Thousand Word Thrills - Short Story Collection

Thousand Word Thrills Short Story Anthology

Yes, Halloween is over. But it's still fall, and that means we can celebrate for a few more weeks before the winter holidays drive everything else from mind.

This October, I counted myself lucky and very fortunate to be able to take part in a short story contest hosted by Rachel Graham over at Killer Thrillers (check them out on Facebook). I didn't win or place in the top three, but my Halloween story was a finalist and is included in the published anthology.

Again, huge shout out to Rachel for putting this on and everyone who took part. I reviewed and rated a bunch of stories and they were all really great. For those who don't want to buy the paperback or hardcover version but are still interested in reading, I've included my story below:

The Birthday House

His phone's GPS lost signal three miles back, but Oliver didn't need it. His hands remembered the turns, even after two years. A ramshackle town that ended as fast as it started, and then the rental car's headlights swept across iron gates - rusted, half-open, perpetually waiting.

Mills-Blackwood House.

Even the name felt wrong in his mouth. Amelia had loved it here, loved this decaying monument to someone else's grandeur tucked into the folds of southwest Virginia's Blue Ridge mountains, nearly flush with the Tennessee border. A haven of Antebellum decorum in everything from its crown molding to fixtures in an otherwise unruly, wild place. Every birthday, she'd insist they drive the four hours from Charlotte, her eyes bright with something he could never name.

"It speaks to me," she'd said once, running her fingers along the wallpaper's peeling edges. A maze of sepia and creaking floorboards. "Can't you feel it?"

He'd felt nothing but cold.

The house rose from the darkness like a shattered tooth - two proper stories of faded brick, narrow windows, and warped shutters, a sloping attic above it all. Massive oak trees pelting anyone brave enough to draw near with walnuts. Oliver killed the engine. The silence was immediate and total. No insects. No wind. Just the metallic pings of the rental car's heated engine contracting.

He shouldn't be here. Amelia was gone. The grief counselor said healing took time, that he'd know when he was ready to face memories. But last night, Amelia's thirty-fifth birthday, he'd dreamed of her standing at one of those narrow windows, a spidery palm pressed against the glass.

Waiting.

The key was where it always was, in a small jewelry box on a sideboard after he swung open the unlocked screen door. The inner door's lock resisted, then yielded with a groan that seemed to come from deep in the house's throat.

The interior smelled of mildew and something else - sweet and rotten, like flowers left too long in a vase. Oliver's flashlight beam cut through the darkness, illuminating room after room of gothic excess: the chandelier dripping with crystals, the mahogany staircase spiraling upward, the portraits of nameless Blackwood ancestors.

And the gilt mirror that turned the room into a circus horrorscape. Amelia had loved that mirror most of all.

His footsteps echoed as he climbed to the second floor, to the room where they'd always stayed. The tower room, his wife called it, though it technically wasn't a tower, just an octagonal room patterned with birds that looked more like bats in the shadows.

The bed was made, the moth-eaten quilt covered in dust. Oliver set his bag down and tried not to look at the empty space where Amelia used to sleep, curled on her side, smiling in the darkness.

"Why here?" he'd asked her once. "Why this place?"

"Because it remembers," she'd whispered. "Everything that happens here - it stays."

Hours crawled by. Oliver tried to read in the gothic sitting room lined with dusty tomes, tried to sleep, but the house was too loud in its silence. The overbearing hum of memories he couldn't shake, all jumbled together and racing back and forth in his mind. All the words he wished he could say. So much his mind couldn't recreate even though he tried desperately to cling to every syllable passed between them. All of it fading all the time.

At midnight, he gave up and padded into the cavernous kitchen.

It was exactly as he remembered - the table too long, too ornate, arranged as if for a party that never came. She'd spend hours here, sitting in a wing-back chair, staring at nothing he could see.

Oliver sat in her place. The wood was unforgiving and cold. From this angle he could see into the long hallway that led to the back of the house. The hallway that had felt too dark, even with every light on.

Something moved at the end of it.

His breath caught. Just shadows, he told himself, playing tricks. But there was no light to create shadows.

The shape moved again, closer. The soft whisper of fabric against wood. Footsteps - light, familiar.

She emerged from the darkness, as if being born from it. Same long dark hair and flowing nightgown. Same knowing smile playing at her lips.

Her feet lost focus before they reached the floor. Her edges seemed to blur, to blend with the shadows.

"Oliver." Her voice was Amelia's but layered with something else, something that spoke from the walls themselves. "You came back."

He couldn't move. Couldn't breathe.

"I've been waiting." She drifted closer. "Every birthday. Every year. I told you this place remembers."

"You're not real." The words barely made it past his lips.

"I'm more real here than I ever was anywhere else."

She was right in front of him now, close enough that he could feel her warmth. "Don't you understand? This is where I belonged. Where I've always belonged. The house knew it. I knew it."

"Amelia, you - you died in a car accident."

A long pause. "Did I? Or did I finally come home?"

Behind her, the hallway stretched impossible, endless. In its depths, other figures with blurred edges and empty eyes paced. All waiting. All watching.

"Stay with me," Amelia whispered, and her voice was a chorus now. "It speaks to you too. I can see it. The house chose you the moment you walked through that door. It's been waiting so patiently."

Oliver tried to run, but his legs wouldn't move. Amelia leaned closer, her face filling his vision, her black eyes reflecting infinite depths.

"Happy birthday to me," she sang softly. "Happy birthday to me."

And Oliver understood, finally, why she'd loved this place. Why she'd always smiled in the darkness. Why she brought him here, year after year, until the house knew his name.

The house did remember everything.

It could never forget.

Thanks for reading! This was so fun to be a part of, and hopefully the competition will run again next fall. Here's a link if you're interested in buying a copy of the entire short story collection (hardcover, paperback, or ebook).

-Charlie