A Man with Eldritch Stare

It was dark. When Jim, a twenty-year-old stout boy with golden-brown eyes who lived in their previous neighborhood, slammed the brake outside their new house.

The sudden jolt of the car disturbed her sleep as she woke up to confront a view which was no less than a horror movie scene, two big trees covering up an old two-storey house. A pale dim light blinking illuminating the tiny garage and a dusty brown locked wooden door.

She was engrossed in analyzing the whereabouts of her new neighborhood when her orbs caught a stranger illuminated in the blue light of his garage gazing at her. His disheveled hair was concealing his face and it seemed like he just woke up from an impromptu evening sleep. Twirls of smoke was whirling around his arm as he had a half-smoked cigarette clutched in between his fingers. There was something weird about the way he was looking at her as he threw some eerie vibes towards her.

What's wrong with this guy? She muffled to herself while shrugging off and she turned around to help his father unload their luggage.

"Let me take this inside" she offered her help to him and took the picture of her mother from his hand which was taken back in her years of youth in the same woods they had left behind.

She unhinged besmear doorknob and pushed it open, a cool gush of air suffused with gritty smell welcomed her. She groped in the serene darkness for the switchboard and flipped on the lights.

"Oh... it's a whole lot of mess out here." She huffed as her still swollen blues eyes took a visit to the living room.

"Yes, that'd be a perfect place for it." Moved towards the right wall just behind the two-seater couch where she hanged the picture of her mother carefully.

"Ella, here comes your treasure," Jim yelled while entering the living room, carrying a big heavy square box, and placed it carefully on the table covered with white sheets.

He knew how peculiar Ella was about her books, so he took it straight to her rather than putting it among other piles of cartoons.

"Oh, thanks, Jim." She said that in a very curtsied manner while turning around towards him.

We unloaded the truck; this was the last one. I thought I should hand it over to you personally and take my leave from you too." He spoke

"Are you leaving?" Ella asked immediately.

"Umm... yes." He mumbled to her.

Her eyes filled with tears once again, but probably it would be the last goodbye of the day. She had to gulp this too, as he couldn’t stay with them, obviously.

"I'll miss you guys all." She whispered as she was trying hard not to cry this time.

Jim hugged her and took his leave.

Jim’s family was very close to Ella. She wasn’t acquainted with many of her neighbors except the Petrovas’. His younger sister Emily was very attached to Ella and she liked scribbling some mysterious notes with her. Ella was in her pre-teenage when she lost her mother and she always admired Mrs. Petrova’s relationship with her children and got envied sometimes because she wasn’t lucky enough to cherish her mother’s love for a quite a long time.

Jim even though never expressed his adultery emotions but secretly he admired Ella. He had feelings for her since the day he saw her crying at the funeral of her mother. A salty ocean was flowing down her cheeks and he saw a reflection so pure and magnificent in it. That moment caught his heart wired in the love of her, but he’d never be able to gather enough moxie to express it to her.

Ella on the other hand always had considered him as his older brother. She was the single child of her parents and always yearned to experience the bitter-sweet relationship of sibling. Though she had seen Emily and Jim fighting like dogs over the tiny things.

She took that box and went upstairs. Her new room was quite spacious because there wasn't any furniture in it except one single bed, one broken rocking chair, a table, and a blinking lamp resting on its chest. The wall was decorated with cobwebs which were also covering the in-wall shelves.

She started dusting off the cobwebs and gritty dust from them and in a matter of some minutes, she cleaned them all.

Then she looked for the scissors in her shoulder bag. Yes, she had kept the scissors in her shoulder bag she knew they'd be going to need it while unpacking that's why she kept them in her brown shoulder bag, so she’d access them easily when needed.

She cut the tapes and opened the box, carefully picked out the book, and started organizing them on the shelves.

"Ella" she heard a voice from downstairs calling her to come down.

She went downstairs to meet his father's old friend who came with his son, Ronnie, to welcome them to this new place and give Ella her documents which she'd be going to need on her first day of college.

"Hi, Uncle John. How are you?" She greeted him and hugged him lightly.

"I'm just cherishing old age. By the way, it’s so pleasant to see you. You grew up so beautiful just like your mother, I must say." He replied to her while making little giggles.

Ella blushed at his comment, but this reminds her of something. A flashback. Her old house. Her room. She picked out books. A letter slipped out. Her mother's letter. The use of past tense in reference to her parents.

Her bubble got busted by Ronnie, who was standing ignored beside his Dad, probably waited for quite a long time to be noticed. Ronnie was the single child of his parents. His mother died during childbirth and it was his father who took care of him and they both lived in a single-storey house just around the corner from their new house.

As he observed Ella was not there mentally, he decided to take this initiative by poking her first.

"Hi, Ella! How are you?"

He politely asked her. Ronnie was a very shy and timid boy. His physical structure was so thin that a minor high intensified wind can blow him away with it.

Dragged back to reality by this mousy interruption she finally noticed a tall thin shy boy seemingly of the age between 16 to 17. 

"Oh, soo sorryy. I didn't notice you. I am good as you can see." She replied to him in her usual manner of greeting boys.

She had not been interested in any boy in her entire life. Neither had she felt anything for anyone. She was the kind of girl who lives in her own fantasy and enjoyed it a lot.

She didn't know what had made her like this. She had never seen her parents fighting over anything. In fact, they were the most ideal couple she could ever imagine. Neither does she had any bad experience in her life with any boy, but it was a true fact. She hated boys. That's the sole reason she never talked to them in a manner normally girls do.

She's also not the kind of girl who goes mad after boys. She was the kind of girl whose heart was hard to melt when it comes to boys.

She went to the kitchen to make coffee for his Dad and their guests. As she set the pot on the stove, she felt an eerie heaviness weighing down her body.

The milk in the pot started to boil as she was beating the coffee in a mug.

The heaviness she was confronting now grew dense. She moved towards the sink to wash coffee mugs when a strange sight caught her. Though it wasn't entirely strange for her as she had confronted a similar view when she reached there. She tried to move her hands, but they dropped as some strange forces were sucking her energy. The light in the kitchen suddenly started to blink. She turned around to go out, but her feet were glued to the floor. She looked out of the small aluminum window screeching with extreme pain to see what powers he had that are weakening her to such an extent.

"What the Heck. What’s wrong with him"

She growled behind her teeth.

Why this man is so weird?  She thought as she was frozen there for some minutes.

As long as she looked in his way, she felt the heaviness inflicted on her from the past 15 minutes vanished. But as soon as he averted her eyes a sharp pain crossed her head all the way down her spine. She bit her lower lip between her teeth as her eyes winced in reaction to that sheer pain.

"Oh, God." She whispered.

"What is this?"

Unable to take that pain she again averted her eyes and looked outside of the window. To her shock, the man was not there this time.

Though her pain and heaviness had also vanished, and she came to her normal state. She was still burdening her mind with a thread of questions. The man. His weird stare. The sheer pain and heaviness.

"Do you need any help?" Again, her bubble of thoughts, or questions, we must say, got busted by Ronnie.

She turned round to see Ronnie standing at the door of the kitchen wearing a sweet smile on his face.

"Amm... No thanks. It's almost done." She replied to him while making her way to the stove.

“Why are you so rude to me?”

Ronnie who had been observing her impolite behavior towards him finally asked her.

“Well, I’m not,” she replied busied in her work.

“I felt so.”

“It’s your fault then.”

“My?”

“Yes. Yours. Because I’m not indifferent to you. I’m just being myself.” She spoke.

“Oh, Ok. But I just told you what I felt. Maybe I was wrong. Sorry for that.” He said with his chin kissing his chest. He was a very shy guy but the other bold, wild, and manly kind of.

She added hot milk in the mixture of coffee she prepared and pushing Ronnie aside she made her way to the living room where her Dad and uncles were arguing on some hot political topic.

Staring at the ceiling of her room. She wondered about the two weird incidents that happened today.

The man had an eldritch stare which sends sheer pain. This place started to appear mysterious to her now. Before moving in here, she knew that she would be going to miss her room and her home a lot. But the events that occurred from the time of leaving her house till now had given her sheer jerks of shock and made her forget the feelings of leaving her place but ponder on these both strange and mysterious events.

Why does he stare at me like this?

Who is he?

Why always stands outside?

A pool of questions was whirling around her head and that mysterious guy whom she encountered first after arriving at this new place was the center of her questions. Her mind swung from one question to another trying to find their answers, as a cool gust of wind seeped through the open window blowing away the curtain making its way towards her, it lulled her to sleep as she whispered in her dream, “But what’s the matter of this man with me?”