He stared at the wall with a look of pure exhaustion. “How did I get myself into this?” he asked, pleading for an answer, but no answer came. He sighed, and glanced at the blank paper in front of him. With a pang in his heart, he picked up his pen and began to write. He wrote about flowing skies, mellow meadows. He wrote about running rivers and white water rapids. He wrote about the beauty of the world. And then, he wrote about something more personal.
With a start, Quenten woke up. Looking around his room, he saw only pitch black. “Mom? Dad?” the boy asked, the feeling of dread bubbling from deep within his throat, “Mom, Dad? It’s scary here. Where are you?” He got up from his bed and found a very welcome sight: his glow-in-the-dark shoes at the foot of his bed, just like he left them. As he slipped them on, the room was bathed in an eerie green glow. “I have to find them; I’m scared,” he thought, feeling the courage start to fill him the more the room was bathed in light. When he opened the door, however, that courage instantly vaporized. Appearing behind the door was a gruesome sight. He saw what appeared to be blood on the walls of the hallway. He trekked slowly into the hallway, the trembling from his legs spreading like a plague to the rest of his body.
The hallway felt a lot longer than usual. The shadows coming from the green shine of his shoes cast monsters onto the walls, each one looking ready to tear into Quenten’s flesh at any second. As he slowly walked onward, he found his courage draining faster than his bladder. More blood. It was oozing, oozing from the walls, dripping and dripping; the sound enough to drive a man insane. As the floorboards creaked with every pitter-patter of his footsteps, he thought he heard a man crying. However, this crying sounded familiar. After getting closer to the origin of the noise, the shadows getting louder and louder as they laughed at the boy's terrible fate, he figured out who was crying. With a sudden burst of strength, Quenten rammed the door open to find his father inside the room.
Quenten looked at his father and saw a different man. His eyes were that of a man in conflict with his emotions, and blood was all over his shirt. He seemed to be in the middle of both crying and laughing. Quenten could feel the trembling growing between his legs. This was really scaring him! The lamplight, while providing a temporary reprieve from the dark corridor, only served to light the room in a menacing way, a way that just didn't feel safe. Quenten looked around the room, and found strange symbols, strange markings all over the wall. All of them looked like they resembled beasts, ready to devour Quenten the minute he got too close. He was just about to leave the room to look for his mom until he looked on the ground. There he found her.
Oh god, what a terrible sight it was. There were giant cuts all over her, and a massive gash in her chest. Her face was mutilated to the point where he could barely recognize her. He didn't even think it was his mom at first. As he glanced back at his father, he noticed a giant serrated knife in his hand, with blood all over. Quenten's father now seemed less like his father, and more like a hungry giant looming over a small human snack. Quenten fell to the ground, not able to get up and run away, not able to escape, even though he urged his legs to desperately get away. Even though he tried to believe what he saw was not happening. It was here that Quenten felt a new kind of fear. The kind of fear that ruins the strong-willed, the iron-resolved, and, worst of all, the naive young child. He wanted to believe with every little bit of his heart that his father didn't do it, that he couldn't have, but even Quenten knew that couldn't be possible. "D-daddy? Why did you hurt mommy?" he asked, voice trembling and his eyes on the verge of tears, "Daddy, please tell me that everything's going to be ok." He got the opposite response.
"I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to do it. I…I don’t know what to do," his father mumbled, "However, since you are here to see this, I have nothing left.” With that, he turned to his son, his knife grinning a sinister smile in the eerie, dim lighting of the room. “I’m sorry, Quenten. Please forgive me...”
The man put the pen down and examined his page. “I feel like the ending there was a little lacking” he thought, looking at the two mutilated corpses of his family at the corner of his room. With a sigh, he aimed the pen at his throat. “Time to make the ending a little better,” he said shakily, and then he thrusted the pen.
As the house drew its final breath, and the lights slowly started to dim out, the sound of dripping ink never stopped. It dripped over and over and over, until silence was all that remained.
Written by The Anonymous Crouton
Content is available under CC BY-SA