A Hell of an Anticlimax (about 650 words)

Image courtesy Peter Herrmann, via Unsplash

 I wrote this for a flash fiction contest in the middle of last year, and never posted it anywhere else. Unfortunately, that contest had a maximum of 650 words, I think? And my first draft came out at nearly three times that. So, this little piece is a good example of what happens when you try to bite off more than you can chew, and also what happens when you try to gut a too-long story to meet an arbitrary length limit.

I remember quite vividly the moment that I accidentally saved over my first draft at around 1800 words after cutting about half of the story.

I present this to you as a bit of a cautionary tale...

A Hell of an Anticlimax

My friend Sam flips houses, and he always drags me along. Last year, it was a little cottage by a river. Today, a stately mansion behind a rusty iron fence.

“You've got to see inside!” he said, leaping out of the car. It was three stories of filthy brick. The windows were crusty gray. Inside, the floors were damaged hardwood. The walls were discolored and peeling. I could see pipes through holes, and nasty water stains.

“It's a... fixer-upper,” was all I could muster.

“It has potential!” He practically sang it.

Potential energy maybe. To fall on us.

He grinned. “I'm working from the basement up.”

Downstairs, he showed me around. It was surprisingly modern--studs and drywall. As we passed the west wall, I spied something odd. A shallow carving in the drywall said “1980.”

I peered at it. “Have you seen this?”

“No.” He shrugged. “A commemoration, maybe?” He leaned in for a closer look, but slipped, and boom! Punched a hole in the wall with his elbow. While he dusted himself off, I noticed: Behind the engraving, there were planks, not stone.

We broke it open. Sam yammered about occult artifacts the whole time. He reads too much Lovecraft.

We found a door, two feet square, covering a hole in the foundation. We tried to open it, but it resisted with an ungodly creak. I grabbed some oil--a few drops did the trick.

Sam yelled as a tiny menagerie crawled out. Spiders, centipedes, you name it. The hole was two feet deep with dirt walls, which explained the bugs. I grabbed another can (pesticide) and went to town. Before long, nothing was moving, and we vacuumed them up.

Inside, a heap of junk. First, a dented pocket watch. Sam grabbed a bag and photographs slid out. “Ghost photos! Look! Orbs and everything!” I blew on it, removing the “orbs.” It was dirty and faded, that's all. Before I could even show it to him, he tossed me another bag.

Inside was a stained doll with a threadbare cord. I gave it a pull, and the string rolled back inside slowly, making a raspy, rattling hiss. It was a little creepy.

Next: a wooden box. “Look!” Sam shouted. “A face!”

They were eerily arranged knots. Come on. Inside were newspaper clippings, surprisingly intact.

Next was a big jar. Sam grabbed a rag and wiped it. A bloated white serpent stared out at us.

Not gonna lie, we both leapt backwards. After a deep breath, I asked, “What did you say was the name of the original owner?”

“Norwood.”

“What Norwood?”

“Uh... Doctor Norwood. Herpetology.”

I rolled my eyes. It was a specimen.

Finally, a bag of waxy paper. Sam reached inside. “It's a spirit board!”

“A what?”

“Spirit board... Trademarks, you know?”

Whatever.

Quite. The. Pile. Clueless, we started reading the newspapers. Oddly, each was a clipping of some weird legend. I was reading about the Dover Demon when inspiration struck. I turned the clipping over. On the back was an obituary, for little Regina Norwood, April 24th, 1977.

Sam grabbed another. November 12, 1974, Honey Island Swamp Monster. On the back, a blurb about the Norwoods' wedding. The clipping about the Jersey Devil had something about a high school football game.

“It's a time capsule,” I murmured. I glanced at the pocket watch. I could guess whose photo was inside.

“Huh. Then why'd they disappear?”

I glared and almost blurted something, but his stupid grin tipped me off.

We pulled everything out, everything but the spirit board. At last, I grabbed it and set it on the floor.

The moment it touched, there was an unearthly hum. We held our breath, and a few seconds later, the furnace clicked and turned on. We laughed.

Then the glowing red portal appeared.

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Thanks for reading! I hope you can see how it seems like a lot of detail and connective tissue has been cut out. I really regret tapping Ctrl+S that one time that I did... the longer version was a lot nicer, at least I thought so, and my failure at version control there was a big loss in my mind.

If you like this kind of creepy story, you might try my other free short story, The Corner of My Eye, which didn't suffer from the same length-cutting issue, or maybe even my novella, What the Soul Still Fears!