These are the results of the horror story contest at the Oh Porings! forum. The first place winner was Sophia (aka Sachre). The original formats have been mutilated by FFnet :3
-Tellie
Home by Sophia (Sachre)
Corosa gropes his way through the darkness of the hallway, footsteps clumsy with the exhaustion of sleepiness. He does not walk slowly or carefully or silently. There is no reason to. He is the only one in the entire house. Once upon a time it was also home to three children and a wife, but they are all gone now. He comes home to peace and quiet rather than wailing and laughter and 'Home now, darling?'
In the dark, his foot catches on something and he stumbles, nearly falling. Then he continues on his way, staying awake just long enough to collapse onto his bed.
He gets up the next morning and is relieved when he comes to the realization that there is no need to go through the bother of changing his clothes, as he had not changed the night before and had opted to fall asleep in his clothes instead. He swings himself out of bed, pushes the door open with a touch, gets himself through his early morning routine, and then makes the daily trip down the hallway to meet the rest of his day. There is a crack in the floorboards; he makes a note to get someone to fix it before it starts widening. The more it widens the more time repair crews will be puttering around in his house, and if there is anything Corosa hates more than dealing with obstinate idiots during a long day's work it is dealing with obstinate idiots in after a long day's work.
Just before starting his quick breakfast he starts hearing indistinct noises from outside, and leans out of the window to take a look. The noises continue, but he sees nothing. Must be coming from the other side, he thinks, closing the window. His only neighbors are proud owners of a gaggle of too-perky too-cheerful children whom have no trouble waking themselves and waking others at the crack of dawn.
He finishes eating and heads back to his room, realizing he has left his guns there. The crack in the floor trips him up; ah, that must have been what got him last night. He retrieves his weapons and walks back down the hall again without a hitch.
The day passes by and as always, he returns home in the evening, passing by the neighbor's empty house. Empty? He pauses and notes that the windows are broken, and it looks like the insides of the house are on their way to collecting thick layers of dust. Despite the lack of a 'for sale' sign, it is obvious that the place has not been touched in a long, long while. Strange. When did his neighbors leave? He has never taken much notice of them, though they have tried to be friendly; he knows their intentions have been kind but Corosa does not have time in his life for them, and especially not for their altogether too bubbly children. And he has been exceedingly busy these past few days. Not like he was glad to be so. The weather alone prevented that.
Today had been smothering, all sun and no wind. The week before had been the exact same. At times he wants to strangle the idiots who decided that a dark almost-black brown was a good color for the gunslinger uniform.
By the time Corosa reaches the door of his own house, he is yawning and fighting a losing battle against sleep, and as a result is none too pleased to discover that the heat of the day has somehow caused the shape of his only key to twist and warp. Its shape has, in fact, changed so much to the point where it no longer fits in the padlock which serves to lock his door.
This will be trouble. He usually locks his door on the outside when heading out, and moves the padlock inside when returning home; if the key no longer fits, the door will remain locked from both inside and out. He does not want to shoot the lock apart, or the door off its hinges. Corosa is not one to waste money on repairs. His wife, on the other hand, had insisted on fixing every tiny wrong in the house. More than half his income had once gone to repairs. Now she was gone and he had not, in any way, inherited her need for perfection.
He has other ways of getting in.
He goes around to his back door. The key fits perfectly there.
"You," someone whispers.
He pauses, the door almost shut behind him, then sees that the window is open and it is only the sound of the curtains being blown around by the wind. He closes the window, absentmindedly thinking that he must be terribly tired if he managed to miss the fact that he could have climbed into the window while making his way to the back of the house.
That night, he goes to bed early. It has been a hectic day.
He wakes up in the night to hear a banging noise and groggily remembers that he has forgotten to lock the back door shut. There must be a storm raging outside for the door to be making such a racket. There is no way he can go back to sleep with the song of wood crashing against wood in the background, so he drags himself out from the warmth and comfort of his bed, finds his keys, and goes on to find the back door, locking it shut. On the way back to his room the floor abruptly gives way, dropping, his foot going straight through with a crunch. This time Corosa does fall, and falls hard, twisting and almost spraining his ankle in the process for it is still stuck in the floor.
He winces as pain starts to prickle up his leg, stinging but not too serious. Gingerly, he presses his fingers around his caught foot and feels splinters. Then he feels around the edge of the hole he has stepped into. It is only a small hole. Grumbling about the builders and their quality of work, Corosa limps back to his room, lights up a candle and proceeds to pick the splinters out in the dim light. Because of the bad lighting it takes him a long while to finish, and he has to double-check to make sure that he has not missed any. The splinters may be small but the idea of infection does not appeal to him, and less the idea of limping to find a medic or healer of some sort.
When he blows the candle out there is a creak from the other end of the bed.
A creak, as if from the pressure of someone sitting down. Corosa assumes it is himself, though even in his irritation and exhaustion realizes uneasily that if the noise was caused by him, it was more than a few seconds too late.
When his eyes adjust to the darkness he sees a dark shadow on the other end of his bed.
Corosa yanks the sheets away and they come away as normal, quickly, smoothly, as if there is nothing on top of them. The shadow is gone but the feeling remains that there is someone sitting on the edge of his bed.
This night is a sleepless one and there are many candle stubs scattered at Corosa's feet by the morning.
And this morning takes a long time in coming.
When the sun arrives Corosa is alone, as he has been the whole night, the whole year, his whole life. For once, he meets the morning not knowing whether to be thankful of his solitude. That is, if he is in solitude as he desperately hopes. The rest of his house is silent and he bleakly wonders if that is enough confirmation that it is devoid of all other life.
Despite the reassuring sunlight now streaming in, Corosa does not dare move for a long time. He spends that long while staring at the door, wondering if he dare to open it.
He finally does. Nothing happens.
He recalls the original reason of his waking in the night and, after pulling on his clothes and strapping his gun holsters in place, goes to check in on the hole in his floor. It is in the same position where the crack once was yet it still takes his foggy mind a long while to make the connection. The crack and the hole, they are one and the same. Simply different versions of one another.
The hole is just big enough for his bare foot to slip into.
He must have widened it when he stepped on it.
This is the logical reason but it is not the right reason, for when he arrives back home that evening—once more through the back door, as the key is still warped and twisted, in fact moreso than before—the hole has widened some more, now enough for his foot to fit in even when wearing his slightly oversized boots.
Strange, but not unheard of. A crack in the wall was also wont to widen. It was the way these things worked. Corosa decided that if he kept forgetting to get the hole fixed, he would have to tattoo a reminder onto his hand.
He puts off sleep that night, preferring to thoroughly and religiously clean out his gun instead, and when that excuse has worn thin he moves on to cleaning and organizing his bullet cases, then messing them up and repeating the exercise all over. At least tomorrow he will not find himself fumbling in the middle of a job.
The wind is howling once more; he can hear it outside. At least this time, he dryly thinks to himself, at least this time he has remembered to lock his doors and windows. Speaking of doors, he also reminds himself to get a new key. The one he has always been using looks less like a key now and more like a...Corosa frowns, fingers playing around with the warped piece of iron, unable to think of an appropriate metaphor or simile. Regardless to say, the key is more circular than straight now and that alone says enough of its present state, let alone its present value. If it curls up any more Corosa will be able to stuff it into his gun and shoot it back out as a bullet.
Eventually Corosa's body decides it cannot stand another sleepless night and he goes to sleep right where he is.
Later that night he wakes up to the realization that there is someone sitting silently on the edge of his desk.
There are things that even the necessities and requirements of the body cannot overrule, and those are the things that fear demands.
Corosa spends the rest of the night staring in deep fascination at the tiny, flickering flames of his candles.
Throughout the night, he notes that there are more candle stubs being discarded than the night before. This night, he is lighting three candles at a time. His supply is almost gone by morning.
The next day he spends scouring nearby shops for any and every variety of candles he can get. They become piled up in his small study room, piled up on his desk like the walls of a castle. A fortress of potential light. It is further fortified by the light pouring in from the skylight above. The skylight is the only window in the whole cluttered room, far up above him. For all its size, this is the point in Corosa's house where the ceiling is at its highest.
There he sits and waits out the night, counting down the slow hour-long seconds until the arrival of bright morning. In the meanwhile, he listens to more than the steady one thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and three in his mind.
There is the howling of the storm that keeps coming back every night, yet is not there during the day.
There is the din of the neighbor's children, still up so late. They do not sleep, do they?—or perhaps it is just the storm again? Are there still children, still neighbors? In his mind's eye, Corosa vaguely recalls dusty doorsteps, hollow walls, cracked and smashed windows.
There is a creaking and snapping coming from his bedroom, loud enough for him to hear, and he imagines that it is the shadow taking residence on his bed where there is no candlelight, shunning the brightness of the flame alight in his study room. The flame, his guardian. In the dim light he almost allows himself the luxury of closing his eyes. That is too far, though. The most control he allows his body over his mind and will is to put his head in his arms and watch the candles burn away, one by one.
The light of morning proves his imagination wrong. The creaks and snaps of the night before are not that of his room, they are that of the widening hole in the hallway right outside the door.
It grows. It thrives. It is now big enough for him to fit in.
When he drops a candle stub down the gaping darkness, the sound of impact never comes.
He puts his hand down inside and feels a vicious wind, whirling like a tornado, sharp like the cut of a blade, and utterly silent.
Corosa backs away.
He does not leave the house today. He cannot. The study room is a dead end; there are no other doors and there are no windows. And he is prevented from moving out by the hole in the floor outside his makeshift sanctuary. He sinks down into his chair and waits.
It is not even noon yet when he hears a ripping and tearing noise, a roar from just beyond the now-shut door.
Corosa scrambles to his feet and vaults over the desk and hurls himself shoulder-first into it, slamming it shut as it begins to slam itself open.
As quickly as it had began the noise stops.
Despite this, Corosa is not reassured.
He wants to barricade the door but the nearest useful, heavy piece of furniture is beyond even his arm's reach, and he cannot move. He knows that if he does, the door will open. It will open.
Tick tock, tick tock.
Noon comes and goes. His arms and back begin to ache from holding himself up against the door so long.
Tick tock, tick tock.
Evening arrives. There is less light coming in through the skylight.
Tick tock, tick tock.
The sun has set and Corosa has not yet moved. The daylight is vanishing into night and if he does not pry himself away he will be lost in the darkness. And he knows that the shadow will come, he knows just as surely as he knows that if he moves from the door it will open.
He puts his back to his door and braces himself against it.
Once upon a time: home now, darling?
