I started spinning a yarn in reply to another post, and thought it might work as a response to the HiveBuzz Halloween challenge. A little editing, expansion, and gratuitous padding later, and here we go: a rare foray into fiction. Or at least, that's what my psychiatrist keeps assuring me...
My first apartment was a pathetic studio shoehorned awkwardly in an old building I was told had once been a brothel. That's not where the spooky things happened, though. My second apartment was a three-bedroom townhouse-style apartment. My roommate married my sister, so I had to move next door and find a new roommate. Fortunately, that was super easy, barely an inconvenience. However, the roommate also got married to another neighbor and moved out. This actually leads to the story, though, because that roommate and his wife eventually moved into a house of their own, and that was where the problems began.
This house seemed normal enough at first. It looked like it had been built some time in the 1970s, so definitely too new to accumulate the expected smorgasbord of supernatural horrors, just the usual mundane bad cabinetry and ugly linoleum horrors.
There was one peculiarity, though. In the hall to the master bedroom, there was a door. It looked as though the opposite side of the wall had been sheetrocked, spackled, and painted in a prior remodel, leaving no trace. The door must have been left behind by someone who didn't want to bother patching two sides of the same wall. No big deal. It just would have been easier to remove if we had the key.
There were higher-priority projects keeping him busy for some time. The door could just wait, so wait it did. If only we knew...
I was visiting them that first Halloween, helping supervise the kids as they got costumed up and occasionally answering the door with candy for the rugrats who showed up periodically. It was a lot like prior Halloweens when we shared the apartment until we heard knocking, opened the front door, and saw no one there.
As we peered into the darkness, we heard the knocking again.
It wasn't coming from this door, but the mystery door in the hall.
The door sealed and locked, the door which should have nothing behind it except an empty gap and sheetrock.
We cautiously approached the hall, and I could swear we heard the faint sound of children laughing. Of course, it was just their kids playing a prank on us adults. Ha, ha, ha.
We almost jumped out of our skins when the knocking came from the door right next to us. A red glow began to emanate from the door frame, and a key slid from under the door, matching the patina on the old doorknob. "Trick or Treat," chanted a chorus of sing-song voices in unison, and the stench of smoke and sulfur nearly overwhelmed us.
I don't remember anything after that until I woke up in the hospital. Their youngest didn't make it out. No one was able to explain the fire, but the report said it was an electrical fault and Danny's remains were consumed. But I know better. The kid found a door, because every Halloween now, I see it again in my dreams, and when I hear the voices, one of them sounds familiar...
Where does this fall on the spooky/spoopy scale or epic/fail axis? Find a way to use candy corn instead of stars or thumbs up/down in the comments for a 100% upvote, regardless of your rating or whether you voted on this post!
