The Stranger Upstairs by Lisa M. Matlin EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Lisa M. Matlin
- Language: English
- Genre: Horror Suspense
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
April 26
Welcome to Black Wood House.
This is the front door Janet Campbell burst out of. This is the barren yard
she ran across, fleeing for her life. Those are her cries echoing down the
lonely street for forty years now.
Don’t kill me. Don’t kill me. Don’t kill me.
Upstairs is a bedroom with bloodstained floorboards. This is where
Susan Campbell bled to death, and this is where I’ll sleep. Some people
think that’s messed up.
I am not some people.
I carry a stack of moving boxes up the long stretch of dirt driveway
snaking through the yard like a scar. It’s silent except for the musical warble
of a lone magpie and the half-hearted squabble of the cockatoos in the
blackwood tree.
My eyes drift past it to the house. Not for the first time I wonder, Why
the hell did someone build a Victorian Gothic in a stuffy country town like
Beacon?
Black Wood House is sharp and strange and utterly silent. Its
flaking paint reminds me of peeling skin, and the steeply pitched spire looks
like a towering black sword. There’s only one window on the front of the
house: a pointed arch overlooking the lounge room and matching the front
door. Whoever built Black Wood clearly did not want anybody peeking in.
A private, sprawling estate. That’s how the probate realtor described it. It
sounds beautiful, and it would have been. Back then. I can imagine it—peagreen lawns large enough for a dozen families to picnic on.
But after forty years of neglect, all that’s left are stark, flat grounds
ravaged by kangaroo shit and echidna burrows and choked with knee-high
weeds. The property has a barren feel to it, like the very ground is grieving.
Like it’s stuck in the memory of that day.
And yet the house itself seems detached from the misery. Like it doesn’t
give a shit what happened here all those years ago. Like it wouldn’t care if
it happened again.
I haul the boxes inside, up the stairs, to my new bedroom. The murder
room.
I don’t know what’s more sinister about this room, the faded bloodstain
by my bed or the concrete-gray wallpaper. Corpse skin—that’s what it
reminds me of. And worse.
Etched into the wallpaper is a massive forest. The black trunks are taller
than me, and high above the canopy is a sky dotted with stars. Back in the
day, I bet it was a peaceful scene. I imagine Susan propped up in her bed,
sipping a hot cup of tea and staring at the forest after a long day of cooking,
cleaning, and whatever the hell women did back in the seventies.
Maybe she even felt like she was inside it, breathing in the clean air, far
away from the pressures of motherhood and her soon-to-be homicidal
husband. It would have been dove gray then. Pretty.
I dump the boxes on the floor and reach up on tiptoe to trace my index
finger over a diamond-shaped leaf. It instantly flakes off and death spirals
to the floor.
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