#its the housebound horror of it all danger inside danger outside

[minibaba]

I do rly love sh1 and 2 but as janky as sh4 is the stuff that's actually in the room itself compels me so so much that it's my favourite despite the earlier titles being much more interesting as a whole 😔

[nellieblybitches]

Ghost Story Part 1

This is a story i’ve been working on for a lil while. it’s me trying to condense ghost lore into a story that also reflects an emotionally destructive family dynamic and matter-of-fact horror

heeeere goes! pls ask questions and propose edits KINDLY

Louise Jones woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night on a Tuesday in late February. She decided to get a glass of water.

The first misstep was the slippers. It was unpleasantly cold, and the linoleum in the hallway would be hell without them, but the slippers were, well, slippery. The stairs would not be easy. They were idiotic-looking, too, with little bunny faces on the toes and carrots on the soles, but she assumed nobody would see her.

Part two: her glasses. Most days, Louise kept her glasses on her nightstand. But she had left them unattended on the couch that weekend, and her daughter Charlotte had sat on them. She had ordered new ones, but they hadn’t arrived.

Part three. She had just awoken from a nightmare, a vivid and terrifying one. In the dream, she walked behind a group of shadowy, sinewy figures, watching them pull every item off the shelves and throw it to the floor. Books, plates, clocks, photos… broken pottery littered the carpet everywhere, and the glass was already cutting her face and feet…Her family was nowhere in sight.

The people were methodical and fast, ripping her children’s artwork that hung on the fridge, smashing a vase with a hammer, throwing rocks at windows. The rubble began to build up on the floor, and then the dream shifted in the way that only dreams can, so she was suddenly in a murky lake in her own living room, full of broken glass and wood. The level of the polluted water rose until she was treading water, swimming with her head against the ceiling, all the way under and trapped with no air…

It was at this moment that she sat up in her bed, sweaty but in one piece, with the paintings still on the walls and the mattress still on the bed. She gulped down fistfuls of air, feeling as though there was toxic dust in her lungs.

Thus: The third and most dangerous part of her trip to the kitchen was not that she could barely see or walk. It was that her dream still clutched her, still strangled her, and bits of it stayed glued to her mind.

So as she navigated the house, her vision was against her: pieces of glass still seemed to litter the floor, the walls sweated bilge water. Her reality and dreams had been mixed violently in a cocktail shaker, and disoriented Louise was alone in deciphering what was real.

She began to run down the hallway. She passed her children’s rooms. Her slippers were slick on the tiles. She reached for the banister and swung at arm’s length away from it to speed up the process of getting down the stairs, but, in her haste, Louise hit the back of her head, hard, on the windowsill. Her feet slid out from underneath her so that she landed flat on her back. She bumped down six stairs before coming to a stop. Her spine stiffened, then relaxed vaguely into the shape of the stairs.

Louise was dead. Very dead. And she stayed unnoticed in her deadness until the morning, when her son Will made that same swing around the corner of the bannister and saw his mother lying there, crumpled on the landing.

It was gory, and probably scarring to poor fourteen-year-old Will, but Louise barely heard his shriek of terror and grip on her cold arm. She was deep in the midst of the feeling of her heart slowing, her body cooling. It was achey and dizzying and painful. She couldn’t even close her eyes.

She barely felt anything when an EMT loaded her into an ambulance, or when she heard her husband Ian lie loudly to five-year-old Mimi that Mommy would be fine. Aches and pains faded in and out of her body. Her skin felt tight, and dry, and cold.

Somewhere on Lunt Ave., she began to feel detached and floaty. All of the scraps of pain and discomfort were loosening their bond on her limbs. As the ambulance turned onto Thornshore Dr., she felt her soul detach from her body. A hiss of air escaped her lungs, or her body’s lungs, because now the human form lying on the stretcher was completely and utterly separate from Louise Jones.

Louise, the real one, was coursing though the sky, feeling as though a magnetic force was pushing her back to where she lived—or used to live. The fact that she was dead and no longer human was dawning on her painfully slowly. She landed on the porch.

For the fist time, her feet—wearing the god-awful bunny slippers she had put on nearly six hours earlier—touched the ground. Immediately, as her heels pressed the doormat, sharp stabbing pains wrenched through her feet. What felt like thousands of needles and bits of glass and gravel were pressing into her soles. She limped to the door. It didn’t get any easier.

Her body, which had been misty-soft when she flew from the Brightstar Hospital ambulance, solidified and took on a humanoid shape, cold and clumpy. Mostly out of instinct, she reached for the doorknob. The lock clicked familiarly—without a key.

Right inside, she sat on the bench by the door, ready to relieve the pressure on her feet. To her surprise, the only thing on the bottom of her slippers was a rather tacky carrot pattern. She stood up. Yet again, walking felt like rubbing glass into her feet. From here began the process of hopping, running and jumping to the kitchen to see if there was any way to get the pain to lessen a little.

Louise made an interesting discovery when she jumped: she stayed up. “Walking” now meant gliding a foot or so off the ground. The pain was gone. Louise pushed the worries about getting back down on the floor to the corner of her mind and rose up the stairs.

On the way up, she paused. She was hovering about eighteen inches above where she had died. There was a good amount of Louise’s blood, mostly dry, on the stairs and windowsill. A wave of nausea rolled over her. She licked her thumb and rubbed at a freckly patch of spatter on the banister support. To her shock, the fluid did wash away.

Louise was becoming increasingly aware of her limits as a ghost. Testing was constant. After cleaning up the brain matter and blood on the stairs, she decided to go outside and see what happened when she interacted with people.

She put her hand to the door. Locked as it was, she had no trouble pushing it open. She rubbed her hands together evenly. Here was where the fun was.

Mr. Robert, the elderly neighbor who took down Christmas decorations on December 26th every year, was walking east, probably to mail the letter in his hand. Louise swarmed down through the air to come to a stop a few yards in front of him. She hovered, tense. What if he didn’t see her? What would happen if he did?

Mr. Robert didn’t slow down or step closer to the edge of the sidewalk. He just walked head-on at Louise, as if she weren't there. For a man who loved his personal space, he seemed okay with just about walking through her.

Walking through her. Louise had a sudden realization. What if he could just occupy the space that she was, like in the movies? He was a yard away now. She was nervous. He plodded on. Just as he reached her, Louise squeezed her eyes shut. There was a faint whooshing sound, and now Mr. Robert was moving away from her, trudging forward like there was nothing more important to him than that letter. She turned to watch him, feeling silly.

If she cut through the Delaneys' garden, she could get to a more main street, with more people. She sped down the side path, passing though Jason Delaney’s tricycle. Huh. So when she wasn’t looking to grab onto something, she could just get past, easy peasy.

Louise was giddy with her discoveries now. No more tripping over items on the floor, she could just pass through them! No more trouble with losing her keys; the door would just open for her. So many of her least favorite pet peeves were—

WHAM. Louise staggered. About four feet in front of the Delaneys’ back fence was…something invisible. She scooped up a stick from the ground and poked at the air in front of her. The stick thudded against the fence just fine, but her fist was rejected by an unseen wall. A solid barrier, no doubt, definitely intended for her. She frowned.

Disappointed, she rose up over the Delaneys’ and back over to her own house. She sat cross-legged on the porch. With her one good idea frozen in its tracks, overcoming her was a childlike sense of boredom. What’s a housebound dead woman to do, all alone?

Across the street was May Simmons, walking her little rat of a dog. May was incredibly thin, with collarbones that stuck out too far and eyes that were too wide. It looked like you could hide soup in her clavicle.

“Good morning, May!” Louise called across the street. May didn’t seem to hear her. Jerry, the dog, glanced her way and looked suspicious. Feeling madcappish, she swooped down to May and Jerry to see if she could get their attention. She reached out to pet the dog’s ugly mat of fur, and he barked, snapping at her fingers.

“Whoa, Jerry.” May was struggling to restrain her dog. “There’s nothing there.” Cereal-box-sized as he was, the puppy noticed her—and did not like her. May, clearly spooked, steered spitting Jerry onto the edge of the sidewalk and tried to calm him down.

Louise was also spooked. So somebody could see her, even if it was just the misshapen puppy across the street. Her privacy came crashing down. What was the use of being a ghost if you were confined and visible? Being dead was spoiling her, making her petulant and demanding. She sat on the porch again, feeling like a teenager. It wasn’t the worst feeling. She had cracked her skull open earlier that day. It didn’t get much worse than that.

She saw a maroon minivan puttering down the street, the engine groaning familiarly. Leaning forward in her rocking chair, she saw her license plate and her husband behind the wheel, confirming the car to be hers. The childish state of mind swept away from her and in its place was a bout of some dark emotion: fear, perhaps, or something like panic. She stood up, then sat back down again. What was the point? They probably couldn’t see her.

Maybe they could. She stood up again. She was about to call out when she realized what would happen if they did see her: mass panic. Their mother risen from the dead, wearing bunny slippers. She crouched low behind a rocking chair.

The four of them trudged numbly up the stairs. Charlotte was crying. Will looked shaken to his core. Ian looked like he was holding two hundred pounds on his back. Mimi toddled behind all of them, unaware and confused.

Guilt spread through her, fast and cold. She wanted to comfort them. She wanted them to know that she was safe, that they could still talk to her. That their mother was close by.

She didn’t let them know any of these things. Instead, she stayed curled up behind the cobwebby chair until she heard the lock click behind them.