Part I - Part II - Part III

Have you ever squandered an opportunity to prevent something terrible from happening to somebody?

Maybe you’ve been caught in a time-loop, too. I suppose you might not yet realise. You could reset tomorrow. It could happen on New Year’s Eve, 2034. Who knows?

Over the festive period, I couldn’t stop thinking about New Year’s Eve, 1999. I remembered being terrified of those bullies, just like the little girl. If I had been courageous enough to intervene, I wouldn’t have faced the karmic retribution of a time-loop.

I am still in I-3, and, since my previous post, I was sure to make note of the internet stranger’s contact details, lest the Glassy-Eyed Man should, once again, reduce my new friend to a smouldering carcass.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Harold Langley,” The man answered.

Harold still wouldn’t tell me how he knew about such corrupted things as Eleven Shrines and spiritual forces. He told me that I already had everything I needed. I knew to go back to the Hawthorne house between 11pm and midnight on New Year’s Eve. Any New Year’s Eve would do, in fact.

“Well, I could simply wait to be reset to 1999. Then, I could stop the boys from ever locking Pippa in the house,” I suggested.

Harold shook his head. “Even if you were to return to the past and drag the children miles away from the Hawthorne house, the Shrine would still entrap them at 11pm on that fateful New Year’s Eve, 1999. Remember, they’re already there. The house exists outside of time. Much like your own loop, no matter where they might travel, their bodies would still reset to that house at 11pm. They can only be freed from within the Eleven Shrine.”

“Sending me back to 1999 is a convoluted way of sending a message,” I grumbled.

“She doesn’t know what she’s doing, Jake,” Harold gently assured me. “Pippa is calling for help from an ungodly realm, and that has incurred an abnormality in time.”

After a long discussion, I could no longer escape the fact that Harold knew far more about this topic than me. I’d spent millennia searching for an answer, and I finally had one.

I just couldn’t accept it.

In truth, I simply didn’t want to go anywhere near the Hawthorne house. It imbued me with unspeakable thoughts. Every time I walked past it, I felt evilness surge through me. And I know that every child in my neighbourhood felt the same way. The Hawthornes had died decades before our time, but we knew that something was deeply wrong with the building they’d left behind. The house felt like a living, unfeeling thing. It was crooked. Out-of-place. Ill-intentioned.

New Year’s Eve, 2022. The Hawthorne house was exactly as I remembered it, though the neighbourhood was certainly much livelier. There were no ‘Missing’ posters, and the roads were littered with revellers, preparing for the new year that I had spent ceaseless centuries attempting to reach.

10:41pm.

Nineteen minutes until I would reset, unless the Glassy-Eyed man finds and ends me. If Harold were correct, my only salvation would be to enter the Hawthorne house. At 11 o’clock in the evening, the Shrine would open.

There’s something much more frightening about seeing a haunted house in the real world. I have never minded eerie buildings in photographs or films, but the Hawthorne house is the most terrifying place I have ever visited.

I gently walked from the moss-covered gate to the fatigued front door, which was painted a long-faded blue. In the front yard, there was an unlabelled stone cross, submerged in overgrown, withered grass blades. There were three storeys to the neglected building. Dark chasms lay behind the glassy panes, and the attic had a misted oval window. I felt a piercing pang of horror in my chest at the sight of a black shape moving behind the glass.

Other than a ‘Private Property’ sign on the front gate, there was nothing to ward away intruders. There was no barricade across the rotting front door, and it was unlocked, so it creakily inched open with a light push. Perhaps the mere sight of the horrid place was enough to deter most people from trespassing. I wished that I could have the same luxury.

As I entered the Hawthorne house, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and lit the dismal place with my torch, revealing a hallway that led onto a ginormous staircase. There was an open doorway on the left-hand side of the hallway, and it led onto the lounge. I strolled into the dusty, asbestos-riddled death-trap. In the living area, there was a sofa which had been partially-devoured by vermin, but I collapsed onto it and waited.

11pm.

My heart stopped. I wasn’t fading away. I was still in the present. No. This isn’t the present, I reminded myself. The Hawthorne house exists outside of time. Nevertheless, my phone’s lock screen displayed 23:00, which was good enough for me. I wasn’t resetting. That was the important thing. Before I could wrap my head around that, however, I noticed something.

The walls were groaning.

Chest undulating in terror, I leapt to my feet. The whining foundations of the house seemed to lament my presence. I took a look at the world outside of the mucky lounge windows. My dimly-lit neighbourhood was rapidly vanishing from view. Within seconds, everything beyond the exterior of the house was black. The bridge to the physical realm was gone.

Though time was a foreign concept in that shrine to evil, I still felt that it shouldn’t be wasted. I had no idea what happened to the children, and I had no idea what was about to happen to me. I needed to find them. Then, I could focus on finding a way to re-open the bridge and escape.

“I don’t know how to exit an Eleven Shrine,” Harold had quietly admitted to me. “Time works differently in there. I think it only opens a bridge to our world when it wants to do so. So, I suppose you have to give it something that it wants more than Pippa and those boys.”

Those words rung in my head. I found myself meandering in the living room of that lost house. There was a large frame above the fireplace. Using my phone light, I studied the unnerving canvas that loomed above me. It was a painting of the Hawthorne house in its bygone glory days. I did not recognise the three people standing in front of the house, but I assumed it had to be the Hawthorne family. The mother and father were prim-and-proper. They must have lived in the 1940s, judging by their fashion, but I wasn’t really looking at them. I was looking at their boy.

He was a skeletal thing. His flesh seemed to cling tightly to the outline of his skull. The indignant expression on his face was communicated through joyless eyes and thin lips. He had a complexion that was almost wholly white. And that, strangely, gave the jubilant expressions on his parents’ faces a sinister undertone. Why were they so happy? Their son appeared half-dead. Needless to say, the painting absolutely horrified me, but everything in that house horrified me.

The swirling, nightmarish colours of the artwork felt like a fever dream. In the pristine oval window at the top of the painted house, there was movement. The paint was actually moving. Unlike the movement I’d seen in the real-life oval window, these painted shapes were crystal-clear. Pippa and the three bullies. Their mouths were agape, much like the man in The Scream, and they were huddling together, ferociously banging their tiny fists on the window.

As if that weren’t horrifying enough, there was more movement in the picture.

The painted mother turned around and started strolling along the path, heading towards the house. The son was decaying before my very eyes. His painted form seemed to be crumbling. Yet, the father smiled, and the mother continued walking towards the house.

She reached the front door.

Thumping followed.

And I do not simply mean that I saw the painted mother thump the painted door. There was a thumping sound on the real-life door, which was in the hallway behind me. A bloodcurdling screech followed. It was a woman, I suppose, but her voice no longer sounded human. There was a guttural, distorted quality to it.

“DON’T TAKE MY CHILD FROM ME!”

I had no desire to hang around and find out what she meant. I sprinted from the living room to the hallway, praying the front door would hold, and I hauled my body up the rotting stairs, two at a time. Plunging into the darkness, I prepared for the door to fly from its hinges.

The thing for which I did not prepare was to suddenly find myself standing on a well-lit, refurbished landing. The Hawthorne house had morphed into a lavish home. From the top of the staircase, I turned to face the downstairs hallway. The banging on the front door had ceased, and it opened to reveal the mother. She was an ordinary person, not a frightening apparition. I realised I had wandered through a portal in time. I would say my initial guess had been accurate. It seemed to be a snapshot of the 1940s.

“Jonathan, tell Bert that dinner will be ready in half an hour,” The mother shouted.

“He’s not in here, Sarah,” Jonathan replied.

The father’s ghost startled me, though the couple seemed much jollier in this memory. He strolled straight through my body and walked down the stairs.

“Well, I told the boy that he could only play until I finish taking down the laundry,” Sarah huffed.

“He was with the Dalton boys across the road,” Jonathan said, now striding across the downstairs hallway. “I shall fetch him.”

The ghosts of the parents evaporated, and the house transported to a different moment in time. There was crying from a room farther down the landing. As I walked towards it, I noticed more frames on the walls. They were less macabre than the portrait I’d seen in the living room. There were three paintings of the individual Hawthorne family members.

Seeing an ajar door on the left side of the landing, I peered through the slight opening. The sobbing mother was sitting at her dressing table, which faced away from the doorway. I could only see the back of her body. The father was holding her shoulders and futilely striving to console her.

“I cannot live without him, Jonathan,” She wailed. “A mother cannot live without her baby!”

“You shan’t have to do that,” Jonathan promised. “I have found a way to return his soul to us. Francis acquired some books. There are rituals that can help, but they come with a price, so-“

“- Any price,” Sarah coldly interrupted.

“And what of the boys who murdered our child?” Jonathan asked.

“Death would be too merciful,” She said.

“I agree. From my readings, I have learned ways in which we could make them suffer. If we could transform this house into unhallowed ground, we could ensnare their souls and eternally trap them here. They would become part of the building’s woodwork. We would have to build an Eleven Shrine on the eve of the New Year. There might be consequences for others who step foot on this land, but it-”

“- Do it,” Sarah icily whispered.

The world washed away again. I saw brief flashes of the parents in their bedroom. They were drawing bloody patterns on the walls. I heard sourceless screams. Cries of anguish from who I only assume must have been the children who murdered Bert.

The jigsaw pieces were sliding together. The souls of Bert’s killers were embedded in the Hawthorne house. Sarah and Jonathan had succeeded, but had they also managed to resurrect their child? I shuddered, remembering the ghastly painting of a withering Bert in the living room. Something told me that a happily-ever-after hadn’t been on the cards for the fractured family.

The lights extinguished. The fresh decor aged in seconds, returning the Hawthorne house to the present. Well, I suppose I wasn’t really experiencing any sort of time period.

Everything faded away, except for one thing.

One person.

The mother.

She was still sitting at her dressing table, facing away from the doorway. Her vanity mirror was cracked and coated in filth. I couldn’t see her reflection. Her clothes were dusty and tattered. Her once-beautiful blonde hair was withered, and she was stroking it with a hairbrush. Her strokes were so vicious that clumps of hair were ripping from her head. No fucking way. I’m not going in there.

I attempted to cautiously back away from the door, but floorboards betrayed me. They moaned beneath my weight. Fuck.

The hair-brushing abruptly stopped.

The old, rickety vanity stool squeaked as the mother adjusted herself. I expected her to twist her entire body around to face me, but she didn’t. Instead, she simply twisted her head.

She twisted beyond breaking point.

She twisted her head one-hundred-and-eighty degrees.

What was even ghastlier, however, was the face which gazed upon me. It was decomposing. Maggots swam through the cavities in the mother’s flesh. Her lipless mouth opened, revealing rotten teeth. She did not smile as she had in the painting.

“WHERE IS MY SON?” Her half-human voice cried.

To protect itself, my haunted brain had detached from reality. So, when the bedroom door slammed shut, I was relieved and petrified in equal measure. I was relieved to be free of the mother’s ghoulish gaze, but I was petrified of what I would face next.

Remembering why I had come to the Hawthorne house, I resolved to keep searching for Pippa and the boys. I didn’t know what kind of demonic spectre I’d just seen in the bedroom, and I didn’t want to know.

Standing in the upstairs hallway, desperately trying to catch my breath, I became aware of a squelching sound. I cast my phone torch onto the wall behind me. A black liquid of unknown composition had scrawled three direful words:

FATHER IS HOME.

Moving my torch onto the paintings, I saw Bert and Sarah in their portraits. The third painting, on the other hand, was merely a blank canvas. Jonathan had left his portrait. I heard the front door open and slam shut. Loud footsteps moved with immense speed and purpose, clunking up the stairs.

Crying in utterly primal fear, I ran towards the far end of the landing. I opened the final door on the left, hearing floorboards groan beneath the weight of some hulking, monstrous entity. For a split second, before I stepped through the open doorway, I caught a glimpse of something in the glow of my phone light.

The father was far taller and wider than he had appeared in the flashbacks. His gargantuan, ghostly form could barely squeeze through the upstairs corridor. His decomposing face was much like that of his wife, but his eyes were bloody spheres in his sockets.

I slammed the door behind me and locked it. There was a cacophony of fist-pounding on the door. The father said nothing. His fury spoke far louder than words. I found myself in a second bedroom. Bert’s bedroom. Heart still not slowing, the frights did not cease.

“Jake,” A disembodied girl’s voice hissed.

I froze.

“It’s Pippa,” She continued. “We’re in the hideaway. We’ve been here for months.”

“Where’s the hideaway?” I asked.

The banging on the bedroom door finally quietened. Pippa whispered again.

“Behind the wardrobe,” She said. “Hurry! I think they heard me…”

I found the wardrobe on the left-hand wall and started to push it to the side. It was surprisingly light. Once it was a few feet to the right, a small opening was revealed in the wall behind it. I couldn’t see anything inside the darkened doorway, but I had to press forwards.

I used my phone to light the way, and I found myself ascending a small set of stairs. Of course. The attic with the oval window. I tentatively clambered up the staircase, keeping my eyes and ears keenly peeled for anything untoward. When I reached the top, I stretched my hand towards the door handle before me.

Creaking.

An icy breath skirted across my left ear. Something was standing on the step behind me.

“They murdered him,” A voice groaned.

I didn’t need to turn my head. I knew it was the mother. Quivering, I lightly pressed the standby button to switch off the screen. On the dark, glassy surface of my phone, I saw the walking corpse of the half-decayed mother standing just behind me. Her gaunt face was illuminated by my torch light.

I screamed in terror, but I was quickly silenced by a gnarled, bony hand that clasped over my mouth. That only made me scream louder.

I shook the creature off me, whirled around, and she was gone. Too frightened to spend another minute in this house of nightmares, I proceeded to repeatedly slam my shoulder into the attic door.

Finally, it gave way.

I cast the phone light into the attic, expecting to be met with emptiness, but I turned to the right to find myself looking upon four malnourished children, who were shivering beneath the oval window. The world outside remained an endless void, but that was besides the point. I’d done it. I’d found the girl who had been trapping me in the loop for thousands of years. It hadn’t been a fruitless endeavour.

The children were crying incessantly.

“I’m so sorry,” Pippa said. “I was just so scared. Can you help us to leave this place?”

“We didn’t mean to do it,” One of the boys whimpered.

“The voices made us lock her in here,” Another boy added.

The third boy simply nodded, seemingly too traumatised to speak.

“Okay,” I eventually managed to say. “Do any of you know something that could help us to escape?”

Their eyes widened.

“You don’t… know how to free us?” One of the boys shakily asked.

I didn’t respond. My mind was whirring. I thought about everything Harold had told me. Then, I realised I didn’t need his help. I needed the help of the people who had created the Shrine.

“Sarah!” I screamed. “Jonathan!”

“What are you doing?” Pippa asked, horrified. “We need to get away from them!”

Before I could reply, the wall at the far end of the attic started to ripple. Like swimmers coming to the surface of a pool, the dreadful mother and father seeped through the torn wallpaper. The children screeched, but I stood my ground, keeping the torch light on the horrible abominations that were striding towards us.

“Is your son buried in the front garden?” I asked.

No reply. The emotionless demons looked upon me with their awful eyes.

“If you create a bridge back to the real world, I could return him to you,” I said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

The mother started to walk towards me, and I trembled in immobilising terror.

“He should be here with us,” She wheezed.

“Open the bridge,” I repeated. “You can’t leave the house, can you? I can return his bones to you. I can give you peace. But you must return all of us to our rightful places on our rightful timelines.”

The ghouls stared for a long time. The only sound in that haunted room was the blubbering of the four children who were hiding behind me. I received my answer in the form of light pouring into the room. Not light from my phone. Light from the oval window.

I and the children turned to face the real world. Fireworks filled the sky. As we watched, with teary eyes, the children dissipated. The outside world, in turn, rapidly changed. The sun rose and set thousands of times in the matter of seconds. Years were passing.

When the earth eventually slowed, I knew it was 2022 again.

“Return our son,” The father wheezed.

When I turned to face them, the terrifying entities were gone. I sprinted down the stairs from the attic, bounded across Bert’s bedroom, flung my panicked body along the hallway, and started to sprint down the main staircase. Gliding across the hallway towards the open door, I prepared to taste freedom.

Scorching agony.

Horrified, I found myself engulfed in darkness, before being thrown onto the floor of the hallway. I bellowed in pain, feeling a searing sensation across my skin.

“No…” I whined in horror.

The Glassy-Eyed Man.

He was standing on the front porch, obstructing what seemed to be the only exit from this house of hellish tricks. He was little more than a shadow, filling the doorway with his black form and white pinpricks.

“I fixed it,” I yelled. “The loop is over!”

No response from the inhuman entity. No movement. I checked the time on my phone. 11:02pm.

“It’s after 11 o’clock, and I’ve not reset!” I explained, exasperatedly. “THE LOOP IS OVER!”

After an eternal moment, the shadow faded into the blackness. The glassy pinpricks merged with the night sky, joining a canopy of twinkling stars. My strained heart finally loosened. Gingerly, I attempted to leave the house. I took a step onto the porch.

Nothing stopped me.

I hurried into the front yard and tore at the grass with my bare hands. Dirt under my half-broken nails, I quickly dug my way to the cluster of bones that the Hawthorne parents had buried. Why did they not keep the bones in the house? Did they ever manage to resurrect their son? Why were their souls trapped in the Eleven Shrine with their son’s murderers?

So many unanswered questions.

I delicately and respectfully placed the pile of bones inside the main hallway, quickly exiting the Hawthorne house. As I tiptoed backwards, keeping my eye on the open front door, I saw a bony hand stretch across the wooden floor and drag Bert’s remnants out of view.

As I passed through the gate, the door to the Hawthorne house swung shut. That was fifteen minutes ago, and I hope, beyond all hope, to never re-open that terrible chapter of my life.

At this very moment, I find myself sitting on the curb, typing my update, and staring vacantly at swarms of party-goers. They’re blissfully unaware of the horrors lurking in the abhorrent building just behind me.

11:22pm.

I’ve never lived beyond 11pm on December 31st, 2022. That must be a promising sign. I’m free, surely? At 11pm, I didn’t wake up in 1999. Pippa must have released me, but has the Hawthorne house released me? Has the Glassy-Eyed Man released me?

I suppose I’ll never have a definite answer. I’ll always wince in terror at the sight of cavernous crevices. I’ll always look for those white eyes. I cannot conquer the unknown, but that’s not my battle. After thousands of torturous years, I would simply settle for seeing January 1st, 2023.

At midnight, let’s hope I manage to post a comment.