the curse of eight

The Curse of Eight

The crick, crick, cricking of the stairs echoes as she strides upon the stairs. The plodding of her footsteps echo on the walls of the solemn home, an old Victorian with ancient history. The ticking ticked and ticked from the grandfather clock mounted beside the benign wall leading to the stairwell from the living room to the upstairs. The clock moved its hands with the melody of his own clicking coming from within shattering the windows with its own high pitched screech that was unheard by the neighbors, maybe it was only imagined by the young girl trotting up the rickety stairs, or maybe it was an omen of the screams to be heard on this fine Halloween night.
     There was naught but a cry outside as people partied and drank and went trick or treating and gathered with their friends on the day that Samhain would come out and murder and pillage any victim without a mask or out of their home. The cold October wind thrashed at the trees tearing branches from their ready limbs, raining on those people from near and far across a nation that barely had its foot in the door in the eyes of the rest. In a state called Michigan where people still complained and whined about the lakefront weather though they had lived there all of their life, when they were surprised to see snow come by before the fall was over and snow stop coming when winter had begun. With the fragility as the leaves that fell every sing fall night, the people scream and yell and wail at the haunted houses and the idea of giving candy to children. Some of the parents begin their drinking to help with the fact that the children will soon be hyped up, no matter how many pieces they are only allowed to eat, in their terrifyingly “cute” costumes made by their overzealous grandma or mother.
     But this was far from the home that would scream the most on this fine, cold and chilly, Halloween night. This old Victorian with the grandfather clock and about nine acres surrounding it with trees and soil and the birds and the bees that already began to flee to the warmth of the south, maybe Florida or Arkansas. This old home with the shutters closed and cracking paint peeling from the decrepit walls and the vines growing, climbing the chimney, and the bushes all overgrown and dying from lack of watering, as it had all been stolen by the trees and the other undergrowth. With the trees scratching on the window panes and on the doors by the will of the evil of the wind.
     And on that cold, frigid really for a fall night, October night the little girl walked up the oak steps that creaked and that cracked as did the fire in the place. She held in her hand as she stepped on the first of those sixteen steps a kitchen knife gleaming in crimson. And if one were to follow the trail of the drippage they would find as it wound through the living room, behind the couch passed the table and then into the kitchen, a trail of scarlet on the white marble floors and even a bit on the countertop, and then finally into the hallway and through the barely open door, the door that was not a door, and to the other side of the bed a red mess. But the red mess of blood and gore was not all to be found if one were to look. Under the bed, above the floorboards, there was a body of a nine year old girl with her throat slit and the wrists slashed and the eyeballs dangling, puffed up, outside of the standard orifice she had the head of a ragged doll stuck in her mouth, which had gagged her, kept her from speaking or screaming or yelling to the owners of this home.
But if we go back to the young lass who had climbed to the fifth step of the ladder of the stairs one would see that she had on her calves a series of slashes and dashes and cuts and scars and blood dripping and dripping and seeping in a river to the floors. And as your gaze moves up you would see the blood dripping and slipping and falling from her arms, this is on the tenth step, she walks and she walks so slowly, getting used to the moving and swaying caused by the drunkenness of this pain she had caused on herself. But as she reaches the final step, she glances back in her white- now red- gown of hers, that once her sisters, you could see the utter sadness and melancholy and confusion and delusionary fear of what is happening. She did not like the pain, it was the other, masochistic and homicidal and irreversibly murderous beast that found its way into this sweet girl's dreams and inner sanctum of nightmare had become her entire consciousness.
The nightmare took back the control of the benevolent girl’s body and took that final step up unto the second’s story of the old Victorian house that once belonged to a murderous man’s illegitimate descendants. The man himself perished in fifteen-eighty-one and was deemed one of the worst serial killers of all time, having been convicted of some five-hundred-forty-four over the course of around twenty years, twenty four of which were the unborn fetuses of children cut from the women who bore them, to be used for black magic and as a ritual of cannibalism. This monsters name was Peter Niers, but none of the family that lived in the old rickety, crickity, fidgety house knew of this fact.
The girl who knew not of this ancestry, of this fearful apparition that strayed, somehow, someway into her, strode to the closed door at the end of the hall on the creaky old floorboards that caused a resounding screech to echo. She raised a bloodied hand not encumbered by the blade that bloodied it and grasped the old brass door handle, and turned it, ever so slowly. The clicking of the gears, click click click click, reverberated on the flower wallpaper and the photos of all the family, for they were a family’s family. The cross that hung at the other end of the hall, near the stairs, was knocked down to the floor with a stain of blood cracking it, burning the crucifix that represented the lucid Catholicism abound in the home. But the god that they believed in either watched the girl and this all happen or didn't exist at all, but who knew?
With the door now opening with a squeal, the door that was no longer a door, but was ajar, the girl walked into the master bedroom to the side of the bed where lay her mother, in dreamland at 11:30 at night with the moon driving beside the flicker of clouds streaming in the distance and shimmering, twisting like an eel. The sound of the parties did not reach this place, did not come back to the old Victorian house, once built by the descendent of one of the most horrific serial killers, did not reach the center of the forest with the woodland critters and the angry trees.
     Standing beside her mother the girl lacerated the older ladies jugular and trachea, and stabbed her repeatedly in the chest, in the heart, in her lungs, into her own soul she stabbed her mother. As the symphony of the beat stopped its pulsing the girl strode to the side of the bed with the alpha male the one who once abused her on the whim of the spirits and the liquor. She walked, with the pitter of blood rippling the earth that was the bamboo floors, not quite from Asia but that is where the two naive adults thought the planks had been cut from. The girl stood beside the man whose eyes opened at the feel of the warm oxidized blood that pooled around him. He screamed, as he saw his daughter, who had been so kind and sweet before something had gotten inside her only a year ago, as she held the blade over top of him, letting his wife's blood find him and drip on him from so slight a height, raised the blade and impaled him, stabbing him several times, several too many times to slay. Somehow, the girls soul was still resident in the body, after eight long years she got her vengeance for the father who had beat her only once under the influence of the spirits and the liquors and the drinks and the rage of being fired for staying behind at home to watch his sick and ill daughter who had just faked the illness to stay home from school. But it wasn't the girl who killed them, it was the true owner of that house, that final descendent of Peter Neirs, that eight year old that had committed suicide after murdering her family on her own eighth birthday on that fateful Halloween night a mere twenty years before. This eight year old, no, not quite eight yet, girl at eleven fifty nine on this Halloween night in the master bedroom of her parents aimed the knife at her neck with the fear dripping in crimson streams from her eyes and arms and legs to the old bamboo floors from the plants that did not grow in Asia in the old Victorian house in the outskirts of the city in the forest so far from the hearing range of any other. She aimed the knife at her neck in that final moment, the millisecond before midnight, and drew out her blood to drip on the old bamboo floors in that old Victorian house on Halloween night.