PseudoPod 1046: Annie’s Heart is a Haunted House
Annie’s Heart Is A Haunted House
By Todd Keisling
Sheila was the next to go. Before her, Tobias and Jenny.
Now there was only Rich and me, standing in the foyer and staring at the shredded remains of our fellow inmate. Half a torso and one leg. Some of her insides were scattered across the floor, and the whole foyer was a skating rink coated in her blood. There was no mistaking it. The House Master had been here, and it had treated Sheila like a grisly piñata.
“We were only gone for a couple of minutes…” Rich turned to me, his cheeks slick with tears, and held out his hands in defeat. I stood at his side and looked at the dead girl. She’d survived longer than I expected.
How many days had it been now? Sheila was the one who kept count, scratching a thin line in the upstairs hallway for every sleep cycle. With the windows bricked up, we had no idea if time even existed here, but it kept Sheila busy, gave her a purpose.
“She was gonna be my girlfriend,” Rich said, and dropped the fire iron at his side. “We just…last night…” He turned to the stairs, in the direction of our sleeping host. “You crazy bitch!”
His knees buckled, and I watched him sink to the floor in despair. I reached out to comfort him but thought better of it. There’s no point now.
We made a rule in the beginning: Never go anywhere alone. It was a rule we learned the hard way. Rich had wandered away from us in search of a bathroom while we bickered among ourselves, confused, disoriented. Scared.
“This doesn’t make sense, man.” Tobias tugged on the chains barring the entry doors. Four chains, the heavy-duty kind with thick links, and bound by multiple locks. Defeated, he paced the foyer and mumbled to himself. “I went to bed. In my bed. How the fuck did I end up here? How did any of us?”
Sheila was a crying mess. Jenny held her, tried comforting her friend, but it was no use. She was equally frightened, and for good reason. We’d each gone to sleep in our own beds, in homes scattered across town, and woken up together in this massive house. A mansion, by the look of it. Everything was ornate and immaculate, not a speck of dust or sign of clutter, with dual chandeliers above and a large fountain at the far end. Mounted animal heads above the doorway—one moose and a boar on either side. Red walls. White crown moulding. Polished hardwood floors.
It was something right out of a magazine. Picture-perfect and untouched. Someone’s idea of bourgeois living.
And then we heard Rich screaming for help.
We found him at the end of a long hallway. He clung to the edge of a hole in the floor, dangling above a hazy red void. Tobias took hold of Rich’s hand and pulled him to safety.
“How’d you miss a giant hole in the floor? Dumbass.”
“No,” Rich whimpered, “it wasn’t like that. I was walking and the floor just gave out beneath me—”
A square flap of flooring unfolded by itself and sealed the hole. The trapdoor’s outline was barely visible in the glow of gaslights adorning the hallway walls. No wonder Rich hadn’t seen it.
Sheila found her voice between sobs and asked, “What is this place?”
“Shh, it’s okay.” Jenny looked to me, and then to Rich. Her face slowly drained of color as realization took hold. “Could’ve been any one of us.”
“Are we gonna die here, Jen?”
She put her arm around Sheila, gave her a squeeze. “Shh. No, Sheila, no. Right, guys?”
Silence slipped between us. We were all thinking the same thing, and were too afraid to say it.
Three days passed before we saw the House Master for the first time. We were tired, strung out, panicking because we hadn’t felt hunger or the need to relieve ourselves. Everything had stopped. We were trapped in a prison of Better Homes and Gardens, and at first it seemed like everything was over, the world had come to an end.
God, we were so wrong, and I only wish we had remained ignorant. But then that’s the nature of our punishment, isn’t it?
“I don’t have time for this reality TV bullshit!” Tobias raged to no one, screaming until his voice fried and he exhausted himself. He looked to me and Rich, and then to the girls. “I can’t be here…I’ve got a game tomorrow. Or was that yesterday?” He collapsed on the floor, chest heaving, chin quivering. I saw a tear slip from his eye.
Tobias’s forlorn proclamation echoed our quiet sentiment. We were seventeen, in our last year of high school—we had final exams and games and parties. Well, most of us. The others were so popular. At the top of our social pyramid, Tobias was a linebacker for the football team and had a full university scholarship waiting for him in the fall. Jenny ran track and was the president of both the National Honor Society and the Drama Club. Sheila was the homecoming queen and captain of the dance team. Rich was the class president and an active member of the Future Business Leaders of America.
And then, at the very bottom, there was me. I was the odd man out in our imprisoned group. An art nerd. President of the National Art Honor Society. Spent most of my spare time in the art room. No scholarship, no real friends, and no place among my peers. Even I didn’t understand my presence in this place.
“Please stop yelling,” Sheila said. It was the first thing she’d spoke in more than a day. “It isn’t getting us anywhere.” She paused, shook her head in disappointment. “We all had things going on this weekend.”
Tobias snorted. “Whatever, Sheila. Nothing important, I’m sure.”
“Fuck you, Tobias.”
“Guys, please don’t fight.” Rich shot a look to me for support, but I shrugged in reply. What could I say that would make them calm down or even listen? He scoffed, annoyed by my silence, and raised his voice. “Seriously, stop the arguing. It isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“You wanna come over here and make me, tough guy?” Tobias shot to his feet, popped his neck, and glared. Rich shrank back, played off his panic with a shrug, like the 220 lb. brick of muscle wasn’t worth his time. “Yeah,” Tobias said, grinning. “That’s what I thought.” And then, to the girls: “I don’t see you two doing anything about getting us out of here.”
“All I see is you whining about your fucking football game.” Jenny had finally had enough. “Who gives a shit, Tobias? You whine about homework. You whine about Sheila not giving you the time of day. All you do is whine. Why don’t you actually do something about it instead of crying like a little bitch?”
I really thought he would hit her. He opened his mouth, closed it, and shook his head. “Nah,” he said, “fuck this, and fuck all y’all, too.”
He left us and took the stairs two at a time, his heavy footfalls rattling the whole house. Rich implored him to wait, but Tobias had said his piece, and there was no stopping that freight train. We looked at one another, listening to the guy’s footsteps upstairs, and held our breath when the pounding started.
Tobias kicked in every door he found in the upstairs hallway. He’d already worked his way to the far end by the time we reached the second floor. Tobias stared at us, the trunk of his torso heaving with deep breaths and his face bright red. He had a runner’s stance, was about to charge straight for us. Rich gasped. Jenny and Sheila held hands, shaking. Me, I readied myself for the impact—
The jagged end of a broken wooden beam exploded from the ceiling and pierced Tobias’s stomach. He gasped in shock, tried to scream, but all he managed was a slow mewling groan. Another piece of wood, this one finely sharpened into a stake, shot from above and impaled him through his chest, pinning him in place. The others cried out in terror, but I was too shocked to make a sound; instead, I could only stare and try to make sense of what I was seeing. The two wooden pieces were still attached to the ceiling, protruding from a cracked hole directly above Tobias, and I thought he’d fallen into another one of the traps.
Pieces of plaster and crown moulding broke away from the walls and merged together. Wires snaked through the cracks and wound their way around the two jutting timbers. Tobias was long dead at this point, a merciful end in retrospect—he never had to experience the truth of what killed him.
We forgot our places in the social scheme and huddled together in fear. We whimpered as the House Master assembled itself.
We watched.
Bits of drywall coated the floor and filled the air with so much dust. The gas lamps along the hallway formed eerie halos in the cloud, silhouetting a thing composed from pieces of the house. The creature’s body was the size of a refrigerator, and its multiple arms of wood and rebar scraped the walls and creaked as they bent at the joints. It descended, examined its prey, and lifted Tobias’s limp corpse. A makeshift door swung open from its chest, and in went the remains of our school’s star linebacker. Satisfied with the kill, the House Master walked to the nearby wall, and merged with the structure. The whole upper level trembled with the creature’s force, and within seconds, it was gone.
A beat later, Rich said, “What the fuck was that?”
Exploring upstairs was Rich’s idea. You’d think Rich’s own near-death experience would’ve dampened his courage, or even Tobias’s demise, but no. There was a void to fill in our little group. Someone had to be step into Tobias’s shoes and “be the man,” or the “alpha.” The FBLA had enriched his go-to attitude, nurtured the concept of carpe diem, and gave him just enough confidence to be annoyingly optimistic.
After Jenny and Sheila retreated back to the foyer, Rich pulled me aside and spoke in whispers like we’d been friends for years. “Listen, Adam. If we’re gonna survive, we need to scope out this place.”
“With that thing in the walls? Are you out of your mind?”
“Exactly my point, man. We need to defend ourselves from…” He trailed off, searching for a noun that might accurately define what was in this house with us.
“The House Master,” I said. A spur of the moment title, I admit, but one which felt apt.
Rich stared for a moment, thinking it over, looking at me with the sort of expression I was used to. I could see the wheels turning in his head as he wondered what a weirdo I am. Adam, the odd loner art nerd. Voted most likely to become a serial killer in a joke poll taken by the school newspaper.
“Right…” He cleared his throat. “House Master or whatever. Anyway, I say we split up, each take side of the hallway, explore the rooms. See if we can find anything useful.”
A voice in the back of my head screamed for me to walk away, leave him, and return to my tiny bubble of isolation. “You’re crazy, Rich. What if that thing decides Tobias wasn’t enough, huh? What then?”
“At least if we try, we might be able to defend ourselves if it comes back.”
He had me there. Our odds of surviving this place had diminished greatly in the last ten minutes. We needed every advantage we could find.
That’s how we ended up exploring the upper floor. Jenny and Sheila insisted on joining us—“No fucking way you’re leaving us here by ourselves,” Jenny said—and together we slowly took inventory of the rooms. Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, all lavishly furnished. Rich claimed a fire iron from one of the fireplaces, and Sheila found a decorative sword mounted on a bedroom wall. Jenny and I came up empty-handed. The chest of drawers in the rooms were empty, as were the wardrobes, and like the rest of the house, everything was completely spotless.
There were more traps, of course. Sheila narrowly avoided a wall of spikes when she claimed the sword. They shot out of the adjacent wall, Indiana Jones style, and after her initial panic she refused to explore further. One of the bathrooms opened into a bottomless pit, and I nearly fell in. After I caught myself on the doorframe and gave my heart time to steady itself, I took one of the decorative glass sconces from the hallway and tossed it into the void. Nothing shattered. For all I know the sconce is still falling.
The whole time we searched, we panicked at every creak and pop of the floor, thinking it was the foundation, or maybe the House Master lurking in the walls. I can’t speak for the others, but my imagination ran wild, and I startled at the faintest movement from the corner of my eye. Tricks of the mind, maybe, but after all these years, I’ve learned not to trust what I see in this place.
The House Master remained absent during our search. Perhaps it was merciful enough to grant us this head start. When we finished, we met back in the hallway, and looked at the only door Tobias hadn’t kicked in during his tirade. It was larger than the rest, with a bas relief depicting twin winged creatures serenading a young girl to sleep. They were too strange to be angels or demons. Too angular. Barely humanoid.
Jenny raised her hand. “I’ll check this one.”
We watched her twist the knob and held our breath as the latch clicked. She pushed the door inward and then jumped back, expecting another trap to be triggered by the opening. Instead of spikes or trapdoors, we were greeted by a warm glow of candlelight and a massive black canopy bed at the opposite end of what we discovered was the master bedroom.
That’s when we found her. The real reason for our imprisonment in this nightmare. We stared across the room in disbelief. Sheila broke the silence. “Is that…oh, gross. It is.”
A figure slept peacefully in the bed’s center, surrounded by fluffy white pillows, and covered by a crimson duvet pulled up to her chin. Annie, a girl we all recognized from school.
She smiled in her sleep, seemingly pleased with the dream she was having, and why wouldn’t she?
There was a note on the nightstand. A clean sheet of paper. Typed.
I DREAMT I BUILT A HOUSE
INSIDE MY BROKEN HEART
FOR YOU ALL TO REPAIR
IN THE SWEETEST WAYS
BEFORE MY WAKING
—A
Jenny read the note aloud. When she finished, Sheila laughed and said, “What bullshit is that?” And then to our sleeping host, “Wake up, psycho bitch!”
Annie didn’t stir, but something shuddered in the walls. Rich took hold of Sheila’s arm and hissed. “You want to alert that thing out there? Don’t be an idiot.”
She pulled free of his grip and pushed him away. “Don’t touch me, asshole. If this trash is why we’re here, I’m gonna—”
“If you wake her, we’ll die.” They all turned to me, startled by the sound of my voice.
Jenny snorted. “How do you figure that?”
“Whatever, Adam. Go draw a picture or something.” Sheila tugged on Annie’s arm. “Get up, dammit.”
“Read her note again,” I said. “We have to take that at face value. She built this place in her dream.”
“So?”
“So she’s still asleep, and we’re here physically.” I knocked softly on the nightstand. “What happens to us when she wakes up?”
Rich shook his head. “That’s crazy, man. This is all so fucking crazy.”
“Any crazier than the monster that killed Tobias?”
He didn’t have a dismissive retort this time. Sheila paused, thought about what I said, and slowly stepped back from the bed. They all did.
Tears filled Sheila’s eyes. She leaned toward me and said, “What now, smart guy? What happens to us if we don’t wake her up? Are we stuck here forever?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Jenny said. “He’s just trying to scare us. Fucking weirdo.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Stop,” Rich said. “No one gives a shit what you’re saying. Come on, girls.”
They left me standing at Annie’s bedside, muttered reassurances to themselves as they walked to the door. I looked down at Annie’s face, wondering if I was wrong, wondering if we’d brought this on ourselves. Her note implied as much. Were we the cause for her broken heart? And what kind of sweet repairs could we possibly perform in this place? The mansion seemed untouched, perfect in every sense, except for what Tobias—
Yes. I understood then. His end should’ve been a warning.
The traps we’d encountered should’ve been a warning.
The others were convinced this was all a bad dream we were somehow sharing. Any time now, they said, we’d all wake up in our own beds, in our own homes, and life could continue.
The funny thing is, they were half right.
Jenny, Rich, and Sheila avoided me for the most part over the ensuing days. I was fine with it, to be honest. We’d never had much to say to one another to begin with, so suffering their company in silence wasn’t all that different from our days in school. The rule of staying together, however, remained in place, no matter how much they wanted to avoid me. Discussing our predicament in relation to our slumbering host upstairs wasn’t welcomed, but any time the House Master made its rounds, the four of us had no choice. We banded together to survive.
Annie’s pet didn’t have a pattern, no discernible “schedule” for its appearances. It roamed the rooms and halls like a feral animal, always on the hunt for us, drawn by our noise, maybe even our scent. We didn’t see it again for several days after it killed Tobias, but we heard it in the walls, its movement filling our ears with the creaks of timber and the shrill whine of scraping metal.
What’s worse, I think, was the vibration of its approach. Room by room, an ongoing quake rattled windows and bones, and with it a slow bulge in the walls. Plaster and drywall cracked, flaked paint and dust in a kind of trail, and often the rooms were left in considerable disarray. The lavish mansion and its finer details were destroyed one piece at a time.
The House Master didn’t care. It was the house. A piece here, a piece there, a living machination born from wood, wire, steel, and the nightmarish imagination of a teenage girl. And it wanted us. That was its only purpose: to kill us, consume us. Absorb us.
So why didn’t it come right out and end us?
I didn’t understand that part for some time, but as I came to terms with our reasons for being here in the first place, I began to realize the creature’s intent.
Annie trapped us here in the prison of her mind, a deceptive labyrinth of fancy decoration and deadly traps, and set loose a minotaur of her own making. Not only to end us, but to punish us.
Did we deserve this? I used to think we didn’t. What kind of sadistic monster would do this? We were just kids. Stupid kids, I admit, but still just kids. Cruelty comes so easily to us when we’re at that age but without the understanding of what it truly does to others.
Now I know better.
One month. That’s how long Jenny survived. Sheila had just marked our first month on the wall outside Annie’s room.
We were exploring the southern wing of the mansion. Rich was certain it hadn’t been there before. The rest of us couldn’t remember; after all that time, the house had begun to look the same, one hallway decorated identically to another. Terminal boredom had taken hold in our minds, numbing our survival instincts, and that is perhaps what the House Master had planned for. We couldn’t stay vigilant all the time. Malaise would take root eventually. And with the promise of something new to see and explore, we were more than willing to leave the relative safety of the foyer.
“This looks just like the north wing,” Sheila said, holding back a yawn. “Can’t we go back? I need a nap.”
“We might find something useful.” Jenny always said that whenever we made these short trips to other parts of the house. The possibility of change was too alluring to ignore. We never found anything useful, of course. The house wasn’t built like that. Even the so-called “weapons” we’d found the day Tobias died weren’t all that useful. Not really. Not against the House Master.
The illusion of safety, comfort. Another trick to throw us off our game.
In hindsight, I suppose Jenny’s death was partially my fault. I was just as bored as Sheila, and in a rare moment of social interaction, I brought up Annie again.
“Enough about Sleepy Beauty back there.” Jenny turned to face me, began walking backwards. “She didn’t matter in school, and she doesn’t matter now. She never mattered. The sooner you figure that out, the better.”
“Haven’t you all listened to a word I’ve said? God, you’re all so fucking stubborn. She does matter. She’s why we’re here.”
Jenny shrugged and spun back around. “All Annie was to me, was a mouse. Or maybe an insect.” And then to Rich and Sheila: “Do you guys remember that day she tried out for Macbeth? When she showed up wearing those dirty clothes and her hair was all greasy and knotted? I almost felt sorry for her.” She broke into a fit of laughter. “Almost.”
Rich chuckled. “I remember that. She really thought she got the part of Lady Macbeth.”
“God,” Jenny said, “the whole ‘out damn spot’ scene was pure cringe. Remember what I said to her?”
Sheila perked up. “Didn’t you tell her something like she’d be better off as a peasant?”
“Told her she might have a better chance as one of the witches, but she’d have to clean up for the part.”
All three of them burst into laughter. Heat flushed my cheeks, and I wanted to scream at Jenny for being such a callous bitch, but I never got the chance. In their disgusting reverie and ensuing laughs, they hadn’t noticed the floor ahead slowly bulging upward. Jenny was the closest, might’ve seen the emerging creature in time, but she was facing her friends. By the time any of them felt the vibrations stirring beneath our feet, the House Master was halfway out of its hiding place.
For a while I told myself I didn’t have a chance to warn her, that I was too shocked to find my voice—which was sort of true. I was stunned by the House Master’s appearance, and what it had done with Tobias’s remains. Pieces of his body were wrapped around the creature’s limbs like wet towels wrung tight. Shreds of his clothes hung from the thing’s chest and legs. Tobias’s head was tethered to its torso, the cords of his bloody neck stretched tight and tied off, his dead eyes open and a purple swollen tongue hanging from a gaping mouth.
Sure, I was frightened. I was surprised. But after all this time, I also know I could’ve said something, made a sound, gotten their attention somehow. Yet I didn’t. Because I knew Jenny deserved what was about to happen.
She spun around, found herself standing mere feet from the hulking beast, and screamed. Rich and Sheila were already backpedaling, worried more about saving themselves, while I remained where I stood. Watching. Fascinated.
Pleased.
Jenny tried to turn, attempted to run, but the creature was faster. A flash of movement and one of Jenny’s eyes shot from its socket as the House Master’s limb pierced the back of her skull. Followed by another sharp limb straight through her gut. Wooden pieces groaned against metal, almost like a cry of victory, and in one swift motion, the House Master ripped Jenny’s body in half. Some of her blood splashed my face. Thick. Warm.
I didn’t linger. I’d seen what I needed to see, and soon I was chasing after Rich and Sheila. There may have been a bounce in my step.
Annie. Where to begin.
Every school has one, I guess. One person who’s so low on the pyramid of popularity they’re basically buried beneath it.
In our school, Annie’s sin was her presence. She exuded the kind of “different” that most found repulsive for one reason or another. Different clothes, different attitude, different everything—doesn’t matter. “Something different” is like blood in the water, and popular kids are the sharks.
Annie, the odd child in elementary school who danced by herself on the playground. The girl in junior high who still talked to an imaginary friend. And in high school, the weird book nerd who liked to draw bizarre creatures in the margins of her homework. Symbols, sometimes. A few she carved into her arms with a paperclip. The lone girl in high school who went into a witchy phase and never left, who always smelled of incense and sweat. The poor kid who wore dirty clothes, often for multiple days in a row. Everyone knew she came from a poor family, another sin for which she’d never be forgiven, but Annie thrived despite her circumstances. She didn’t let it hold her back or stop her from trying to fit in. The popular kids hated her for that, and let her know it at every opportunity, but poor little Annie kept her chin up, held her smile in place, and kept trying.
Jenny’s fatal anecdote of that day in Drama was only one example. For dance team, there was Sheila, who called Annie white trash in front of the entire team. For FBLA, there’s Rich, who looked her in the eye and said it didn’t matter how much she learned about business, she’d always be too poor to afford the necessary attire, and who’d take trash like her seriously anyway? And then there was Tobias, the worst bully of them all. Who, for three weeks straight, sought her out in between classes and shoulder-checked her so she dropped her things, scattering papers and notebooks everything.
And then, the day before we all woke up here, she dropped her ratty old purse in the cafeteria and small glass jars rolled across the floor. Wasn’t long before the rumor that Annie had drugs spread to the principal, and she had to face the humiliation of having her locker and other possessions searched. It wasn’t weed, it was other herbs and incense. She claimed it was for religious reasons, and they let her off with a warning, but the damage was done. Annie was yet again the laughingstock of the school. This time she was a drug dealer and devil worshiper. I wasn’t there to see it, but I heard she left school early that day in tears.
Annie was different.
Annie was bold.
But everyone has their breaking point.
Days and weeks, a wall’s worth of scratches.
Being the only two “normal” kids left in the house, Sheila and Rich bonded. Fell in love, or whatever they thought love was. We kept our distance from one another, but in a house this empty, sound carries. Night after night, I heard the primal grunts of their incessant fucking, and my resentment grew. I feared she would get pregnant and bring a kid into this nightmare. A little Sheila or a little Rich. Another asshole too many.
But that never happened. Just like we never grew older and never starved. Annie wanted to prolong this torture for eternity, or at least for the duration of her dreaming, however long that may be. Absolute stasis. No change, except for death.
The House Master bided its time. Maybe it was waiting for the right moment, or maybe it was waiting for me. After weeks of suffering their mundane banter and dirty looks, I decided I couldn’t deal with being around them anymore. I broke our rule, started taking walks to get away from my companions, hoping I’d run into the thing living inside the walls. I’d let it take me, I decided. Sweet release was preferable to an eternity here. The riddle of my place here with the others had proven to be too much. The others, they’d all made Annie’s life a living hell, but not me. What the hell had I done to piss her off? We didn’t have any classes together. We never talked.
One night I was so caught up in my thoughts that I didn’t see the trapdoor open. I gasped as gravity took hold, flailed my arms in panic, and gripped the edge at the last moment. A dark void beckoned to me from below. I wanted to fight my instincts and just let go, let myself be free of this prison, but the House Master—and Annie—had other plans. Those familiar tremors shook the world around me, and a breath later, I saw the beast looking at me from the ceiling. Pieces of Jenny’s entrails decorated the hodgepodge figure, and when it reached down with one of its spindly appendages, I saw it had impaled her arm with the sharpened tip.
Jenny’s hand—I recognized the purple nail polish—hovered in front of my face. I was confused, yes, but mostly elated and terrified. In the end, my instincts won out, and I took hold of the disembodied hand. The House Master lifted me to safety. Once I was back on my feet, the creature simply retracted itself back into the ceiling. I was alone again, but the odd encounter had set off a light in my mind.
It wanted me alive. Annie wanted me alive.
I didn’t understand it then, but I wasn’t about to question my luck. I’d been set aside, given a different purpose than the others, and maybe this was Annie’s way of commiserating with a fellow loser and outcast. Help me, she was saying. Let’s get rid of them together, so they can’t hurt us anymore.
Finally, I understood. This was my way out. It had to be.
That’s why I waited until Sheila was asleep. It’s why I woke Rich and told him he needed to see something. “It’s important,” I said. “Let Sheila sleep. This won’t take long.”
And I led him through the first floor, toward the back of the house. I told him there was a break in the wall, that I could see light streaming through it, but of course that was a lie. There was no hole in the wall, and after we’d reached the far kitchen, I shrugged and said, “Gosh, the rooms must’ve changed again.”
Annoyed, he said, “You weird asshole,” and began his journey back to the foyer. We were halfway there when Sheila screamed, and she was mostly gone when we arrived. Just half her torso was left. That and one leg, surrounded by bits of her entrails and so much blood.
I let Rich have his moment of mourning, and while he cried over Sheila’s death, I picked up the fire iron and smiled. After he’d made such a fuss about finding a way to defend ourselves, he never got a chance to put this to use.
But I did.
Exhausted and covered in Rich’s blood, I ascended the stairs and made my way toward Annie’s bedroom. Nothing had changed since our first discovery of her presence. She hadn’t even moved, and if I hadn’t known any better, I would’ve thought her dead. But she was still smiling, and for once, so was I.
Until I saw the card on the nightstand.
It was small, covered in pink hearts and a frilly red bow. Handmade, by the look of it. I picked it up. Holding the card sparked something in my head, a glimpse of a memory, and I resisted the lump climbing up my throat.
I opened it. The lettering was imperfect, looked like it had been drawn by a child. The kind you’d place in a kid’s card box on Valentine’s Day.
From: Annie
To: Adam
Will you be mine, Valentine?
Yes or No
Another image flashed in my mind. A young girl in a dirty pink dress. Unwashed hair and a bit of smeared chocolate on her cheek. Standing in front of my desk, blushing and grinning and saying, “I made this just for you.”
And there’s young me, already nestled at the bottom of the social pyramid, scrunching up my face like she’s given me a bag of dog shit. Stupid me, saying “Ew, gross!” as I take the card and toss it on the floor. Cue laughter from our entire class. Cue little repugnant me trying to make myself as small as possible in my chair.
Cue Annie’s heartbroken tears.
My whole body went numb. I dropped the card and looked at Annie’s peaceful face. A single tear slid down her cheek.
The room trembled, and I’d barely uttered “No” before the House Master emerged from the wall and drew me into itself.
There was no death. No sweet release. Only the heat of my shame and stupidity.
Years have passed. I’ve lost count. Annie still sleeps. I’m a part of this place now, roaming its halls in an endless labyrinth of blood and memories and regret. My presence here the sweetest repair of all.
Annie’s heart is a haunted house, and I am its ghost.
