The Wendigo House

Rando 11/52

Photo by Mallory Johndrow on Unsplash

The old house, with its wildly overgrown garden, was silent, secretive.

Katy didn’t mean to come back. Call it old habits dying hard, but she couldn’t help walking down a lane in the small town of Herringsbone and cutting through a hedge to get to the house.

She stared up at the structure — with its broken windows, peeling paint, and moss-covered sides — and felt a shiver pass along her back.

Back when she was a teen, it had been called the Wendigo House. The name had seemed only appropriate because of all the strange things which happened there over the years.

The last family to live there had been two siblings and a mother — and each one had died a grisly death one night in early November. It had been in all the papers that were now just archives in the library.

The police officers didn’t find the pentagram in the basement, but Katy and her friends? Oh, they saw it themselves when they broke into the house.

Dylan had thought it would be funny to see what the house was like on the inside, so breaking in through a small window on the ground floor had seemed like the best option. Katy remembered stomping her feet just to get some warmth into her limbs, her windbreaker barely able to keep out the surprisingly chilly April night air.

Their friend Ryan had been a few yards away, smoking a cigarette. Once Dylan had succeeded in pushing through the rotting frame of the window, however, Ryan had mashed the tip of his cigarette into the pavement.

“We’re going to be in hell if they catch us,” Ryan had muttered before jogging forward to help Dylan shimmy through the opening. Then Ryan gestured for Katy to follow, and she swallowed before doing just that.

The guys’ antics notwithstanding, she had been curious to see what awaited in the mysterious house that had haunted Herringsbone’s lore for so long.

Dylan used a small flashlight on his keyring to illuminate their surroundings. Dust permeated everything as they moved through the empty house. Only a grandfather clock with a broken face stood off to one side.

When they found nothing on the first floor, they took a set of stairs down to the basement. Katy curled her fists into her jacket because the cold had followed them inside.

“What the hell?” Dylan, the leader, murmured.

The flashlight illuminated the markings of what appeared to be triangles on the floor — but a quick swipe of the light revealed it to be the shape of a pentagram.

And there were the unmistakable signs of bloodstains within it.

Katy had brought her hand up to her mouth.

Even now, she could taste the iron in her mouth as she thought back.

Because the memories? They stopped there.

The next thing she knew, she awoke in her bed at home.

And Dylan and Ryan? They were nowhere to be found.

Gone, without a trace, from that night forward.