In this house (PowerhouseCreatives Contest)

This is a work of fiction, but there have been such places around the world where once you enter you never come out alive again...

Image by TheoRivierenlaan from Pixabay

In this haunted house, servants are like sleeping policemen and terribly hard to find for the looking, and most especially when you’re calling from the bottom of an endless well full of echoes; but I’m not terribly fussy really, I’ll take a naked one if it comes to the pinch, or even a gardener offering me a rose with her teeth. Yes, these days I’ll take anything I can get.

Oh, but they’re a lazy bunch around here; why, only yesterday I found them all lounging around in my Jacuzzi and slurping juice and smoking stuff and laughing over nothing; made me feel strange, I can tell you. Don’t get me wrong though, I’m not a couch slipper yet, oh no, I can still do a reasonable tango at a stretch; it’s just, the servants are a really strange bunch, and don’t come when I call them to get me what I want when I desire something.

I keep calling for the servants to bring me a glass of wine for the hour is getting to that time; but I think they must have gone off to haunt someone or something; or maybe gone out to howl at the full moon and dance in the fields; I wouldn’t put it past them, a silly bunch of ghosts the lot of them.

Still, they make me laugh, and not much does these days, so I’m glad they are around, somewhere.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

They carried me off to bed last night you know, all the way, and just as I was going to sleep in their arms they threw me onto my bed, turned the light out, closed the door behind them, and left me in the dark alone, and thinking that maybe I should get a butler to manage them all.

Tomorrow, I’m going to take a different path, one that doesn’t bring me into conflict with anything or anyone. That’s my secret plan, one I’ve had for ages and ages and sticking to it for all I’ve been worth and never breaking down no matter what apparition appears before me to break my eyes and rattling its chains. Yes, I know: progressive, but that’s me at heart.

There’s this one that I like a lot, she’s got a cheeky way of looking at me when she comes around, makes me feel as if I ought to do something, maybe reach for her, make a play, kiss her lips.

She only comes around most infrequently mostly, and gets me to thinking where else would she be if not here? Maybe down in my wine cellar, drunk as a newt and dancing for her very life in amongst the dead men who were enemies all, and hanging from the ropes around their necks on the walls, and who can never dance again but look on from their looking.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

Or, maybe she’s just a ghost haunting me in this huge old house where I draw my breaths, one by one, as if they were the last ones to come my way and no more available, sorry.

I look out for her you know, even when the fudge has gummed up all my teeth and I can’t see through my glasses for the mist steaming up.

Perhaps I should write this into my memoirs, a tale like no other, where love is a challenge and dances alone.

Image by annazuc from Pixabay

Maybe I’m getting old in my old age, or maybe I’m just waking up at last, but whatever, I sure do like that girl.

Perhaps and maybe seem like my lot in life this last while gone, where I’ve been boiling my blood in the urges to come alive again and revisit the many rooms of this house where once so many screamed their appeals to my humanity.

Creaking floorboards I hear now with my ears, someone coming within my hearing. Who could it be? Perhaps some assassin comes to finish me off for their justice at last.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

Is it the painter escaped from the chains of the cellar where she has been caged for years?

Or is it the gardener, coming to show me her roses and hiding a vial of poison behind her back?

Oh, who could it be that comes?

In this huge old house live many ghosts who do not show their face to anyone, and they live down in the cellar where they can moan to die every day that death comes for them. And then there are those who show all of their face every moment as it happens, to anyone that comes close enough to see it.

I surely do love that girl when she comes close.

There are those who are abandoned, and there are those who are safe, but that girl made me feel like the third kind of party where abandon was a way of life and where safety could never replace passion.

It’s a shame I had to extinguish her life for not loving me enough and for wanting to leave me. And now in her death I’ve claimed her forever.

This house has many rooms of undoing in its drawers, and ghosts of memories haunting. Yes, in this house there are many movements and visions galore, like boats to an island of doom, all pointing to come this way and see their burning torture, and a huge score of terror that freezes the veins with shrieking cries of agony, and please place your bets down now before we move on to the next delight as to which one will curdle your blood the most.

Image by Dimitris Vetsikas from Pixabay

Oh, those were the day where once I was chief executioner and torturer here for the longest time before the revolution closed it down.

And they say I’m not adventurous, as I wander around in this house exploring the many cells and opening every door with my eyes open wide to see the suffering captured there.

Yes, this was the place where insurgents and those against the state came to be interrogated, and never left here alive, and in fact were never seen again after coming in here.

Image by M P from Pixabay

I’d like to say I’m saved, but that would be an exaggeration, an expired dream come true. No, I have my memories of all the suffering and the curses of those gone now who cursed me to reign in hell, endlessly revisiting their terrible and agonising drawn out deaths.

I will say this thought about it all: that in this house, there’s a girl that comes and goes and’s making me dizzy with her spells, and although she cursed me in her dying, it’s alright, she’s mine now for eternity in this house where the dead scream forever.

Image by cocoparisienne from Pixabay

Images from Pixabay