They’re Home
A piece of slightly occult flash fiction
“Hello?” Kurt said, opening the door to a crack, resisting the urge to scratch his new tattoo. “Hello? I’m here for the package. Anyone home? Mrs. Lands? Mr. Lands? Hello?”
“Come on in, boy!” A man’s voice, in the gloom inside. “We’re home.”
“We’ve been home forever,” a woman’s voice added. “We’re bored. It’s so good you’re here, Kurt.”
“How do you know my name, Mrs. Lands?” Kurt asked, a little surprised. “Did they call you and tell you about who’d be coming for the package?”
He opened the door wide open now, and stared down a hallway that somehow seemed much older than the house, which was itself ancient.
“Did they call us? They used to, sure! But now, did they?” the man said somewhere ahead, ending the question in the tiniest of ugly snorts. “Hear that, woman?”
“Oh, Kurt,” the woman said. She sounded old, yet strangely playful. “They don’t call us. We call them. But yes, they’ve told us who’d be coming.”
“They told us everything, Kurt,” the man added, slightly wheezing. “So come on in, don’t just stand there. Enter, by your own free will, as they say, haha. We have the package.”
“They told you… everything?” Kurt found that creepy. “What do you mean… everything?”
“Everything we need to know we’re safe.”
Oh, Kurt thought. Old people need that. To feel secure, to know who they let into their home.
For a second, Kurt wondered what Mr. and Mrs. Lands would think of his new, itchy as hell but beautiful tattoo. An ancient, tribal-looking drawing his boss showed him a week or so ago. Kurt had no idea what it was, but he liked it a lot. It would probably scare them, the old couple, though. Good thing it’s on his chest, covered by his shirt. They sure don’t know about that.
“We can’t come to the door, I’m afraid,” the woman’s voice said. “We’re old, Kurt. Too old. That’s why we summon people. In the old days, they summoned us. Now we use the numbers, we say the words, so it’s you coming here, to us now. The tables, I mean the table has turned. We have cookies on it, Kurt. On the table. You can have one. And there’s the package, of course! It’s also on the table. Do come in.”
“Yes, madam,” Kurt said.
He didn’t understand a word about this summoning thing, but the cookie sounded great.
He entered the darkness of the house, and closed the door behind himself.
His tattoo stopped itching, suddenly.
