What Was Inside the Barn

I had just finished the fight to get my children to stay in bed. They were supposed to be asleep by 8:30, but they required snacks, demanded several stories stories, and of course had at least three cups of water before they finally passed out. When I was able to collapse into the couch for some alone time the clock read 12:15 am. With my luck I’d get maybe three hours of sleep and be up at 4:30 to spend some time with my husband before he left for his shift.

I considered giving up my alone time and just heading to bed, but I could hear my husband snoring from down the hallway and decided that watching tv in the couch until I fell asleep was the better option. After I grabbed a pillow and blanket, I went around the house shutting off all the lights. When I shut off the last light in the livingroom I noticed something odd out in the darkness.

Now is probably a good time to mention that we live on the farm in the middle of the prairies, besides a few patches of trees and flat fields sewn with crops there’s not a lot to look at. So when I noticed the barn with a singular light on in the loft maybe two kilometres away, my curiosity was peaked. Not simply because the light from the loft was so bright, but mostly because there had never been a barn there.

I don’t know why I was drawn to investigate it, but soon enough I had my boots and wool sweater on and was headed out the door, making sure to grab a first aid kit and a hunting knife just incase.

The air was colder than usual for July. The wind bit at my face as if telling me that I should just go back home, but I couldn’t. Something was pulling me towards the barn. I trudged against the wind, hands in my pockets and hood up, I silently thanked myself for having the common sense to wear something warm. I’m in pretty good shape, but the walk seemed to take hours and I found myself short of breath by the time I had reached my destination.

The barn looked old and weathered. To someone who didn’t know the area it would seem as if the barn had been forgotten and left to rot away. I could still see the light glowing from the loft, although now it seemed much more faint, and flickered similar to a small fire. A savoury fragrence wafted from the loft, making any feelings of suspicion or anxiety about this mysterious barn disappear.

With more effort than should have been necessary I forced the sliding door open just enough so that I could shimmy my way inside. My fear returned when I realized that I had been swallowed up in darkness. I held my breath as my eyes adjusted, I could make out a faint glow coming from an opening in the upper floor that I assumed was the way up to the loft.

I stepped slowly with my arms out in front of me. Besides the dim glow, the rest of my surroundings were still hidden in perversely overwhelming darkness. I shuffled but other than the musty straw that had been laid across the cement floor. I could hear what I assumed were mice and rats which made my skin crawl. As I kept progressing further I silently begged to not cross paths with one of the feral rodents.

Finally I could make out an old ladder that lead to the second story. The sense of relief in knowing that soon I’d be able to see my surroundings again propelled me to achieve my final goal.

I let the warmth from the fire envelope me as I looked around. Any feeling of peace and safety I had quickly left as I saw a woman sitting by the fire looked like me.

I should say, she was a morphed representation of me. The woman, or rather the thing, had my same hair but it looked more like thread than hair. Its face was longer than mine and warped as if its head had once been made of clay then mushed in by its creator. It smiled at me, much too widely to be human, and I saw her jagged teeth. They were a discoloured yellow and a deep brown at the gums, but despite their unhealthy appearance I had no doubt that the size of them could easily peirce my neck in one bite. It’s limbs were too thin and long, and I couldn’t help but notice that it had talons instead of nails.

The creature moved her hand in gesture for me to come closer, but I opted to stay frozen in place, slowly moving my hand to the hunting knife I had brought with me. This seemed to anger the creature, as it continued to gesture more aggressively. I shook my head and mustered up a meek, “no thank you.” Then proceeded to head back to the ladder, all while continuing having my hand ready to grab the knife if need be.

A screech rang out as the thing opened its mouth disgustingly wide, and several snake-like, barbed tongues shot out at me. I jumped down the hole, slashing at the tongues in an attempt to wound the monster to slow it down. The impact of hitting the cement floor from so high made me cryout in pain as I crumpled into the straw forcing me to cough and hack from inhaling the mold spores and straw dust.

Another screech echoed throughout the whole barn. I scammbled to my feet despite every muscle in my body protesting to do so. I could see part of a tongue I had cut off. More were wriggling through the space I had jumped down. They seemed to get longer and longer, emitting a faint glow. What once was pure darkness was now just well lit enough that I could make out my surroundings.

Numerous corpses had been wrapped as if a spider had mummified them, except instead of webbing, it looked more like the threaded hair on the monster. By this point I was too scared to scream, my survival inticts took over and I knew I had to get the hell out of there. That’s when the rats showed up. Except they weren’t rats, they were smaller, faster, versions of the monster upstairs. The only difference being that their faces had not yet been formed to imitate that of a human yet.

As I ran I tripped on a chain, allowing one of the monster’s tongues to get hold of my ankle. The feeling I got when it touched me was instant nothingness, I felt hollow, as if I no longer existed. I had just enough sense in me to cut the thing off of me and managed to escape, slamming the sliding door behind me and twisting a scrap of wire around the two handles.

Despite feeling that all of the life had been drained out of me, I continued to run. The monster’s cries motivating me to get home as fast as I could. I could see the glow of the morning sun in the distance, the glow of hope, he glow that urged me to not look back until I reached the safety of my front door.

Thankfully getting home was much quicker than getting to the barn. I cried with joy when I got inside and ran into the bathroom to clean the evil of the barn off of me. As I ran the sink, I looked into the mirror in horror. My face looked as though it had aged 50 years! The skin was loose and wrinkled, my eyes were gaunt and my hair was grey. I started to scrub in an attempt to undo whatever had been done to me, but the skin stayed old and withered just like the barn.

All I could do was silently cry on the bathroom floor until I fell asleep from exhaustion.

When I awoke I was on the couch, tucked in with the tv on. My husband had already headed out to work but had left a note behind “hey hun, I found you on the bathroom floor, thought you might have been sleepwalking again, tucked you back in on the couch. Love you!”

The note read nothing about the fact that I had aged over 50 years in a night. I ran back to the bathroom and despite the dark circles under my eyes, I was back to normal. I ran outside to see if the barn was still there, but as I assumed, it wasn’t.

Its been months since that night. I put my kids to bed earlier now, and kick my husband to the couch when he snores. I’ve tried to dismiss the whole event as a bad lucid dream, but that’s hard to do when I go downstairs every night at 12:15am for a glass of water, and every night I see the glowing light in the loft of the barn.

The worst part is, I still have to fight the urge to not go back.

***photo credit to https://wallpaperaccess.com/old-barns