Framed

The old Mithwraite house looms over a thistle-choked yard and crumbling stone path leading from the sidewalk to the steps of the wraparound porch. Down the street, Darren can hear the distorted music of the county fair’s carnival rides and the screeching laughter of children, having the time of their lives under tonight’s full moon. A shiver runs down his spine as he looks up at the Victorian tower and ornate gabled roof, starkly silhouetted in the moonlight.

“Go on, Darren,” his friend Carson urges. “You just have to go inside and come back out with something from the house.”

“The creepier the better,” Eric, another from their friend group, adds with a mischievous smirk.

“We’ll be waiting for you right out here.”

“Thanks, guys,” Darren mutters, but gratitude is the last thing he feels as he walks with feigned confidence down the uneven path towards the house. The closer he gets, the more the hairs on his arms prickle and the cloudy windows seem to be shouting a voiceless warning to stay away. He tells himself that he’s been watching too many horror movies lately, as he usually does in October, but the attempted reassurance does him little good.

The porch creaks and groans loudly as Darren ascends the wooden stairs. One board snaps as he starts to put weight on it and he jumps back just in time. Behind him, he can hear Eric snickering. Annoyed, Darren squares his shoulders and crosses the porch to the front door with a single step.

The door itself is painted black and bears an ornate knocker that reminds him of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. He tries not to look at it as he pushes on the door to open it. To his surprise, it swings open with almost no sound. Wind behind him encourages him to step inside the old house, which he does after only a moment’s hesitation.

The Mithwraite house seems to be in better condition on the inside than it did from outside. Although Darren hasn’t brought a flashlight or even a candle, enough moonlight comes through the plentiful windows to afford him a decent view. He closes the door behind him, shutting out his friends’ whispers and the unsettling sounds from the carnival down the road, then begins to explore the house.

A thin layer of dust coats every surface, floor to ceiling, except for the numerous picture frames and mirrors on the walls. They line the entrance hall, and the parlor to his right and sitting room to his left also have walls covered in frames. Each picture frame contains a portrait of a single person, each of whom, without exception, wears an expression of terror, horror, discomfort, or alarm. Then Darren looks in a mirror, but instead of seeing his own reflection, the face of a terrified, red-headed teenage girl stares back at him, arms crossed in front of her as if to tell him to go no further.

“Hate that,” Darren remarks under his breath. “But that ought to be sufficiently creepy for Eric…”

He tries to pull the mirror off the wall, but it’s either heavier than it looks or very firmly attached. Frustrated, Darren grabs the sides of the frame and yanks on it: once, twice, then three times.

With the third yank, the house gets darker, and the eyes of the girl in the mirror seem to glow.

“You messed up,” she says to him. Darren yelps and releases the mirror, then turns to run back the way he came, out of the house and back to his friends.

To his surprise, the front door of the house is no longer behind him. Instead, he finds himself in a sitting room lined with more mirrors and framed paintings and photographs. The figures in the paintings and photographs all seem to be staring straight at him, penetrating his soul. Some brandish bloody knives or shards of broken glass, and one even appears to be pointing a rifle at him.

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” Darren says, alarm creeping into his voice as he backs out of the sitting room and trips, falling backwards onto a set of stairs leading upwards. He scrambles to his feet and picks his way up the stairs, which have multiple rotten patches and a rickety banister. More framed pictures and mirrors line the stairway. Darren seems to hear whispered warnings as he passes them, though he keeps his gaze on the stairs rather than looking at any of them.

“Turn back…”

“You will regret this…”

“Help us! Help us!”

“I’m sorry! I want to leave, but I don’t know how!” Darren exclaims, covering his ears as he reaches the top of the stairs and finds himself in another hallway. Framed mirrors and pictures cover the walls; a different face stares at him from each of them. These faces glare at him with anger and disgust palpable in their bulging eyes, tense jaws, and furrowed brows.

“Too late…” a voice echoes in Darren’s head, and this time the lips of the portrait he’s examining move in time with the words.

“Too late…”

“Too late…”

“Too late…” the rest of the framed faces take up the cry, surrounding him with myriad voices predicting his doom. Darren’s feet start to move, as if of their own accord, carrying him down the hallway towards a closed wooden door. As he reaches the door, it swings open for him, letting him into what might have been a nice bedroom at one time. Now, however, the room is completely devoid of furniture - no bed, no dresser, no wardrobe, no lamps or any source of light other than the moonlight streaming through the two windows opposite the door, which seem to be staring at him like the eyes of the house itself. Between the windows, a large fireplace with a huge decorative mantlepiece adorns the wall. Above the mantle is yet another picture frame, larger and more intricately formed than the others. It glints as though it might be made of gold.

Unlike all the others Darren has seen since he entered the house, though, this picture frame is completely empty. No portrait or silver fills it; no face stares back at him. He can see straight through the frame to the bricks of the chimney behind it.

Darren takes one step towards the fireplace, then another. The floorboards creak and groan in protest under his footsteps. Each step seems to echo off the bare walls of the room. When he reaches the center of the room, the windows fly open and the door behind him slams shut. Wind seems to swirl through the room. Darren tries to run, but his feet seem to be rooted to the floor. The picture frame above the mantle shifts back and forth in the wind, its ponderous weight scraping against the bricks like fingernails on a chalkboard before it heaves itself into the air and floats between Darren and the fireplace, silent and menacing.

“I’m sorry! Please just let me go! I’ll never come here again!” Darren pleads. A deep, malevolent chuckle fills the air around him and reverberates through the floorboards. Try as he might, his feet still won’t come off the floor to try to run.

“Too late….” A voice hisses from everywhere all at once. The picture frame swoops towards Darren with a hissing whoosh of cold air. A blood curdling shriek tears from his throat. He squeezes his eyes shut and crunches himself into a ball, trying to be as small as possible so that the picture frame will miss him.

A deathly chill passes through Darren, and then he feels as though he’s flying. He opens his eyes to find himself staring down at himself in the center of the room, floating through the air inside an elaborate frame, as his body crumples lifelessly to the floor. Glassy eyes stare back at him from his own face.

“No! NOOOO!” Darren tries to scream, but no sound escapes his lips. His frame settles back above the fireplace. He can feel the bricks behind the back of his head and shoulders. He can’t feel anything below his elbows and ribcage.

The malevolent chuckle finally fades from the air and the walls of the house. As if on cue, something dark starts to boil out of the fireplace below Darren’s vantage point. The squeaks of hungry rodents meet his ears as the darkness separates itself into hundreds of rats, which converge upon his corpse and begin to feed.

Outside the Mithwraite house, Carson and Eric hear Darren’s shriek.

“Oh shit,” Carson whispers, and Eric’s expression turns solemn.

“What do you s’pose happened?” Eric asks.

“Don’t know. But it’s our fault he’s in there. We have to go help him.”

“No way I’m going in there!”

“It was your dare that sent him in!” Carson argues. He glares at Eric, who seems to wilt in response.

Eric gulps and nods. “All right. Fine. Let’s go.”

And so the two boys approach the house, side by side on the crumbling stone path, under the light of the full moon.