#They really knew what they were doing with that pink yellow and blue setup huh | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

spookyspaghettisundae · 6 years ago

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A Beautiful Day in this Neighborhood

Karma rang the doorbell.

She fidgeted while she waited, wondering why people always knocked in the TV shows when there was a perfectly functioning doorbell outside most modern homes.

Her neighbor seemed to be a nice enough guy. Even if he was a bit odd. What was there to be nervous about?

A full minute dragged on like molasses and felt like an eternity outside the warm confines of her apartment. Karma hugged herself to close her jacket more. She had not bothered to zip it up because her neighbor lived in the apartment immediately next door. And now the nightly chill of early autumn was already getting to her.

Finally, the sound of unlocking clicked and clacked. The apartment door opened slowly. Gently.

Her neighbor’s face lit up, and he gave her a bright smile when he recognized Karma. She gave him a shy smile and raised her hand for a tiny wave.

An unlit crumpled cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. His smile appeared genuine and felt out of place with the rest of his looks—dark rings of sleepless nights lining his eyes, hair dyed pink and cropped short, black-painted fingernails, torn jeans, unlaced combat boots, and topless—his whole look screamed something emo or punk or goth and did not match his age, either. Guy must have been in his late thirties. His somewhat androgynous figure and symmetrical face did look oddly familiar to her. Maybe he was in a band? Or had a YouTube show?

“Hi,” she said at a mousy volume. “Uhm, I need to borrow some salt?” She hated it when she caught herself posing things like a question when they should have been a simple statement. It stemmed from insecurity, and that was truly the reason why people walked all over her.

He just stared at her with a dumbfounded expression.

“It’s a bit late and, uh, the store is, you know,” she said, trailing off and flashing a nervous lopsided smile.

“Salt, huh. Sure, oh. Uh, yeah,” he said, muffling his own voice with half his lips sealed to keep the cigarette in its place. He looked over his shoulder to some dark corner that she could not see and gave her a big smile when their eyes met again. “Name’s Kevin by the way, don’t think I’ve introduced myself yet, yeah?”

She smiled and nodded. Only several beats later did she realize from his fading smile that she missed the opportunity to introduce herself.

“So, you’re in luck. I happen to have a shitload of salt. How much do you need?”

Karma hugged herself a bit tighter to pull her jacket more snugly to her body and shrugged.

“A cup? I guess? Really anything you could spare, though.”

Kevin nodded slowly, then nodded again with more vigor to it. He returned a timid smile and raised his hand, extending an index finger.

“One minute.”

He shut the door but the mechanism did not quite engage—with a soft click, it opened again and remained ever so slightly ajar. Just enough to fit some fingers through. Or spy inside. She bit her lip and told herself not to gawk. But then again, it was cold out, and he had not invited her in. Then again, they barely knew each other, and it might have been weird. Then again, maybe Kevin was hiding something.

Squelching wet sounds made way to something reminiscent of sandpaper being rubbed over wood. Then came a soft squeaking sound, much like a rubber ducky being squeezed or someone cleaning a smooth surface.

He was definitely hiding something.

She rocked back and forth on her feet and then pretended to casually lean forward, stopping mid motion to peer inside.

Twilit shapes barely illuminated from the adjacent kitchen and rooms comprised the apartment’s dark interior just beyond the entrance. Nothing out of the ordinary except for a strange arrangement of candles on a coffee table.

Karma did a double-take. It was difficult to tell by looking just through the crack in the door and the weak lighting, but she would have bet money on those candles being dark blue or black and set up in a circle. And in their midst was some sort of bronze bowl, surrounded by innocuous objects like rubber bands, a messy pile of keys, and what must have been erasers broken off of pencils. Random objects, but arranged with system.

He is into the occult, she thought. Imagery of her own research into the subject flooded her mind. Pentagrams, horned pagan gods, ritual fires, blood sacrifices, sex rites, magick. But the strange assortment of objects threw her off. Not associated with any kind of tradition she knew to be real, working magick.

Something in the bowl moved. Something small. Or lots of something tiny. A handful of writhing worms maybe?

Shuffling pants, the combat boots clomping across the floor—noise heralded her neighbor’s return in advance, and she sprang back into a position where it looked less like she had been spying. Karma pretended to be looking over the railing out onto the parking lot in between the apartment buildings.

He returned and swung the door open. In his hand he held a coffee mug. The cup’s side featured a bright yellow smiley face with a gunshot wound on its forehead and the word “HATE” printed in pink letters underneath it. Some salt spilled out of the top of the mug and onto his ratty carpet as he stopped the door from swinging open any farther. Her eyes wandered, only now registering what a pigsty his place was.

He gave her a smile again and handed her the cup.

She almost managed to hide her spying. Almost. The problem being that her big round eyes were too expressive, and the bowl in the circle of candles drew her attention again. Karma realized it after the fact and bit her lip again.

Kevin’s smile faded from his eyes while his lips could not keep up the guise alone, leaving a cold grimace in its wake.

He knew.

And that made her freeze. Knowing well that the longer this dragged on, the more likely he might figure out something about her that she did not want him to, she wanted to quickly retreat to her own apartment. Uncertainty paralyzed her.

Pulling a zippo lighter from his pants pocket, he flipped it open and guided the tiny flame to his face. He lit up the cigarette and took a long drag. Blowing out smoke into her general direction caused her to emit a muted cough from the unpleasant smell and fumes. He seized the opportunity and asked, “So, what’s cookin’?”

“What?”

He leaned against the door in a pose both languid and almost lascivious. Her eyes darted away from the nipples on his bare chest to catch another glimpse of the bronze bowl behind him—definitely worms, as one of them spilled out now and wriggled on the table in between the rubber bands. He caught her staring and asked, “The salt. What’re you having for dinner?”

While she hesitated and struggled to come up with appropriate words, he pulled the door shut by a few inches, breaking her line of sight to the strange setup.

“Mac and cheese,” she finally replied with a nervous smile. She had no idea what to cook that evening, but why not? Except that she now worried that the answer had been too simple, too stupid. She would never need that much salt for that.

Kevin whistled in the fashion that people do when they express surprise. He took a drag from his cigarette and cocked his head back to blow the smoke out upwards.

“Cool,” he said with a nicotine-laden rasp. “So,” he added, letting the sound trail off with a tail of impatience or the intent of bridging conversation fragments over a sea of awkward silence.

“Yeah,” she said and cleared her throat. Then she forced a smile that convinced nobody. “Thank you. I’ll be on my way then. It’s really cold, right?”

“Uhuh,” he replied with a nod. He produced a phone from his other pants pocket and thumbed through the display while staring into her eyes. Karma found something about his gaze magnetic, though also scary.

“Toodles,” he said. He gave her a flippant wave with the cigarette in his other hand and continued to stare while raising the phone to his ear and only slowly closing the door. Then the door shut completely, emitting an orchestra of three locks clicking into place.

Once more, Karma hugged herself and looked over her shoulder while she left with quick and frightened steps. Kevin peered out of his living room window, watching her leave through crooked blinds. The glow of the phone display by his head and the cigarette in his mouth cast spooky little lights in the darkened room, creeping her out even more.

The next time she looked back, his blinds had straightened out and folded closed. She hastily entered her own apartment.

Once she had shut the door behind her, she used Kevin’s mug to pour salt out along the crack at the bottom of the front door and proceeded to distribute more lines of salt across every single windowsill throughout her home. Once she had finished, she retreated to her “study.”

She had painted the door to this room pitch-black and covered it in ancient Sumerian glyphs. Karma whispered the words of power and opened the door to step inside.

She now grew paranoid: how thin were these walls? Could this Kevin fellow hear her chants and mystical utterings? Her first impression just now had painted him as some hack, but what if he was also a practitioner of some arcane art? One that worked?

Something like a whisper out of nowhere beckoned her. A reminder of the power she had been toying with for the past year.

The warm, soft glow of candles welcomed her. The tiny flames flickered in a gust of air that escaped through the door and stopped the moment she closed it. A deathly cold filled this room, no matter what she tried to do to heat it. Like a cool air just sprang out of nowhere in the windowless walk-in closet and kept it close to freezing temperature.

It somehow fit—she had used her witchcraft here to hex people for bad luck. None of the really dark stuff that she could have been working out of her ancestor’s book of shadows, though her nemesis Helen losing her hair and some teeth was a bit nastier than she had predicted. And Helen had only been the beginning, for Karma had exacted her revenge on four people already. Nobody knew. How would they? Nobody believed in magick. Nobody could prove it.

Nevertheless, Karma knew. She suspected dark forces at work when she worked spells. It was no wonder if the shrine in her closet had grown supernaturally cold. Who knew what malevolent spirits lingered there.

Bad juju.

She used the remainder of the salt to lay another line by the door to her shrine. Superstitions of that practice being effective at keeping ghosts and demons at bay were common in lore, but she had started to put stock in superstitions for the off chance of them containing a grain of truth. The whispers she was hearing had been increasing in frequency in the past days.

Karma sat down in the circle of candles and folded her hands on her lap. The young woman meditated, preparing mentally for the next step in her ritual. To make the next person pay for what they had done to her. Something kept distracting her though—the presence of that blasted mug. She opened her eyes and glared at the now empty cup Kevin had given her. The smiley face with the gunshot wound in its head grinned stupidly at her, and the pink letters spelling “hate” started feeling like a threat.

Or part of a bizarre spell.

She jumped to her feet and carried the mug back out of the room, swearing under her breath about forgetting to utter the magick words of warding while passing through the door. Just when she placed the mug on the kitchen counter, she froze when something in the front window caught her attention.

The faint glow of someone taking a drag from a cigarette, peering inside through the blinds. The dark silhouette of someone standing outside.

Her blood froze, and her heart skipped a few beats. She quickly turned off the kitchen light and hid behind a cupboard while holding her breath and staring at the front window. The cigarette-smoking person had already vanished—had he really ever been there or was her paranoia playing tricks on her mind?

Karma waited for several more minutes and listened intently. The kitchen faucet dripped irregularly. The air heater in her bedroom buzzed softly.

The door to her study creaked.

She lunged forward and snatched a knife from a kitchen drawer, leaving it open. She snuck through the dark apartment, creeping ever closer to the black door. Just like she had expected from the sound, it stood ajar. Like it had never fully closed—like Kevin’s front door earlier—or like someone else had opened it.

Trembling all over, she reached out until her fingertips connected to the cold surface of the doorknob. She gave it a gentle pull and gripped the knife in both hands while the door slowly swung open.

Cool air washed over her skin and made her shiver. The candlelight flickered once more. Nobody else was there.

Something shattered. Karma spun around, holding the knife out in front of her. She gave every corner a wide berth as she rounded them on her way back to the kitchen. She bumped into the drawer she had left open and muttered curses under her breath. Then she found the culprit.

Kevin’s mug had fallen off the counter and shattered, spread out in a hundred pieces scattered across the white tiles on the floor. Her paranoia had turned into full blown terror. She swore again and started searching the apartment, prepared to scream and stab and run for her life.

But there was nobody there. She went through every room, ripped open every closet, switched each light on and off, and looked behind and under every piece of furniture in her home.

She locked herself inside her bedroom. Karma left the knife on the nightstand next to her bed and wrapped herself inside her blankets.

Sleep refused to come. She expected an intruder anytime, anywhere. Someone hammering at her door. That weirdo neighbor busting in and doing something. She considered calling the cops, but what would she tell them? If they came in, how would she explain the study? They would think she was a freak.

She was, but that was beside the point.

Even when fatigue began to overtake her overactive mind and she started to doze off, sounds pulled her back into a waking state, reactivating her brain and sending it into a spiral of dreading the unknown. First, she managed to explain the sounds away, thinking of familiar nuisances like the dripping faucet. Then she started to hear the whispers again.

Unlike any words she knew. Barely audible. Whenever she strained to make out what she heard, it sounded so distant and surreal that she wondered if she was really hearing anything or being plagued by an overactive imagination. To the point where she doubted her own sanity. Maybe it was time to see a shrink.

But what if this was payback for the magick she had wielded? What if her neighbor practiced real magick and was hexing her as well? She had thought he seemed nice when he moved in a week ago, but now that she lied in bed, tormented by doubt and fear, she looked back. He had seemed too nice. And the way strange people of all walks of life seemed to visit him at dark hours within just a few days of moving in had made her think he might be a weed dealer, but now she wondered.

Unable to sleep, she slipped into her purple bunny rabbit slippers and emerged from her bedroom, still clutching the kitchen knife. She traversed her apartment and halfway to the shrine in her closet, she felt an awful sting in her foot. The pain shot up from there, and she resisted the urge to make a sound, instead hissing in agony over it. When she lifted her foot, she saw a chunk of the broken mug sticking out of the sole of her slipper and a dark spot spreading through the fabric, soaking it with blood.

She inhaled sharply as she pulled the ceramic shard out and swore out loud at how it hurt even more than stepping on it in the first place. She placed it on a nearby bureau and sat down. She hobbled into the bathroom, dug through a small first aid kit from behind the mirror, and sat down on the closed toilet to bandage up her injury.

Some minutes later, the blood had soaked through bandage and slipper, though she did not notice. Bloody footprints that grew in size with each limping step she took on her way back to the shrine. She did not forget the words of power this time, but the door stayed shut when she twisted the doorknob. Locked, or stuck.

She shook at the door, trying to yank it open with brute force, but it refused to open.

Her heart dropped into her stomach when she heard Kevin’s voice behind her, asking, “You thought you would get away with that cobbled together old-world crap?” It dawned on her that she had forgotten the knife in the bathroom when she bandaged up her foot.

“How’d you get in here? I’m going to call the cops,” she said, her voice trembling almost as much as her body. The threat was empty. Her phone sat on the nightstand in her bedroom. Too far away.

Karma turned around to face Kevin. He stood in her kitchen, casually leaning against the counter with his arms crossed in front of him. Though dressed like before, he had slipped into a felt jacket that revealed he was still topless underneath. In the darkness, his silhouette stood out by the remainder of light spilling in through the front window in the living room behind him, his face completely bathed in shadows.

“You forgot to lock your front door. And go ahead, call the cops. I want to see them try to do anything. I’m sure they have some sort of specialist to stop a curse.”

She was right. She had been all along. The fear rolled down into her belly region, knotted there. It swilled around, balled up into anger. Karma slammed the bottom of her fist against the black door to her shrine, causing it to quake in its hinges.

“What have you done?”

Kevin replied, “If you’re more than a second-rate dabbler, you should figure it out soon enough.” He then shrugged and added, “Besides, I can’t really take full credit for it. You’re the one who was toying with twisted spirits, not me. All I did was help them, uh—vent—a lil’ bit.”

Karma thought of all the horrible things that had happened to the people she had hexed thus far. Fury and fear mixed in her brain, awash with imagining how much worse it might be if it was her being targeted by a spell.

Then the whispers started again, sneaking up on her. Causing her to shoot paranoid glances behind her, next to her, all around. The only other person present that she could perceive was the dark silhouette of her neighbor standing in the apartment. Sounds of scratching, like a small kitten pawing at a door, came from inside the study, from behind that black door, sending shivers down Karma’s spine.

“Why? Why are you doing this to me?”

He stood and motioned to leave, stopping just at the end of the kitchen counter and answering with a question of his own, “Really? You really need to ask?”

When Karma posed another question, it escaped her mouth with such volume that it came out halfway between a croaking sound and a scream, “What have I done to you?”

He buried his hands in his jacket pockets and crammed around in them, looking for something.

“Ain’t done nothing to me, sister. And given my read of you—if I tell you who hired me, I’ll just be sentencing you to death.”

The scratching from inside the study became louder. What could have been a kitten now sounded like a large dog. A menacing baritone growl accompanied it.

“It was Helen, right? I’ll pay you more than whatever she paid you,” she pleaded. Her voice swung back and forth between rage and dread, fueled by waves and bursts of desperation.

“Maybe,” he said, pulling a cigarette out of his jacket pocket and sticking it into the corner of his mouth as he looked back. “But she’s not exactly paying me in money, and I don’t think you can beat what she’s giving me—”

Karma stormed off to the bathroom to retrieve the knife. She winced from the pain shooting up from her injured foot as she put full weight onto it on the way, but the fury coursing through her drove her to ignore it. When she reached out for the knife, she knocked it into the sink and cut her fingers on the blade in the second attempt to grab it.

She swore out loud and clutched it in her other hand, returning to Kevin. Drops of blood dripped to the floor while she balled her bleeding hand into a fist on the way.

He had backed up towards the entrance and already opened the front door behind him. His voice came out muffled again, once more because of a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, “Shouldn’t bring a knife to an occult fight.”

Before she could charge at him and lunge at him with the knife, he kicked the line of salt on the doorstep, disrupting the line and sending the tiny minerals flying in every direction. For a moment, the world slowed down, and the dim glow from the streetlights outside in the parking lot made the tiny cloud of dispersing salt look like stardust.

Karma could still not see his face, but she could feel the smugness oozing from him as he uttered a simple word. “Oops.”

A freezing gust of cold air blew inside past Kevin, causing his jacket and hair to flutter. The whispers turned louder, reminiscent of chanting. They had something vengeful about them—something sinister. But the fear subsided, the wrath took over, and Karma heard the alien-sounding words, not understanding their meaning, but interpreting them as calling her to action. The scratching stopped, and a sound of a lock clicking resounded from the black door. Karma knew what to do. This guy would pay.

They would all pay. The hexes she had used? Helen had gotten off easy for stealing her career. They had all gotten off easy. They would suffer. This punk rat from next door would pay, too.

She threw the knife at him, and he ducked outside although she missed by a long shot. The knife stuck out of the doorframe.

Kevin scrambled and stumbled past her front window. But there would be no escape. Karma turned to the black door and clutched the doorknob with her bloodied hand, unaware of the symbolic tension therein. What all the drops of blood and bloody footprints soiling her apartment carpets meant. The lifeblood smeared onto the cold metal as she began to twist.

Wind carried Kevin’s voice from outside into the room, the distance and wall in between rendering it feeble and frightened in tone, “Uh, I wouldn’t do that if I were—”

She twisted the doorknob all around and the black door swung open, as if it had been pushed by a tremendous force. Snowflakes and chilling air exploded out of the closet-shrine and hurled Karma against the wall behind her. The line of salt had been blown away and the candles went out, but only a split-second after her glimpsing something small sitting in the circle where she had meditated and worked all those spells to curse people.

The very place where she had summoned those spirits, or demons, or whatever they had been, and forced them to do her bidding.

It was blurry, and indiscernible. Small as a housecat but with too many limbs, covered in tiny mouths lined with what looked like sets of human teeth that had glistened in the candlelight. Chomping and snapping. And angry. Bloodthirsty. Like it had devoured all her fury and left only the terror that paralyzed her now.

She tried to kick the door shut but whimpered as she struck it with the bottom of her injured foot. It was too late, anyway. The thing had already scampered out of the room, and she felt tiny hands on her leg. She imagined it making its way up to gnaw through her ribcage and devour her heart.

Instead, what happened, happened so fast that she could not even emit a single scream. The creature latched onto her head and ate its way through her skull. She even heard the disgusting smacking sounds and gnashing little teeth and breaking bone until she lost consciousness. It slurped up her brain and crawled into that slimy cozy space to take control over her body and start a new life in an alien world.

And nobody would know except for a certain neighbor.

—Submitted by Wratts

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