Flash Fiction February - Cardboard Fears
This flashfic is inspired by a prompt posted on 19h February 2022 by the Writer’s Digest to “play with a horror trope”. This story is just under 700 words. Enjoy!
Georgia rubbed her thumb over the smooth, silver surface around the camera’s monitor. The camera itself whirred and clicked, but for a while, she doubted the old thing would turn on.
When she found it in the attic, she felt drawn to it, like a shiny coin in a sea of grey concrete. And when she picked it up, she felt even more mystified.
It didn’t help, of course, that the real estate agent had mentioned the deaths of the previous owners were still considered “undetermined”. Georgia didn’t sit well with mysteries, so from the second she set foot in the old Tudor house, she started looking for clues, as if the house itself could tell her why a fit, young couple would die suddenly in the night.
And now she held a digital camera in her hands, the dust of the attic sawing in and out of her lungs.
Who had they been? Had they had a happy life together? Were things troubled? Turbulent? Or plain sailing and dull?
The camera finally blinked to life and a smiling face flashed up at her. The dim light of the screen reflected a shallow image of her own face over the picture, a compilation of a young married woman and a young entrepreneur. She smiled too, bringing on an even greater sense of glorious rapport.
She flicked through the camera roll, unravelling a life filled with camera smiles and chaste kisses and belly-bumps and baby shopping. Sometimes Georgia laughed as if remembering the photos as her own memories, as a moment she shared with these chronically happy people.
But then, she noticed it.
In fact, she noticed it several times and dismissed it almost as often.
She paged back, comparing every photo, particularly those taken in the living room with each other. With two fingers, she enlarged the image, zooming in on a dark spot in the background. She frowned into the dim of the attic, breath catching when she saw the strange, elongated shadow looming under the stairs.
She paged to the next photo, zoomed in, and there is was again, its silhouette slightly turned, slightly adjusted from the picture before.
As if it had moved.
Georgia hardly breathed, hardly moved. And even as fear started to seep into her joints and seal her inside her own skin, her hands kept moving from photo to photo. There was even a laughter filled video with bright candle lights and a white birthday cake and rowdy extended family, and still it stood in the background, the red light making it seem taller, lankier, more bent out of shape. The happy couple's cheers echoing around the attic, disturbing the shadows in the rafters and the demons behind the cardboard storage boxes.
A chill ran down Georgia’s spine.
She became increasingly aware of just how alone she was, in her big, empty Tudor house.
It took a long time before her limbs became functional again, but when they did, she put down the camera and drew in a deep breath. After a brief and panicked scour around the attic, she took up a rusty golf club.
“Alright, I’ll go and see it for myself.”
But she didn’t move for several more minutes.
When she finally made it down the stairs, when she finally managed to turn her body 90 degrees to face the cupboard door and reach for the brass knob, her fingers started to turn white around the golf club, sweat pooling on the small of her back.
“Come on Georgy,” she said, heaving in an unhappy breath, “You’ve got this.”
Slowly, she turned the doorknob, head lowering as she cringed. Her teeth ground painfully together.
The lock clicked free, and she swung open the door. Crying out her best battle cry, she drove her golf stick into the figure. Again and again. Eyes squeezing shut as she shrieked, in terror and in determination. It suffered blow after blow, screeching with a sound she barely comprehended as the golf club collided once or twice with the wall, sending terrible vibrations through her hands.
Eventually, when she realised she hadn’t in fact died horribly, and whatever it was had made no attempt to retaliate, she opened one eye and peered at the shadowy creature that had murdered her predecessors and stolen their hard earned happiness.
An extremely mangled celebrity cardboard cut-out winked up at her, charming and pleasant all despite.
Georgia growled out a self-reprimanding groan. “It’s just Andrew Garfield,” she whispered, banging her head against the cupboard door.
19/02/2022To Be Proofread . . .