“Akimbo Limbo” by K.K. Monroe

Akimbo Limbo

by K.K. Monroe

 

Property listing: unique farmhouse situated at end of mile-long, winding drive through lush Vermont woodlands offers unparalleled privacy and seclusion for one lucky buyer!

In waist-high grass, thick curls of bruised-purple vines, hold the For Sale sign hostage. 

Hacking up vegetative Cthulhu will be a feat, she sighs, troubled gaze drifting. 

A once-white picket fence, now overgrown with dense vegetation, encloses a sparse yard off the dilapidated front porch. Miserable, her eyes skim past broken piles of debris, imagining how she once rocked there, sipping pink lemonade, ice clinking against glass. 

Unmistakable, the heart-stopping ratcheting of a shotgun’s pump, stuns her.

A deafening blast! 

Acrid smoke imprints on the air with the insidious afterglow of death, bitter residue coating her tongue. Fear corkscrews her stomach, adrenaline gushes through her choked veins. Hungry, the house slurps her into utter blackness, unceremoniously dumping her inside. 

Clomping boots move from room to room in search, Pa feeding shells into the chamber, fist-pumps the slide, sharp and metallic. 

Ma staring into the wide eyes of the double-barrel, paralyzed. 

Bang! 

“Not again.” she pleads, clapping hands over ears to dampen the shrill ringing. 

The house chews her up, then hacks her out into the weeds.

“It won’t stop,” Annalee laments, cold ashy-blue flesh broken by craquelure. “Until it wants to.” Fissured plaster in the ruinous interior walls, traps breeding moisture from nightly downpours. Black mold, a living organism, grows from Annalee’s Swiss cheese holes, reeking of sour mildew. “Why won’t it let us rest, Marigold?” 

Because it’s hateful.

Desiccated patches of faded, hand-painted, flowery wallpaper from the dining room—where Annalee succumbed—leaf up from the girl’s mottled flesh, like upturned pages in a book. 

Steady decay reflects in the watchful eyes of windows, capturing a grisly metamorphosis. 

While inside the desolate house, dry rot disintegrates antique rugs and drapes. Cushions crumble to dust. Beneath a bloodstained pedestal sink in the washroom—where Pa cornered Marigold—the otherness of hardwoods, clenches from bloat, splits appearing in her corpse-skin.

 Ma appears at random, sitting in a crumpled heap on the dilapidated porch, now. The shotgun blast took the lower jaw, chunks of her delicate neck. 

Ma’s otherness never speaks, vacant blue eyes staring into the void. 

Nesting in storage above the pantry, a tether to the kitchen where Ma died, huge, fuzzy brown spiders pour from beneath a bone-beaked palate, across broken front teeth. Marigold watches the arachnid longlegs scurrying up a half-face devoid of expression, shuddering, hard. 

The putrid stench, of thick-sliced bacon left to rot in the cast-iron pan Ma set on the counter just before Pa opened fire, curls her nose. 

Rankness, an omnipotent and omnipresent olfactory haunting, permeates the yard. 

 “Does anything we do matter?” Annalee stares up at the two-storied house, knowingly. 

The cavernous hole of the younger sibling’s left eye, a gouged-out portal through which Marigold glimpses broken shutters. The Storm arrives like clockwork. Every evening. Howling, whipping winds have torn tar shingles from the steeply-pitched roof. She’ll have to fix that.

To keep the drenching fury of Pa’s evil temper, out. 

A dark demigod, still lording over all, compels unnatural weather; Pa’s Tempests rage violence, weeping viscous blood, discharging high-volts from The Executioner’s Chair.

 “I don’t know,” Marigold admits, grim dread vice-gripped around her throat. “Better, to try.” What else was there, other than suffering?

***

After the brutal departure from her corporeal form, the ghostly voices came. 

Distant echoes of unfamiliar footsteps wandering through the house, these roving intruders terrified Marigold, at first. 

Disembodied conversations she didn’t know she so desperately needed.

A prize! A steal at that eye-popping price?! For this acreage—what’s wrong with it? 

Look at the condition! A century old, yet well-loved.

But here’s the thing… 

Full disclosure.

She suspects what the ghosts see out there, isn’t what she sees in the liminal space. 

The house revealing its true nature, afflicted Pa in the living domain, twisted his mind until it snapped. A greedy, morose beast, it only allows them to serve it. Their Master.

Shrinking, and vacuuming her into a whorl of wood, buffered beneath shuffling undersoles, Marigold screams out, “Help! We’re trapped inside!” 

Glugging comes from the otherness of the washroom’s toilet, septic sludge glopping from the ragged wound in her chest. 

“Get us out of here!”

Otherworldly, melancholic moans send the ghosts, fleeing.

***

Murky, dense vegetation marks the perimeter. A demarcation between dimensional domains—Life and Death? What of this creepy otherness? Held captive in a special kind of eternal hell, akimbo limbo. No one has prepared her for this. 

Or, for what’s lurking out there. 

 Past the fringe borderland, a vast snow-blinding ocean roils with intense heat. 

A brutal scorch emanates from those impervious clouds, and infernal waves wash over her, blistering corpse-skin. From everywhere at once, thunder rumbles lowly. 

Menacing growls, of creatures concealed inside the fog. 

Brittle scratches rise along the backside of the fence, curdling her blood.

“Will they ever return?” Annalee reminds her of the task at hand.

 If someone purchased the beautiful carbon-copy, would the demonic looping end?

Hope is a dangerous thing. Shrugging, Marigold avoids it. “Maybe.” 

Equipped with garden shears and gloves, she wades through shifting verdant stalks, hacking and yanking, to clear a path from the jungle. 

Snipping and cutting tuberous spiny growths, ouching yet never bleeding, hooked-needles grab every inch of skin.

She gets nowhere fast. 

The crucial signage by the main road, remains unreachable. 

If there’s still anything out there? Beyond the fog? 

She excavates the artifact, wrests it from Cthulhu’s grasp. Bleached as old bones, once-crimson words read barely legible. Vines unfurl like regenerating tentacles. The ad omits an important detail: The entity infects any chink in the weakest link of its occupants. Takes possession. Diabolical Keeper of Souls—

Unmistakable, the heart-stopping ratcheting of a shotgun’s pump, stuns her.

A deafening blast! 

Acrid smoke…

Thorny Cthulhu tears the sign from her startled grasp and, the house whispers, it won’t ever let her go, before sucking her back inside.