The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

What Still Screams
by Kathleen McCluskey

They treated it like a joke on the drive out, another entry into the long list of sites rumored to be haunted by something vague and conveniently unprovable. Marcus kept the tone light, talking about views and subscribers. He was going on about how a “witch house” thumbnail that would pull numbers even if the footage turned out to be nothing. Lena listened without contributing, watching the road narrow as they moved farther from anything recognizable. The trees closed in until the house finally appeared ahead of them, sitting low and dark as if it settled into the ground rather than built on it.

The interior was exactly what they expected at first. Empty rooms. Stripped walls, the faint smell of dust and long abandonment. They moved through it quickly, setting up cameras more out of habit than necessity. Calling out to empty air and waiting for the usual flicker on a meter or a distortion on audio they could stretch into something usable. Nothing responded. The house felt wrong, not in a way that translated to evidence. Marcus had already started suggesting they cut their losses when Lena opened the final door at the end of the hall.

The temperature did not drop when they entered the kitchen. It rose, but not with any sense of comfort. The heat pressed close to the skin, unmoving, carrying with it a slight metallic scent that seemed to coat the inside of their mouths. Unlike the rest of the house, in disarray, the kitchen was left untouched. It was as if the homeowner had only just stepped out.

Pans hung from hooks driven deep into the beams, their surfaces blackened and warped from long use. Behind each one the wall was marked by dark, vertical stains that stretched downward in uneven lengths, too consistent in their spacing to be random.

They gathered without speaking, drawn closer despite themselves. The shapes in the pans resolved themselves the longer they looked, shifting from abstract discolorations into something structured. Each pan’s stains suggested a body that had been forced thin, shoulder narrowed, torsos elongated. There was a faint hollow where a head would have been pressed into the surface. It was not an illusion, it was pattern recognition. The longer they stared, the more undeniable the arrangement became.

Marcus moved first, stepping toward the wall with the silent confidence of someone determined to prove a different explanation. He reached out and pressed his fingers into one of the pans. He hesitated as the surface gave slightly beneath his touch. It did not feel like old metal. There was resistance, but it was uneven. It felt as if the material had been altered from within, as if something had once occupied the space and changed it permanently.

The pans shifted.

The movement was controlled, not the sway of loose metal. Each bent inward just enough to distort the images they held. Lena raised her camera. It was faces, flattened and stretched inside the pans, their features forced outward by a pressure that did not break the metal but was used as a boundary.

They screamed together.

The noise filled the kitchen, not loud but total, vibrating through bone and thought. A chorus of voices that had been held too long and were finally granted release. Beneath them the stains began to move, darkening. Loosening. Then dripping in thick, black strands that slid toward the floor.

The smell hit next, iron, rot and something scorched and smoldering.

The strands gathered at their feet, pulling inward as if drawn by a current no one could see. It thickened, rising slowly, shaping itself into something that resembled a woman, but only in outline. The screaming weakened as it formed, not stopping just…thinning, as though it was suddenly afraid.

The figure lifted her head.

Her face shifted, never settling. Her features slid over one another like something remembered wrong.

For a moment it was still. Then the sound slipped out of it, soft and low, almost gentle. It grew slowly, folding in on itself. A quiet, demented laughter echoed through the room, it carried something deeply wrong beneath it. It was unmistakably female, but there was no warmth in it. No humanity, only a thin, delighted cruelty that seemed to savor the sound of her own voice.

The faces in the pans all twitched. Some leaned forward, some dimmed. All of them listened.

Her whispering voice danced in the air. “The iron holds the shape.” Her laughter threaded through the words. “The soul is what I keep.”

And she stepped forward.

Fiction © Copyright Kathleen McCluskey
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com 

More from Kathleen McCluskey:

The Long Fall: Book 1: The Inception of Horror

Lucifer always cunning and intelligent challenges father to a battle of wits. Being the angel of light he casts a judgemental eye upon mankind. He begins a war with his fellow archangels and God. Michael, along with his siblings defend their home and mankind from their deranged brother. Broad swords and hand to hand combat drench heaven in blood. The four apocalyptic steeds are released, each having their own destructive power. Betrayal and lust are at biblical levels. Understand the very creation of evil and the consequenses that transpire in the first of THE LONG FALL series.

Available on Amazon!