Prompt #2: The Secret House

(This was a fun one. Thanks Heather! I don't know about everyone else, but I did complete freewriting...which means this hasn't been edited at all. Hope it makes sense, seeing as how my "20 minutes" was really about an hour that was interspersed with nursing a baby and trying to play with whiny children.)

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It was a witchy house: the low-slung roof; that quiet gray paint; those squinting, shuttered windows; and the empty porch rocker that rocked, rocked, rocked day and night. When people passed they unthinkingly spoke in hushed tones, fearful of waking the unknown power that lay over the house, that gave it a sense of constant muted humming, as if plugged into dangerously high voltage. For that same reason, no one ever went near the house, never even dawdling on the sidewalk in front for more than a few moments to wonder about its inhabitants. And that is why it was the perfect hiding place.

I had been tracing the worn pathways of the mysterious house on Amelia Street for over a year. Being unable to sleep, due to my unfortunate condition, I had been forced to find other amusements during the witching hours, ones that catered to solitude. I was wary of wandering the streets, still stinging from my encounter with One-Eyed Bob in the mostly deserted alley behind the mini-mart last summer, and had been anxious to confine my wanderings indoors. The quiet house was precisely what I had been looking for. I had noticed it, of course, in passing during regular daytime hours when everything assumed a sense of normalcy and I greeted neighbors on the street cordially, smiling and laughing gayly at the children racing their bikes down the smooth asphalt on Amelia Street. But I had never felt the same sense of trepidation I was conscious of in others. It had instead seemed to great me warmly, as if it understood my nighttime ailments and its the broken timbers of fence that surrounded it stretched out in embrace to enfold me in its secrets.

A house of secrets-- that's what I found the first time I entered through a side door I found unlocked though had to stubbornly force open. Time seemed to have worn its frame down as an old man, causing it to lean lamely on itself from tiredness and lack of strength. Its dusty interiors calmed my usually heightened senses at night and instead weaved a blanket of serenity over everything, easing my nerves and warming the ache in my mind. Often I would lie on a small cot that sat in one of the upstairs bedrooms, a small but sturdy thing that sighed comfortably with my weight. It was my favorite room in the old house, sparsely decorated with a small washbin in one corner and a large ornate mirror placed above it on the wall. A three-legged table stood next to the cot, its only contents were a pot of plastic yellow flowers and a worn copy of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner which had now kept me company for many nights. I would often lay there, conscious only of the fall wind creaking in the branches outside, wanting the dust of the house to envelope me, too, to encase me as one of its secrets, a mummy of shadow and dust and sleep.

The only other thing in the small room was a large trunk sitting below a lace curtain-framed window. The trunk was probably large enough to fit two grown men inside. Its main body had been covered in a dark ebony leather, with two iron bands running around each end, like giant rubberbands holding the lid in place. Although I had spent most of my time in this tomb of a room I had never once opened the secret trunk. Not wanting to know more about the tenants of my private cave, not wanting to disturb the fantasy I had created for my midnight wanderings, I cringed at the thought of what I might discover inside. I liked that about this room, that there was a secret I didn't know.