“When all the stars align”
A saying that typically implies that something impossibly good has transpired. That all the twists and turns present in day-to-day life just happened to lead you down all the right paths.
That’s kinda what happened here. Just the opposite.
Now, everybody loves going to house parties, but hosting them is another story. When the uninvited dipshits begin showing up and wreaking havoc on your mom’s antique vase collection, that’s when you typically begin realizing your mistake.
We all wanted to party, but nobody wanted to host. We didn’t feel like going to some rando’s party, either. It’s just not the same that way. So when Jason started talking about a decently-sized cabin in the woods that seemed to be abandoned, we were intrigued.
Of course, we were all skeptical despite the fact. What if somebody actually owned it? If it really was abandoned, then that must mean it’s gotta be pretty shitty, right? How deep into the woods was it? We weren’t trying to get lost, either.
But when we took the trip out there ourselves, the place couldn’t have been more perfect. It was only an eight minute walk into a nearby wooded park area. The only thing that worried us here was the fact that there wasn’t an explicit trail leading to it, but we dealt with that by making our own artificial trail by cutting through the foliage.
The place was also nice. A little dusty inside, but nothing unbearable. There was even electricity. But that was the concerning part. I mean, somebody had to own it right? Even so, Jason claimed that he hadn’t seen anybody enter or leave during the times he’d come across it. In fact, the door was always unlocked.
It was still hard to take his word for it, obviously. The whole situation seemed a bit strange. But since we’re idiotic teenagers, we underestimated just how strange things could really get. We didn’t simply leave it at that. We decided to “scout” the place over the course of a week, in an attempt to determine whether or not it truly was abandoned. It if it truly was just there for the taking.
Sure enough, a week passed and nothing interesting happened. Nobody even approached the place. However, this brought up a frightening possibility. That somebody was already living in there. This idea was somewhat combated by the fact that we'd already entered the place a few times and caused a reasonable ruckus, so it would’ve made sense that the owner (if they were there) would’ve confronted us already. In any case, it was still a cause for concern. We argued about how to deal with this, eventually deciding that somebody simply had to go in and do a sweep of all the rooms.
The conventional response was something along the lines of “Fuck that, I don’t wanna run into some weird-ass guy in there”, but we eventually managed to convince each other to go. During the middle of the day, the five of us went in together.
As it turns out… every room was empty. Well, expect for one. The door to what had to a closet of some sort was locked, so we ignored it (Rookie mistake, I know). There were a few other peculiar things about the house itself, though:
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There was only one painting framed up, which looked to be of some kind of shadowy figure standing outside a window.
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There was straight-up hole that was about 2 inches diameter in the basement. We tried looking down into it, but it was just darkness.
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There was a heavy locked box in one of the rooms upstairs. Contents obviously unknown. In the same room, there was also an older, banged-up android phone, which was out of battery.
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The TV worked, but there was only one obscure channel, which was just constant footage of a faint light illuminating what appeared to be a wall and a bedpost.
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And finally, there was a rocking chair in the living room that was stuck tight to the ground.
Reasonable people would’ve considered these circumstances and noped out of there on the spot, but as I’ve already established… we were dumbass kids trying to our party on. Nothing was stopping us.
We scouted the house for a few more days before finally making our move. We each called up numerous mutual friends, informing them about the plan. They were excited, of course. We were all excited. We’d planned on having about twenty people in total. We had slivers of common sense, after all. We didn’t want to invite hundreds and risk causing a forest fire or something.
The day that the party was supposed to take place, we got there early and began setting everything up, which was basically just music, chips and beer. A good party is bare-bones, after all. No need for a disco ball and a buffet. Just alcohol, weed and good company.
We also tried hooking up an Xbox to the TV, but we couldn’t get it to work. The channel stayed the same, no matter what we did. Although in retrospect… I did notice that the light seemed to be getting brighter.
We told everybody to come at around 8PM, and we finished setting up at around 7. Since we had an hour to kill with just the five of us, we cracked open some beers, rolled a few joints, and got the night started.
At some point, our buddy Boris brought out something that looked like an Ouija board.
“C’mon, we gotta try it.” He said, sounding excited. The only other person on board with the idea was Max, so we let them go at it while the rest of us continued getting intoxicated.
About ten minutes later, Jason went to the washroom, leaving Chris and I alone. We looked over at the peculiar rocking chair.
“What’s the point of sticking this shit to the ground?” Chris said. He walked over and peered down. “Is it glue or some shit? Can’t tell.”
He inspected it for a few more minutes, before getting into the chair himself and rocking back and forth. “Man, I haven’t been in one of these in a while.” And then his face dropped. We both came to the same realization simultaneously. He got off the chair, and it immediately stopped moving. He tried moving it again while standing, but it wouldn’t budge.
His face contorted in confusion. “What…”
“Oh, c’mon!” Max’s outburst interrupted our thoughts. We looked over, watching as he held up the Ouija board. “What kind of board is this?” He said. “It’s not even in English!”
I took a look at it myself, and he was right. On first glance, the characters appeared to be the letters of the alphabet, but all of them were slightly off. For example, the “A” had two lines through it.
“I swear, it was fine when I bought it.” Boris looked at the board, his face also sporting confusion.
“Well, where’d you buy it?” Max asked.
“At some moving away sale. Three bucks.”
“Guys…” I said, as I checked the time on my phone. “It’s 8:40. Where the hell is everybody?”
They all looked up, checking their phones as well. “Alright,” Max said. “I’m gonna call Erin. See where she’s at.” He dialed the number and walked to the kitchen while the three of us stood still, a vague dread looming over us. I looked at the stationary chair and shivered. As I far as I was concerned, weed and alcohol didn’t cause hallucinations.
Jason came back into the room, now holding up a book. “Check this out,” He said, opening it up. It looked comparable to a children’s pop-up book, with crudely drawn animals and trees materializing themselves on top of the pages.
“What about it?” Chris asked.
“Look,” Jason said, pointing to a space in between two trees. I squinted, making out what appeared to be a large, grey hand coming out of the dark woods, grabbing onto a branch.
“Dude, what the hell? Chris said, staring at the bizarre detail.
“Alright, this doesn’t make any sense,” Max stormed back into the room. “Erin said that she arrived 20 minutes ago. And then she let out this weird fucking laugh and hung up.”
Before we could even react to that, Boris spoke up.
“Uh… guys?” He said, in a shaky voice. “I can’t move my hand.” His hand was firmly planted on the board.
“Quit fucking around.” Max said, somewhat angrily.
“I’m serious, man.” Boris responded, his voice increasingly frenetic.
“I can’t deal with this shit right now.” Chris said, pacing around the room. I was feeling something similar. There were too many things happening simultaneously. Too many storylines to follow. It was frustrating.
And as if things couldn’t get any worse, I glanced over at the television, which had been on the entire time. The light had illuminated further, revealing the source of it to be a candle. But it revealed something else as well…
A hand, dangling over a bed.
“Jesus…” I started, but was interrupted again by Boris. He was still screaming about the damn board. We looked over, watching as his finger moved across the letters.
“Fucking hell!” Max shouted, slapping the board out of his hands.
Or at least… that’s what he tried to do. Just like the chair on the floor, Boris’s hand was actually stuck.
Max staggered back, shocked at the sight. “This can’t be happening.” He muttered.
His phone suddenly rang again, and he quickly answered it.
“Hello?” A faint chattering could be heard on the other line. As he listened, his face grew paler and paler. He put the phone down a few seconds later. “It was Erin. She said that everybody’s in the attic. That we should join them up there.”
“Does this place even have a fucking attic?” Chris shouted.
“Oh thank God.” Boris breathed a sigh of the relief, as he finally managed to unstick his hand from the board. "That was weird."
“It spelt out a message, right? What was it?” I asked him.
“Yeah, I wasn’t paying attention. Too busy freaking the fuck out.” He responded.
“This is pretty weird…” Jason muttered, his eyes still glued on the pop-up book.
Maybe these were just side-effects from some bad weed, I thought to myself, despite the fact that I felt effectively sober. In hindsight, that was simply a delusion spurred on by this chain of unexplainable events.
“Where the hell did Max go?” Boris spoke up.
We looked around and sure enough, he was absent. For a while, nobody spoke. We were nearing our tipping with all the madness going on, after all.
“Alright,” Chris said. “You’ve heard the stories, right? Carbon Monoxide makes you loopy and shit. You see things that aren’t really happening. If that’s the case, then we need to get the hell outta here.”
“What?” I responded. “How does that explain-“
But before I finish my sentence, he high-tailed it past me, right out the front door. I went after, screaming at him to get the hell back. He ran all the way to the edge of the trees before stopping.
“Look man, if it was gas, I think we’d be dead by now!” I called after him. But then something caught my eye. Something in between two trees.
A large grey hand, coming out from the dark woods. I raised my voice, ready to yell at him to get the hell back, but he was snatched away before I could utter out a vowel.
“Oh shit!” I yelled out, before bolting back inside and locking the door behind me. But truth be told… I wasn’t so confident about our safety inside the house, either.
“What the hell’s he doing?” Boris asked.
I didn’t bother responding. Instead, I sat down, attempting to make sense of any of this. But I couldn’t. Everything was fucked.
“Wait,” Jason said. “You hear that?”
Everybody went quiet, trying to discern what he was referring to. Eventually, it became obvious. There was some kind of mumbling coming from down in the basement.
“That must be Max.” Jason said.
That seemed like an obvious explanation, but with everything that was going on, I had to be skeptical. Eventually, the 3 of us decided to head down, just to confirm.
Sure enough, Max was there, mumbling while kneeling down. He was also transfixed, staring into the hole in the floor. I approached him and strained my ears, trying to figure out what he was saying.
“Yeah… yeah okay. I’ll kill them, I will. Yeah. They’re right behind me. I’ll do it now.”
Oh, shit, I thought to myself. Out of all of us that could’ve gotten possessed, it had to be the guy who practiced kickboxing.
Max turned around, and I winced upon seeing his eyes rolled all the way back, now displaying nothing but white. I tried running back upstairs, but he charged me, sweeping my legs.
“What the hell are you doing?” Boris yelled at him. But his words didn't register. Max rushed him as well, before delivering a devastating kick to the ribs.
“Oh shit,” Jason stammered out, as he squared up himself. That turned out to be a bad move, as he was dropped in a single punch. I looked over at the hole, which now had an eyeball stalk coming out of it.
The sight of that put my flight-or-fight response into overdrive. While he was distracted, I kicked at Max’s legs, causing him to stumble. I lifted myself up, before making a beeline up the stairs. I could hear Jason and Boris following close behind. Once the three of us got up, we blocked the door with a couch. As Max began trying to tear it down moments later, we’d decided that enough was enough.
“Let’s get the fuck outta this place.” I said.
Nobody argued with the proposition, so we packed up what we could and headed for the door.
But… things wouldn’t be that simple. As I was about ready to begin sprinting, I noticed the painting from earlier. The one with the shadowy figure stalking a window. Oh, please don’t, I thought.
My eyes began moving towards the only window in the living room. Sure enough, the shadow-man was right there, staring at me. A dark body with two bright white eyes.
“What’re you doing man? Let’s go!” Jason said, holding his nose, which was gushing blood. I gestured towards the window in response.
"Fuck."
Moments later, Max’s arm burst through the door.
“Well, I’ll take my chances anyway.” Boris said, pushing past me and heading right out the door. About a second and a half later, he let out a blood-curdling scream that was abruptly cut short. A deep, guttural chuckling followed. I bounded over to the door and locked it again, only to turn back to see Max’s head bursting through the door like Jack fucking Torrance from the shining.
He said something along the lines of: “THERE WILL BE NOTHING WHEN THE OLD ONES DESCEND UPON THIS CURSED EARTH.” However, since it was Max, I found it hard to take seriously.
In any case, Jason and I realized that we were pretty much screwed if we didn’t act fast. We both tried weighing our options. While Max was slowly breaking through, it still looked like he had a while to go before he was out completely.
Max had left his phone, and it was being bombarded with texts from Erin. Most of them said something along the lines of “If you don’t come to us, then we’ll come to you.”
For that reason, we were hesitant about escaping upstairs. But that hesitation changed once Jason pointed out something horrifying.
“Dude… the door’s open.”
The door he was referring to was the one that’d been locked the first few times we tried opening it. I also noticed what was now on the TV.
It was… us. Jason and I, both looking shit-scared, seemingly being filmed behind a door that’d been cracked open just slightly. We looked back towards the door in question, seeing a hand wrapped in barb-wire now slithering its way out. In the meantime, Max's full upper body was through.
We didn’t want to go upstairs, but that choice evidently wasn’t up to us. We sprinted towards and up the stairs, locking and pushing a bed up against the door. Our logic operated on the idea that if a couch couldn’t hold Max back, then a bed would. Right? Luckily for us, there wasn’t some additional demon waiting for us.
However… we did happen to be in the room that contained the phone and the locked box.
And that's where we’ve been ever since. I think we got a bit lucky, though. It sounded like both Max and whatever had been hiding in the locked room came out at the same time and became preoccupied with each other.
I called the cops just before getting out my phone and typing this out. It’s been quiet for a while now, but there’s no way in hell that I’m going downstairs. Doesn’t look like Jason wants to, either.
Looks we’ll just stay here for now.
UPDATE:
The shadow-figure is now outside our window, and we can hear stomping and laughing coming from the floor above us, even though I'm pretty sure that there is no floor above us.
This is going to be a long fucking night.
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Credits
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