The three men walked into the house and were immediately taken aback by the smell of rot that emanated from inside of the house. It did nothing but add to the awful sense of gloom that hung in the atmosphere of the mud room. The men walked, hesitantly, further into the house.
The oldest of the men realized, as they began to walk to the left of the staircase that opened up from the entrance, that he had forgotten to yell for Paul. The shock of the awful smell must have made him to forget that they were there to find Paul – hopefully alive. Although he had begun to very seriously doubt that they would actually find the missing man, he began to yell for Paul, and he instructed the other men to do the same.
Walking first into the living room, the men had to be careful where they stepped – papers were scattered everywhere on the ground, as well as all over any surface that was available in the sparsely decorated room. The youngest man in the group was trailing behind the other two, and he happened to glance over at a sketch that sat, immersed in a pile of balled-up papers. The sketch was drawn in a heavy hand, with thick black lines, which made the pale inner body of the Thing all the more ghastly pale. Almost as soon as the man recognized what he was looking at as being as awful as it was, he threw his gaze from off of it and fixed it ahead of him. His hands shook, and worried that the two senior officers would see how shocked he was, he buried his hands into his coat's pockets, not thinking for a moment that horror had already settled on his features.
They moved from the living room, glancing around for any obvious clues, shining lights around to fight through the heavy miasma of darkness and awful stench, before eagerly moving onto the adjacent hallway.
They tromped into the kitchen, where they finally got an idea of where the stench was coming from.
The kitchen itself was clean – spotless, in fact – but on the stove was a large stock pot. Grimacing, the younger of the senior officers gestured for the novice officer to look into the stock pot. Groaning loudly in dismay, the youngest man did as he was instructed, trying to stop thinking about the sketch that was still imprinted on his mind.
Looking into the pot, the man had to step away from the stove and clamp his hand over his face, over his nose and his mouth. Even then, he had to bend at his knees, nearly collapsing on the ground, from the strength of the stench so up close.
One of the other officers shook his shoulder, and answering hoarsely, he said, “There's a lotta... It looked like fuckin' stew. God -” Although he had been fighting to keep his composure, he could not stop himself from dry heaving on the ground. As he tried to straighten himself up, he strove to gain control of what he wanted to say. “... Ugh, I can't even guess about how long that had to of been here. There's a lot of it in there – are you guys sure that he lives alone, that he don't have any friends?”
The senior officer happened to glance over into the large sink next to him. “Well,” He said, gesturing towards the sink. “Based on all of those dirty bowls in there, I'd say he's been livin' off of this for a while. Must've not had much time to cook for himself.”
The three men abandoned the room, relieved that they did not have to remain in it for long. They walked back out into the hallway, where they made a quick search of the three nearly empty rooms that they came to agree that the doctor must have been using for storage.
Coming out of the hallway, they walked back through the living room and up to the stairs. Upstairs there seemed to be much more evidence of an everyday life than the first floor had. A basket overflowed with the doctor's clothes in the short hallway that lead to the two rooms on the second floor. They glanced into the bathroom and found nothing unusual about the room, save for the fact that the room looked almost obsessively clean, compared to the rest of the house that they had seen. They walked into the bedroom, and began to walk around in it, looking for any sign of the doctor, dreading that they would find who they were looking for, lying in bed with his head blown off from a shotgun.
They found nothing in the bedroom, and they left, walking down the stairs and preparing to leave the house. As they came from off of the stairs, the youngest of the officers happened to glance over at the living room. He stopped the others with a near-shout, his heart feeling as though it was bursting out of his chest.
All of the mess that had been in the living room was gone, the furniture in the room had been moved dramatically, with everything, save for the coffee table, pressed up against the walls of the living room. The overhead light in the room was on now, casting a yellowed, discomforting light on the room, and made the neat pile of papers, wrapped in string on the coffee table, only more ominous.
No comments:
Post a Comment