Previous 13 The Drawing
“We can leave rooms with doors. But what happens when the room is our thoughts and there is no way to leave them behind?”
The wood was stained with blood and dirt. Kelly struggled to draw a deep breath, wincing as pain flared through her ribs. The air reeked of iron and ozone.
Kelly dragged herself slowly across the floorboards, splinters digging into her forearms and tearing at the fresh scrapes and bruises mottling her skin. Just a few more feet, she told herself. She kept her eyes fixed on the wooden door at the end of the room. Each breath pulled against her ribs, sending a searing line of pain through the bruised bone.
She glanced behind her. A dark, jagged trail of broken wood, smeared dust, and wet blood marked her path. The shattered bed frame lay where she’d left it, its front section bent where she’d managed to loosen the supports and free herself. The floorboards didn’t groan beneath her weight. Instead, they gave a faint, wet squeak as her blood-soaked denim dragged across the splintered wood. Above her, darkness pressed heavily into the corners of the ceiling, like soot that had accumulated undisturbed for decades.
Several feet above her, a faint growl gave way to a shriek. She didn’t remember coming inside. The last thing she remembered was the young man sitting beside the service highway, waving her down as she drove past. After that, her memories blurred.
She blinked against the pain in her temple, struggling to pull the fragments together. A hand had gripped her arm while she’d been driving. There had been a house. The man had asked her to take a turn off the road and keep driving. He’d said he was trying to get home. But when they arrived, he’d vanished.
She’d gotten out of the car and looked around. There had been no sign of him. Then something seized her legs. Not physical hands. Something stronger than that. Something invisible, dragging her through the woods. She remembered rocks cutting into her skin as she was pulled faster through the undergrowth. She remembered screaming, her fingers clawing at the earth, desperately trying to stop herself. Nothing had slowed her down. Then the memory faded into blackness. Only the steady, throbbing hum of the room remained.
She paused, pressing her forehead against the cold, unvarnished pine, her lungs struggling for air that tasted of rust and dry dust. Move, she thought. The word wasn’t a voice; it was a spasm in her chest. Just move.
Her right hand reached forward, her fingers hooking into a gap between two floorboards. The wood was swollen with rot, damp and soft as wet cardboard, but it gave her enough traction to pull herself forward. Pain shot up her forearm like a taut wire stretched from her wrist to her neck. She squeezed her eyes shut until pale yellow light bloomed behind her eyelids, holding her breath until the pounding in her temples subsided into a dull, steady ache.
Somewhere outside the room, she heard footsteps. Heavy and deliberate. When she opened her eyes, the doorway seemed no closer. Her legs refused to move. She reached back and felt along her ankles and feet. There was nothing attached to them, nothing she could touch or grasp. Yet they remained stubbornly still. Move, damn it! her mind screamed.
She looked toward the door again. A distortion stood at the end of the hallway, tall and narrow, blocking a rectangle of dull gray light leaking from beneath the door. Outside, something moved through the trees—or perhaps it was only the wind dragging pine needles across the roof. She couldn’t tell. The sound followed a regular, dry rhythm, like a gloved hand tracing the grain of the exterior siding, patient and unhurried.
Kelly froze. Her chin rested against the damp floorboard, her mouth slightly open. The metallic taste on her tongue had grown stronger. She glanced behind her again, whimpering as she struggled against whatever held her in place. In the hallway, where the wall disappeared into the shadow beneath the ceiling, a floorboard shifted. It was a single, subtle transfer of weight. Not a footstep. Just the faint depression of timber beneath something heavy. The floorboards groaned and settled.
She turned back toward the door. The distortion remained. “Who are you?” she screamed. “What do you want?” It didn’t move. She refused to look behind her. She knew that if she turned, her eyes would find nothing but darkness, and her mind would fill it with a face. A shoulder. The pale curve of a hand sliding down the banister.
She tried to speak again, but the sound died between her teeth, escaping as little more than a dry, clicking rasp. The air shifted. The smell of ozone sharpened, electric and acrid, like the moment before lightning strikes an open field. Her skin prickled beneath her damp shirt. She reached forward again. Her left palm slid into something slick and warm. She pulled anyway.
One foot dragged against the wood. She winced as her toenail caught on a splintered board and bent backward. A scream tore from her throat. The scrape of her knees against the rough floor echoed down the narrow hallway, a grinding sound like stones shifting in a dry well. If something stood near the doorway, it knew exactly where she was. She imagined it hearing the fabric tearing, the ragged hitch in her breathing, every involuntary gasp whenever her damaged ribs protested.
She kept pulling against whatever held her back. Finally, the resistance released her feet, and she dragged herself forward another two feet.
When she reached the door, the distortion was gone. She looked behind her. Whatever it was had moved to the edge of the room and was beginning to crawl up the wall, its shape bending at angles that made no sense. From somewhere above her came a shriek that sounded nothing like a human voice. Then she heard her own voice surrounding her.
“Help me. Please. Help me!” The words were distorted, almost recognizable, but layered with deeper tones, as though a chorus of voices were speaking through her.
She forced herself upright, gripping the doorknob. It turned beneath her hand, but the door wouldn’t budge. She pulled again, dragging herself onto her knees. The rough floor cut into the exposed skin where her jeans had torn. She twisted the knob repeatedly, pulling until her arms trembled. It rotated freely inside the lock mechanism, yet the door remained shut. Then, without warning, it gave with a sharp squeak, as though something had finally released it.
Gray light spilled through the opening and reached into the hallway, stopping a yard short of her outstretched hands. Its pale illumination caught suspended specks of dust that hung motionless in the dead air. She could barely make out the floorboards beyond the threshold. If the doorway led somewhere she could escape, she had to know. Before she could move, the light shifted, revealing an opening at the far end of the hallway. Beyond it lay the porch, and beyond that, the wet black trunks of the trees stood like iron bars against the dusk.
A draft moved through the room. It didn’t come from the open door in front of her. It came from behind, cool and steady, carrying the faint, sweet scent of cold rain—and something else. Something heavy and damp.
“Kelly,” a voice said, filling the space around her. “Kelly…”
She whimpered. The voice was low and gravelly, resonating inside her head rather than reaching her ears. “Who are you?” she screamed. The voice faded, replaced by the sound of breathing.
It’s just the house, she told herself. It’s an old house. Old houses settle. They breathe. This isn’t real.
Then came the second movement. It wasn’t a footstep. It was the dry, sliding friction of fabric against fabric somewhere nearby. She couldn’t tell which direction it came from. It moved down the hallway behind her, keeping pace with her crawl.
Kelly’s breath caught. She dug her toes into the gap between the floorboards, ignoring the agony in her ribs, and dragged herself forward six inches in one ragged heave. Splinters dug into her left thigh, biting deep, but she refused to stop. “Please,” she whispered to the floor, barely able to hear her own voice above the pounding in her head.
The presence behind her didn’t stop. It continued to follow, moving closer. Not directly behind her feet, but along the wall to her left, where the darkness was thickest. She reached the threshold, her fingers brushing the cold, weathered cedar of the outer sill. The air beyond it was different—fresher, cold enough to burn the back of her throat, carrying the sharp scent of pine needles and damp earth.
She lifted her head. The porch steps descended into a stretch of high weeds. Twenty yards away, the tree line waited, dark and tangled, but open. She pulled her hips across the sill, her legs dragging behind her like lead weights, heavy and unresponsive. As her hips cleared the doorframe, she stopped.
Slowly, inch by inch, Kelly turned her head toward the interior of the house. The hallway was empty. Gray light stretched back into the corridor, lying flat across the floorboards. The dark, wet smears marking her path glistened against the wood, and jagged slivers of splintered timber filled her vision. But there was no one standing in the darkness. No shadow at the foot of the stairs. No coat hanging against the wall.
Nothing.
The silence was suffocating and absolute. Then, right beside her ear—so close she felt cold, dry air stir the hairs on her neck—a breath was drawn in.
Kelly threw herself off the edge of the porch and struck the wet grass below. Then something seized her legs and dragged her backward, hauling her toward the house with a force she couldn’t resist. A scream tore from her lips as her fingers clawed at the grass, ripping through the wet blades in a desperate attempt to hold on. She couldn’t stop herself.
The door slammed shut with a sharp thud, plunging her into darkness.
Quiet Pressure Thrillers
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