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Today’s Prompt:
You’ve just
moved to a new house and are trying to fix it up. In the process of painting,
you find an odd crack in the wall. As you explore further, you find out it’s a
secret passageway—and you have no idea where it leads. You decide to grab a
flashlight and go exploring.
Word Count: 1,253
I moved into Outlaw’s Hideout precisely six moths
ago. ‘This house is meant for you. I can
feel it.’ My agent muttered as he gave me a tour of that place. I can’t tell
you I didn’t feel a bonding when I stepped
inside that apartment.
“What happened here?”
“What do you mean what
happened here?” the guy who put the house on the market asked.
He knew. I could smell the
truth on him. The bastard knew and pretended just sell me that haunted piece of
architecture.
“There is a potent trace of mystery in this environment.
This room vibrates with electric potential; the electrons in the air are
battering each other and giving off peculiar warmth. Don’t you feel it?”
The guy swallowed spit. I think
he didn’t want to own up to the palpable and he didn’t want to deny it with a
flat out lie. I sort of had him pinned in a tight spot.
“Well, this place has been known to be capable to
spur uncanny activities.”
“‘Uncanny
activities,’ does the phrase X-Files
jog your memory?”
He deferred.
“Thing is, you deserve this striking beauty, don’t
ever let doubt alter your initial course of action. I don’t dig the shit and I
don’t wanna go on and tell you lies but this house has got a history and it’s none of your business
unless you make it.”
After we finalized the deal, I
came around some fine evening to clean out Outlaw’s
Hideout and my neighbors—practically the whole street, if I gotta be frank
with you—were out watching me, with awe pasted on their faces, like i was a
rabbit hopping out of a hat. A few of them mustered up the courage to say ‘Hi’ to the guy who inherited a lunatic’s memory
and I Hi’d them back. That was my first day at Outlaw’s Hideout.
Around the back of the house was a shed for storing
tools intended for basic house maintenance. I found some old but still serviceable
paintbrushes in there. My first day alone in the house was uneventful. The
electricity I had felt on my first visit was poignant in the air. I could feel
the vibrations but besides that nothing peculiar
turned up. One of my neighbors finally got over his cold feet and came over
to the house on the third day I was out there. I was in one of the rooms
painting.
“Hello, there.”
I turned around and there he
was looking dressed up for manual labor in his pink polo shirt and jeans
shorts.
“Hello, buddy. How do you do?”
“The name’s Effiong (/eff young/). You the new guy,
right?”
It was more a statement than
question.
“Yeah, I’m Udoh (/hoo dor/) been nosing around a
little trying to create some sanity out of this mess, I gatto admit, shit is
more than I can manage alone.”
“Want me to come give you a hand?”
“Sure, I could use an extra hand. If it don’t bother
you, why not?”
“What do I gatto do?”
There’s the guy who let me in
on a little secret about my house.
The first man who lived in Outlaw’s Hideout was military—a retired
soldier—one of the first batch of soldiers sent in on peacekeeping mission
during the first Liberian civil war. “He was a nice guy, the first few years he
spent here,” Effiong said. “He raised this structure from the dust. I think his
family sold it off after his demise. Akam (/arkham/) used to have a beautiful
sense of humor that was before his wartime memories caught up with him. It’s
like he never got over the war.”
“What ever happened? How did he stop being nice?”
“First thing we discovered was the fact Akam spent
more and more time alone inside his house; he severed ties with the outside
world. He didn’t have a wife. I suppose she divorced him shortly after he
returned from serving in Liberia. And I rarely saw anyone visit at his place.
But when he first arrived here, he used to come by the house and we would talk.
It was such fun cause he was a loving man.
“Something happened to Akam that most of us—his
neighbors—have come to believe can be traced to this building, Outlaw’s Hideout. We cannot verify our assumptions
but we feel we don’t have to. The last days of Akam’s life is all the proof we
need. His entire life bogged down the day he took that kid out while screaming
his head off in Liberian tongue, finishing him off by pumping hot lead into his
head.
“The kid belonged to the Jacobson’s, they moved out
of the hood a few weeks after the incident. The stain nevertheless is pasted on
the air of this town like a stamp.”
That was my first taste of the Hideout’s peculiarity. My time would
come to have a scuffle with the source of Akam’s psychosis. And I dreaded it
with every atom in my being.
I was painting over the east
wall of the guest bedroom when I chanced a crack in the wall. When I jimmied it,
I discovered it pried open a bigger fissure, which eventually turned out to be
a secret passageway wide enough to allow a man. I had my doubts but I knew that
sooner or later, the urge was going to be irresistible and I would take a walk
down that mystery corridor behind the wall.
When the day came around, I
grabbed a flashlight and set off down the path that spelled out my doom. I
wanted to know the experience that changed the soldier called Akam.
The tunnel led to a dark, damp
and extremely creepy room. It was Akam’s memory room. Photographs—souvenirs from
Liberia—of corpses in grotesque poses. Farther down the room, in a corner where
the sun will never shine, a rack packed full with weapons, firearms and rifles of
varied make hung down a wall. The object that transformed me into the thing I am,
stood atop a shelf layered with dust; a shotgun shell. The slug displayed
markings etched into its shell. Each marking I assumed, represented death.
Probably, the total count of people this unfortunate soldier offed in field of
battle. On the other hand, it might signify innocent civilians caught in the crossfire.
Akam definitely, never forgot.
He lived with the pangs of memory his entire life. When I touched the bullet,
strips of film, horrendous images, flashed before my eyes. I stood inside a
war-torn zone, watching slugs whizz by and tear up flesh, human flesh. Akam had
learned about the disease called war the hard way and it had turn him against himself;
corrupted his own sense of humanity.
When I let go of the shell, I
knew I had inherited Akam’s memory; his curse had been turned over to me.
This is what I saw, never-ending
devastation. Women, girls, boys, men, pregnant mothers, babies ripped out of
their mama’s womb—death that stretched on without the promise of exit. I felt right there pulling the trigger on these
vulnerable creatures. I saw familiar faces distorted in terror; saw the ammo on
the rack by the wall in my hands; saw me gunning down people.
It wasn’t just a feeling, I’m
almost sure of it. I must have killed all those people or I would not be
writing this from behind the bars of a jail cell.
Eneh
Akpan
June 27, 2013
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