Chapter Text
The lights flickered in the room. No one seemed to notice.
It was a nice evening in the middle of the summer holiday. The sky was clear, and millions of stars shone brightly all over it, but not overshining the crescent moon. The air was hot and steamy in the evening, too. Two girls were chatting outside, on the balcony of a big house that stood alone at the edge of a beautiful but dark forest. It was quiet and relaxing.
"Hey, by the way, thank you for letting me hang out at your place for a whole week!" Cora said.
"Of course! I mean, we are like besties! Besides, I need some break from these two idiots," Sarah answered, referring to her brothers, who, in fact, could be really annoying. Their parents decided to visit a distant relative on the other side of the country and Sarah and the boys didn't want to go, so they will be alone for a few days.
"Soo..." Cora asked, "what are we going to do for four days?"
"I actually don't know...yet. But we can go have a picnic tomorrow, you know, for starters. I think the weather will be just fine."
"That's a great idea!" agreed Cora. They continued stargazing in quiet, looking for shooting stars, but just after a minute, they heard loud thumping on the stairs. It was getting louder, followed by another person.
"Look what I found! Look what I found! "Cole, Sarah's younger brother kept shouting, with great excitement in his voice.
"Well, damn , here we go again." Sarah sighed.
"Can't you give us a break?!" she said louder, a bit angrily, but they stood up to go inside.
"Every damn time I try to be alone, he finds me with something. Little siblings are so annoying!" she complained.
Cora chuckled. She was an only child, so she never knew what it was like to live together with two boys, but she had a 5-year-old nephew, so she could imagine. Then Cole bursted into the room, followed by Damian, who was supposed to play with his ten year old brother.
"Look what I found!" Cole said proudly, holding up an old, bit rusty-looking key.
"A key?" Sarah asked confusedly.
"You interrupted us just because you found a key?!" She shook her head. "Unbelievable," she muttered.
"Well, what does it open?" Cora asked curiously and took the key to take a look at it, to examine it. It was black as night, with silver lines on it. Cora realised they formed a short text, but it looked like it was written in another language. She could't translate it. It was written in cursive, and some words she could make out looked like italian, but she wasn't sure. Sarah was opening her mouth, but Damian was faster.
"We don't know, " He claimed.
"I mean there aren't any doors in this house that are old enough for this key." He said.
"We checked every room, but it wasn't good for any of them!" Cole added.
The four of them stood in the middle of the room, thinking. Cora visited them many times before, and there wasn't a room she hadn't been in. She just kept looking at her friends, to see if they figured something out. The moon was shining into the room, and a cold breeze came through the open window. The wind ruffled Cora's short black hair a bit. She slightly shivered and put her hands in her pockets. She looked around but it seemed like none of her friends noticed the cold breeze. Then Sarah gasped, like she just realised something.
"No, you are wrong. There is one door you haven't checked."
"The attic." Damian said, and Cora could have sworn she heard fear in his voice.
"But...that has never been opened since we moved here. We don't even know what is there," Cole whispered.
"Eh, probably some old crap that mom and dad put there when we moved here." Sarah said with a shrug. Then Cora came up with an idea:
"Maybe, you could try and open the attic door and see what is there? What could possibly happen?"-she laughed nervously.
"That is not--" Damian started, but he was interrupted by his sister.
"Cole, isn't it past your bedtime already? You should be in bed at-she looked at her watch-11 pm now!"
"Please, please, please!" Cole begged. "Just a look inside! I won't be able to sleep out of curiosity! Pretty please!" he looked up at his older siblings with his irresistible puppy eyes. Sarah and Damian looked at each other as if they were having a conversation with their eyes, then gave in.
"Alright, fine!" Sarah sighed. " We can take a look inside." she smiled. After all, she seemed quite excited, too.
"Yayy!!" Cole yelled, and ran out of the room. Sarah went after him and they could hear her warning her little brother: "Not so fast on the stairs!".
Cora was just standing there, unsure what to do, even though she was the one who suggested the idea in the first place. She and Damian looked at each other. She blushed. Cora had always looked at Damian as some sort of a big brother figure when she was younger, because she was an only child, but as she grew older, she always caught herself watching him from a safe distance, and now she found him quite cute. They have known each other for more than ten years, but she still didn't tell Sarah about this. Sooner or later she will have to, but not this time. She couldn't hold eye-contact anymore. She gripped the key so hard it almost felt like it was cutting into her hand. Damian held out his hand, waiting.
"You coming, Cory?" he asked. " Cory ". He started calling her Cory the moment they met, and the nickname stuck to her, and then all three children started to call her that. Cora actually liked it, especially from him.
"Yeah, comin'!" she said finally, then she put the key into his hand and stormed out of the room. She was a little tense from the contact. Cora ran upstairs, and Damian followed her, calmly walking. Then they walked towards Sarah and Cole at the end of the corridor. They looked rather defeated as they looked at them. Cora and Damian looked up, just to see a ladder folded on the ceiling.
"We can't reach it," Sarah stated the obvious with an annoyed tone in her voice. "Dami, please get it down!"
"Yeah I can see that!" Damian laughed as he simply reached up, and started unfolding the ladder.
"Watch out!" he warned the others as he put the end of the ladder on the floor. Damian went first, because he had the key. Cora went right after him, then Cole, and Sarah. As she started to walk up on it, Cora started shivering again. She couldn't explain why, but as she got closer to the attic, she suddenly had a very bad feeling about this whole thing they were about to do. Siriously, opening a door in another house that hasn't been opened for more than ten years? Who knows what is in there? She would have preferred to back out of the whole thing, but after all it was her idea and everyone was so excited. Besides, it's just a bad feeling and you don't base anything on a bad feeling. Damian put the key into the lock smoothly.
"Well, the moment of truth!" he said with a laugh as he turned the key without any struggle and pushed the door open.
Not surprisingly it was pitch black inside. He stepped in and Cora followed him.
"I hope someone brought a flashlight, because I can't see anything here," she told the others. As Cole reached up, he handed his flashlight to Cora.
"Thanks," she said as she turned it on. The four kids stood there, quite amazed, as the bright beam of light illuminated the room. It was, to say at least, eerie. Like they stepped into a time capsule from another century. There were old paintings of long dead people on the dark walls, old books in piles on the wooden floor covered in thick dust, and candles. Lots of candles, and as Cora looked around with the lightbeam, she realised that some of them formed a big circle on the floor. As she went closer to it and reached for one of them, a hand gripped her arm strong.
"Don't touch anything!" Sarah warned her with a spooked look. As she moved, a huge cloud of dust rose from the ground, leaving both of them coughing for a good few minutes. As the floor cleared up a bit, they saw that the candles were black, molten, and there was some kind of drawing on the floor underneath the dust. And there was something else on the ground...
"Look, it's a board!" Cole pointed at the middle of the circle as he and Damien came closer. As she came closer, Cora looked at her watch to check the time, and she noticed that it shoved 11:30. That was strange, they couldn't have spent half an hour in the attic, they just came up like 5 minutes earlier. She couldn't make any sense of it. She leaned down and dusted the board. She let out a frightened gasp.
"It's an...ouija board!" she informed the others as they leaned closer.
"This is seriously creeping me out..." Sarah whispered.
"Well, well, isn't it an interesting turn of events? Are we going to summon something?" Damian asked mockingly.
"Ha-ha...very funny," his sister told him off.
As Cora looked around, she noticed another interesting thing: a faint drawing under the thick dust in the branches of the five-pointed-star. She couldn’t make out what it was, but she had a bad feeling about it because her blood ran cold at the sight of it. If anyone were to ask her about it, she would probably brush it off as the cool air, but this meant no good.
At first they didn't notice, but the room grew brighter and brighter around them. They were confused for a second, but then they realised that Cole, who had been unusually quiet for the last five minutes, was lighting up all the candles around them. He somehow didn't look anything like he was before. He moved very unnaturally and his eyes were quite glassy. His lips moved, too, but they couldn't hear a thing he said. He also held something in his hands, it looked like a bowl, full of something. He acted as if he was in a trance. Then, Cole placed the bowl in the middle of the pentagram. They would have tried to stop him before he lit up the last one, but they weren't fast enough. Finally, the boy dropped the lit-up match in the bowl, which lit up with blue flames. While Cora was standing in one place, almost hypnotised, she thought the flames were rather beautiful. In the very moment Cole finished, and stepped out of the circle, a clock somewhere in the house struck midnight. A freezing cold breeze of air came from seemingly nowhere, and the temperature dropped quickly.
Cora started moving too: she looked around and immediately realised that they were standing inside the circle.
"Oh shit, shit, shit!" she whispered rather loudly, even though she promised she would never swear in the presence of Cole, who looked himself again, and also very horrified. Then loud rumbling and booming echoed from everywhere around them. They were all looking around in the room, panicking. Damian, who looked the calmest out of the four of them, grabbed Sarah and Cora and pulled them out of the circle because they were freezed in a spot. The rumbling became louder, it almost sounded like thunder.
Black smoke came from the floor, from the bowl and gathered in a form of something that they couldn't make out. It let out a horrible screech, so loud and deafening, and it just echoed through the space. Cora could have sworn it was looking at them, even though she didn't see its eyes. That was the exact moment Sarah started screaming and Cora could almost see her pass out. Cole was shaking and grabbed his brother's hand really hard. He looked like he was having a panic attack. Damian's face was pale, like a ghost, and he was shivering. He was trying to show that he is strong, and not scared in front of his siblings and Cora, but she could see that he is also scared of this thing, this creature in front of them. Cora wanted to scream, or shout, or even step back from this...entity, but she couldn't. Her throat was dry, her legs were shaking, her whole body was shivering from the cold that this thing gave off. She grabbed Damian's hand, to have something to hold on, and because it just felt safe.
How the hell did they even end up in this situation? Cora had seen a few horror movies in the last few months, hell, last summer she even read all the Supernatural books she could find. But none of them could have prepared her for experiencing something like this in real life. In the movies this was something that she always saw as creepy but not this terrifying. And usually in these kinds of films, there was some sort of solution, but she didn't see one now. She felt like they could even die, if they don't do anything. She didn't want to die, of course, she was only 16!
As she watched this thing in front of them, the smoke slowly started to materialise. It had a tall, around two metres tall humanoid form, and its structure looked like a male, but the whole creature was completely made out of pitch black darkness. And it didn't seem like a flesh and blood creature, it still somehow looked like smoke. Cora couldn't figure out how this thing worked. Then the demon flashed its glowing red eyes. And not just the iris was red, the whole eyes flared with red flames. Pure evil shone in them.
It ran its eyes over them, as it was trying to figure out what four children were doing in that old attic with itself. It was...thinking. As its eyes finally settled on one point, just above their head, it finally spoke:
"Who are you?" it growled in a low, so inhuman voice.
"What are you doing here? Who are you?" Damian asked. He always had been a little reckless. But this was different. They were in an almost life-and-death situation, and as much as Cora liked that he was brave enough to speak, she feared for him. They didn't know who, what this thing in front of them exactly was, but they knew, they had to know that it was something cruel. Something ruthless and lethal. Something not to be played with. And it seemed like it was not going to answer.
It took one step towards the children. Then it took another one. And slowly the safe distance decreased between them, until around three steps left. Then it stopped. It was waiting. However, as none of them answered its question, its eyes flashed angrily. They have done the only thing they shouldn't have: pissed it off. Doors started banging in the house, all the lights buzzed, then went out. Quiet, low growl was its only reaction, that gave them goosebumps, and that made it even more terrible. It still felt to Cora that it was just like the calm before the storm.
"Run!"