Psychosis II

           S. Howell
         Psychosis II
I don't want to be here.  Not that I'm scared, mind you, but no one ever wants to have to make good on a lost bet.  So I stand uneasily on the sagging porch watching the splintered door with fervent disgust, almost as though staring will make it shuck its exterior and make it beautiful and inviting again.  But the snaggle-toothed windows glare back, challenging me to disrespect my elder.  "I was here first.  Get off my porch."
         I turn the handle and press into the door, which sticks in its frame, one final act of defiance.  I respond by shoving my weight against its resistance.  I won't give up so easily.  It gives with a crack and I stagger into a wall of musty, stagnant air.  The entry smells vaguely loamy and soggy, with the underlying sting of death.  Straightening, I scan the room.  Dingy floral wallpaper droops like the tangled curls of a petulant five-year-old girl on Sunday.  The film of grime layered upon the few remaining windows over decades of neglect blocks most of the feeble light the moon provides.  Rough, rotted floorboards have left hazardous pits across the room, and the bits of intact floor are littered with refuse of the echoes of life.  Empty soda cans, beer bottles and discarded tissues, the shattered remnants of someone's china, and, in the darkest corner of that front room, a stack of empty, transparent orange bottles.
         The house is almost too stereotypically frightening, like a depiction of a haunted house from a children's book.  I wonder, if I reached out and tore a strip of dead skin from the wall, would I find some cryptic warning painted in blood.  It seems staged, and whoever set it up is trying way too hard.  I scoff and turn my back on the room.
         I have a purpose here.  I have to prove that I came, I saw, and I was not impressed.
         Local kids call this place the Hansel and Gretel house.  I've heard the stories.  About how some old lady lived here and fed curious children to her cats.  I'd even repeated the stories to my sister and her stupid friends to freak them out.  But it's just a story, and this is nothing but an old house.
         Above my head, a board creaks and dust rains from the ceiling onto the floor in front of me like an hourglass signaling my time is up.  I tense, then laugh at myself for being jumpy.  It was probably just a raccoon.  What about her?  I shake my head to release the loose thought.  There was this girl, last November, who was supposed to meet my buddy here and vanished.  But she was a weird one, anyway.  Chances are she'd realised she was being stood up, had enough, and ran off.  Some people just can't take a joke.
         I square my shoulders.  It's time to get this over with.  The object of my little adventure is upstairs sitting in the front window.  A doll, the kind with the eyes that close when you lay it down, with stringy clumps of patchy blonde hair jutting out in odd angles from its porcelain scalp, dressed in a dusty grey wedding gown.
         At the foot of the precarious steps, I pause and turn my head to look up at the oppressive wall of black hovering in the landing.  I pull out my phone and click a side button to light the screen, and weak light illuminates the path ahead.  I slowly extend my leg and rest my foot on the lowest step.  We learned about weight distribution in physics this year.  Mr Johnson would be proud to see me applying what I learned.  I ease my weight up and, though the wood groans in protest, it feels solid enough.  Piece of cake.
         The scenery on the second floor is similar to downstairs.  A long corridor stretches lazily before me, flanked by doors.  In each of the bedrooms, ragged curtains drape over wavy glass windows.  The biggest difference is a sort of heaviness in the air, like deep-south humidity in the summer, but it's bone dry and freezing, despite the warming spring nights.  In the room at the end of the hall, the skeleton of a metal bed squats defensively.  A chair lies on its side, the cushion torn and scattered in clumps around it on the floor, one leg splintered off.  And in the window, staring out at the world with wide, unblinking, ice-blue eyes, is the doll.  A sound like the creaking of rusted springs echoes in the narrow corridor.  Probably just that raccoon again.  I step confidently into the room, cross it, and snatch the doll from its perch, then stride back into the corridor.  I take about two steps toward the staircase when a shrill, ear-piercing screech nearly knocks me off my feet.
         I dart back across the space and into the bedroom.  The bed has moved about a foot across the floor, leaving gouges in the wood.  Then my phone flickers and blares a warning that the battery is low.  Blink once, blink twice, dead.  I can see my breath billowing out before me in the weak moonlight.
         "Kyle!" I call across the silent darkness of the hall, "Real funny, man!"  I grip the doll by one leg, ready to beat my idiot friends over the head with it if I need to.  A door slams somewhere distant, the sound muffled through several walls, then another.  I run back out of the room, then stop myself.  I can't look like I'm starting to panic.  I pace my way slowly through the corridor, but I can't deny that I'm starting to feel tense.  The air feels even colder, and the hair stands up on the back of my neck.  "Come on, guys.  I've been all over this stupid house; you can't convince me it's haunted.  I got the doll, let's go."  I jump into the next open room, expecting to catch one of them in the act.  I peek behind the door, but there's no one there.  I turn to scan the room.
         A rotting cradle crouches in the corner, looking forlorn and pleading, empty but for a few lonely dust bunnies.  I sniff and turn toward the closet at the other end of the room, which looks out of place in the tiny space, like an afterthought.  I throw open the door, hoping that Kyle or Josh or some neighborhood kid is hiding in the darkness, but nothing greets me but a few spindly wire hangers.  A slow, echoing creak drifts across the room toward me and I turn, my shoulders hunching and my breath catching in my throat.  There's an antique rocking chair sitting against the opposite wall, leaned on the back of its rockers, poised and waiting.  The wood is polished, the cushion is clean.  Every other piece of furniture in the house looks about ready to fall to pieces.  But not this.  I gulp and it lurches forward with a solid clunk.  Before I even realize what I'm doing, I find myself darting toward the door, which swings shut in my face.  I stagger backward, facing the chair, which rocks with increasing speed and fervor until I'm sure it's going to tip over.
         As it begins to slow, a face appears in the wood grain of the back.  At first I think it's just my imagination, but then the face opens its eyes.  I can't tell if it's male or female, young or old, but I can tell that it's angry.  It contorts into a sneering mask and a hollow, piercing scream issues from its throat, its lips pulled back to reveal a row of sharp little teeth.  I feel like all the blood in my body has frozen, and my brain keeps begging me to run, but my legs won't obey.  I can only stare, unblinking at the malicious face in the chair as it begins to take on a third dimension, filling itself out.  My chest feels hollow, and my throat aches with the tension of a scream that I cannot seem to release.  My heart hammers and I can feel my pulse in my temples.  The face has developed a body, and it totters forward uneasily toward me, the shriek still unbroken, its jaw gaping, elongating.  It charges me.  I never even got a chance to scream.  I don't want to be here.