MicroHorror

The house on Roanoke Circle was incredibly well maintained for having been abandoned for several months. The grass was neatly trimmed, the roses were pruned and healthy, and the walkways were swept clean of fallen leaves. Ted decided to find out which of the neighbors was taking care of the yard and send them a gift basket. It was much easier to sell a house that didn’t look like the derelict wrecks he was used to abandoned properties being.

A quick inspection of the interior turned up several odd but generally pleasing things. The previous owners had left all their furniture, decor, and major appliances. This might have been a problem except that it was nice stuff, and the entire house was apparently receiving regular cleaning by someone. The cleanliness and furnishings almost felt staged, like he was in a model home. Also of note was that the house astonishingly still had electricity. The televisions worked and the refrigerator was running, but none of the lights worked.

There was also a skinny black cat, possibly left by the vanished original owners. It had appeared in the living room shortly after he’d come in. It never came close to him, simply stayed back in the shadows and followed him from room to room, its bright yellow eyes never leaving him. He could see why it had been left behind; the thing was eerie.

The last stop on his inspection of the house was the garage. I wouldn’t. Ted whipped around search for the source of the voice he thought he’d heard. There was only the cat. He turned back and opened the door to the garage.

There was a car. Ted’s mind reeled; the sense of something being off that he’d had since he arrived assaulted him almost like nausea. There shouldn’t have been a car. The owners hadn’t been seen in months. Then he saw the two piles of bones in the corner. Sorted, organized, and neatly stacked with the skulls on top. They were also terrifyingly clean, just like everything else.

I tried to warn you. Ted turned back toward the living room. The cat was surrounded by dozens more sets of lambent yellow eyes. “Cat” wasn’t the proper word for it either; its shape was only vaguely cat-like and only one of its eyes had a cat’s slit pupil–the other had the wide rectangular pupil of a goat. What he’d originally taken for fur was a side effect of the creature having no defined outline–it simply faded out around the edges. None of the other things, for that was the only word for the miscellaneous horrors, were as big as the cat. Besides being asymmetrical shadows with mismatched yellow eyes, they had no common form.

This is our house now. The cat-thing projected its words into his mind as it reared up on its hind legs. Four more eyes were set haphazardly across its torso. They’d started to go yellow, and the pupil of one of them had started to shift like a broken egg yolk, but you could tell that they were human eyes. The missing homeowner’s eyes. Ted’s mind filled with the grisly, hollow laughter of the other assembled apparitions. The nauseous feeling in his stomach wrenched violently, and Ted vomited. Suddenly, the laughter stopped, and every horrible eye was on the mess on the carpet. Ted took the opportunity and fled the house.

Ted Safford quit his job as a realtor shortly after that, and was never seen more than a few feet from an electric light until his disappearance during a power failure two years later. The second realtor that was sent to inspect the house never returned. 1408 Roanoke Circle was never sold, and those that live near it never seem to question why the “abandoned” home is so well kept up, though there seems to be a universal fear of black cats in the area.