If you’ve been following my blog, this story doesn’t require you to read the first part which I began two weeks ago. The blog is bimonthly, for those of you who are new to this blog of true horror.
One of the items in Sam the antique dealer’s arsenal happened to have an ‘attachment’. That is, something like an entity or a discarnate being comes with the object. It came as a gift from close friends whom Sam eventually suspected were attempting to rid themselves of the object. Honestly, if I had friends like that, I would get rid of them fairly quickly.
You’ll see why.
Here’s the rest of the story. Sam drove home to verify his wife’s call that the haunted lithograph was hanging on the family room wall. He had taken it down after the highly bizarre circumstances surrounding his parents’ death. He had tossed it up to coincidence that his father had gazed upon the painting and became blind a few days later after just having cataract surgery. His mother met up with a similar demise, and both died shortly.
Sam’s business began to falter shortly after receiving the gift. Anxious to rid his household of the sinister painting, he takes it to his store. That’s when the business began to experience mishaps and shortly his store started losing customers. Sam felt extreme foreboding around the object. His wife, not prone to headaches, began to experience migraines.
The list kept going.
Sam gets home and there it was: hanging on the wall of the family room where he left it. Impossible. It was hanging in the store when he left. Did it walk?
Sam examined the painting with much reluctance. He felt like something was staring back at him with malevolence.
Exhausted and stressed from the combined loss of his parents, his income from the store and their health, Sam could no longer deny that the only change has been the introduction of the gift into their lives: The lithograph. Sam pulled the cursed painting from its frame and rolled it, wrapping it in paper and taping the sides. Tonight he would once and for all get rid of it. Was the cursed painting replicating itself?
Sam finds himself driving to his parents’ house, a vacation home in a seaside town they’d been meaning to sell. Now empty of furniture, the house which used to hold fond memories of vacations with his parents and family reunions, now sat silently, abandoned. By the time Sam rolled into the quiet and deserted house, he was exhausted. It was evening.
He gazes down on the passenger side floor to remind himself of the task at hand. The lithograph sat rolled in a piece of paper on the car’s floor. Sam grabs the painting, dashes to the house, unlocking the door to be welcomed by silence.
Sam’s grief made palpable by the quiet pushes him towards the fireplace. He tosses logs into the hearth and lights it. Then, he has an idea. Sam grabs the cursed lithograph and tosses it into the fire.
Does it burn?
Of course not.
What does Sam do next?
Have you ever had an object that materialized in two places? How about an object somehow follows you wherever you go?
What would you do next?
Sam finds himself in a restaurant, then finally the local priest of Bar Harbor. What happens next will blow your mind. Are you ready to read the book?
Please stop in at the Bucks County Paracon this Saturday if you’re free. Noon to 5 pm. This story is included in my anthology of true horror, Haunted Heirlooms.