He waited until the widow left the room, anxiously looking at the clock as she stepped out the room wearing a black dress and a veil that covered her runny makeup, she had cried her eyes out throughout the funeral. The service was at his house since the couple’s apartment had previously burned down during what’s believed to have killed her husband, even if the body inside wasn’t able to be identified properly.

As the door closed behind her, he immediately stood up from the chair he was sitting in and grabbed the crowbar that was stashed in one of his drawers. It was already quite late, around midnight when the widow got in her car and drove away as he desperately started tearing open the wooden floor, plank by plank. Once finished he took a breath and a huge grimace worked its way through his lips, a small cackle slipped out.

“Hello sleepy head!” he said to the helpless man lying on the now opened floor, he was tied up, mouth taped and his legs broken, unable to move but very much alive. It was the husband.

“Oh don’t look at me like that…the only thing I did was sooth the pain of a lonely woman, she won’t be offered to them…not yet” he chuckled. “Now then, I think you’ve simmered enough, haven’t you? you haven’t eaten in what…two, three days?” he said as he carried the husband downstairs, not to the entrance of the house but to some kind of basement.

The husband couldn’t move, every motion had his body screaming in excruciating, unending pain; it was difficult to breathe, his vision was blurry, the only thing he wanted was to see his wife and warn her about the monster that claimed to be their friend. After going down an extensive flight of stairs they arrived to a white door in an empty corridor, sitting next to it were two buckets of red liquid labeled “paint”, though the smell said otherwise.

He threw the husband on the floor, dipped his hand in the bucket and calmly painted the door while muttering something to himself. The door opened, there was no sound, the lightbulb illuminating the corridor slightly dimmed as the husband stared into the empty dark void in front of him. The husband shuddered, his body went completely cold, a part of himself told him he was still alive but he felt like he had always been dead, the thought of his wife was completely erased, nothing mattered…not in front of the void.

He pushed the husband through the door. “You should be honored…they picked you first” he said with a hint of jealousy.

As the husband fell, everything in him went numb, he needed to scream so badly but his mouth was shut, he couldn’t move or cry. He just drowned in the endless darkness that surrounded his being.

———