The Hallow’s Eve Haunting
Juicy Hallow's Eve Stories...
The Hallow’s Eve Haunting
There’s one thing that confidently can admit haunted houses fascinate me. I have read about many over the years, but none remotely resembling the house on Calle Leiva. According to the testimonies of its neighbors, every Halloween the most incredible events occurred there.
Here’s an experience worth mentioning:
-On the eve of Halloween I forced the front door.
I immediately shivered because of the state of abandonment in which it was. The walls were covered in mold. A sickly grayish moss hung from the ceiling, like beards or shaggy, luxuriant growths. The stench was so horrible, so immemorial, that I even considered the possibility that the bricks were in the process of decomposing.
At every step he found signs of decrepitude. The sound of my own footsteps disturbed me so much that I felt like an intruder, yes, and I was, but not among ghosts or vague apparitions, but an intruder in that lethal silence of decades and decades of abandonment.
I won’t talk about the… presences. It’s too awful, even here, under the steady, safe, and logical fluorescent light of a nearby bar. After all, perhaps my destiny is to return.
Let’s say, at least, that those presences did not translate into visible appearances. They seemed to rise from the black putrescence of the walls: a vapour, perhaps, a fetid mist that spread in the air and dyed the light of my flashlight a repulsive yellow.
My experience of long years wandering through building monstrosities oriented me towards the master bedroom. The door was a memory. Only the frame was intact, like Euclidean maws yawning into the pitch black.
I sat for a moment on a faded old chair. I tried to catch my breath as I swept the walls with the glow of my flashlight. The moisture had eaten away much of the wallpaper, even the wainscoting, leaving limp flaps that were slowly ripping away under their own weight. No trace, no circumstantial vestige that could give me any kind of information about its former inhabitants.
Almost by chance, the light fell on a small, faded portrait on the nightstand: a young couple in the sun on some beach like any other. She, dark and stylized, printed an affectionate bite on the boy’s cheek, her blonde hair ruffled by the ocean wind.
What I heard next was as if something, an immemorial, atavistic vibration, had detonated in my brain. I felt long pulses of excruciating pain, as if Precambrian teeth were crushing my skull.
With the last registers of will I dared to direct the flickering light towards the bed. A dark, compact figure, distantly reminding me of a sinister meditating Buddha, rejected the flashlight beam. It was not a shadow, at least not in the traditional sense, but something of a cosmic blackness, absolute, imperturbable.
It would be blasphemy to try to describe his voice. After all, what words could he use? Could he tell that the voice was inhuman, inarticulate, deep as if emerging from some remote crack in the mountains? Could you perhaps describe the liquefied snap, that dry, mechanical chewing, as if you were gnawing on an old skull?
Suffice it to say that I heard it, and that I was petrified, alert, madly tense.
The figure seemed to expand, as if rising from that devilish lotus pose. An arm, I think, slowly separated from the amorphous, gelatinous mass of the torso. At the end of what could well have been a hand I observed a hemispherical object, eaten away, as if it had been gnawed with teeth.
Then it made a guttural sound, a hideous regurgitation that bubbled between the walls and stirred the shreds of wallpaper: a blond lock, covered in a repulsive greenish substance, fell at my feet.
I tried to get up but I couldn’t. I was simply unable to muster the will to control my muscles. My brain, on the other hand, worked at a frantic pace. At last, I thought, after so many years of wandering among frauds, among elusive specters that later revealed themselves as perfectly natural effects, I had found a ghost, a true haunted house.
“…found… house…”
I don’t know if the figure read my mind or if the horror on my face was more eloquent than any human word, but the voice spoke again: inarticulate, sucking in and exhaling the sickly dampness of the air:
“There are no ghosts in any house,” and then he added, putting a shapeless finger to his heart. This is the site of the apparitions.
See Also:
http://dimidesan.com/the-old-nurses-story-by-elizabeth-gaskell/
