text: This is the first time I've tried to write a sort of story, I feel it'd be embarrassing to ask anyone to read it so I wanted to see if anyone on here would enjoy or criticize it. I opened the door, things seemed almost unfamiliar. I stepped in the house I called my own and it hit me. “This house,” I whispered, “It’s not mine, is it?” Although the key worked, it still didn’t feel right. The smell, the taste of the air, and even the creaking sounds of the floorboards were different. But the house looked the same, all the flower pots and pictures of my wife and I are still here. Before my wife died she was diagnosed with severe OCD. Her parents never took her to get a diagnosis. They thought if she was diagnosed with a disorder the people in this small town would look at her differently. She would label everything on its bottom. All of the flower pots had a number that matched their spot on the table. One went with one, two went with two, and so on. The plants themselves matched their spot, but as I lifted them up the number ‘one’ on the table didn’t correspond with the ‘9’ on the pot. “Jacob” I heard a voice similar to my wife’s wearily say, “is that you love?” It was followed by a small laughter. She always did find it extremely cliché to call each other ‘love.’ It was the laughter that caught me off guard though, I could almost feel it. Even as the hot sun rays came in through the open door the chills I got were incomparable to any winter cold I’ve ever felt. I was distracted, how I had gotten so off track was almost bewildering to me at that moment. I continued to walk around the house. Why was it so unfamiliarly familiar? As I entered the kitchen this sort of ravenous stench entered my nose. The smell was neither good or bad, but I felt as though it was consuming me. It drew me to the basement so I followed it. Even then I knew I shouldn’t have followed my curiosity, but I couldn’t help myself. My hand slowly got closer and closer to the knob almost like it was magnetic and my hand was made of iron. My hand finally reached the knob after what felt like a lifetime of going towards it. I couldn’t feel that endlessness again so I turned the knob and opened the door as hastily as I possibly could. I thought something greater would have happened but it was like any other door to any other room in the house. I flipped the switch but no light came on. I tried flipping it a few more times but all I got was a small zap. With no light in the basement I went to go find a flashlight from the kitchen drawer. She labeled these sorts of things too. I began to remember the number I used to see on the flashlight. “46,” I told myself “I really hope it does say 46.” I opened the drawer with the label ‘21’ and lifted up the light but it was numbered ‘64.’ But I could have just forgotten, maybe switched the numbers up in my head. To this day I still don’t have an answer for that. Regardless, I went back to the basement and turned on the flashlight. What I saw was horrifying, something that my brain could have never switched up like a number. There was a mirror, with a reflection of me next to my wife, the both of us were hanging from the tree out front. If my mind was playing tricks on me, I will never forgive it. I didn’t know what to do. I was stuck, with tears rolling down my cheeks and into my mouth. The salty taste of my tears must have brought me back to reality as I almost immediately threw up into the kitchen trash can labeled ‘53.’ While the dim kitchen light only barely lit the trash can, I could still see the red, I was puking blood. I screamed for my life when I saw it. I wasn’t scared, because that was nothing compared to what I had just seen. “Joseph, come back.” The same voice whispered. Instinctively I ran for the front door. It closed slightly with every step I took. “Could have just been a breeze.” I told myself, even though deep down I knew it was a lie. “It’s fine my love, just come back to me and everything will be fine.” “Who are you?” I answered reluctantly. “How could you forget me,” I heard which was followed by a slight sob, “we’ve been married all this time and you forget me just like that?” But there was no way it was her, it couldn’t have been. She died more than two years before then, but I tried my best to believe the voice with the ounce of hope I had left. But the hope was overpowered, what could I possibly be hoping for, she was gone and I had to leave. So I did, running for the door all I could think of was the reflection I had seen in that basement. A part of me was saying that if I did leave now, I could never come back. That was fine though, in the moment at least, because no matter what happened next I would always have the memory of my wife. I got to the door, pulled it back open because it had nearly closed, and took a step back outside. The door slammed behind me, which startled me slightly but I was already terrified so that couldn’t compare. Going outside and seeing the tree from that reflection, it almost made me throw up again, but I didn’t. I turned around, locked the door and left, never to return. It’s two years later now, I’ve seen hundreds of therapists, almost using every paycheck on each of them. But nothing helped, no matter how hard I tried there was never a difference. What I saw was real, if it wasn’t then why was it just that once that it happened, in that old creaky house. The only real therapy was visiting the hospital bed where the doctors tried to save her. She had killed herself. Slit her wrists and drowned in our bathtub. I begged the doctors to save her but no matter how hard they tried, there was no hope. That hospital bed is my last memory of her. To this day I’ve never taken off my wedding ring. I couldn’t go through that pain of losing again. So I make it clear to everyone that I’m still married. Women say constantly that I look good, or any other compliment they can think of, but I never listen. The past three years I haven’t spoken a word to a woman. It was almost a trigger to me, all the memories seem to come back and hit me like a train. My boss sees I'm struggling, he knows the story of what happened in that house. He never believed it but tries to comfort me as much as possible. His name is Jerimiah, a nice, clean, and business-like man. He tries, and for that I will forever be in debt. I could never help him if I tried, how would I be able to if I can’t even help myself. I work in a police department, most of what I do is paperwork. I used to go to the crime scenes a lot for more insight, but I lost motivation for doing so. Especially since the last time I went to one, it was hers. There are men in my department that believe it wasn’t suicide, they say there's evidence it was a murder. It was never conclusive but it was ruled a suicide. But still the cruel men and women blame me. It was unbearable listening to them go on and on the week after she died about how it could have been me. But it wasn’t me, it couldn’t have been, I was at work the whole day. So from my point of view, it came down to suicide, or whatever was in that basement. I’ve been keeping up to date with our old house since I sold it, which was the day after I last went in. There have been 10 or more people who've bought the house and left within a month. All of them said that something was off, or that they didn’t feel safe there. I understood their emotions, more than they ever could. The part that scared me the most was the most recent owner had told me that the basement door is bolted shut. Nobody else has said this so it must have been recent. I contemplated returning there to see if it was true, but evidently, I was horrified to do so. “I guess I’ll wait until the next owner buys and leaves to see what they say” I told myself. So I did, and two months later the next owner died. The station made me look over the evidence, and as I read the autopsy report and saw the pictures, I burst out into tears. He had died the same way my wife did, the exact same. The slits were in precisely the same spot on his wrist as hers. He laid the same and even the blood, for some reason, looked so similar. I decided to go with them to the crime scene. It was the only way I would be able to go there again and come out alive. Jerimiah and I entered the house, nothing was the same. Now there was a reason to speculate if it was my old house or not. Every single thing had been changed, from the carpet to the ceiling type. It was so strange to see, a house so familiar yet so different. Rather than go upstairs to see the actual crime scene, I went to where I witnessed the worst thing I ever would. The previous owner was telling the truth. The basement door had been bolted shut. “Jerimiah!” I called out. “Yeah what is it?” He asked while hastily walking over to me. “Something happened in this house after what I saw, somebody else saw something, that must be why the door is like this.” I said almost excitedly. This was the first bit of proof I had towards me not being crazy. “Ehhh Jacob I don’t know man, this could be from anything.” He had a disappointed look on his face. It was like he got scared I would never be well again. I walked away slowly, looking at the dreadful expression on his face. “Wait did you hear that??” He asked suddenly. “No,” I said with a confused tone, “what was it?” “There was a voice, it screamed for help, and then there was a scraping on the wall close to the door.” I was shocked, he was describing it like it was written on paper and he’d been reading it every day over and over. It was hard to tell if he was making a joke or not, but as he turned around to look at me it was like he had died of fear. His face, which usually is a bright and pretty one, was so shockingly pale I almost jumped back. “Jerimiah are you alright?” I asked worriedly. “I don’t think so, call over some more people,” he said in a tone like that of death, “we’re getting this damn door open.” So I did, we grabbed some crow bars from the cars out front and began working at the door. After five minutes or so the door had opened. Following it was a darkness like no other, we all were knocked over and left with slits in our arms exactly the same as my wife and the most recent victim. That terrible darkness that scarred us all had gone straight for the front door. I couldn’t make out a figure but it was there, and somehow person-like. I could see the door locking itself almost like it was being forced to. The shadowy figure slowly merged with the door and it became a pure black. Slowly, the windows and the walls were all consumed as well. That same ravenous smell came back as I sat on the floor surrounded by darkness and the other frightened officers. The basement door was the only other visible thing. I was drawn towards it again, and I think the others were as well. One of them got up and started walking to it. “GET AWAY!” I yelled in complete frustration with her. It seemed so stupid of somebody to be in a situation like this and still think to follow that great darkness. But with me yelling the shadow ran back to the basement as fast as it had come. We were back in the house again, the bright sun shining through the kitchen window. The girl began to cry, it was like she realized that she almost killed us all. Leaving the house was the worst part, blood dripping down are arms in similar streams with the same cuts on all of us. It looked like we were some sort of satanic cult. How could anyone believe what we had just seen? We would look like lunatics, then again we already did. The second I felt the outside air hit my arm the cuts and blood all cleared up. Slowly the blood on all of our arms had vanished, and we were left with nothing but the memory. Even with that memory trigger of talking to women, the girl that stood up had something about her that drew me close, wanting to learn more I went with that feeling. I pulled her aside asking her what she was thinking. I needed to understand what she heard and saw. I felt as though if I couldn’t understand, I would never be whole. “I heard my husband, telling me to come closer, and there was this frightening smell, it was in some terrible way consuming me.” I gave her a hug, the most comforting way I possibly could, and went straight to my apartment. As I entered my small rundown apartment I felt as if I needed to take a bath. I went to the bathroom and turned on the faucet. I sat on the couch for a few minutes waiting for the tub to fill and when it did I got undressed and got in. As my foot touched the water my arm started to burn, but by the time I looked at it I was fully in the tub. The cuts had reappeared and with it the darkness filled the room, I was bleeding heavily as I felt a strong hand drag me into the tub. I looked down and the tub became an endless ocean. I went to pull the hand off of me and as I did I saw the shiny ring that was on its finger. It was my wife's ring, I knew because the diamond had her name in big blue letters. ‘Delilah,’ it read. Reading her name on her ring made me give up. I stopped struggling and trying to swim away. I let myself be taken away and eaten by the darkness. And with my final breath of air I whispered to myself, or to her even, “I’m coming, my love.” As I slowly drowned in the endless waters, I laughed for the first time in years. Thinking about how my last words were the ones she loathed the most.