Red

When I was a kid, I lived in a small, ugly yellow house. I can't remember much else about it. I kind of went into shock and forced myself to forget.

And why, you ask?

My parents were murdered. I was found unconcious in the woods nearby, clean and unharmed. Or, that's what I was told. I could never remember it. No matter how hard I tried, I could never remember any details before waking up in the arms of some doctor or ambulance driver. I was never allowed to go get my stuff, because apparently the murderer destroyed everything in the house.

After that day, though, I had nightmares. Terrible nightmares of a tall, red-eyed man in a suit carrying a scythe and of a dark forest in blood-red light. Every other night, I would wake up in a cold sweat, screaming. I was sent to a psychiatrist for it, but there was never any explanation or solution given.

Despite that, I grew up as a well-adjusted person. I did well in school and I found the woman of my dreams. We married about a year after graduating together. We both worked, but we found it in our schedules to go house hunting occasionally. Both of us figured that we had to move out of her parents' basement anyway.

I found our dream home while searching for a deal. I took a quick look of the outside, but the door was locked and it was impossible to get inside. The house looked quite old; it was this eerie yellow color. Something about it looked familiar, but I couldn't place it. Well, either way, I contacted the owner and got it for an extremely cheap deal. He seemed kind of relieved that someone wanted to buy it, as if it was avoided before. But I showed my wife and she loved it just as I did.

When we went inside, it was a mess. It looked as if a tornado blew through. The previous occupants of the home had left everything they had, though destroyed, as well as some red wine stains. Almost immediately, my wife and I set off to make the place livable. Eventually, we got the house to that status.

It was that one night that I was asked to take out the last bit of garbage. I picked up the entire pile and stuffed it in a trash bag. When it was all ready to go, I picked it up, hefted it over my shoulders, and began to walk to the trash bin out by the pool. Yeah, there was a pool. It was empty, though.

Halfway there, I noticed something fall out of the bag. I thought it was nothing at all, nothing more than my failure to securely tie the bag. I looked toward the ground to see what it was.

I saw two photos. Both were upside down. I knelt down and flipped one of them over. It was of a blood red forest...the same from my dream. I dropped the bag of trash and high-tailed it back inside. From there, I ran into the dark bedroom where my wife then slept.

"Honey, you have to get up. I found something within that trash."

My wife stirred and sat up, yawning.

"Do you have to wake me up in the middle of the night? What is it?"

"I found some photos in the trash. One of them was a photo of the forest from the nightmares, and--"

"You're probably imagining things."

"No, it's not my imagination, I--"

My wife sat me on the bed as she got up and turned on the lights. She turned to me and looked in shock.

"What's wrong with your arm?"

I looked down at my arm. It was completely red, even the sleeve. I had no idea what was going on. Looking at my wife, I noticed the color of her eyes had changed to red. It made me nervous, so I looked away. My eyes found the cat, but its fur was red.

My wife noticed the changes too, and panic slowly began to set in. We left the room and went into the dining room. It had the biggest window, so we thought we could see something...anything. That's when I noticed her arm was turning red, too. It looked like the red was just appearing on her arm by some sort of vortex on the back of her hand.

I suddenly remembered that when we had begun clean up of the house, we found a ceramic red hand. I tried to get my wife's attention, to tell her about her arm, but my mouth wouldn't open. And my arm... It wouldn't move.

That's when I heard the thump on the other side of the house.

(I had this dream last night. Some of the details I couldn't remember - or were stupid - were abridged or left out. But the story is basically the same. I'll be rewriting this a little to make it clearer.)