Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-29709755-20160919031031

I'm hoping this isn't too short to build up any decent tension/too long to get away with it. The idea, at last, should be worth a shudder.



The man lived alone, in a small house on an empty street. The other houses were abandoned, grass up to your chest and kudzu on the walls. At night they looked like little green hills, sentinels keeping watch for something very large and terribly old. It was dead quiet at night, the only noise left was the quiet hum of the streetlight just in front of his house.



He was used to living by himself, but he still got uneasy at times. His dog would wake him at night, barking and snapping it's teeth and spinning to face every direction, as if he were surrounded with invisible enemies. He'd walk around the house with his shotgun to see if something was amiss. He'd find things different, not so much so that he could say for sure they'd been changed, but furniture would be just a bit out of place, pictures would be tilted, the books would be rearranged. He once woke to find that the front door seemed to have moved a foot closer to the wall. Finding nothing more concrete, he'd go back to bed, though the dog would refuse to settle down, and it'd get outside if it could.



One night, standing on his back porch and looking in the moonlight at the green mounds where the other homes stood, he glanced over the shadow of his house cast by the streetlamp. There was something that looked like a head and shoulders silhouetted on his roof. He looked back, briefly startled into a panic, but it was just the chimney. The bricks were the shoulders, the stovepipe the head.



He took a long, hard look at it. He didn't know why it made him so suspicious. Just one of those uneasy moments, he supposed, when the house felt ominous, like a silent hatred needling his soul, a malicious threat he couldn't quite grapple with. He'd had a hard time sleeping in the house lately. It felt like the walls were watching him, and now there was a chimney man to leap from the fireplace in his dreams.



He'd gotten himself quite worked up thinking about the house as a sentient thing. Imagining big, black pupils opening up from the walls and pointing a furious gaze at him while he ate, while he showered. While he slept at night. So worked up that when a sudden noise jolted him from his thoughs he reacted like a bomb had gone off. A sudden spasm of terror that made him jump and clench his fists so he stood tense all over, taking short, agitated breaths while his heart pounded in his chest and his whole body trembled.



From inside the house the dog had begun yelping, and it bolted from the back just as the door slammed shut with tremendous force on it's 35-pound body. The man heard the crunch and turned away just a moment too late to see that the silhouette of the head and shoulders was no longer being cast, and far too late to stop some fantastically heavy masonry from crushing flat his ribcage. While his vision blurred and faded away, the last thing he saw was an enormous pair of eyes staring into his, filled with incomprehensible loathing, moving closer and closer.  