The Cottage Filled With Secrets Almost Too Big To Be Held

(This is a young-adult crime story, hope you enjoy it.)

A Cottage Filled With Spilled Blood and Shadows

I was walking over to the neighbor’s house- we had just had a blizzard about a week ago, and no one had seen Maggy or her family come out of their house. 

Once I was at the top of the little hill her house sat on, I knocked on the door. I waited, breathing heavily from the walk over here, but after 2 minutes, I knocked again… Still nothing, I knocked once more before shoving open the door a crack and asking, “Hello?”

I moved open the door some more- which was quite hard considering that it was stuck shut with snow. When I finally could squeeze through the space I had made in the door, I looked around. I saw signs of life, but signs of life from about a week ago, a piece of molding bread on the counter and a cold cup of water. Also, a dark red stain on the carpet in front of the fireplace. Probably just jam, I thought.

“What happened here, though,” I wondered.

Just before the blizzard had come through, I had been over at their house. Me and Maggy had been sitting and watching the dog play with her son, Jack. But we had noticed that the clouds looked heavy, and it was getting cold outside, so I had said my farewells and left.

“Was it possible that they had all…” I couldn’t bring myself to say it, although I was definitely thinking it. Though it could be possible that they had fled, their tiny brick cottage sat on the edge of the neighborhood, near the beginning of the woods. They might have run into the woods… But now that I thought about it, I don’t see why they would have to.

I looked around once more and decided to leave.

I walking towards my house, dragging my feet in the snow behind me, when I heard it, Jack’s voice, barely just a whisper in the wind, but still there.

I turned toward the house and looked inside, “Hello? Jack? Where are you?” Nothing. All that you could hear was the wind gossiping about what had happened in the past week, probably gossiping about the crazy lady talking to an appeared empty house. But I knew that someone was there, whether they wanted to come out or not.

I spent the rest of the day looking around the house, looking everywhere that a family and a dog could hide and wait out the storm and, saw nothing, but they had to be here! I knew they were here, because twice while I was looking I heard the soft wailing of Jack somewhere.

Eventually, though, I gave up for the day and decided to tidy up the house.

2 hours later

Finally, I finished and decided to sleep in Maggy’s bed, as I got ready to doze off for the night, I noticed just how many shadows there were. Enough, and big enough for a small family and a dog, so getting out of bed, I checked every shadow I could find, still nothing.

I got into bed and was about to blow out a candle that I had set earlier when I heard it, Jack whispering once more, “M-Mom? I-I’m c-c-cold.”

When I awoke it was around midnight, so I was about to go back to sleep, when I smelt it, SMOKE!

I ran out of bed, half expecting the house to be on fire, and half expecting Maggy downstairs making breakfast. But, when I got downstairs, neither was happening. I mean the fire wasn’t likely because of all the snow, but it was more likely than what I saw.

When I got downstairs there was a small fire in the fireplace, smoke billowing up towards the chimney. But I didn’t remember setting a fire that night, and rather than the fire being warm, it was bitter cold.

I was about to put the fire out and go back to bed, but halfway through a shiver I heard Maggy’s dog barking, and Maggy’s still shivering voice trying to calm him down. So I sat down in the center of the room and waited to hear a voice or to at least see something. But, like I was now expecting, I saw nothing.

A couple of hours later, I realized that I had fallen asleep and it was now early morning. I heard knocking on the door, so I got up to answer it, and what I saw were shocked faces.

“Are you Maggy Baker?” They asked me.

“Umm, no. My name is Mary Johnson. And, umm. I’m a friend of Maggy’s.”

“Okay, are we allowed to ask why you’re inside of her house?”

Then it occurred to me how hard it would be to explain what had happened to me for the last day and a half.

“Umm, I’d rather not explain,” I said, shivering in the cold.

And, I guess that they noticed that I was freezing because they left me.

I walked back inside the house, trying to shake off the dreadful feeling of the cold. But it was even colder inside of the house than outside.

I went to make a fire in the fireplace since the one in it earlier had gone out, but whatever I did, I could not start a fire. And then I heard it.

“Come here… NOW!”

“I don’t care, what Mary would want me to do, this is what I want to do! Now get over here before I do this a little messier.” Although I couldn’t see them, I could feel Jack’s body quivering under her cruel smile.

Then I gasped with disbelief, concern, shock, and realization. “So that’s what happened,” I choked out between tears.

I can’t believe she would murder her son... And this whole time I thought the wind was just gossiping, it was just telling me the story, the story of what happened, and then I realized a little too late that she might be coming for me next. Suddenly I crashed to the floor as I was cut off from my scream. I had been slit in the throat.

Standing behind me was a soul-less Maggy, standing with a blood-died knife, “That’s right, Mary,” she said. "Go to sleep now. I just made this easier on you... Now you don't have to witness everyone dying." She kneeled down beside me to check that I was dead.

And after checking my no-longer pumping pulse, she said in a voice filled with corruption. “Now you know the story of the already murdered Mary, and her crimes.”