Karen sighed. It had been six months since her Aunt Esther had died. She had been putting off the task of going through her house and her belongings. Her parents were too devastated to look through them and Esther's kids insisted that since they lived three states away that it wasn't any undertaking they were interested in taking up.
It wasn't that Karen didn't like her aunt, but she wasn't quite fond of her aunt's house. Karen had always been spooked by it. It had always given her the aura that something wasn't quite right there.
She had not visited the house since she was ten years old. After that, she insisted that Aunt Esther come visit her.
There was a certain sadness in her aunt's eyes, she recalled, at Karen's refusal to come. She hadn't meant to hurt her aunt. However, after the event that had happened when she was still a small girl she just couldn't stomach it.
A part of her of her was filled with regret at that. Perhaps, she should have shown more consideration for her aunt. After all, the house had never harmed her aunt, had it?
Karen remembered the day like it was just yesterday. It was like any other visit to Aunt Esther's full of tea, cakes, and large, empty rooms that Karen could fill with inventions from her own imagination. She liked to play pretend, too, in addition to all the arts and crafts she littered across the rooms.
Aunt Esther always made her feel as if she were special and could achieve anything. She always placed Karen's drawings on her fridge, praising them as masterpieces. She had been her number one cheerleader when she had been accepted into art school.
That day, however, was unusual as Karen observed a new painting hanging on the walls that her aunt never had before. It was a moody young man whose scowl and dark eyes disturbed her deeply.
Why would her aunt want something like that hanging in her house?
She ran off to grab her crayons and tried to draw a smile upon his face, but the crayon faded away as if it were nothing, and the man behind the painting grabbed her wrist.
"Don't do that," he said in a deep, dark voice.
"Let go."
"Only if you promise not to do that again," the painting hissed. "It's not nice to disobey your elders."
"I promise."
Karen frantically raced around the house, finding her aunt dusting something in her kitchen.
When she told her aunt, of course, Esther didn't believe her. She laughed, insisting that her niece had the biggest imagination of anyone she knew. However, Karen knew it wasn't just something in her head.
She grabbed a knife from the kitchen cabinet to convey her point.
"Where are you going with that?" her aunt asked.
Karen didn't answer. She just raced over to the painting. She was determined to make her aunt understand. "Look, Aunt Esther, it won't even leave a mark!"
"Karen, don't, that painting is very old!"
Swipe. Karen slashed the painting with the blade and the blade mark disappeared as if it had not happened. The painting, however, struck back with a dagger of his own catching Karen right above and below her left eye. It left a nasty scar.
Karen cried out, recalling the pain that seemed so intense that it would never fade. Blood had gone everywhere. It seemed as if it would never end, and she was certain that the painting smugly smirked at her.
Her aunt looked both horrified, but didn't seem to know what to do. It took her several minutes before she responded to Karen's cries.
Esther had looked at the painting in abject horror before locking it away, deciding it was too dangerous to have out and about. She had tried selling the painting, but no one was interested. The painting changed itself to make itself most unpleasing to anyone's eye every time she tried.
Karen wouldn't doubt the truth in that considering how it seemed to have a vicious personality of it's own and liked to get it's own way.
To Karen's knowledge, however, the painting was still somewhere in the bowels of this large house. Self-consciously, she put a hand to her face, reliving the moment that the painting had struck her with a pained grimace.
Of course, she was never able to tell her parents what really happened so she and Aunt Esther had constructed a story that she had clumsily fallen when playing a little too roughly in the house.
However, after that day, Karen refused to step foot in her aunt's house.
Now she'd be facing it all over again.
She was a woman now, though, not a child she told herself. She should be strong and face this house again. Karen coughed as soon as she entered her aunt's house. It smelled and looked as if it hadn't been dusted in quite some time.
Cobwebs hung from the ceiling and dust was heavinly engrained in the floor and even the walls were speckled and splattered with debris.
She cried out, imagining a spider as large as her face jumping out at her. But when she clawed frantically at her face, nothing was there.
What had gotten into her head just then?
She was going to freak herself out before she even got through any of her aunt's old things at this rate. It was a house, normal as any other, she reminded herself.
Karen wished that she had brought her boyfriend Cal with her, though, she knew he'd just laugh at her fears and tell her that she was being silly.
Shaking her head, Karen continued onward. She felt as if it would be a long evening of looking through things and she was already tired. She walked up to her aunt's bed, and fell to sleep within moments.
Her dreams were dark, disturbing, and made little sense. In fact, trying to remember them when she woke only gave her a headache so she stopped trying to piece them together. The sooner she got rid of that painting, the better.
It didn't take long for Karen to find said painting in Esther's attic. What was weird, however, was that the painting wasn't dusty in the least whereas everything in the room was.
She dragged the painting downstairs and threw it in the fire place. She used her lighter to set the painting on fire.
Her back was to the fire place, however, Karen let out a scream when someone or something grabbed her from behind. What in heaven's name was going on?
"I wouldn't exactly call me heavenly, but thank you for freeing me from that painting. It was exhausting living there without any companionship for years, but after I scared you, she wouldn't let me see anyone."
A male's voice? It wasn't Cal's...so who was it? Was it her cousins playing some cruel practical joke on her to get into her head or something? Just because they had a twisted sense of humor gave them no right. She was beginning to feel irritable until she spun around and saw that it was the man who she had cut at ten years old.
To her horror she saw that the crayon mark she had left on the painting was on his pants, somehow. How did crayon manage to stain them?!
"What are you talking about?" she blinked. None of this could possibly be real. Could it? She felt the panic that she had when she was a girl wash all over her again. She put a hand to her eye as she felt the blood pouring from it once more. What on earth? How had that happened? She didn't think to ask him because she didn't think he'd answer her, anyway.
"I told her that I was lonely, and she locked me in the attic because I scared little Karen and hurt her. So I made sure that I would let her live in misery of not being able to rid herself of my presence." He let out a vehement hiss. "I'm not someone you can lock in a painting for thousands of years and forget. But no one listened to me when I warned them of my dark magic."
"You're a wizard that has been locked in a painting?"
"Witch, actually. There's no masculine of witch. It's just what they are. But no, I'm a demon," he answered, shrugging. "Now that you've freed me, you must know, I vowed to marry the woman who freed me."
"What?"
"Is there a problem with that?" he demanded.
"Cal..."
"Who's Cal?"
"My-m-my bo-boyfriend," she stammered.
"Isn't that a pity? I've never liked whores." With that the man from the painting brandished the knife he had used to cut her years ago and slit her throat before she could do more than scream.
"Well, thank you for freeing me, Karen. Don't worry, I'll let your family know how mad you went when I tried to help you...they'll understand it was self-defense," he sneered. Smirking, the man that had been trapped in the painting walked free, and that made the world a very, very dangerous place.
Linda M. Crate's poetry, short stories, articles, and reviews have been published in a myriad of magazines both online and in print. She has five published chapbooks A Mermaid Crashing Into Dawn (Fowlpox Press - June 2013), Less Than A Man (The Camel Saloon - January 2014), If Tomorrow Never Comes (Scars Publications, August 2016), My Wings Were Made to Fly (Flutter Press, September 2017), and splintered with terror (Scars Publications, January 2018), and one micro-chapbook Heaven Instead (Origami Poems Project, May 2018). She is also the author of the novel Phoenix Tears (Czykmate Books, June 2018).
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