“Please? I’m so bored.”
She finished collecting the tissues and put them in the overflowing Spiderman trashcan in the corner of his room. “What about your comics?”
“I read them all.” Kyle looked at the stack of Image comics that his mother had picked up for him at the Jackson Comic Shop where he had a file. They filled the file each week with his various favorite comics, and he’d fallen behind on picking up the newest issues. Wednesdays were the day that new comics were released, and if his file hadn’t been cleared the shop’s owner would’ve stopped saving them.
“You read all of those?” She looked at the stack of bagged and boarded comics on his nightstand.
“Yes, I told you, I’m bored. Can you please bring me the TV from the den with the VCR in it? I want to watch a movie.”
His mother sighed and then capitulated. “Fine, but just one movie. Okay? I don’t want you rotting your brain in here. You know how I feel about having TVs in the bedroom.”
“I know, but I feel like sh…” he almost cursed, but caught himself before he did, “…shadoobey.”
His mother smirked at his nearly foul mouth and muttered as she carried his trashcan out of the room. He coughed, despite not needing to, in hopes his mother would hurry to get the television if she felt bad about how sick he was.
She eventually brought the 19” television with the built in VCR and set it on his dresser. He asked her to let him watch his father’s copy of Goldeneye, but she laughed off the request and put in Toy Story instead. He didn’t complain.
Somewhere around the point in the movie where the toys go to Pizza Planet, Kyle closed his eyes. He didn’t mean to fall asleep, but the next thing he knew he was waking up on a cold pillow that was wet with his sweat and drool. He wiped off his cheek and looked around in confusion. The television displayed snow, the movie long over, and the clock on his nightstand revealed that he’d been asleep for over two hours.
3:14
“Mom,” he said and rubbed his eyes.
He glanced out the window and saw that the previously bright afternoon had turned dark. At first he thought a storm had come through, but then he recognized that it was fog he was looking at. The fog flashed with green light and he pulled the covers up over him tighter at the sight. The flash of electric green light rippled through the fog as if he were watching monochromatic Northern Lights.
“Mom,” he said with more insistence.
Something moved beneath his bed.
He leapt into a sitting position and pulled the covers up closer to him as he yelped. There was something scratching at the floor beneath him, and it seemed to get excited by his voice.
“Mom, help!”
She didn’t answer. The green light flashed outside and cast devilish shadows across his room.
“Mommy!”
The scratching got more intense, and then the creature under the bed started to groan. It made a guttural sound, like the gasps of a choking victim shortly before they succumb.
“Mommy, please help. There’s something under my bed. Mommy!”
He continued to scream as the scratching got worse. He was terrified of getting off the bed, afraid that whatever was hiding below would grab at his feet and pull him under. Yet, despite how loud he screamed, his mother wouldn’t answer.
He turned and pulled one of the wooden swords off the wall above his bed. He held it tight against his chest as he stood on the bed and prayed. Then he gathered his strength before leaping off the bed in the direction of the door. His bare feet slapped against the wood floor and he wasted no time fleeing. He only dared to look back once he was safely in the hall, far from whatever had been hiding under him.
Kyle saw the top half of his mother’s head on the floor, with her fingers sprouting from the wood like the tops of carrots. She was scratching at the floor and he could see the top of her head wiggling as she tried to speak. Her body was fused with the floor, and as he reached the stairs he could see the bottom half of her body hanging from the first floor ceiling, beneath where his bed was.
“Mommy,” he said in shock.
She gurgled and scratched before her legs went limp, dangling from the ceiling.
16 Years Later
March 9th, 2012
Alma was anxious about meeting with the reporter, not because of the story they were going to run, but because of the offhanded remark by the cameraman about her relation to the mystery of Widowsfield. It had been nearly 16 years since that awful day, and she tried for all that time to forget as much about the investigation that tore her family apart as possible. She would’ve refused to meet with them, but wanted to make sure her past wasn’t going to be part of the story. The last thing she needed was to be contacted by her father about why she had allowed reporters to discuss their family’s dark history.
“Alma.” Rachel waved at her from across the small dining room. She was seated at a table with the cameraman, Stephen. The meeting was set up at a local Chinese Buffet restaurant, and the smell of sticky sweet chicken and pork sickened Alma. She’d been a vegetarian for years, not for any altruistic or health related reason, but because the thought of eating flesh sickened her. It had bothered her since the day her brother disappeared in Widowsfield, 16 years ago.
“Hi.” She stared at Stephen’s plate, which was loaded with fried pork covered in a fiery orange glaze and mixed with rice. It was steaming, and the sauce clung to his chin as he smiled up at her. He wiped his lips off on a red napkin that had been in his lap before he got up and pulled out a chair for her.
“Want me to get you some food?” he asked, trying to be nice.
“No, thank you.” She sat down with Stephen to her right and Rachel across the square table from her. The reporter had a sparse amount of food on her plate, and no meat.
“Not hungry?” asked Rachel.
Alma shook her head. “Not really.”
Rachel tilted her head and sympathetically asked, “Not a fan of buffet food? Me neither. This was his pick.” She pointed her thumb in Stephen’s direction.
“I thought you’d have the camera equipment here,” said Alma. “Aren’t we supposed to be doing an interview?”
Rachel smiled and squinted as she bobbed her head as if about to apologize. “Well, that’s not really the case. We’ve got everything we need for the story. I guess I should just come out and admit the truth. You see, Stephen and I have a side project going on that’s been gaining steam lately, and we thought you might be able to help out with it.”
Alma was confused and looked back and forth between the two of them. “How?” she asked with suspicion.
“Stephen started a website last year about haunted houses. It was sort of a pet project for us, and we filmed a few Youtube videos to put up on the site, never really expecting much of anything to happen.”
Stephen wiped his mouth again before he interrupted Rachel. “Yeah, it was just for shits and giggles initially, but now we’re starting to pull in serious numbers.”
“Okay,” said Alma, afraid of why they were talking to her about this. She could guess where the conversation was headed, and didn’t want to go there.
“A couple months ago, Stephen caught something on camera in a house out near Pittsburgh,” said Rachel. She absently stabbed her fork into a piece of fried zucchini on her plate. “We didn’t even see it at first, but one of our viewers did. Stephen was calling out the name of a little girl that was supposed to have died in the house and in the corner of the room you could see the shadow of a figure. It’s hard to really tell what it is, but the net just went bonkers over it. We split the video up to just show that scene, and it’s gotten almost a million hits already.”