bloody and murderous affair in the small attic, as the harrowing death screams of the couple echoed down the street. The children looked up at the attic window from where they were playing in the yard, next to the green pool. The screams of mutilation and death resounded cruelly in their little ears, and responding to the instinct flight, they ran blindly down the street in search of help. Their small screams took over where their parents’ screams gradually grew quiet behind them.
When the police arrived they found the butchered couple in a bloody mess up in the attic. They found multitudes of finger prints all over the crime scene and the murder-weapon, but the maniac who had done the foul deed was gone. The prints established that the murderer was an escaped inmate from an asylum for the criminally insane. There was little record of this mad-man from before that time. He was a bit of an unknown.
As the years went past the rumors in the neighborhood surrounding the murders slowly abated, but the mad-man was never found. He had disappeared as he had come, into thin air. The new owners never lived in the house themselves, but rented it out to tenants who came and went in quick succession.
And out in the middle of Allen Street, the old house still stands tonight. It is silhouetted darkly against the black, starless sky with the blood-red moon shining through wisps of cloud behind it. The wind whispers around the corner, and far away one can hear a sad train whistle blow…
