Uninvited Guests
Based on the Harris Burdick picture and caption of the same name.
Not entire story.
His heart was pounding.
He swore he had seen the doorknob turn.
Uninvited Guests
It all began a few years before. A light rain shower glazed over the grass and pitter-pattered on the window pane. A boy by the name of Frederick Dean stepped cautiously down the old spiral staircase, looked around the stone-cold, abandoned basement, and shivered. The only reason he dared to set foot there was to find the tennis ball his dog had dropped down the stairs. No one in his family had gone down to the basement for years, but Frederick had never known why. He took away a moldy piece of carpeting lying against the wall and gasped.
There was a door. It was a small door, only a few inches high. Frederick was a dreadfully curious boy, and nothing was quite so curious as a small, mysterious door. He hesitated a moment, wondering whether it was a good idea or not to see what was behind it. Then, after a few seconds, he bent down, lifted a trembling hand, and lightly touched the tiny silver doorknob. The door slowly creaked open.
A shiver ran down Frederick’s spine as he reached a shaky hand into the opening. His hand touched something with a fabric-like texture. His fingers slowly wrapped around the object, and pulled it out of the doorway.
The first things he noticed were the eyes. They were wide open, baby blue with flecks of silver. They almost seemed to glow in the light from the top of the stairs behind him. A crown of strawberry blonde hair fell around and framed the contours of her freckled, porcelain face. The sharp details vexed Frederick; it was almost as though they were much too lifelike. Almost as if…
Blink, blink.
Frederick screamed and dropped the doll. He turned to dash up the stairs, when he heard a deafening crack. He stopped in his tracks. Slowly turning around, Frederick saw that the small door had broken into two pieces. Wary, and ever conscious that this was not an ordinary doll, he hurried up the spiral of stairs, slammed the door, and hoped that he would never come across the doll ever again.
* * *
Three years later…
“Oh, Freddy, dear, your father and I are going out for our anniversary, so you’re in charge.”
“Okay.”
“Oh, and Freddy, you need to clean the house spotless before we’re back, but don’t eat all of the Goldfish. Ta-tah!”
When his parents left, Frederick was a little tired, but went to clean the kitchen anyway. Before he stood up, though, he heard a faint noise; it sounded like a small tapping noise, seemingly from under the floorboards beneath him. He wondered what it could be, and thought that it might have come from the basement.
When he thought of the basement, however, an odd feeling grew in his stomach, seeming to tell him that maybe he shouldn’t go downstairs, but he dismissed it to be nothing. He started towards the kitchen and glanced at the door to the basement. He opened it and looked down, and he recognized the dark, dank emptiness from a few years before. He stepped cautiously down each creaky spiral step, and finally saw what he had forgotten before.
There was a door.
All of the memories came back of the doll that had blinked at him that had come from the tiny door. Then all of a sudden, he felt something under his foot, and let out a little shriek. When he looked down to see what it was, he found that it was the tennis ball that he had been looking for the first time he wandered down to the haunted basement. He had almost run immediately back up the stairs, when he noticed that something else was different. The door was fixed, and was right where it had been the first time. An eerie aura began to drift through the room, and Frederick’s heart began to race nearly through his chest. Adrenaline began to rush through him, and he started to sweat.
His heart was pounding.
He swore he had seen the doorknob turn. With a tiny groan, the door slowly opened. The doll once again blinked at him with haunting eyes. Frederick didn’t know what to do. He froze.
The doll came slowly hobbling over, but Frederick could see that the doll had a small, yellow sheet of paper attached to the red and white cloth dress. It was a note. Frederick cautiously picked up the porcelain doll, and read the scribbled letters on the page:
“Where is Della?”
Frederick’s heart skipped a beat. He couldn’t breathe. He felt dizzy, almost to the point of tumbling over onto the cement floor.
Della was Frederick’s mother.