Nameless

By and ©

DragonLady of Avalon, all plagarisers will be made to stay in #50 Berkley Square overnight in The Haunted Room

Number Fifty, Berkley Square stood empty and vacant, a single bit of gloom and sadness in an otherwise prosperous British street. Its windows were dark, decay showed when the daylight struck them because it could not penetrate the thick layer of grime and dust that coated them tighter than skin on an animal. The once-beautiful paint was peeling like diseased skin, coming off in curls and leaving behind growing, gaping sores.

The house had once been quite nice. It was a four-story townhouse that had once been home to Prime Minister George Canning. It was a pleasant-looking building, in its day, but it had been abandoned for years. Once the caretakers retired, it had been impossible to find any more to fill their place.

The building, especially the top bedroom, had a bad reputation. Terrible things happened there. It was haunted. Extremely. Perhaps not in the theory that it had multiple ghosts so much as its…quality of ghosts.

There was a girl seen on the balcony of The Room. It is thought she died running from a lecherous uncle. Or, if you are more inclined to the even stranger, running from a nameless…thing that prowled the halls after dark.

There was a man, too. Some had seen him and thought, because his clothes were a few hundred years out of style, that he had been to some sort of costume party. Others had seen him as the Thing, with a white, ghastly face and a mouth as black as pitch.

And the thing…slimy and grotesque, there were stories about it dragging itself along the floor, like an octopus, leaving a slimy trail behind it, to wrap its tentacles around its victims and…no one knew.

That was the eerie mystery of it all. Anyone who went into that cold, chilling, creepy room and dared to sleep either woke up insane or not at all. Some who died had their necks broken.

For awhile, the house was a place for young people to dare themselves with. “Stay the night, friend,” they’d say, “and you can have my money, my respect, a pat on the back.” What they won, though, when their eyes closed and their breathing slowed was irreplaceable and hardly worth the price paid.

They say, though, that it sleeps, when the ghosts prowl and the young people leave unharmed. When the insanity stops and the nightmares abandon their posts, the creature is sleeping.

Why does it sleep? Where does it sleep? That is the mystery, is it not? No one knows what this thing is, where it lurks. Those that survive its nocturnal feedings are rarely in any condition to say. The idea that we know what it looks like, that it has slimy tentacles and pulls itself along the floor and wraps itself around the face of the victim is a miracle in itself.

The first time they noticed that it had not stirred, they asked, “Will it return?” Then someone tested the legend, and it was hungry. Its slimy tentacles felt through the dark, its inhuman eyes searched for its prey, its hunger volatile.

When the body was found, curled in a corner, weeping and speaking of the octopus that crawled up the stares and fixed on it with a bloody gaze so red and so hungry that he could do nothing but stare, the building was boarded up again. No one came, not this time, to dare the legend, to tempt fate. It grew hungry. It writhed and shook and shuddered in its hiding place, its hideous noises echoing through the house, disturbing the ghost of the girl. It had no nourishment for so long, its hunger had consumed it, and it knew nothing but hunger and a tedious, patient waiting.

And so it slept, cold and hungry. The house screamed when the wind blew, crying out with its master’s fury. And nobody entered, no prey entered its domain. The years rolled by and it was alone, once more, surrounded on all sides by paradise but trapped in the netherworld. Senseless, it slept, blind and deaf to anything but hunger.

And then all of that changed when a school group came by. Their last night in the country, an ouija board, a few beers, and a haunted house. Windows were broken, they snuck their way in. They went to the top level, to the room at the top of the stairs, were an insane man so violent he had to be fed by a special slot was rumored to have been kept.

It heard them. It felt them move. It felt them dance and party, playing with their toy. It felt one go to sleep, and it stirred.