DEV>The Attic (Additions I)

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(originally titled "Additions")
A little sister's prank goes horribly wrong...
(Horror, Short Story)
-Original draft: February 1-2, 2002
-Additional editing: January 15, 2009

The Attic (Additions I) fav.me/d5y3rft
The House (Additions II) fav.me/d6rlya9
The Closet (Additions III) fav.me/d8u1r8k
The Doors (Additions IV) fav.me/d8xr44f

EPILOGUE: fav.me/dco5rbn

This was the first serious short story I’ve written in full. Years ago, when Stephen King first published his treatise/autobiography, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, he included several writing exercises in the book, as well, at that time, as a little contest of sorts. Even after the original game expired, the members of the Stephen King message board carried on their own version, with a series of writing contests, the Writing Challenges. This was the first one I ever entered, the theme being Haunted Houses. The winner (the one who received the most votes from the other members) would get to choose the theme for the next Writing Challenge. Mine took fourth place out of about eight or nine stories posted, so I didn’t think that was too bad at all for a first attempt.

The whole thing started with the dirty tricks I used to play on my little sister when we were children, and the simple “what if” of revenge that backfired in some horrible and unexpected way. The scenario itself inspired by the upstairs of my aunt’s old house, which was laid out very much like the place in this story. I also wrote several sequels about the house, but each one was weaker than the last, so I decided later to quit while I was ahead. This story seemed to work best all on its own.

There is one more piece of the puzzle that I apparently forgot about when I originally wrote this note about the story. Though I don’t know if it’s true or not in real life, there was a creepy story someone told me when I was a kid, about a large family that lived in an equally large house.

One day, the kids decided to play hide and seek, but by the end of the game, their youngest brother had gone missing. They searched all over the house, the grounds, eventually expanding the search to the entire neighborhood and a Missing Persons report, but it seemed as if their youngest child had vanished off the face of the earth.

Many years went by, and the child’s disappearance eventually became a haunting family memory. As the youngest of the children grew up and prepared to move out on their own, their parents decided to sell the house, deciding that they no longer needed such a large place with all the kids out of the nest. As they were packing, one of the eldest of the children went up to the attic, a place full of seldom-seen relics and items that had accumulated over the three or four generations their family owned the place.

In the corner, she found a really old trunk. Deciding to see what was inside, she popped the lid…

An autopsy revealed a severe fracture in the child’s skull, leading them to believe that, all those years ago, when they were playing hide and seek, the boy went up to the attic, looking to out-do all the others in his choice of hiding places. More than likely saw the heavy wooden trunk as an excellent hiding place, and that the lid must have fallen shut on his head while he was climbing inside. Additionally, the trunk had a latch on it that, while easily opened from the outside, would have been impossible for a child to budge from the inside.

The most likely scenario, given the level of skull trauma, was the he suffocated while unconscious inside a trunk that, ironically, nobody ever thought to look inside for more than ten years. He had indeed found the perfect hiding place.

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