Not wanting to be apart of the lynching Dia had walked off by herself trying ot think. She heard the cold screams behind her and shruddered. Another one of them dead. How many were left to go? How many hours did she have left? The child still spooked her out a bit. Why was a child here, if she had wandered into the place why had the lawyers just let her stay. The lawyer knew this was going to happen. Hell the painting new but still a child? It was almost inconcievable to her that a child could be a greusome killer, but she had seen stranger things happen in life time.
Back in the foyer Dia closed her eyes and let her self open up to the house. The faces and feelings she had had before were not just random. Something ached at her and propelled her forward. A small voice was crying, first quietly, like a childs small sob. Opening her eyes Dia began to move fast towardds where she could hear the crying. It seemed to be comming from the west wing of the house.
The crying got louder as she neared a set of french doors. Beautifully carved and crafted the doors contained stained glass panels of a pale red. Grabbing the handle she felt a chill so cold it was almost hot and immediatly drew back. The crying continued. Without hesitation this time, Dia grabbed the handle once more and threw open the doors. Inside the large room was a elegant marble stairway that leaded to who knows where. What was most surprising was the body at the bottom. A tangled mess of legs and arms, blood and hair. As she stepped in the body shruddered and layed still.
"Clara!" she shouted in alarm.
As she ran to the mangled body Dia noticed that the crying ahd stopped, stopped and turned into heinous laughter. It grew louder and louder and she covered her ears.
"Stop it! Just stop it!" she shouted at nothing.
Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimps of movement. Turning her head to her left she missed what it was but an unearthing chill rushed her and she fought to catch her breath. The laughing was gone and now so was Clara. All that was left was a destroyed body and one less person to suspect.
HM Mafia Round #4 MAFIA HIT: The Trip of a Lifetime
The staircase leading to the second floor was truly a work of art; crafted seamlessly from a single piece of cloudy white marble, it stretched up into the darkness like a long, pale neck. While the look of the house, or, more accurately, the feel of the house, was all wrong in some ways, Clara thought it held a unique grandeur from some lost age. She could almost imagine, as she ascended the steps, what this place might have looked like before…
…what had happened in this house? Why was it, for all intents and purposes, abandoned?
Clara ran her hand along the shiny railing and frowned in unfamilar sympathy. “You’ve been left all alone for ages now, haven’t you?â€Â
As if in answer to her rhetorical question, Clara felt a sudden blast of cold run through her, and her mind seemed to cloud over in confused anger. So sudden was this surge of outside emotion (and the cold, god, the cold) that Clara startled.
And lost her balance.
She seemed to fall for ages, crashing again and again on the hard marble steps, down and down and down until at last her face smashed into the banister at the bottom of the staircase, leaving her lying face down in a heap on the tile.
Clara reflected in that moment, as the blood and mucus poured out of her nose and down her throat, that perhaps a more ordinary retirement would have suited her better. Bird watching. Golf. Painting pictures of other old people painting in the park. Instead she was lying on the cold tile floor of a house straight out of hell. And she was probably going to die. Her right leg was, not just broken but shattered and her arm felt as though it had been ripped from its socket. She was sure some of her ribs were smashed, and she struggled to breath. She began to shiver and was convinced shock was settling in to finish her off.
Oblivion consumed her like a gaping maw, swallowing her in the darkness.
Dia
19 years ago