Page 6 of Cursed by Death

The home phone in the kitchen started ringing and I knew it was the security company calling to ask if I was okay or if I needed assistance. I rolled my eyes, I wouldn’t have hit the damn button if I didn’t need the help.

I let the phone ring as I headed towards the basement and my safe room. With Thomas’s help I had it built in the house not long after I had moved in. It was the first time I had spent a shit load of money on something that the old man had wholeheartedly agreed on.

I placed my palm against the scanner that unlocked the door to the basement. There was a twelve digit numerical code thatunlocked the door and a different one that unlocked the front door as well.

The only two people who had the codes and who’s palms gave access were myself and Thomas. Thomas would now have to be removed from the system since he was dead because, as awful as this might sound, hands could easily be removed from the rest of the body.

I had no one else to share these secret codes with anymore.

Before, when I had thought I had been all alone in the world, I really hadn’t been because, even though she had not made herself known to me, my grandmother had been watching over me from afar.

It wasn’t much and didn’t make me think very highly of her, but something was better than nothing.

Maybe.

Or, at least, that’s what I tried to tell myself.

I closed the door, it automatically locked behind me, and I carefully made my way down the stairs. The lights lit up along the wall with each step down that I took. When I took that final step off that last step the lights overhead flickered to life throughout the basement and the entire wall of screens blinked several times before coming on and staying on.

There was enough food, water, and provisions down here in the storage room to last me months, if not an entire year. There was also a couch that pulled out into a bed for me to sleep on and pretty much everything else I might need to live down here for however long the food would last me.

It was the wall of monitors that had brought me down here today. There were cameras covering every single inch of the outdoor space on my property. Though, there were absolutely no cameras inside either of the houses or the garage. I believed in privacy, but I still wanted to know what was going on on my property.

The camera footage wouldn’t tell me what Thomas had exactly gone through before his death, which I wasn’t sure if I was thankful for or not, but it would show me who had entered the cottage. Which would tell me who had done that to the man and stole the rest of his life from him.

I sat down on the couch and picked up the laptop on the cushion beside me that I had discarded and left there the last time I had been down here.

I fired the laptop to life and started clicking around on things, bringing up the cameras I was looking for.

The screens on the wall started backtracking through time. When it showed two men, seemingly identical, walking out of the front door, I slowed it down and paused it.

I zoomed in on their faces, moving from one to the other and back again.

Yes, they were indeed identical. Most people would likely never be able to tell them apart.

But I knew in my heart. The one on the right was Bane. The one on the left was Roan.

It was them.

I knew after all this time just looking at their images on screen and not up close and personal. I hadn’t seen them since they were young teens, but I’d know these men anywhere.

What in the fuck was going on here? Had they killed Thomas?

After all this time, how had they found me?

Did they even know that they’d been to my house, that I lived here?

I watched them walk through the yard and disappear into the trees where the woods kissed the edge of my yard.

I kept watching the video play out. It showed another uninvited guest that left before the twins had showed up and he had stayed far longer than they had. I didn’t get a clear look athim because he’d worn a dark hoodie with the hood pulled up over his head, and his face had been hidden in the shadows.

He was short and slightly overweight, with a protruding belly.

He came out of the same woods that the twins had vanished into. He’d skulked around my house, trying to get inside. When he couldn’t he went to Thomas’s front door.

Before Thomas opened the door for him, the man looked up. The only thing the camera made out clearly was his vibrant, glowing, red eyes.

Eyes that very much did not appear human.

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