The Truth About Us Pt. 02

"I'm really starting to think this is just a nightmare," he said. That was when a face peered around the corner and looked at him. It was pale and ghoulish, unlike anything resembling an actual human. It also seemed obscured from his vision despite being in plain sight. Like it was out of focus despite looking square at it. "Oh my god! Jesus Christ! Agh!"

Aldous screamed and stomped wildly at the unusual figure, allowing his primitive fight or flight instincts kick in. The figure disappeared almost as quickly as it came around the corner. Aldous was now sweating profusely from just how afraid he was. His eyes bulged as he was too scared to even blink. That was when he felt something knock him hard on his left side, sending him into the bedroom right next to where he stood. He hit the ground hard as dust flew up and caused him to start coughing hard. He gasped as he laid on his back to see what hit him. A plank board used for the ceiling had inexplicably come loose and swung down against him.

"This house is trying to kill me," he said as he stumbled to his feet. He looked around as the sound of footsteps stomping toward him could be heard coming from all directions. In a frantic panic, Aldous screamed and stumbled back out into the hallway and started somersaulting down the stairs. He thought maybe he should just ram the door to get out or try the glass window that magically healed itself before. It could have been his mind playing tricks on him. As he screamed he fumbled in an attempt to miss the hole and catapulted forward, tripping on the stairs and hitting several steps as he fell to the bottom. He cried out with every thud as he was battered and bruised by the time he reached the bottom. He hurried up to his feet and looked around. "You won't kill me that easily! I'm getting the hell out of here if it is the last thing I do!"

"It will be the last thing you do," whispered an ominous voice.

"Who is that!?" Aldous screamed as he bolted around with his palm light shining every which-a-way. "I heard that! Don't you play any more of these mind games! I have a fucking lightshow in my hand right now and I'm in no mood for this haunted reality bullshit! Show yourself!" He pointed the light into the living room that appeared to have a sinkhole in the middle of the floor. He raised a brow curiously as he took one step closer only to hear the sound of hissing coming from within the room. "Oh shit, what the hell is that!?" he shouted as he aimed his light in every direction he could to spot the source of the noise. "Is there an animal in here!?"

He stepped back only to hear the sound of crashing in the kitchen. He jumped and turned his light back to find the source. He hurried away from the living room back toward the kitchen as he shined his light around. A bright, glistening reflection stood out to Aldous nestled on the floor. He looked down and noticed what looked to be a broken piece of a pristine fine china cup. He raised his brow in surprise, seeing it there in the middle of the floor. It had nowhere to fall from and looked too vibrant and new to have not been noticed before. There was a low creaking noise that could be heard behind Aldous as he shifted his eyes toward the laundry closet at the end of the room. He shined his palm light on the door that was once closed now slowly drifting open. He opened his eyes wide, anticipating the worst. He didn't know what it was, a ghost, an animal, another human, all he knew was it had to be the worst of those things.

The door swung open slowly enough that it transfixed Aldous's attention. He watched only to see nothing but darkness on the other side. The sudden anticlimactic terror made him fall back on his hands against the floor. He breathed out slowly and rubbed his face, wiping sweat from his brow. He paused as he felt something cool and sticky rub against his skin. He looked down from where he had his hand on the floor just to notice that all the dried blood had liquified into a coarse, coagulated mess on the floor and he was sitting right in it. He reeled back as he looked at his hands in horror. "Wha-what is this!? What the hell!? Blood!?" he screamed. "What the hell is going on!"

That was when the sound of heavy stomping from the darkness of the closet could be heard. Aldous turned to see a massive creature with extraordinarily long limbs come lumbering out of the closet in a furious fit of rage. Aldous screamed as he rushed to his feet and bolted through the house. With the sound of stomping from the strange, pale, and inhuman looking creature closing in behind him, Aldous knew he had to get as far away from it as possible. He didn't have time to think. He didn't have time for anything but running. He was barely even able to hold his breath as he bolted back up the stairs, his leg tripping on the hole but with sheer upper body strength, he was able to continue his pace by pulling himself out by the handrail.

The creature bellowed an unearthly sound as Aldous dropped to the floor in a panic and watched his palm light go out on impact. He turned to see down the stairs, the only thing he could see being the illumination of the beast as it spread its limbs out like a spider and used the walls to carry itself up toward Aldous. He screamed once more, finally finding his wind again as he bolted to the one bedroom he knew had a door. He grabbed its knob as he turned and looked into the darkness to see the creature closing in. It extended its neck longer and longer as it screeched. Its human-like face made it all the more ghastly. Aldous was struck with fear, forgetting to even slam the door until the last second. As he did, the whole door pushed back as he could hear the unearthly being let out a series of barking cries while it scratched and scuffed up the walls.

It felt like he was in a movie. Like he was one of those sorry saps tricked into a ritualistic sacrifice to some otherworldly cult that summoned demons. That couldn't have been the case, at least not the way it ran through Aldous's mind. Possibly the beast was something undiscovered that had taken up residence within this abandoned old home. Then again, it was massive, and it couldn't have simply come out of a closet the way it did. Nothing about what was going on made sense anymore. Aldous slumped against the door, looking into the darkness of the bedroom with only the moonlight shining through a single window illuminating the pitch black.

"Wait... a window?" Aldous gasped. He could have sworn that wasn't there before. He stumbled to his feet, scared to let the pressure off the door, and welcome the creature outside to come back in. He had no other option. He had to escape. He breathed out and braced for impact as he barrelled across the room toward the window. He held out his elbows, ready to break through the glass and brace for a fall from the second-story window. It would be worth it though to escape the nightmare. He closed his eyes as he felt his feet carrying him across the floor. He leaped forward and slammed hard into the wall. "Agh!" he cried out as he fell backward and held onto his arm as it burned with pain. "Oh god help me! Agh! It burns!"

He looked up to see the window was no longer there. The light that shined into the room came from a window on the other wall. He opened his eyes at the impossibility as he looked back at the door. He had run straight for it and still, he hit just an empty wall. He hit it hard enough that it left a dent in the old paint. He eyed the dent as he stood up and started frantically punching it, hoping to just break his way out of the house by force. It was an old and rotten building and so breaking through its walls shouldn't be as difficult as it seemed. For a solid minute, he punched the wall and watched the hole grow bigger. Only when he stopped to hold his sore and burning hand did he realize the hole he made began to self-repair.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me," he whispered loudly to himself. "You've got to be FUCKING KIDDING ME!!" The sound of the creature outside the room started echoing as Aldous turned angrily. "OH SHUT UP!" He looked around the floor for anything. He spotted a broken piece of wood on the floor as he grabbed it and slowly managed to rip it out of the floor. It cracked and splintered but came off with relative ease. Now Aldous was going to use it as a weapon. He was going to square off against this ungodly monster and kill it. Ask the questions later. "All right you ugly son of a bitch, let's do this!"

He burst through the door with the weapon in hand and screamed wildly as he swung with the nail out and with the intent to kill. The wood instead smashed into the wall and shattered a hanging mirror that wasn't there before. Aldous gasped as he stood there in the empty hall, not a monster in sight. He turned and looked at the shards of glass now scattered about the floor with the reflection of his wild look staring back from each broken piece. He watched as his reflection just smirked while his face stayed the same. He looked away and shook his head. There absolutely was a monster here. He still had the coagulated blood sticking to his body. None of this was adding up.

Furthermore, the hall appeared different. It was fully decorated with mirrors everywhere as a row of candle lanterns suddenly illuminated off the walls. Aldous stepped back as he looked at the lights. "None of this is real, I'm dreaming," he said.

"You're not dreaming," came a meek voice from the other end of the hall.

Aldous jumped in fright as he picked up the wooden board. He looked around the brightly lit hall of mirrors and slowly stepped over the broken glass. "Who goes there!?" he cried out, his heart racing in a panic.

"You shouldn't be here," came the voice that almost sounded like a child.

"No shit," said Aldous as he did his best not to look directly at any of the mirrors, the side of his eye-catching constant movement throughout each individual piece. "Who are you!? What do you know!?"

"If you want to leave, you can't," came the voice. "They won't let you. You can try to escape through the basement. They don't have power beyond the walls where they died."

"They died!?" Aldous shouted as he approached the other end of the hall where he noticed a flashlight roll out of the darkness and touch his foot. "Are you telling me this house is just that haunted!? This isn't fucking real..."

He looked down and breathed out slowly as he quickly picked it up and turned it on to shine in the darkness. As he did, all of the lit candles went out as quickly as they came. Aldous turned around to see all the mirrors on the wall were still there but now they were all cracked and shattered. Aldous turned back and shined his flashlight into the room where he heard the child's voice. There was nothing there. Was it a friendly ghost trying to help him find a way out of there? He was on the top floor now and the furthest from the basement. The house was not going to let him get there easily. He knew he had to make a break for it and get out. He had no other option, even if it was a trap.

Aldous turned and looked down the stairs. That was when things started to become even more heart-wrenching. It was now a spiral staircase where he could not see the bottom. The house was shapeshifting, or perhaps it did not have one set appearance. Aldous screamed as he charged down the stairs in a panic, hoping his cries would ward away anything that could be down there. He held the flashlight forward as he swung wildly at nothing, hitting the walls as he moved back and forth. When he got near the bottom, he tripped on the stairs and fell forward onto the board. He let out a painful cry as the rusted nails punctured his upper shoulder and he was forced to pry the board off of his body.

He stood and whimpered quietly as he could feel the blood run down his arm under his sleeve and over his hand. There was an echoed grunting cry that could be heard somewhere within the house that drew Aldous's attention for just a moment as he reached down and pulled the board up. "Maybe I can't fight it," he said. "Maybe all of this is just a bunch of illusions." As he said that, the grunting turned into a devious snickering noise. "You think this is funny!?" Aldous yelled angrily. "Is this just some sort of sick game!?"

The sound of the snickering echoed all around as it seemingly moved from room to room. Aldous turned around several times in an attempt to follow the sound. The whole downstairs looked completely different, with old furniture now set up where there was once nothing of interest. It was almost as if the house was coming alive with his presence. He could hear a creaking noise behind him as Aldous turned and shined his light back on the stairs. They had returned to normal and from the hole that he made earlier he saw a shriveled, skeletal hand reaching out from the darkness beneath in an attempt to crawl out. Aldous stumbled back, struck with a fear he had not yet experienced. He couldn't explain what it was that kept his body from moving as the ghastly, weathered skull of a bug-eyed ghoulish woman emerged from the hole in the stair and let out a low and unsettling grunt.

"What the hell are you?" Aldous gasped as he managed to take a step back and feel the wall and shut off the front door behind him. He kept his light strictly focused on the creature as it wailed in agony and showed its sunken in, whited out eyes. Its sickly look and stretched out skin made it look horrific even by the standards of a zombie. "Whatever you are, you're not real."

Aldous decided it was time to change strategy. Like the protagonist of a horror movie who comes out in the end. They always had some sort of revelation that their circumstances were not as they appeared and they became defiant, able to stand against the odds. Aldous was whimsical enough to think that could be possible as he watched this abomination crawl down the stairs with the sound of its bones snapping and crippling under the weight of nothing. It moaned and groaned painfully as it approached him, reaching the bottom of the stairs as its nails scratched the old wood. Aldous then realized he wasn't brave enough to actually think all of that crap, as he was always the type to believe what his own two eyes saw. He screamed and leaped over the creature as he bolted down the newly formed hallway into the living room. The place looked cluttered but bigger than before. It was also missing the mysterious hole that Aldous had stumbled across previously.

He curiously started looking around, trying to forget about the slow-moving, moaning woman that still resided at the base of the stairs. He wanted to try and find a way into the basement, as per what the mysterious voice said. He didn't know if it would actually save him or lead him into something even more horrifying, but it was clear that upstairs and downstairs of this home were not going to let him simply leave. In a weird way, the basement made sense. Given the age of this place, it was likely a bunker in case the house itself burned down, or perhaps it was used as an escape tunnel. The sound of the wailing woman grew louder as she drew closer, moving mere centimeters at a time with each scratch of her crooked nails into the wood. Aldous turned and looked at her as he growled angrily. He screamed as he ran up to her and stomped his foot down on her face. Just like that, she vanished.

Aldous watched as she dissipated into a mist before his eyes and the smog whisked itself up into the ceiling and disappeared. He watched it vanish as he came to a realization. Everything he witnessed was a manifestation of some kind of trickery. A poltergeist, perhaps? Aldous wasn't an expert on ghosts, but he seemed to remember certain behaviors they showed off that felt reminiscent of this. All he knew was that now that the cards had been dealt and the hand had been played, he was seeing the game for what it really was. He was being toyed with. But how did something so powerful that could conjure up illusions to mess with Aldous's mind end up here? What about the visions he experienced before? The pieces just didn't add up. Surely he would discover more in the basement.

Aldous turned back to looking around the living room as he shined his light on all of the newly placed furniture. He reached out and touched several pieces curiously to see if they were real. "As solid as I am," he muttered as he pushed on a couch end table, stirring dust off of it like it had been there for ages. Aldous looked at the dust on his hand and rubbed it curiously. It was real. So what was an illusion before had now broken? The house wasn't as dilapidated as it first appeared when he entered. "There has to be a way into the basement. Maybe a door between the kitchen?"

Aldous pondered out loud to himself as he walked through the living room, making sure to take cautious steps as he slowly turned to the opening on the other end that led out to the kitchen. He shined his light on the fresh pool of blood that bubbled in the one spot he fell before. He grimaced at the sight of such a macabre scene and turned his attention to the door he thought was a closet that the lanky monster emerged from before. He slowly approached it and reached out his hand for the knob. As he did, the blood bubbled and coughed, making Aldous look back to see something as it started to emerge from the pool. He raised a brow as the visage of the same woman from the stairs became visible, only now she was coated in a thick paint of crimson blood. The woman wailed, with an echoing voice that trailed behind her own, sounding like the otherworldly cry of the first creature Aldous encountered.

Aldous's eyes widened in horror as he started to turn the knob as hard as he could. It felt like there was a resistance fighting him on the other side as Aldous screamed and eventually yanked the door open. He shined the light down into the dark abyss of the basement as the sound of the blood-soaked woman slapping her hands on the floor to crawl out of the blood reverberated in his ear. Without looking back at the creature, Aldous started down the stairs, pacing himself as he held his bleeding arm, feeling it burn from having to fight with the door so aggressively. He grunted and cried with discomfort as he nearly stumbled on the stairs before reaching the bottom, slamming his body up against the wall of the basement floor.

"Agh! Damn it!" he cried as he turned and shined his new flashlight into the basement. It looked like an old abandoned storage room full of shelves filled with glass jars. Aldous raised his brow curiously as it wasn't something he expected to see in the basement of what was supposed to be a building built back during the Irish renaissance. "What is all of this?"

"Trinkets and remnants of the past," came the friendly voice of a child.

Aldous turned his light to spot the young boy looking back at him through the shelves, his vision obscured by a murky old bottle and the shelf between them. The young boy looked at Aldous with wide eyes through the shelf. "W-who are you?" Aldous asked. "W-what is going on and what was that thing I saw upstairs?"

"That was the wicked witch that lived here before," said the boy, his English accent breaking through and sounding very regal and misplaced from the setting.

"A witch," Aldous gasped as he looked at the boy curiously. "I don't understand..."

"She doesn't like it when people come here," said the boy. "She especially hates the Nephilim."

"Nephilim?" asked Aldous.

The boy nodded to his hands. Aldous blinked and looked down at them to realize he wasn't holding a flashlight at all, but both of his hands were glowing with a radiant light that started to encapsulate his body. "That is clearly what you are," said the ghost boy. "She is afraid you will purge her from this house. She is a very powerful spirit that must be put to rest if any of us should find peace."