My Boyfriend Forced Me To Go To An Abandoned House For A Scare, But When We Got There It Wasn’t Abandoned At All

Its long elegant neck was stretched out in an expression of delicate surrender. As though it were saying, ‘Yes, you’ve won, lay your weapons down.’

I stared at it, the little flourishes on its head and the larger ones on its rump, and finally said, “Mark, you killed a peacock.”

“No way,” he said immediately.

Dennis crept closer and squinted in the dusk’s low light.

“She’s right, man, it’s a fucking peacock.” He turned back to us, a baffled expression on his face. “Where did this thing come from?”

Almost as if on cue, we heard a more subdued version of the alien howl that had startled us in the car; a gentle yoo-yoo-yoo sound, like they knew one of their own had been murdered in cold blood.

“Is this a peacock farm?” I asked, bewildered.

A chorus of strange coos seemed to answer my question.

“Maybe that’s what ran in front of the car.” Dennis looked around, squinting, trying to see the other peacocks in the fast waning light. “You didn’t have to kill it, man.”

“So what,” Mark scoffed. “It attacked me, what the fuck was I supposed to—“

And above the cooing, the plaintive mourning of birds in a foreign tongue, another sound interrupted him: a soft, hiccupping sort of cry.

It was quiet, but powerful. The kind of crying you do alone in your bedroom when you know someone’s just outside and you can’t break quite yet.

“Is that Barb?” Mark asked, already backing away.

“I don’t think so,” I whispered. I felt stuck to the earth where I stood. To move, I thought, would mean my certain death.

From beneath the steps of the little white farmhouse, a figure emerged, creeping on all fours towards us. It was small, but gangly, limbs hanging limply as it crawled along the grass.

Its head was huge.

Around where the jaw must’ve been was normal, sure, but from there it ballooned up, swollen like a ripe harvest pumpkin.

It was weeping.

“Don’t…move,” Dennis whispered. Mark kept backing away; I could hear sticks snapping beneath his feet as he went. I didn’t need the suggestion, I couldn’t have moved if I’d been ordered to. I was paralyzed with fright – surely I’d read that somewhere before and thought it some kind of flowery metaphor but it was true, you could be so scared that fear froze you in position like a fast-acting toxin.

The shadow crept closer, nearly to us now, and in the last shreds of the day’s light I could see it was a boy – a little boy, maybe only 10 or 11. His head was grotesquely formed, yes, but his face was just a boy’s face, streaked with tears. I noticed with dull fascination that he was wearing a little button-up sweater over corduroys, a snappy little ensemble to say the least. His knees were grass-stained.

The three of us stared at him as he tenderly lifted the limp peacock from the ground. He sat on his haunches, rocking slightly back and forth, and began to cry harder. He pulled the dead bird to his chest and wailed helplessly.

“You killed his pet, Mark,” I whispered, swallowing back my own tears.

Horror writer for Creepy Catalog, ESFP, Kylo Ren advocate, Slytherin, sassbasket.

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