And here’s the original work that I promised you guys! A bit different than what I usually write, but I hope you enjoy it just the same. Please like or comment if you do 😉
In Elena’s opinion there were few better jobs than being a babysitter. Of course then it obviously wasn’t what she was going to do with the rest of her life. After graduation she was going to be a model. But for now, as she was about to finish her third year of high school, babysitting was an acceptable substitute.
For one thing she could already put the children to bed around eight, and the parents usually didn‘t come home until ten or eleven at night. Which meant two-three hours of being paid for watching television, eating whatever delicious thing she could find in the refrigerator and chatting with her friends over the phone. But her favourite part of babysitting, her absolute favourite, had to be the snooping.
Elena had always been a curious child. A curious child who had eventually grown up into an even more curious teenager. She loved knowing everything there was to knows about other people’s personal lives. She lived for gossip and dirty little secrets. And boy, could you find many dirty little secrets as a babysitter.
She went through medicine cabinets, jewel boxes, night stand tables. The juicier the better. And did she find some juicy stuff.
Elena knew, for one, that eighty-year-old Marcy, who had lived by herself since her husband passed away fifteen years earlier, had no less than three vibrators hidden away in her night stand, one bigger than the other. All black.
And Elena knew that cheery Suzy Campbell took antidepressants and had bottles of alcohol hidden around the house.
And Elena knew that the local pastor had quite the impressive collection of hard BDSM porn hidden underneath his bed in a box, which top layer consisted of bibles of all things.
Elena thrived on knowing. So when the mayor himself asked her to babysit his two little twin daughters, she was ecstatic. She was going to know the secrets of the mayor. The seemingly perfect mayor, who was well-known for his lack of skeletons in the closets. The widower, who raised two daughters on his own after his wife’s passing. The best mayor that Hallow Spring had ever had.
And Elena was about to find his every little secret. She wondered what they were going to be. Drugs perhaps. Using the town’s money on buying prostitutes. Homosexuality. There was so many options, and each one was better than the latter.
So when the day finally arrived, she could hardly wait until the girls were put to bed. Of course they weren’t easy sleepers either. It took no less than four goodnight stories before they finally closed their eyes. Elena waited another half an hour after that before she felt secure that they weren’t going to wake up.
Then the hunt began.
She started out with the night stand, which seemed to hold the most promise, but to her disappointment there was nothing to be found there except a book, a pair of reading glasses, some tissue and an edition of playboy. Boring really.
After that she went through his bedroom closets. Which consisted of clothes. Row after row of pressed suits in boring, dark colours. There wasn’t so much as a pink shirt. How disappointing.
There was no alcohol anywhere in the house unless you counted a couple of bottles of red wine, clearly meant for company.
The only pills she could find anywhere in the house were aspirins. It wasn’t even extra-strength. It was without a doubt the most boring house Elena had ever searched through. When the clock struck eleven she was ready to give up. The mayor had told her that he’d come home around midnight, and it appeared that she had looked everywhere. It was disappointing.
And that’s when she saw it. A slight line in the ceiling, barely visible to the human eye. But Elena saw it nonetheless. A line. The kind of line you got when part of the ceiling could open up. There was a loft. There was still hope.
The excitement made her heart beat wildly as she got a chair over and got up on it. It hurt as she put her nails into the line and pulled, but it was worth it. It was as if she was five again and about to open the biggest of her Christmas presents. The anticipation of what hid on the other side was almost too much.
She just barely got out of the way as it opened up and a ladder fell down. With a wicked smile, she stopped for only a second to hear if any of the girls had awoken by the noise, before making her way up. She wondered what she would find up there. For each step up she came up with a new possibility. Hopefully it wouldn’t just be boxes with clothes or something equally boring.
The loft was dark, and she could see nothing except for some dark shapes. They reminded her of when her brother hung up his diving suit. With both hands reached out, she searched blindly until she found the light switch. It was with a hopeful glint in the eye that she turned the light on.
And then she screamed.
What had reminded her of her brother’s diving suit were bodies. Bloody, hardly recognizable as human, and hung up on large hooks from the ceiling. A dozen dead eyes stared back at Elena’s terrified face as she kept on screaming. Slowly her voice gave out and she could only stare at the corpses in horror. Dark spots danced before her eyes, and her throat felt constricted and pinched. She couldn’t breathe, and broken sobs shook her entire body.
Six bodies hang before her, four men and two women. One man’s intestines hang out of his gutted up stomach, ending up in a bloody pile on the flour. One woman’s eyes were gouged out, and the other woman appeared to have been whipped to death. Elena couldn’t even begin to fathom how painful their deaths must have been.
The walls and floors were covered in carpets, darkened by blood. Their faces were still frozen in the horrified, tortured expressions they must have had when they died.
This wasn‘t drugs, or alcohol, or porn. This was a mad man’s torture chamber. The lair of a serial killer.
A serial killer who was currently on his way home. A serial killer who would kill Elena if he knew what she’d seen. In a way that undoubtedly would be painful, slow and drawn-out.
She stumbled down the stairs, falling the last several steps. She had to get away from here.
Then a voice sounded behind her.
“Why did you scream?”
Elena spun around, her scream stuck in her throat. Little Annabelle was up, obviously awoken by her earlier scream.
“I saw a spider,” Elena told her, begging that Annabelle couldn’t see anything of what was in the attic.
Annabelle merely nodded. Screaming over a spider seems perfectly reasonable when you’re five.
Elena knelt down next to her.
“Go back to bed, sweetie,” she told her. “I’ve already killed the spider.”
“Will you come read us another story?”
“Sure,” Elena said, ready to promise anything if only Annabelle would leave. She would go to the police tomorrow. Tomorrow everything would solve itself out. But today was about not letting the mayor find out that she was on to his secret. And curse the fact that the battery on her phone was dead.
Annabelle left willingly enough, and Elena had enough sense to climb up the ladder one more time, pointedly not looking at the bodies as the turned the light off. The ladder was a hell to close again though. She struggled with it for ten minutes, every little sound appearing to be the footsteps of the mad man, ready for murder.
Finally it was closed, and every evidence of her earlier expedition was gone. She was safe.
With a wildly beating heart she went her way downstairs, barely keeping her composure when she found that the mayor had come home. He was standing in the foyer, casually taking off his overcoat. He smiled as he saw her.
”Ah! Elena! I hope the little ones weren’t too much trouble?”
“Not at all,” she assured him, unable to see anything but corpses hanging from the ceiling.
The mayor smiled pleasantly. “I suppose you’re in a hurry to get home? Your parents are probably waiting up.”
“Yes,” she said, relieved beyond words that the nightmare was over. “I’ll just be leaving then.” Hurriedly she put on her sneakers, trying her hardest not to look like she was running away. She even did her best to answer his pleasant smile.
However even her feeble attempt of a smile disappeared when he held her jacket out towards her. He wanted to put it on her.
Taking a deep breath, she forced herself to turn her back towards him. She couldn’t let him know. Slowly he helped her into her jacket, but rather than taking a step back, his hands lingered on her shoulders. How easy for him to just follow the curve to her slender neck and squeeze. She would be dead within minutes.
Unable to breathe, she felt his hands slowly make their way upwards. One of his hands entwined itself into her ponytail, while the other slowly caressed her pulse.
“You know,” he said slowly, whispered it into her ears as if they were lovers. “You have a bit of blood on you. Right here.” His thumb pressed a bit harder against her pulse. “It’s… quite a fetching sight indeed. But nowhere near as beautiful as you would look completely drenched in it.”
A sob broke its way through her throat. She should scream. She should run, but she found herself unable to move.
Slowly, as if he was savouring the moment, he leaned forward. She could feel his heavy breath on her skin as his hands tightened their grip on her. His tongue flicked out and licked up a drop of sweat.
“Let’s have fun,” he whispered into her ear.
Her scream was only heard by two small girls, who willingly believed their father when he told them it had just been the television.
mariasjostrand 