Me again - with yet another short story that doesn't really fit into any particular category. If you think it should go somewhere else please tell me!
There’s something about that Sundial. It just stands in all its majestic glory yet it has something about it, something magical. Something only old things possess, it’s a feeling, a tingle, a shiver but nothing more. I just can’t seem to put my finger on it but ever since that arrived everything is different. The house itself seems to have aged into something more real, more old yet more now.
It’s strange. I walk around the house and I can sense something different. I have a feeling I am being watched. A bit like the house has opened its eyes and it’s watching me walk around its regal halls. There is something here that wasn’t here before. I feel so much older yet insignificant here now. I feel like an object of disdain as I stroll around my house in jeans and a T-shirt. I can almost hear the suppressed gasps and I’m sure in bed at night I feel fingers pointing at me. I know I am the only person in this house but I’m sure I’m not the only presence.
It sounds strange I know, but this can’t be just a feeling. At night I can hear footsteps above me and every so often, when I feel brave, I wander out of my warn bed into the cold air of the attic to see if I can catch a glimpse of the unknown roaming around my house.
This isn’t my imagination running wild on me - I know that whatever it is, it’s definitely real. I don’t feel alone anymore but I know that either it, or me, are no longer welcome in this house. I don’t want my house over run by forces and presences of the Unknown.
No one has been to the house since these have arrived. The phone has never rung, the doorbell has never sounded even the doors don’t creak anymore. There is something supernatural here but I’m not sure what it is or what it wants.
There it is again – that noise. I can hear them, I can practically feel them above me. I drag myself towards the staircase and I know that it is not my imagination playing tricks as I see the doorknob turn on the master bedroom door. As I walk up the stairs I feel all the more unwelcome and almost as if I am an intruder in my own home. I cautiously open the door, continuously praying that I’m only seeing things. But my prayers are in vain. As I let my door swing open – there it is. The window is wide open, the curtains blowing in the gales and the soft patter of rain hitting the floorboards as if in an act of obeisance to the Sundial, which seems suddenly taller, stronger, almost frightening.
I hear faint laughter from behind me. I swiftly turn around and what I see shocks me no, – what scares me more than anything is the fact that I can’t see myself, I gaze in stupefied horror as I observe a couple sitting on my window sill in what appears to be Victorian Dress. They’re looking straight at me but they don’t see me.
He hairs on the back of my neck begin to tingle and stand on edge as a shiver travels through my body, racking my very bones. I can feel myself fading away and I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I see a truly terrifying image of my face just slowly disappearing as if I’m being rubbed out of the canvas of life and in my place stands the Sundial, no longer majestic glory but in Sadistic victory as it watches me realise that I don’t belong hear anymore. I realise that it’s no longer my time but ‘it’s’ time. It’s taking over not only my body and my mind, but my only dwelling place and I can do nothing. I am powerless against its’ forces.
I’m not there anymore – I’m nowhere. I’m just a voice haunting the halls of my house hoping to return to my bed or be able it feel the wind on my lost forever face. But oh’ no, the Sundial keeps stopping away me, preventing me from regaining the life I once had and forcing me into this menial existence of nothingness. I’m that feeling you get when you’re alone in the dark, I’m the creak on the stairs in the middle of the night, I’m the noise you thought you heard. And all this is due to the object I once loved almost more than my beautiful house – the Sundial. I wish I has never, ever, thought of buying it.
