Number 9 Vienna Drive nosleep

The town I grew up in used to be extremely rural, meaning that the oldest residences are sitting on large parcels of land, the younger the house the less land it sat on, until it got to that standard suburban size where you could fit a decent sized pool or a swing set in the backyard, but not both. So the neighborhood kids all took to our bikes and took our energy out on the streets most days.

A few streets away from my home, on one of the roads we used to ride our bikes to school, was the house of Ms. Gertie Collins. The houses on Vienna Drive were a little older, their yards large enough for a lovely garden, but only the grandmotherly older woman at number 9 bothered to do anything with her yard. She was the nicest woman I’ve met to this day. She had a wide and sincere smile, she always had a plate of fresh baked cookies and pitchers of lemonade, and I saw her on many occasions, rushing over, first aid kit in hand, to patch up anyone who fell off their bike, then she would offer to call their Mom. A boy a few houses away from hers had a slew of allergies and she always had a special batch of baked goodies just for him, I heard her say that she washed everything twice before baking his, just to be careful. I never once saw her turn down a Girl Scout or athlete selling from their fundraising flyers either, and she was found at practically every school event, church bazar, and neighborhood volunteer project. But, no matter how sweet we all agreed she was; Ms. Collins’ house was unnerving. We couldn’t put our fingers on anything actually wrong with the home, no one had seen anything ghostly or anything, but even so, no one wanted to go past the front gate. Strangely, even though she clearly adored our presence, Ms. Collins herself never invited any of us into her yard or home. Even on Halloween, she would bring an old folding chair and a giant bowl of candy down to her gate and sit there cooing at every one of our costumes.

In the spring of my 5th grade year Ms. Collins was found in her garden, gloves still on, having died of a heart attack. We all went to her funeral, but we felt her loss more when we passed her house. For a year we passed the house and watched her roses wilt, her front porch chip away it’s cheery white paint, and her lawn become an overgrown mockery of her previous diligence. Without her smiling face and cheery garden the house became even creepier. Before long it became a sort of staple in the horror stories we made up to scare one another. It was just a matter of time until it became a dare spot. One day, on a Tuesday after school, we were leaning on our handlebars and chatting about school where we could use our repertoire of curse words without our mothers hearing. Marie was staring at the house and Jake started to make fun of her, “too scared to even stand on the street next to the haunted house?” he jeered at her.

“I saw the curtains move,” she answered matter-of- factly and we all gasped and began scanning the windows for signs of movement. When we didn’t see any it dissolved back into mocking Marie. She took it as well as any adolescents do, but when she grew too tired of our ribbing she hit back. “Well, if you guys are so sure, I dare all of you to come back this weekend after dark and go in!”

We all fell into a pensive hush, avoiding eye contact with one another, but Marie wasn’t fooled and turned straight to Jake and demanded to know if he was a chicken. Well, of course, with that we were all dragged quickly into an agreement that we were, in fact, not chickens, and would meet here after sneaking out Friday night.

Wednesday we talked a little about our plans, but it was a normal day otherwise, until we all went home. When I got in the house and followed the scent of dinner into the kitchen My Mom turned around and smiled at me. “Hi Sweetie, you have a little note! It was left in the mail box, maybe it’s a secret admirer.” She winked at me, but turned around, obviously trying to give me some privacy.

The outside simply said my first name, Evelyn, in big block letters. I ripped open the envelope and pulled out the single sheet of plain white paper. It said only “Don’t go to 9 Vienna Drive”. I was immediately curious who it was from, obviously one of my friends was more scared than they wanted to let on and was trying to scare us away.

The next day after school we all gathered outside the house as always, to discuss the notes, which everyone said they had received. Someone suggested it was a ghost, since we all got one, but I would have covered my own path with a fake note to myself, and I told them so, and so we were all eyeballing each other suspiciously, but somehow were more determined than ever to go.

That evening, after we had all headed home, phone calls began to come in. The landline rang while Mom was in the middle of getting our supper ready, and Dad was still headed home from work, so I answered, thinking it would be one of my friends anyway.

“Hello?” I answered.

Silence met my greeting, but I could hear the ambient noise that told me there was someone else there. I waited nervously and was about to either hang up or start asking who was there when I heard a whisper. It was too quiet to really determine who it could be, not even if it was a boy or a girl, but they said “Don’t go to number 9 Vienna Drive.”

They promptly hung up, but I held the phone to my ear stupidly and asked the dead line “Who is this?” I was briefly agitated, but in the way of children, I didn’t think too much about it and before dinner was even on the table I had fully convinced myself that the same friend who had left the notes was still trying to get out of our adventure.

At school the next day we all looked suspiciously around our group until someone demanded to know who called them. I don’t remember who broke first, but it didn’t matter anyway, because no one would confess to the calls, but we all had gotten them. We each probably had a different suspicion about who had made both attempts at frightening us, but we didn’t discuss it beyond assuring ourselves with the bravado of youth that we were definitely not being deterred from our plans.

By the end of the day we were all too excited to even play around after school. We had discussed what sort of supplies to bring with us, and we all went home to pack our backpacks, filling them with flashlights, pocket knives, water, and cameras to prove what we had braved. We had agreed to meet there at eleven; late enough that everyone was sure their parents would be asleep.

My bike sounded far too loud as I peddled towards Vienna, but no houses turned their lights on, and nothing around me stirred until one of my friends, Ben, also came into view on his own bike, and we both turned down the street and headed towards where we could see Marie, Jake, and Penny already gathered on the sidewalk opposite number 9.

We whispered excitedly for a little bit, deciding how we were going to enter the house. Finally we agreed to try the front door, and we all left our bikes and tiptoed over to the gate. It was closed, like it always had been before, but now it seemed entirely unwelcoming. We had a small tussle over who would open the gate and I lost, so I reached over and as gently as possible lifted the catch. It squeaked a little, to us it sounded like a blaring alarm, but it must not have been very obvious, because we all entered the lawn and closed the gate again, with another little squeak, without anyone coming to check on the commotion. We were elated with our success and moved with more confidence up the rickety old steps to the front door. This time Jake lost, and he turned the door knob. I was sure that it wouldn’t work, but with barely a push the door swung open and we were staring into the darkness of a home none of us had ever thought we would actually see the inside of.

We stood out there for a while. Stupidly we had never really considered the laws we were breaking with our little excursion, maybe, like me, nobody thought that we would make it past peering into windows and running away frightened. Marie finally broke the silence and asked us “are we doing this?” And that’s all it took, a suggestion and the ever present peer pressure, and we were all shuffling into the house and shutting the door behind us.

We took out our flashlights, I waited to turn mine on until someone else had first, and soon the little foyer was lit up. It was just a normal house from where we were. I could see a dining room to our right, a large table, slightly dusty, with an old china hutch behind it. There was a floral print on them, pink and green. We could see that the dining room had another open doorway that led to a room with linoleum flooring, likely the kitchen. To our left was a room with an old floral patterned sofa. The walls had lots of photographs, some looked rather old. Ms. Collins was in most of the pictures, several with a man who must have been Mr. Collins, who we had never met ourselves; Ms. Collins said he had passed years before from smoking related illness. We couldn’t see much detail, and we couldn’t see any of the rest of the house from our vantage, so we all inched forward, shining our lights in different directions.

The room to the left turned out to be a sitting room; it had two high backed chairs with matching floral to the couch, and a large coffee table in the middle of it all. There was an old silver tea tray sat on it. It was the exact sort of room that all our grandparent’s had too, and in that familiarity was safety, so we went in there first. There was a vase on a little side table with the remnants of flowers in it. The pictures were family and friends, we assumed. There were several of a younger Gertie and the man we assume is her Husband. In a few of their photos they had a boy, and there were photos of them and the boy individually. There were also groups of women, friends she must have leaned on after her husband passed, and a fair few of a little dog that we all barely remembered, we couldn’t be sure but we thought we remembered its name being Lady.

The room wasn’t frightening in the least, but it did make us miss Ms. Collins all over again. Our confidence was restored as we headed across the hallway to the dining room. There was nothing of interest here for us, so we swept straight into the kitchen. This is where our youth and ignorance became obvious to me now that I’m older. The only noise in the kitchen was the hum of the refrigerator. A common noise in all our kitchens, and we thought nothing of it, but now of course I can’t understand why we didn’t wonder why the electricity was still running to the house of a woman who died over a year ago. We opened a few cabinets, there were regular household staples in them, and again, we never wondered about their presence.

We headed back across the hall from here, and we had relaxed so much that we weren’t being quiet at all at this point. We were laughing and talking to each other, and we made it all the way into the living room before we looked around. There was an old TV in the center of the room, an outdated couch with a hand-sewn quilt draped over the back. There was something on the walls, and I lifted my light and walked towards them. I saw my friends headed to look too, but suddenly I was entirely bathed in a cold sweat and a ringing in my ears. The walls were covered in pictures and papers. There was a Polaroid picture of each and every child in the area, and all of them were taken of us outside on the sidewalks in front of number 9 Vienna Drive. The pictures were pinned up next to a paper that was littered with untidy scribbles and half formed thoughts about that child. There were some older kids, I saw my older Brother, now away at college, his picture peeking out from behind one of a girl who was only a grade or two ahead of me.

I was drawn closer almost unwillingly. I found a photo of Penny, she was playing hopscotch with a few other kids, and I even saw my own shoes. The paper attached next to it was headed with an uneven print that said her name. Her first name and last name were in different colors and looked a little different in their handwriting. Underneath was different factoids written in clustered groups, all in different directions and colors. “Birthday: March 11th”, “favorite color: pink”, “told Sam she has a crush on Ben”, “parents work evenings on Wednesdays”, “nice” were some of the scrawled thoughts, and as I moved on to the picture of a girl a year older than us I saw that these random facts were common throughout all the papers. Some of the things were clearly secrets shared between friends; some were things we may say to anyone, like our birthdays. My stomach was clenched in utter fear and confusion as I looked at the papers on the walls.

Eventually I became aware of a new noise. Or maybe it wasn’t new, since my ears were still ringing with the shock of our discovery. But I heard crying now. I looked around at my friends who were all still reading the pages in a silent shock. It wasn’t them crying then, and now that I was paying attention it was clear that the noises were coming from outside the room. I walked out into the hallways without really considering what I was doing. I certainly wouldn’t have done it again, walking towards a mysterious crying in a house that should have been empty, leaving my friends behind me.

My flashlight rose and illuminated the figure of a grown man standing by the front door. He was shaking with his tears; his shoulders were slumped in a posture of defeat, but his hand was resting on the door lock. He looked up at me, our eyes met, and as he held my gaze he locked the door. “I asked you not to come.” He whispered it, but every word stood out starkly to me. He was still crying, he looked strangely sad even as he clearly stood in the path of our exit.

I dropped my light then, I wanted to scream or run, but all I managed was to drop the heavy metal torch. It was enough to get the attention of everyone else, and before I knew it there was plenty of screaming. It was a confusing cacophony, the man, who was clearly the boy from the pictures in the sitting room, now maybe in his 40s, was still crying. My friends were shouting, screaming, and crying themselves. Someone grabbed my elbow, whether they were trying to encourage me to run or if they were just looking for comfort I couldn’t tell you. But when the man took a step towards us there was a definite pull and I heard someone yell “run!” We all scrambled away from him, and that led us directly to a set of stairs. We ran up them, and again, with the hindsight I now have, this was stupid, but we were barely in our teens, not even, I was twelve and frightened.

We found ourselves up the stairs and looking into a hallway, there were 5 doors, all of them closed. So we dove into the nearest room without much more thought than to get a door between us and the man who we heard slowly mounting the stairs. We slammed the door shut, there was a small lock on it, and we clicked it quickly. We looked for furniture to move in front of the door, but everything was heavy wooden bedroom furniture, we had no chance of moving it. We were in Ms. Collins’ old room, her bed was neatly made, a pair of slippers sat right next to the bed. She had a mahogany wardrobe, a large matching dresser, and the heavy queen bed. We saw the glint of a bathtub in our flashlights, but there were no other doors and we were too scared to jump out of the second floor window. We waited, our breathing coming in short panicked gasps, and after an eternity we heard him outside the door.

There was a scrapping and we all stared at the door. “I have the key to the door here,” we heard him say, kind of sadly still, not really threateningly, but as a warning more so. We rushed away from him in the only direction left to us, into the bathroom. He’d removed every single lightbulb in the house, which is why no one had seen lights in the house and thought anything of it. It also meant that we were still just relying on our scant light. I blame the disorienting effects of the 5 different beams swinging about for what we did. It wasn’t until we were leaning against the bathroom door that I saw there was another entryway across from us, leading into another bedroom. Ben and Marie saw it too, but they must not have had the sudden resurgence of fear that I did, because they ran straight for the room. I don’t know what made me follow, maybe I just didn’t want to be left alone, but I was the last to clear the threshold and yet the door swung shut as soon as I cleared the space. All 5 beams turned as one to see that the man was latching several types of locks that he had clearly installed himself. He still looked forlorn, but he wasn’t weeping any longer, instead he just kept whispering “I told you not to come” over and over under his breath.

We all backed away from him, and wildly swung our lights about, trying to find anything at all to protect ourselves. I looked at the door that led back to the hallway and saw that it was already locked up with the same array of fixtures.

“Mister, please, let us go!” Ben pleaded.

“Not ‘Mister’” the man said, for the first time looking angry. “George.” He said, and looked at us in that strange sad way again. He reached behind him and we were all momentarily blinded by the overhead bulb illuminating the room.

His window had boards overtop of a curtain, keeping the window looking friendly from the outside, but keeping all the light away from prying eyes. He had a desk with a mess of pens and papers and stacks of the Polaroid type pictures from downstairs. Next to the desk sat several small televisions, which George walked over to and hit the power button on each. They blinked on and focused into images of the outside of the house, between them all we could see the entire outside of the property. The sound of crickets could be heard through the speakers.

“Mom wanted me to have friends,” he gestured sadly to the screens, “but I couldn’t make them outside anymore, not after Teddy.” He stared off into the past for a moment while the implications of all we were seeing gripped all of us in terror. He could watch us all, likely had been while we snacked on fresh baked gifts from his mother’s kitchen, listened while we gossiped to one another and kept little biographies of all the things he had learned while we had no idea that he was there. “Mom left me the house, told me it was a safe place to watch my friends, but not to ever bring them in.” His face crumpled back into sorrow, “I told you not to come!”

We were stuck in place, with nowhere to run and the knowledge of our own foolish ignorance weighing us down. For a while, a minute that felt like an hour, we were all silent as we watched him bawl. Finally Ben spoke up, “who is Teddy?”

George smiled at us then and wiped his tears away. “Teddy was my inside friend.” He moved towards us and we all shrunk away as much as possible, but he was just reaching for the desk. Somehow he reached into the mess and came up with a particular picture. It was George and another boy, both of them looked to be about 10 years old. They were smiling at one another and had their arms casually flung around each other’s shoulders. They looked like good friends. “This is Teddy,” he said to us, pointing to the boy next to him, “We used to get to play in the yard, sometimes we even went to the park.” He turned the image back towards himself and he looked at it whistfully. “I can’t have lots of people around, it makes me scared, but Mom liked Teddy too, and she said he could be my inside friend. Teddy’s Mom came over with him for dinner one night and he got to stay the whole night!” He carefully set the picture back down and looked at us sadly again. “I loved Teddy. I loved him so much, and I wanted an inside friend forever. So when he went to sleep, I looked at his insides.”

For a time there was an air of confusion, what could this man be talking about? Was he confessing to molesting his friend? I don’t know if he thought we needed further explanation or if he just wasn’t done talking, but George continued. “I took a knife from the kitchen and I looked at his insides. I didn’t know it would hurt him forever, Mom always put bandages on my cuts and I was fine!” He was crying in earnest, snot running down his lip, but he didn’t move to get any of it off. “I didn’t know! I just wanted to be his inside friend too.” An image of him sitting in the gore of his creating came to my mind. “After Teddy I wasn’t allowed to have any more inside friends. I don’t want to hurt people, Mom told me that’s what I did.”

I cleared my throat nervously, “George, if you don’t want to hurt anyone, please let us go.”

He looked at me, looked over the whole group, he looked surprised. “But you came inside, so you’re my inside friends. Right?” He smiled at us, and it was clear that we were peers to him, but to us he was a much larger and clearly dangerous figure. “Mom said not let any more people over, but since I warned you and you came anyway, I know that we are really friends!”

The terrible fear finally broke Penny and she began to sob loudly and shouted at George. “No! We aren’t your friends!”

George went from sad to enraged so fast that I didn’t even see the transition. He roared at us, like a wounded animal and he swiped wildly with his arms. We were grouped together tightly already, but we pressed our bodies even closer now. I held my arms up, palms out, in a manner I hoped would calm him down. “We’re your friends George, we all are! Aren’t we guys?” I nodded at them pointedly and they all murmured their agreement. George slowed down, but was still glaring at us. “Tell him Penny, please say you are sorry and we are friends,” I begged, it couldn’t have sounded more desperate.

“I.. I’m sorry, we are friends, we are.” Penny stammered, she was clearly crying again.

George did finally stop any aggressive movements, but he still looked stormy. “Friends?” he asked suspiciously, and we all nodded enthusiastically. He glared at us and finally focused onto Penny. He stepped forward suddenly and bellowed “are we friends Penny?!”

“Yes! Yes, we are friends, we ARE!” She shouted, but even as she did he grabbed her by the arm and pulled her away from us.

All hell broke loose then. Penny was shrieking, saying he was hurting her. George was alternating between furiously shouting “friends?!” and crumbling into his sad posture and saying over and over “I told you not to come!” There was a scattering as George moved closer to the window, Ben ran to the door to the hallway and began struggling with the locks, Marie ran towards the bathroom door and did the same, and I ran towards Penny, managing to grab her other arm, but George was much stronger and he just pulled us both with him. I felt arms around me, it must have been Jake, and the two of us managed to move the struggling girl towards us a little. But it was too late, and we didn’t even know it yet, he had reached his destination and grabbed a large shining knife. I saw it swing up, an arc of warning, but it was just seconds, and we were already pulling as hard as we could, so I don’t know what I could have done to get Penny away from the blade, and it landed in her shoulder.

Somehow Penny screamed even louder now that she had been struck with the weapon. I was screaming too, totally overwhelmed with the sudden stream of scarlet life leaving my friend. The others were all making noise, but I don’t know who was saying what. In the middle of all the chaos George withdrew the knife, making the stream of blood even thicker, and he slashed it down at my grabbing hands as he twisted her away. My grip loosened without permission from my brain, I didn’t want to let her go, but my automatic response was to avoid the sharp edge that he swung at me. It took him no time, or not enough for me to get my body to move forward, to thrust the blade down again, this time I couldn’t see where he hit, his body was blocking my view, but I could hear the wet thuds and the rising panic and pain in Penny’s voice.

Suddenly Jake was pulling me again, this time he was saying something, and I heard someone else saying the same thing. It took a moment to focus on the voices instead of the screams, but finally it hit me, “the door is open, let’s go!” I turned and saw the door to the hall was open, light spilled out into it, illuminating the way away from this nightmare. I wanted to move in the direction of the pulling arms, follow Marie, who was already out the door, God I wanted to. But I also wanted, needed, to save my friend. “No!” I shouted and broke free from Jake’s restraint as I tackled the figure before me, just as he lowered the knife in another sweeping arc.

I must have surprised him, my full weight, if he had been prepared, wouldn’t have been enough to move him, but since he was hunched over the cowering figure of my friend he must have been in a poor position of balance and he toppled over. The blade was firmly gripped in his hand, and as he fell I saw it cut into his other arm. He looked at his bleeding wound in shock, and while he was distracted I pulled at Penny’s arms, held over her head to protect herself as much as possible, though I could see several large and terrible punctures on her arms. I was pleased when she raised herself immediately and began to run towards the open doorway. Everyone else had already left, though Jake stood in the doorframe and watched us make it away from the deranged man still watching his blood drip down his arm. He finally looked up at us as we left the room, his eyes met mine, he just looked sad again.

We made it out of the house so quickly that I don’t really remember doing it. We rushed to the house where the boy with the allergies lives, since we knew him fairly well and his Mom would recognize us. She stumbled to the door after a few minutes of our banging and shouting and let us all into her living room before she even began to understand what had happened. First she saw Penny was bleeding and paling and she wrapped some clean kitchen towels around her wounds and called 911, then Penny’s mother. We told her what had happened, as best as we could, and the police were called too.

We were surprised, but George was still in the house. He had sliced a few more shallow marks into his arms by the time Police had gotten in the home, the door still unlocked and open from our exit.

The story got around town pretty quick after that. George was taken into custody, and told the officers everything. After he had killed Teddy his mother had convinced the police that a stranger had killed him and kidnapped her own precious child. She had hidden him ever since, for his safety and others’. She had arranged to have her home paid for from her life insurance, and she had hired a discreet man to deliver groceries every Saturday night to the front porch. The money should have lasted George for years, and she did the best she could for the son she truly loved. George was clearly not able to stand trial, so he went to his last home, a state mental facility. Penny recovered, but she moved away the next summer, never able to mentally move on.

Number 9 Vienna Drive went up for sale after that, another missed sign from before, but no one bought it. The memory of George overshadowed the fondness we had all still felt for Ms. Collins, so in a way, he managed to kill that night after all.

Submitted December 02, 2017 at 08:15AM by Snapmeupasnape http://ift.tt/2j7hYkA nosleep