“Fine, you’re both buzzkills.” Emlyn put the perfume bottle back down and pushed past Austin, out of the room. She was obviously annoyed that we had both told her ‘no’.
I shook my head, following Austin as he turned toward her. We hadn’t even made it to the doorway, when Emlyn’s scream echoed through the hallway.
“What the…” Austin stayed frozen to the spot.
I moved past him, rushing to the doorway and turning to the right, following the echo of Emlyn’s scream dying away.
“Emlyn? What’s wrong?” I shouted.
The hallway stretched before me, long and ominous, like the maw of a horrible beast, but also empty. I didn’t spot Emlyn’s silhouette anywhere, until I caught sight of the half-open door to the right.
“Emlyn!” I pushed the door open, blinking rapidly as my eyes tried to adjust to the darkness. Even with the flashlight, this room was like a tomb, a mausoleum.
My breath choked in my throat as my flashlight landed on Emlyn.
She stood right in front of me, her back turned toward me.
I put a hand on her shoulder, but she didn’t flinch.
“What is it?” I asked.
She slowly moved her hand, raising her finger and pointing at something in the distance.
I followed the direction Emlyn was pointing at, illuminating that corner of the room with my flashlight. It was so dark in here I still couldn’t make out my surroundings, so I wasn’t sure if we were in another bedroom or some other type of room, but the air here was oppressive, wrong, filthy.
My flashlight landed on something in the corner.
Boxes, stacked on top of each other, and then something else.
I slowly lifted the torch higher and higher, the blood in my veins turning into ice. My lips were as dry as parchment.
“What the hell is that?” Emlyn’s voice came out like a squeak, trembling slightly.
Slowly, I crept toward the item in the corner. The closer I got, the more details I could make out.
Two bare feet, a long nightgown, all of it carved into stone. A life-sized statue, but who would bother making such a statue of a barefoot woman wearing a nightgown?
The torch rose until face-level of the statue, and the words choked in my throat.
I understood why Emlyn had screamed at the top of her lungs.
The face of the statue was frozen in a grotesque, horrible expression of pure fear, the mouth wide open so that all teeth were visible, the eyes the size of flying saucers.
Who in their right mind would ever decide to create such a horrifying statue?
“It’s made of stone,” I said eventually, forcing each word out. “A stone statue.”
“Are you sure?” Emlyn swallowed hard. “It looks so real.”
It did. Real enough that I didn’t want to touch it, in case my fears became reality and the stone, if my hand connected to it, would either shatter in a million pieces like the mirror next door, or that it wouldn’t feel like stone at all, but rather like human flesh.
“I could swear those eyes… That they moved at first.” Emlyn’s voice still trembled when she spoke.
“Just a trick of the light,” I reassured her. “It’s a stone statue, but I have no idea what it’s doing here, or why anyone would bother to put it in the corner of a room.”
I walked backwards, without moving my gaze away from the statue.
I had the sickening feeling that the moment I turned my back toward the statue, it would lurch at me like a monster in a horror movie.
“Let’s get out of here.” I kept on walking until I was standing next to Emlyn. “You go first. I’ll keep my flashlight on that thing.”
“Okay.” For once, Emlyn had lost all her bravado. She crept out of the room, and I followed suit, not once daring to move my torch away from the statue in the corner. I didn’t even dare blink, afraid that the moment I did, the creature would move, and when I opened my eyes again, it would be right in front of me.
Either someone had deliberately designed this house to be as spooky as possible, which didn’t make sense, or something equally disturbing was going on.
No one in their right mind would put a statue as creepy as this one in their house as decoration.
No one; even the Addams family would think this was a stretch too far.
Still keeping my eyes glued on the statue, I reached for the doorknob and quickly pulled it close.
Emlyn was standing next to me, all the color having drained from her cheeks.
We exchanged a look that said a million words. She was as terrified as I was.
“What…what happened?” Austin was lingering in the doorway of the room we had been in before, the one with the cracked mirror.
“Outside. Now.” I grabbed Emlyn’s hand and we started running.
Austin didn’t need another warning, he raced to the staircase as fast as his legs could carry him.
All the while down the hallway and then down the stairs, I kept glancing over my shoulder, half-expecting to see the statue right behind us, chasing us and trying to reach for us.
I didn’t see anything, though, not even a hint of something moving upstairs.
We burst through the front door.
“Man, that was terrifying!” Emlyn shouted the moment we were outside.
With the fresh forest air crawling into my lungs, I finally felt as if I could breathe again. I hadn’t realized how dusty and suffocating the air was inside Ash House until I made it back outside.
“What did you see?” Austin panted, trying to catch his breath.
“A statue,” I told him before Emlyn could reply. “Just a statue. Let’s go.”
We rushed through the front yard, all the way to the wrought-iron gates.
Emlyn crawled over the fence first, followed by Austin. I was the last one, and as I jumped down on the other side of the fence, shooting one last look at
