The Tale of Bonnie Micks

This house contained a secret - or so Jenny had been told. She shined her flashlight all around, scaring herself for a moment after catching her pale reflection in a large cracked mirror. How did she get herself into these predicaments? Why was she always so eager to prove she wasn’t “Mrs. Chicken?”

“They say that’s what killed the whole family, you know?” her older cousin, Cody grinned, only a few hours before.

“What? That ‘Time-keeper’ ghost?”

“Oh, yes,” Cody mused, “because, you see, it’s no ordinary ghost. That’s just one of the names it goes by.” He paused before beckoning her closer, as if to share a devilish secret. “There’s another name you probably know it by: the Grim Reaper.” Jenny rolled her eyes, trying to pretend she was braver than she felt.

“And, exactly how did the big-bad Grim Reaper come to haunt just one house?”

“Don’t you know anything, brat?” Cody retorted as his lips curled into a sinister grin. “There’s never been just ONE Grim Reaper in the world. There obviously need to be more to collect all the lost souls of the world. This just happens to be the Reaper that haunts this dusty old town.”

“Well, how did it come to be in the Micks' house, huh?”

“Because old Mrs. Micks summoned it, that’s how.”

Jenny gulped and moved past the cracked mirror, trying her hardest to force the memory from her thoughts while she searched for this one, stupid door. “It’s the portal to the ‘other-world,’” Cody had insisted. The one that Mrs. Micks conjured up, in her very own home, when she tried to bring her son back to life.

“‘She was a witch after all,’” Jenny quoted out loud, challenging her idiot-cousin’s assertions. “I mean, sure, I heard they were a bizarro-family, but witches? Come on, really?” A floorboard cracked loudly overhead, while a cat hissed somewhere in a distant corner. Jenny froze in place for a moment, not even daring to look back. Once she regained some of her courage she shuffled deeper into the house, her voice rising and cracking slightly as she spoke to the decrepit walls:

“I mean, witches aren’t even real witches. Not in the way Cody thinks - that’s all movies and TV and stuff.”

At last she crept into the kitchen at the back of the house, and carefully guided her little beam of yellow light across the room until she found what she was looking for - the tall, wooden basement door in the far left corner. Jenny gulped again, remembering the rest of the decades-old legend:

“They say that she couldn’t cope with the sudden loss of her son,” Cody continued gleefully. “Old Bonnie Micks was pretty strange to begin with - but she was so grief-stricken by her loss, she decided to try and cheat death.

“So she performed a ritual - a forbidden ritual - to confront the Grim Reaper himself and demand her son be returned. But Death cannot be cheated,” Cody added ominously. “And, as punishment for her defiance, she was cursed to become a Time-keeper at the moment of her death.”

“What’s a Time-keeper then?” Jenny inquired nervously, as she gripped the edges of the living room couch.

“Someone who can tell you the exact day and time of your Death,” Cody whispered darkly.

“But be warned: because if you summon her at the exact moment of your demise, the Time-Keepers have no choice but to take you straight to Hell.”

“Y-Yeah right, Cody!” Jenny suddenly blurted out. “If that were true, then why haven’t more people gone into the house and seen her, huh?”

“Because they don’t know how to summon her,” Cody answered with a shrug.

“And you do?”

“As a matter of fact…”

Jenny stood before the door and stared at it fearfully, mentally repeating the steps of the “ritual” as Cody’s challenge repeated itself again: “Look - if you really don’t believe it, then you go down and prove it.”

Jenny gathered her resolve with a slow deep breath, and reached out one trembling hand to knock:

“Bonnie Micks…” KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK!

“Bonnie Micks…” KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK!

“B-bonnie Micks…” KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK!

Silence filled the house.

Jenny flinched as the door clicked opened and slowly creaked forward. A chill ran down her spine as a long, soft finger grazed her leg. Without thinking, she turned and ran from the kitchen, screaming all the way out the front door and down the rickety front porch.

Meanwhile, the mangy stray cat that had emerged from the basement cocked his head curiously as she fled.

The Cat followed her to the living room and leapt up into the front-facing bay window. He observed her with a bored expression as she sprinted down the street, still screaming. At last she turned the corner and disappeared from sight, that horrible shrieking fading away. Now that the show was over - and with nothing better to do - the stray cat left his perch, cleaned his face sleepily, and then curled up in a corner of the abandoned old house.

___________________________________________________

Fun fact: I first wrote this piece as part of a flash-fiction challenge a year ago...it wasn't selected. But I was still really excited about the end result since I was still experimenting with flash at the time, and wanted to write a piece with a more humorus ending.