Ouranos

Adam had been standing for the past ten minutes just looking at the house. It had been abandoned for generations now, just left in the middle of nowhere to shelter no one. Taking a deep breath, he took his first step forward. 

The door opened with a push, and the inside was much of the same. It was old, dust covering every inch of the interior. Every step made the floors creak, and Adam wondered if they were strong enough to support his weight.

He went up the stairs, which were also creaky, and roamed around the upper floor until he came across a room. Adam didn’t know why, but something about the room’s atmosphere told him it was where the boys of the house had lived. 

One bed stood out to him in particular. He walked towards it and examined the bed. He wasn’t sure what, but something possessed him to lift the pillow. There was a book lying under it.

He picked it up and saw that the cover was blank. He flipped it open, and was immediately met with writing. He knew from what he saw that it was a diary, probably of the person who had once slept in this bed. Starting at a random page, he began to read.

***

Mother presented me with her proposal today. The day itself wasn’t very eventful before that. I did the farm work with my brothers, and we all gathered for dinner. Father preached to us, warning us about the horrors of the world. He’s the only one to have seen the outside world. Maybe Mother has in the past, but if she did, she never talked about it.

I was preparing for bed, and my brothers talked about the noises in the basement. Noises of screaming and banging that we were all used to, for they happened frequently. We were taught to never question what was in the basement causing the noise, but my brothers thought it was fun to speculate. One of them suggested that the basement was filled with our older siblings that had been disobedient. Another said it was where Hell was. 

Someone knocked at our bedroom door, which silenced us. At first we were afraid that our father might have overheard the conversation, but I knew that if it was him, he wouldn’t have knocked. He would have charged into the room and beaten all of us, regardless of who was or wasn’t talking about the basement. Disobedience of any sort wasn’t tolerated in this house.

To my brothers’ relief, it was only my mother who walked in. She asked if I could speak to her for a moment, so I went out into the hallway with her. Closing the door, she told me that she was planning something important. I asked her what, and she looked around, making sure no one was around to hear us. She told me she wanted to kill Father.

I was too shocked to respond. She told me her plans, and said she would give me time to decide if I wanted to go through with this or not. I’m not sure what I should do. I’ve always been loyal to Mother, but the idea of killing Father terrifies me. What if we fail? He would punish us severely, perhaps kill us himself. But getting rid of him would make me the new head of the household. I would be the one to go out into the world, and then I would finally be able to see what it’s really like. I’ll have to give this some thought.

***

I did it, I killed Father. But the price was far greater than I imagined it would be.

Mother drugged him and tied him down to their bed. When she had accomplished this, she called me over to her. I was shaken by the sight of my father tied down. Never in my life had I seen him so vulnerable, and now I would be the one to end it. Mother handed me the sickle and I did what needed to be done.

I was still in shock, and could barely understand what Mother was saying. She kept talking about the basement and how we needed to get down there quickly. I didn’t really know what she was saying, but after she pulled a key out of a box under the bed, I followed her downstairs.

She opened the basement door and walked straight in. By instinct, I didn’t go any further, remembering what Father had always told us about going in there. But then what had happened in the bedroom finally sunk in for me. He wasn’t there anymore, the rules didn’t apply. I followed after Mother.

The basement was dark and smelled foul. Every step down the stairs took effort, and felt like being swallowed by a beast. As I went down, I heard the familiar screaming and banging that always came from this place. Actually hearing it so close unnerved me, and I began wondering if there really was an entrance to Hell down here. What I found didn’t discredit this theory.

I saw my mother in front of a large cage filled with things I can only describe as monsters. These deformed things had multiple arms and heads, and looked like they were in constant pain from just existing. There were some that were mostly normal except for a missing eye, but even they looked too horrific to be considered real. And the worst part is I saw a resemblance between them and me and my siblings. A familial resemblance.

As Mother unlocked the door, she kept reassuring them that everything would be okay now, that Father was gone. She was going to free them. I imagined these things walking out into the world, and the idea scared me.

Mother opened the cage, and I pushed her in. The force of my push made her drop the keys while she stumbled in with the monsters. I kicked the keys far away from the cage and slammed the opening shut. I ran up the stairs, trying to block out the sounds of the screaming and banging, my mother now included in the cacophony.

***

Adam stopped reading and dropped the journal like it had suddenly caught on fire. His curiosity outweighed his fear, so he searched the rooms of the second floor until he came across one with only a single bed. Adam found a room that he was sure belonged to “Father” and “Mother,” but there was no bed, no body.

He ran downstairs and found the entrance to the basement. He walked down the basement stairs, remembering all too well the descriptions of the contents here. He found the keys on the floor and the cage.

The cage was still locked but now completely empty, no corpses or skeletons in sight. But there was a large hole at the bottom of the cage. He stared at that hole, and thought that he could faintly here screaming and banging in the distance.