The Serial Short Story Project: “The House Next Door”

he final thing Jason Lim put upon his desk was a leather-bound tome that had the weight and skull-crushing density of a brick. Sprawled across its front in a tall, rigid serif font were the words ‘The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft’. It was one of two things he had kept from his old life. The other, next to his desk, was a high-backed Herman Miller chair, a gift from his father for his birthday last year to keep him studying at his desk ahead of his ‘O’ Levels this year. Everything else had been sold before they arrived at their new old Yishun flat.

The 16-year-old got out of his room to see if his parents or his sister needed his help unpacking. The mood was somber. Nobody spoke to one another—none of them had anything to say. Everything had already been said and shouted in a whirlwind family discussion the week before. Back then, his mother was hysterical. Today, she was quietly placing tableware into the kitchen cabinets. Jason’s father had been unable to be physically
near his wife over the past week. He, too, was quiet as he hung work shirts in the master bedroom. Jason’s father had tried to be optimistic last week, talking in clearly forced excited tones about the fact that they got their new place for next to nothing. It was that statement that drove his mother to hysterics.

Jason walked over to his 13-year-old sister Jasmine as she was cutting open a particularly large box in the living room. “Need help?”

“No,” she replied curtly, eyes fixed on the box. Her cheeks were crusted with dried tears.

Jason returned to his room and slammed the door behind him. Just last week, walking to his room meant stepping on fine marble imported from Greece before arriving to the aircon-cooled spacious extension of his self. His old room was at least three times as big as his current one. But then the Covid-19 pandemic struck, and his parents’ travel agency began hemorrhaging money. Eventually, they had to sell their condo and live among people of much lower socioeconomic status. He didn’t know if he should blame his parents, but he did so nevertheless.

Jason sat down on the dusty faux marble floor, and found his mind wandering to his old life. If there was one positive thing about this place, it was quiet and peaceful. There were two other empty units on their floor. The unit at the far end of the corridor, his father had told their family a tad too excitedly earlier that day, belonged to a triad member hiding from rival gangs in Indonesia. The unit next to theirs had strangely never been purchased. “I think it’s being set aside to meet the racial quota,” said his father. “Or, it’s haunted!” None of the other members of the Lim family were impressed.

Eventually, the sun surrendered its benevolent rule over the day, and moonless darkness spread its tendrils over the land. Sitting alone in his room and left to his own thoughts, Jason did not even realise the passage of evening. He climbed atop his bed, and let slumber take over.

Jason opened his eyes again. He reached for his phone. Even today, on the day of their move, there had been no messages of sympathy from his friends or relatives. The time was 2:17 a.m.

The boy tended to be a heavy sleeper—something had woken him. The old wall fan’s rattle droned on in the dark.

Jason tried to close his eyes but could not.

He got out of his bed, headed to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of milk. The house was so quiet it should be the headquarters of the International Pin Dropping Association. Jason snorted. Nobody would want this place to be the headquarters of anything. He took a sip of milk.

Then he almost choked on it. There was a voice coming from his room. It did not sound like anything he had ever heard. It had the patterns and cadence of a language, but it was a language he did not understand. More importantly, it did not sound human. The words were growled, escaping from a throat not designed for the pleasantries of human communication.

“Hello? Jasmine?”

He placed his glass on the counter and approached his room.

“Hello?”

The voice paused. It returned something short and harsh, an obvious response to Jason.

The boy reached his room, and flicked the lights on. There was nobody in his room. The voices, however, continued. They seemed to be coming from behind the walls of his room. That was particularly weird, because that fact should mean the voice would be muffled. But it came to Jason, clear as waves crashing against the shore.

A second sound began to accompany the voice. This one was organic, like two heavy slabs of organic matter squelching against one another. And then a third: another voice, singing in some obscure, ancient tongue.

“Hello?” he called again. The sounds stopped abruptly.

Jason shook his head, as if to dislodge the very memory of what he had heard. He exited the house and walked down the grey corridor to the adjoining house. Its windows had been boarded shut. The gate was chained and padlocked. For a wild moment, Jason wondered if it was to keep anything from getting out, rather than to keep anyone from getting in. He looked for cracks among the boards to get a peek in, but the planks were tightly packed. Jason sighed. He turned back home and went back to bed. This time he could sleep.

It wasn’t a restful sleep, though. The nightmare that came would feel so real.

He dreamt of ice-cream.

The idea that he had missed out on dinner came to him through a dense fog of memories and sensations. He could not ascertain if they were things that actually happened to him or just his imagination trying to escape its nebulous cage and exert itself upon reality.

There were only children around him, innocent, wide-eyed little tots no older than six, eating their scoops of different flavoured ice-cream in perfect synchronicity. They were singing, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream.”

Jason looked around. He was in what appeared to be an American diner, its pastel walls adorned with posters extolling the virtues of ice-cream. “Drowning In Flavour!” yelled one that featured manic, lip-licking children eyeing a large vanilla scoop.

“I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream.”

There was a bowl before him. It was a Neapolitan with chocolate syrup topped with chopped walnuts – his favourite.

“I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream.” Jason looked at the children. They were faceless now, just taut skin where their features were supposed to be. “I SCREAM, YOU SCREAM, WE ALL SCREAM FOR ICE-CREAM!” As one, they stopped eating, and seven faceless children turned to Jason slowly, in unison. They threw out a hand, pushing their respective bowls of half-eaten ice-cream to the floor. The floor was different now: instead of linoleum tiles, it now appeared to have the smooth, polished surface of a bathtub. Seven scoops of ice-cream spilled upon the floor. They then moved on their own volition, coming together to become a large, shapeless mash of ice-cream. Then his scoop of ice-cream flew out of its bowl to join this unified body of ice-cream. Soon, the place was flooding with ice-cream, growing and growing as if it were alive.

The ice-cream kept growing, until Jason could not tell if it was a delicious funtime dessert, or a chaotic dairy blob. Jason tried to stand up, to get as far away from this unexpected ice-cream proliferation as possible, but something was pulling him down. He looked; a nightmarish Neapolitan stream of ice-cream as high as his shins had streamed in, gelato-locking his feet in place. He could not move, but the ice-cream was swirling, the brown, pink and off-white mixing into a nightmarish shade devoid of life and light.

And then the strangest thing happened: a million crazed eyes opened at once upon the surface of the ice-cream. Then this monster mass of dessert bubbled, as if screaming at the depravity of its being and existence, as if screaming at whichever mad maker willed it into existence as an unformed, slurry, unintelligible blob. The blob grew a mouth.

It swallowed him whole.

Jason woke up. Sometimes, he said to himself, ‘it was all just a dream’ endings aren’t really that bad. He got ready for school.

With the circuit breaker in place, school took place over video conferences. Teachers would welcome their students virtually, before breaking away to powerpoint presentations. That would be the exact same time the students would break away to social media, or YouTube to watch videos on mute, occasionally nodding to feign both interest and understanding in the class.

For six hours, he attended class after class. It was hard to appoint the same gravitas and respect to his teachers when they seemed a whole world away behind the screen.

He went back out to the living room after the video classes ended, hoping to find dinner. He hoped the second time might be the charm, after forsaking dinner the previous night to investigate the weird, unexplainable sounds that came from the house next door. Instead, he found his parents deep in an argument. It was about money, and blame, and the dreams they would have achieved if they hadn’t gotten married. He headed back into his room.

He then sat down on the floor against the wall, and allowed his mind to wander. He sat there, lost in a familiar place, for what seemed like mere seconds as much as it felt like several eternities.

As the night crept towards the witching hours, there was a knock on his door. Jasmine came in, sat next to her brother and leaned against his shoulder. “You’re the only sane person here,” she said to him.

“Don’t be too sure.”

The siblings talked; they talked about their old life in Les Jardins Residences, they talked about family holidays that felt like memories from a lifetime ago.

“Holidays?” said Jason. “I would kill just to finish a tub of ice-cream as a family. Or two. Or ten.”

“Really? Even after what happened when we were kids?”

“What happened?”

“You emptied ALL the ice-cream in the fridge into the bathtub because you wanted the biggest bowl of ice-cream in the world.”

Jason squirmed uneasily. This was discomforting him to the depths of his being, and he could not figure out why. “What? I don’t remember this.”

“You were like eight years old I think. Mama and Papa were out for date night—back when they used to do those things—and we were left with that lame babysitter…”

Something stirred in Jason’s memories, like a gnarled hand reaching out from the shadows. “Ah Heng! The one whose girlfriend would sneak in after Mama and Papa left.”

“Yeah! I had no idea where he was that night, but I vaguely remember finding you eating ice-cream from the bathtub. I thought you were the coolest brother ever for inventing the bathtub ice-cream. Then…you tried to swim in it…you really don’t remember?”

“I really don’t.”

“You took off your clothes and you dived in. I wanted to join in, but then you didn’t surface… I was crying on the floor of the bathroom when Mama and Papa came back. How do you not remember this? It was one of the most traumatizing nights of my life!”

“I don’t know what to tell you. I’m pretty sure I would have remembered something like that.” As soon as Jason said it, something from the deepest recesses of his being tugged at him, as if to scream, look at me, I have something truly terrifying to show you. 

“All I can say is this: I have the craziest craving for ice-cream right now.”

“I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream,” Jasmine sang, recalling a song they knew as children. Both siblings fell into a contemplative silence.

Eventually, Jasmine rose. “Well I better head to bed now.” Jason did not know what to say.

At the door, Jasmine turned around and asked her brother, “What?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Are you sure? I could have sworn you called my name.”

“Of course I’m sure. I’ve only been sitting—”

“SHH!”

Jason heard it, the same sounds he had been hearing over the past few days. The inhuman voices, the scratching, the unnatural sounds. He must have learnt to block it out. “Oh you hear it, too? I thought I was going crazy here.”

“Of course I hear it! What is it?”

Jason shrugged. “I tried to find out the first time I heard it, our first night here. You don’t hear it?”

“Sleeping on a futon in Mama and Papa’s bedroom? Between Papa’s snoring and Mama watching Netflix on her phone, I can’t even hear anything if it happened in our living room.

But the house next door is locked shut. The gate is padlocked. The windows are boarded up. There’s no way to get in.”

Jasmine gave her brother a mischievous smile.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Are you going to tell on me?”

“Well, no.” Jason sighed. It felt wrong. Every fibre of his being told him that this was a bad idea. But there was another voice, from the very same pits that held his darker, most repressed memories, that urged him to go.

“Nobody lives there. It’s not like we’re trespassing,” Jasmine pressed on.

“Alright. Let’s do it. But we have to be careful.”

“Careful is my middle name,” his sister said jauntily.

“Sure.”

The siblings crept out of Jason’s room. Their parents were asleep – their mother in the master bedroom, and their father on the floor outside. Seeing his father there made Jason freeze.

“Don’t worry, he’s a heavy sleeper,” said Jasmine.

Jason replied, “That’s not why I stopped,” but his sister was already outside the house. They carefully closed the gate behind them, and crept to the house next door.

The sounds inside had fallen silent. Jason imagined a million scary things, waiting with bated, rancid breath, for the two innocents about to fall into their trap.

Jasmine got to work immediately. She unlocked the padlock with video game ease, surprising her elder brother. She then worked on the gate – within minutes, it swung aside, giving her full access to the door.

The door was a standard HDB-issue white wooden door. The paint was faded and peeling. Jason noticed for the first time carvings at the top right corner of the door. They were symbols that he had never seen before, perhaps the alphabet of an unknown language or runes decipherable to a select few.

Jasmine took longer on the door. Her brother kept a lookout. There were the sounds of commotions from a nearby block, the distant wails of an ambulance, the stiletto click-clacks of a young woman returning from a late night out. But nobody had eyes on them.

The younger Lim sibling finally jerked her hand upwards. There was a loud click, and the door whispered just slightly ajar. There was a faint green glow from within.

“Shall we?” Jasmine asked.

Jason forced a brave smile at his sister. “Let’s do this.”

Jason took a deep breath. With clammy hands, he gripped the door knob and gave it a push.

The door was too heavy to be a standard HDB-issue door.

The steel-tipped bottom of the door scraped the raw screed concrete floor, and broke the line of what appeared to be white sand at its threshold. The faint green glow within dissipated. As the door stood ajar, even the dim lights from the corridor behind them could not illuminate the stygian gloom inside the house next door.

He listened. No voices, no strange sounds. There was the howl of wind escaping from the abyss. And then the air was still. Jason felt an inexplicable rush of fear. Perhaps this was not a good idea. Perhaps they should be in bed. Perhaps they should return in the day instead.

Behind him, Jasmine turned on the torch function on her phone. It cast a harsh spotlight on the grey living room. A few things were immediately apparent about the place. For one, it must have belonged to someone at some point in time. There was a faded pastel blue wallpaper, but most of it had been flayed, revealing the cracking grey cement underneath.

Off to the right of the hall sat a teak sofa-and-coffee-table set. Jason switched on his phone’s light and inspected the furniture. The dust patterns on the floor and on the furniture suggested it had been moved and sat upon recently. The siblings exchanged a dark look.

“Jason, look.” Jasmine was pointing to the middle of the living room. Her brother knelt next to her.

In the heart of this battered, hollow unit, there was a peculiar circle made of rice grains upon the grey floor. Unfathomable runes were drawn around the circle in red chalk. It was the handiwork of meticulous, steady hands.

Jason felt his sister squeeze his shoulder as their eyes fell to the middle of the strange circle.

There were a pair of effigies in the circle. There was a male figure, and a female figure. The female figure was holding up a phone. The male figure was kneeling next to the female figure.

“We should get out of here,” said Jason.

“No, we need to figure out who’s been doing this,” Jasmine said stubbornly. She pointed her phone to the adjacent rooms. “Hello? We know you’re in here. Come out, come out!”

“There’s nobody in here!”

But Jasmine seemed angry. “Hello! Whoever you are, can you explain this godforsaken circle to us?”

Jason pulled at his sister’s hand. “Just let it go. Maybe it’s just a very unfortunate coincidence. This must have been here for months or years. Let’s just go home and have some ice-cream and watch TV.”

“There’s someone here,” Jasmine insisted. She gave the circle a wide berth as she walked towards what would have been the house’s kitchen. There was a small dining table there – the kind with a circular wooden top and foldable metal legs they used in coffeeshops. There was a raised platform where the cupboards and countertops should have been, but they have been stripped bare. The windows, as with everywhere else in the house, were boarded up with thick, sturdy planks. The sink and a rotten wooden under-sink cabinet were the only things still in place.

“Hello!” Jasmine called out again.

Jason could feel his heart beating faster. This felt wrong, and dangerous.

“Hello!”

There was a response, and it was unmistakeable. It was that animalistic growl he had heard the night before.

Jasmine was first to respond. “There! Under the sink!” she yelled, striding past her brother to the other end of the kitchen. “This bastard thinks he can hide from us.”

She opened the cabinet door.

A truly hideous thing fell out. It seemed human – it was humanoid in shape, but it was flayed, and the red, bleeding, boiling flesh was bumpy and uneven, and seemed to writhe with a life of its own. Its head had just one feature: eyes, eyes where the mouth should be, eyes where the nose should be, and eyes in between. There was an eye that looked upon Jason with bloodlust. There was an eye that looked at him with a manic hunger. There were eyes that looked at Jasmine. And there were eyes that looked up, and down, and left and right. There were eyes that looked through them. The thing moaned, a sound that nature and life could never make. It crawled to them. Its legs was a gnarled, maimed thing, bent at odd angles. Its flayed hands ended in claws, crimson as death.

Jasmine and Jason yelled, their minds unable to fathom the thing before them.

The thing seemed to yell back, but the sound it made was alien, like a parrot trying to mimic the big evolved ape that kept it in a cage. It yelled back, without the fear that escaped Jason and Jasmine’s throats. The thing’s voice was metallic and organic. If one had put one’s own hand and a television set into a grinder, the combined sound produced would be in the ballpark of the inhuman cry it made.

When morbid fascination gave way to the need to survive, the siblings tore away from the kitchen, ran past the effigies and to the entrance. There was a third figure in the circle now: a monstrous  The door was closed and locked. They had left it ajar when they came in.

Jasmine pointed. “The bedroom!”

They sprinted for the room at the other end of the house from the kitchen. The thing had crawled out of the kitchen and was now trying to stand on its jagged legs.

Jasmine reached the bedroom first. Jason felt something scrape his neck, but he dared not stop. He dove through the door and his sister slammed the door shut behind him. There was a thud against the door. And then the thing made a sound that was analogous to a sad wailing, but without the human emotion that usually accompanied it.

It began scratching its claws against the wooden door. This one felt less sturdy than the one at the entrance. The siblings looked around the room for something to reinforce the door, or a weapon.

“What the hell is that thing?”

“I don’t know!”

The thing banged against the door. They were not sure which part of its anatomy it used, for the reverberations spread powerfully and evenly through the door.

“Find something to reinforce the door!” Jasmine said to her brother. Jason scanned the room. It was empty save for a cupboard that had been axed – or perhaps clawd – to shreds, and a pile of bags and suitcases next to it. Jason took the biggest, sturdiest one – a suitcase made of grey canvas with a steel frame.

They propped it against the door. The thing kept banging, but the door held.

Finally, it stopped. There was the sound of organic matter walking away from the door. Both siblings sighed and slumped to the floor. They tried to catch their breath, while listening intently for sounds outside.

Jasmine was trying to catch her breath, but Jason was intently studying the bag between them. “I know this suitcase.”

“It’s a suitcase. People have suitcases,” Jasmine said, her voice straining as her attempt at mirth clashed woefully with her profound fear.

Jason left his sister to hold the door while he inspected the suitcase. “It’s not just any suitcase because,” he said, holding up a side of the suitcase that had a messy, childish scribble on it, “I wrote this.”

“What?”

Jason brought the bag closer to his sister, and lit its side with his phone. Scrawled in faded blue ink were the words: ‘This belongs to my daddy Nero Lim.’ “I wrote this when I was seven I think.”

He brought his phone up to his sister, who was shaking her head and muttering wildly. “No, no, no way this is real. This has to be some elaborate joke by dad. No way. Nuh uh. This is not happening.”

Both of them fell into an abject silence as they sat with their backs against the door. Occasionally, the thing would return to scrape its horrid claws against the door. Then it would cry out its mockeries of human expression. Then it would disappear again.

After more than an hour of the thing’s absence, Jasmine checked her phone. “It’s six in the morning. You think we should head out?” There, in the abysmal dark, it did not feel like morning.

Jason pressed his ear against the door. “I don’t hear it… Wait!”

There was the sound of footsteps coming from the entrance to the house. There was a sigh – this one was human, and oddly familiar.

“Who’s that?” Jasmine whispered to her brother. Jason shrugged.

Her question was answered when the door was opened from the other side, and they looked upon the frightened visage of their father.

“What are you two doing here?” their father asked, his shaky voice a mere octave above a whisper.

“What are YOU doing here, Pa?” Jasmine retorted breathlessly.

“I heard noises from here, and then I saw that the two of you weren’t in your room.”

Jasmine poked her head out of the room. “Where’s the thing?”

“What thing?” Nero asked.

“The thing…with a thousand eyes. The monster.” Jasmine’s usually composed demeanour was completely gone. She was badly shaken, and this worried Jason.

But Nero replied with nonchalance. “What? What monster? I woke up to see the gate opened and I came to investigate.”

Jasmine’s expression broke her brother’s heart. She was frightened and utterly confused. She was clearly questioning her own sanity.

Jason picked up the grey canvas luggage, holding up the end that held the words ‘This belongs to my daddy Nero Lim’. “Why is this here?”

Nero took the bag from his son, and smiled at it wistfully. He then looked up at them, and sighed. “I used to live here,” Nero said to his children, sitting down on the floor. Exchanging confused looks, his children joined him. It felt like a lifetime since he last spoke to them at the same level. “This was your grandfather’s house. Since your grandfather died six years ago-”

“I thought grandpa died before we were born?” Jason interjected.

Nero sighed. “I lied.”

“Not just about grandpa!” Jasmine lowered her voice, even as it strained under the weight of her disorientation. “About this house! You never told us we were moving in next to this hellhole. Does Ma even know?”

“No, she doesn’t. And I’d like to keep it that way. This is our little secret.” Nero returned his gaze to the bag. “I lied to protect you and your mother. Your grandfather was…crazy. He was nuttier than a squirrel’s hole. When he died, I paid people to settle his funeral. I didn’t even go. I couldn’t bring myself to. This house fell under my name, and I’ve used it as a storage facility ever since.” Nero gave a small, unconvincing laugh. “I didn’t want to tell you about this place because I had a bad relationship with my certifiably insane father. Something I hope the two of you won’t have to experience.”

Jason pointed towards the living room. “What is that circle on the ground?”

“Like I said, your grandfather was crazy. He did a lot of weird things.”

“Then why are there figures of us there?”

Nero snorted. “No there aren’t.”

Jason looked. In the light of morning, he saw two misshapen blocks of wood that looked nothing like him or Jasmine. Maybe they had imagined the whole night…

Jasmine pressed on, “Why did you board this place up?”

“Because I didn’t want people coming in to take my things,” Nero said with conviction.

Jasmine was still very visibly agitated. She opened her mouth to ask something, but Nero very gently cut her off. “I’m sorry I lied to you. To both of you. But I just want to put the past behind me. And maybe, the two of you can put tonight behind you as well.” He opened his hands for a hug, and the two of them leaned into their father.” Nero kissed both his children at the top of their heads.

When they broke the hug, Jasmine seemed more composed. “Pa, there’s something I’ve wanted to ask you for a few years now.”

“Ask away, sweetheart.”

“Were you named after that crazy Roman emperor?” Jasmine asked.

Her father laughed. “No, your grandfather was disappointed that I was a thin, scrawny baby, so he named me after the first adjective that came to his mind when he saw me.” Nero looked at the confused expressions on his children’s faces. “Your grandfather was really bad at spelling.”

Jasmine laughed heartily. Jason’s laugh was more hesitant.

“Now let’s head back before your mother gets worried.” Nero smiled at his children, and they smiled back.

The father and his two children left the house next door, and each of them, for different reasons, hoped they never had to return to the awful place.

“How did you guys get in here anyway?” Nero asked as they closed the door behind them.

The two siblings exchanged looks. “I picked the lock,” Jason lied convincingly.

Jason and Jasmine sat down with their parents in the kitchen of their new, much smaller home later that morning. Together, they had breakfast, followed by a post-breakfast bowl of Neapolitan ice-cream, and while conversation began awkwardly, soon there was laughter and mirth that filled the small house in Yishun they now called home.

* * *

Jason went to bed early that evening. In the clarity of night, he began to process the events of the past two days. What he fixated on wasn’t the strange creature in the house next door, but the simple lie their father had told them: the origin of his name. He had said it so convincingly that Jason had thought nothing of it. That is, until now, as he laid in bed.

There was a sound outside. It was the short rasp of one of the dining chairs being quickly dragged on the floor.

He opened the door to the living room, and heard a small squeak in the dark. There was something under the dining table. His eyes adjusted to the dark. It was Jasmine, manically waving at him to join her.

“Hurry!” she whispered urgently. He bounded over to the dining table, his eyebrows creased in confusion. He crawled between the chairs and sat next to his sister. Jasmine was trembling, her eyes wide with fear as tears of terror slithered down her cheeks. “It’s here,” she said.

“What?”

“It. It’s here. The thing.” She pointed.

Jason jerked his head around. The house was dark and still.

“In Mama’s bedroom.” Jason’s gaze lingered at his sister. She did not say the master bedroom. He then peered through the half ajar door. He couldn’t see much. Both his parents were asleep, facing opposite directions in their bed. The only light source was the digital numbers of their alarm clock.

There was movement in the shadows. Jason angled his gaze higher. Something was shifting on the ceiling. The boy crawled out from under the dining table. His sister stayed, watching from behind the legs of the dining chairs. Jason took out his phone and shone the torch into his parents’ room.

A thousand eyes bore into Jason.

The thing was crouching like a predator at rest. That is, it was crouching upside-down from the ceiling, as if the natural laws of this world did not apply to it. As if it was above the limitations of physics. As if it was only shaped like a human being as a mockery to mankind.

It lowered itself to the floor and stood upright, the sound it made was organic and metallic in equal measure. Neither Nero nor his wife stirred.

“Jason come back!” his sister hissed behind him.

But Jason found himself unable to move. The monster made its way to the boy, each step a terrible, unearthly clang-squelch. He felt his sister pulling at his ankles, but he was still as a statue.

The monster stopped, a clawed arm’s length away. The thing brought its head of eyes closer to the boy. Jason could smell metal and flesh, oil and blood, it was putrid and heady and familiar.

“What…are…you?” he asked, his entire body paralyzed with fear.

It spoke, with blinking, screaming eyes. It spoke mouthless, but the words formed clear in Jason’s mind: “I am your father’s legacies and sins. I am all that you are not.”

Two of its eyes focused on Jason’s as the others looked around the home, blinking, screaming silently, watching, wondering, calculating, hunting. Jason felt like he was staring into a funhouse mirror made of eyes that looked exactly like his father’s, or maybe his.

The thing reached out a hand. The last thing Jason saw before a dark, gnarled, clawed hand engulfed his vision was his father getting out of bed, holding a dark, glassy orb. The last thing he heard was his father shouting, “No, not my son! This is not your covenant!”

And then it all went dark.

* * *

Jason opened his eyes. “Where am I?”

Nero was sitting next to him. “You’re in your bed, my son. You just had a terrible nightmare.” He dabbed a cool wet towel on his son’s forehead.

“Where’s Jasmine and Mama?”

“They’re at your grandfather’s.”

This confused Jason. “But my grandfather died before I was born.”

Nero gave his son a grin. “Your maternal grandfather.”

“Oh.” Jason tried to get up, but he couldn’t. He tried again. He looked to his sides. “Pa, why am I tied to the bed?”

“It’s for your own protection.” Nero rose, and walked to the door. He turned, and for a brief moment, there was a flash of regret in his eyes.

“Pa!” Jason screamed. “Pa! Please! Why are you doing this to me? Pa!” He began crying as he begged. “Pa let me go!”

“I did not want this for you or your sister. Least of all, I did not want this for your mother. But there are things that our family cannot escape. I just wanted the best for us, but everything comes at a price. We had it good. But we can’t escape nature. Nature corrects, and balances. The pandemic, the curse, the monster…it’s just the universe trying to right itself. Periods of adjustment and rebalancing are difficult, especially for our family. And I need you to stay here, until all is right again.”

“Pa, I don’t understand. Please untie me and we can talk. Please, Pa.”

“You will understand, when the time is right. It’s for your own protection, son,” Nero repeated with conviction. He then crossed the threshold of the room, and took out a bag of salt from his pocket. He lined the threshold with salt, before closing the door.

The door looked familiar to Jason for the wrong reasons. He wasn’t in his room. He looked around to see peeling walls, and a raw concrete screed floor. The room was empty. Jason screamed and screamed until his throat was sore and all that came out was a wheezing, impotent attempt at making sound.

Night fell, and the sound of a monster with a thousand eyes came with it. The door flew open. The monster was there, just before the threshold. A hundred pairs of eyes looked down to the salt on the ground. It stood there, so still that Jason thought for a mad split second that it had always been a statue.

Jason tried to scream again, but he was too weak to do so. He tried to squeeze his hands out of their restraints, but it was too tight. “Pa, please,” he whimpered one final time to a person who could not hear him. “God, please,” he whimpered, to a being he never thought existed.

Mentally and physically drained, Jason slumped back to the bed. After several moments, he looked up at the monster, whose every eye was trained at the boy. The thing had thousands of eyes, but for some reason, Jason was able to count two new pairs added to that grotesque yet increasingly familiar face.