Dark Room

From Write

Dark Room is a one-shot story by EB Kaun.

Prologue

Screams in the night. No idea where they are coming from. No idea who they are coming from. All that is known is that there are screams. And someone needs to stop them.

Pain can be heard within these screams. It calls for help, but none comes. Help is unable to come. No one is alive to hear the screams.

A girl is laying on her bed, hiding under the blankets as if they were an impenetrable shield. A man looms over her, laughing. Then with a swift movement all goes dark for the girl.

Two bodies by the side of the bed now. One is breathing, the other is not. The girl lays by her mother, unaware of anything around her. The man reaches down to pick her up. The girl is now resting on the man’s shoulder.

Headlights crawl up the driveway as the father comes home from a busy day at work. He has no idea of what is going on in the house. Until he sees the door swinging wide open, and the lights off inside the house.

He gets out of his car and runs to the door. An overturned chair, broken glass and blood. This marked the spot of the fight.

He rounded the corner, into the kitchen and saw more blood. The hallway had a trail of blood leading to the bedroom.

The bedroom. A prime place to lay the dead to rest. Oh, God he hoped he wouldn’t find them dead.

He found them dead. Well, one of them. A man, or more of a thing, stood above his wife with his daughter on his shoulder. The man looked over at James. He smiled.

“Put her down!” James’ voice cracked with horror.

“I don’t think so.”

James was at a loss of words. This man was bigger than him, so he had no possible way to fight him.

“I’m pretty sure that you have no idea what is going on. All I can say is that there will be no salvation for your family.” He was finished, and to add drama to his little speech, he jumped out the window.

James was left standing in an empty room stained with blood. His wife, the love of his life, had been taken from him. She lay dead by his feet. His daughter, and only child, had been kidnapped and he had done nothing to save her.

That would change. He would get her back. He would give his life to have her in his arms again. The problem was that he had no idea where to start.

Chapter One

Pounding rang through the usually quiet neighborhood as a sold sign was hammered into a yard. The house, an old Victorian style building, was recently sold to a man looking for a new start.

The house had a wraparound porch that extended from the right side of the house to the left, allowing a person to walk halfway around the house without setting foot on ground. The house itself was two stories tall and was a light brown color.

A man stood in front of the porch, looking the building up and down. He had wondered why he had an attraction to this particular house. There were many others out there that would have suited him better and had been cheaper, but for some reason he couldn’t say no to it.

He shrugged and opened the door to the porch. Inside was a dark green carpet that hid the beauty of the floor underneath it. James wondered if the previous owners hated wood, or they loved the color of puke. Maybe it was a little of both. He made a mental note to pull the carpet up later.

James looked to his left and noticed a few wicker chairs that had been left behind. To his right was more green carpeting and a large window.

He grabbed the doorknob and turned it, allowing himself entrance to his new home. New Home. His old home had been a thing of memories. Memories that he had no interest in keeping. He wanted a new life. He wanted to start over. This home would help him do that.

James stepped into the entrance hallway, finding the dirty blue carpet waiting for him. This blue carpet clashed with the porch’s green carpet in a way that reminded James of the ocean and beach. The way that the waves crashed onto the shoreline. The vision he had was a beautiful thing, the carpet was not.

James made a mental note to pull up the blue carpet too.

James walked further into his new house and looked around as if he was seeing it for the first time. The living room was at his right, and the kitchen was to his left. James walked into the living room and stared at the old couch that had been left there.

The couch was a disgusting mixture of green, brown and yellow. It was as if someone had tossed three buckets of paint on the couch and had let it sit for years. The previous owners obviously had bad tastes.

The living room itself was a subtle pink, the walls covered with dust to hold its brightness at bay. The blue carpet made everything worse.

With a disgusted look on his face, James crossed the hall to the kitchen and opened the swinging door to reveal a green and blue tiled floor. What was it with those two colors? They didn’t even go well together.