Cliche: The Horror Story! – SHORT STORY

IT WAS A dark and stormy night…obviously.

A possessed child was being held down on a table while the priest quickly talked, reading passages from the Holy Bible. Billy’s proud Mum, Tera, and Dad, Kevin, watched on, bored by this familiar routine. Suddenly their son began to talk in tongues – he hadn’t been receiving speech therapy for nothing.

A knock at the front door could mean only one thing: once opened nobody would be there. For some bizarre reason kids would travel miles to this house in the middle of nowhere to play chicken. Determined rascals if nothing else.

Inevitably the house phone began to ring soon after. Kevin and Tera looked at each other, silently wishing the other would go and pick it up. If it wasn’t PPI or loft insulation they’d hear heavy breathing or the line would just go dead, yet another missed call.

While all that happened an upstairs window opened of its own accord. Hearing the familiar sound Kevin made a note to dig out the Velux guarantee – what was on the notepad made no sense at all; just a series of zigzags and assymetrical shapes.

Billy eventually calmed down and the Priest ceased his babbling, leaving with his two holy inept assistants, but not before wringing another pricey fee from the hapless parents. “The devil is in him again,” he said. Just think, £200 each time, and Rev. Donnelly, if he was a Reverend, was the cheapest exorciser in town. “Until next time!”

Kevin suddenly said – suddenly – that he was seeing things again. Having found his displaced glasses he and Tera thought it best that Billy get on with his homework in his room; it was maths night. Kevin and Tera left him to it, hearing this as the door shut, “If the Devil is six, then that must make me…”

Once downstairs, the parents decided to play with the second hand Ouija board in the basement, to try and contact the living. Naturally they’d purchased it from a travelling gypsy stranger and it was cursed, to have the spelling acuity of a four year old. A dead four year old.
When the light mysteriously went out plunging them into darkness, Kevin used his mobile to navigate upstairs and returned with a replacement bulb. The only thing haunted were his tastebuds from the dodgy Spanish plonk they were drinking, labelled, El Diablo.

Kevin and Tera took a break from the Ouija, enjoying the silence until a banging noise could he heard above them, leading to a knowing raise of the eyebrows, before they said in unison, “The Poltergeist!”, and laughed. It was the best automated vacuum cleaner they’d ever bought, still under warranty.

Having decided it was time for bed at precisely midnight, they creaked their way up the stairs to the bedroom next to Billy’s, as the paintings that lined the staircase looked at them, which was disconcerting as they were all landscapes.

First they peeked in at Billy, sound asleep, and Tera talked to her hunchbacked husband through unusually accentuated i-teeth, “He’s so peaceful. I’d kill to be able to sleep like that.” Out of sight, a doll, so out of place it wouldn’t even look right in a period drama, sat staring at Billy’s bed…Barbie had crawled out of her packaging, in a toy shop miles away, sporting a cute little dagger.

Repost from 24:10:14