Page 21 of Monster Mansion

Logan

I woke up in a fog with an extremely dry mouth and a pounding headache. I reached for my phone on the ground next to me to check the time—it was just past seven in the morning. It took me a moment to gather my bearings and realize that Jake was no longer sleeping steadily behind me.

“Jake?” I called with my groggy morning voice, but there was no answer. Either he’d left extremely early in the morning, or he had just gotten up off the couch and was moseying about. I wasn’t sure which choice was more likely, but I had a vague memory of him saying he was going to call a car. It just surprised me that I’d slept through it.

I rolled off the couch and rose to my feet, feeling more like a zombie than a person, and shuffled to the bathroom that hung off the dining room. I flipped on the light, gazed at my face in the mirror, and scoffed at how insane I looked. My hair was in a rat’s nest on the back of my head, and my carefully done wing-tip eyeliner had smeared into splotches that made me look like a disheveled racoon.

“Hot,” I said to myself sarcastically before turning on the cold water and cupping my hands under for a drink. As I leaned into my hands, something caught my eye. A splotch of red on the edge of the sink.

Blood? I thought as I sucked down the cool water. Once my throat was no longer a barren desert and my lips didn’t feel so painfully cracked and dry, I took a better look.

There were more red drops—nothing outrageous, and all of them small enough to miss unless you were looking for them. I wondered if maybe Jake had experienced something like a nosebleed last night and maybe that was what had been taking him so long in the bathroom. Then I remembered his eyes being almost entirely black, and the presence of a nosebleed only gave further evidence to my drugs theory. Of course, there was still the frantic memory of trying to convince myself that there were no tentacles protruding out of his mouth. It beat against my aching skull like a panicked butterfly trapped in a cage.

With a sigh, I took a handful of toilet paper and rubbed at the spots of red, and they came off with a rusty flakiness that told me there was no doubt about it… the drops wereabsolutelyblood. I frantically began to look around the bathroom, trying to piece together the events like some sort of forensic scientist making sense of a crime scene. Grabbing for my phone, I opened a blank message, intending to text Jake something innocent like, “do you know why there’s blood in the bathroom?” but was still stuck in my not wanting to put him off by asking prying questions. After all, if it had been drugs, questions like that would certainly lead down a rabbit hole of awkwardness.

Then reality hit me like a Louisville Slugger over the head. I didn’t even have his phone number. The two of us had been so caught up in the moment that we had never even considered the most basic steps of courtship—to get each other’s phone numbers. Now, I had no way of even knowing if he got back down the mountain okay. My inner Blair began to think in worst-case scenarios as I imagined all the ways my newest paramour could have met his demise. I even heavily considered the fact that maybe the monster we had both seen came for him in the end.

I stepped on the button to open the bathroom trashcan’s tiny stainless steel lid and covered my mouth in shock. At the bottom of the tiny trashcan was the decorative hand towel that had been previously hanging next to the sink, stained deep red and still wet with blood. Someone—or something—had used it to clean up quite a mess last night.

My heart began to race with panic as I replayed the possibilities over and over in my head. I felt absolutely bonkers when I couldn’t come up with a better answer than “a monster got him.” I hated even considering it with any ounce of seriousness. Not only did I not want it to be the answer, but the possibility certainly didn’t help the ever-loosening grip on my sanity. Still, I didn’t fear for my own safety so much as I feared for my understanding of what was real and what was fiction. Every day I stayed here, the lines seemed to blur quite a bit more.

My instincts screamed at me to run, to just leave all my stuff here, head right out to my car and go, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave the mystery unsolved. Abandoning the scene and running away went against my nature, and besides… what if what had happened to Jake happened to others before him? What if whatever had happened to Jake would continue happening over and over again if I didn’t choose to stay and see this through?

This was only day three of thirty. Whatever was in this fucking place was trying to get the upper hand, and I wasn’t going to let it. I may not have been the toughest girl, but there was one thing I was damned good at. Research.Thanks, University of Pennsylvania!

I could have smacked myself for not looking this place up prior, but the job sounded like such a great deal that I hadn’t even considered it. Once the semester had ended, I’d sorta eschewed all manner of research in an attempt to do a university detox of sorts, opting to use my laptop only for Netflix, Spotify, and some guilty pleasure fanfiction. Plus, I’d prioritized the money, my project, and my fantasy of living alone in the woods for a month over anything else. How was I to know I’d end up in an old house with a terrible reputation, one or more weird ass monster things stalking me, and a potentially dead one-night stand? I charged up the stairs to grab my laptop, still in nothing but a t-shirt and panties. At least it was Saturday, so I wouldn’t have to deal with maneuvering around Ted in my current state. Nothing like a Walk of Shame around the groundskeeper.

I snagged my laptop off the side table in my bedroom, where it had been charging since yesterday, and flopped down on my bed with it on my lap. My stomach’s incessant growling was going to have to wait until I was done scratching this mental itch.

I typed the address of the mansion into a search engine first, though nothing official stood out, which struck me as odd. Considering both the grocer and Jake both had something to say about the residence, I refused to believe the internet hadnothingon this old place. Maybe I just had to get more specific.

I hopped over to Reddit, and rather than search the mansion’s address, I searched “Tallpine, WV” against the site’s different forums. I was met with the same information I’d found before I came. “Extremely unsettling,” one post said, but it left out any specific details. There was no way not a single post of this place had ever made its way onto /nosleep. Either the town was suspiciously hush-hush about the mansion’s stories, or Mr. Silver himself was monitoring what information was being spread about it.

Frustrated, I decided to get even more specific, and typed “antlers” into the site and began scrolling. Over two-hundred pages of posts mentioning the word “antlers,” but I had a hunch this would give me something.Anything.

After what felt like forever, there it was, on page sixty-two of my scrolling. Some user named “bmx_life96” posted a grainy cell phone photo of the same creature I’d seen and that Jake had mentioned, asking “what’s wrong with this deer?” onto a WV hunting thread. Nearly every response was one of pure confusion, or trying to call out the kid for faking the photo. Whoever “bmx_life96” was, he had no idea the absolute win he had given me.

I spent several hours combing through the site, breaking down my search into more and more specific terms, and scrolling endless pages of content until pages upon pages of my journal were scribbled with findings. Someone had taken great care to censor certain posts, as some I thought might be promising were actually redacted when I clicked the link, or comments were turned off prematurely. Jonas had influence, it seemed, or at the very leastmoneyto pay off the moderators.

Regardless of his efforts,MisterSilver couldn’t stop me from finding enough to fuel my need for information. It turned out Jake wasn’t the only kid to experience something strange in his youth, and most of the posts retold similar tales. My notes looked like the chicken-scratch of a frantic elementary school student, but the time spent was worth it.

Each account was different, I learned, but in essence, all the same. Each one described a hulking, boney monster with a mane, huge antlers, and a skull for a face. Not to mention something that looked like a man but was made of pure darkness and shadow with ghostly tendrils extending off his spine, and a creature that seemed to change and shift while it stood next to you with pitch black eyes.

Fuck,I thought. The creatures in this place already had the upper hand.

Jake’s sweet face flashed over my mind’s eye again before I extended the range of my internet search. I typed “Tallpine missing person” into the search bar and was overwhelmed by the amount of hits I got back. There weresomany. Almost all of them were college-aged girls. Almost all of them weren’t from Tallpine originally. Reading through the news articles was like I was getting a sneak peek at my own eulogy, and the walls felt as if they were closing in around me. Part of me wanted to contact the police purely for the paper trail, but then I realized how damning it all looked.

Hello, Police? My one-night stand got blood all over the bathroom, and I don’t know where he is. By the way, I’m pretty sure there’s like… monsters in here.I imagined the phone call and quickly decided against it for now.

Perhaps it was ignorance, but I had to see what his reaction would be. I had to know what he knew, or what he was willing to tell me. Quickly, I snagged my phone from the bed next to me and dialed up my employer. As the line rang, it occurred to me that I had no idea what time it was in Tokyo, but I also didn’t particularly care. If the worst was true, and this man put me up in this house knowing full well that there was creepy shit going on here, then I could not have cared less if I woke him up with my interrogation.

“Hello?” he asked in a voice that sounded like I had woken him up. I tried not to feel a little thrum of satisfaction.

I took a deep breath. “Hi there, Mr. Silver, so I was just checking out the property on the internet, and it turns out that perhaps a lot of the town’s concerns are legitimate rather than pure superstition. Are you aware that multiple young women have gone missing off this property? There are a ton of accounts from local teenagers seeing some pretty horrifying shi—things as well.”

“Logan, it’s gotta be, what, seven-thirty in the morning your time?” he responded in a groggy voice. “Can we discuss this later?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Silver,” I continued, unwilling to let him urge me off the phone before I got some sort of resolution out of him. Even if it wasn’t a perfect explanation, he had to tell mesomething. “I just really would like to know who exactly purchases a house for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that’s just being generous, and then updates the property for even more money, without doing a quick internet search on the place’s history.”

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