Menagerie (standard:horror, 1595 words)
Author: Lev821	Added: Jan 04 2010	Views/Reads: 3163/1937	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A seemingly empty house contains many corpses of animals, and why should the drum not be banged?

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

Double glazed sliding panel doors that led into the backroom were open,
and he made his way slowly across and peered inside. Again, there were 
no dead animals, but the room itself was like nothing he had ever seen 
before. The floor, walls and ceiling had been painted white, and what 
looked to be Egyptian hieroglyphs had been scrawled across them. In the 
middle, there was a strange structure that Daniel could not make out, 
so he stepped in and walked across to it. It was wooden and circular, 
with what looked to be a stretched canvas across it. It's a drum, he 
thought, and that wasn't canvas. It was skin, around four feet in 
diameter. He also noticed that around it on the floor, bones had been 
scattered, and some broken skulls. He then noticed that in the middle 
of the drum there was a jaw bone that had been sharpened into a 
makeshift blade, and a small note. On it, it simply said: ‘You'. He 
slowly picked it up and unfolded it. ‘Hello friend,' it said, in barely 
legible blue biro. ‘I expect that by now you will have seen the 
animals. Well, now you can partake in this new experience. You see, as 
owner of this house, and of this ‘Menagerie', I discovered a lost, 
ancient Egyptian scroll on my travels in the middle east. You'll never 
believe what I had to do to get it. Some people are very protective of 
things, you see, but I obtained it, and it gave me the power to bring 
organic beings back to life, and when it did, they remained immortal. 
So you see, I had to kill my animals, and then myself, but then I 
needed somebody to bang the drum to complete the final part of the 
ritual, and that, my friend, is where you come in. The drum needs your 
life's essence to bring us back into existence. Bang the drum with your 
blood. I expect that you are quite sceptical at the moment, so I had to 
cast another spell over this very letter, which means that when you 
stop reading this, you will do exactly as I have written. Open your 
throat over the drum, and play the rhythm”. Daniel shook his head at 
the note. “But what you've forgotten,” he said, aloud. “Is that while 
you were waiting for someone to come along, the bodies still decay, and 
rot. Didn't think of that, did you?” He tossed the letter aside and saw 
the sharpened jaw bone, which he found himself reaching for. ‘What am I 
doing?' he thought, staring at it as though he didn't know what it was, 
then sending it into his neck, opening his veins and arteries. He fell 
forward and gripped the sides of the drum, positioning himself over the 
skin as the blood splashed on its surface creating a drumming sound 
that reverberated further than the confines of the room. After around 
thirty seconds, what was left of Daniel's own mind returned and he 
staggered towards the garden. He fell to his knees, and before he 
collapsed to the floor, saw that the crosses in the earth were falling 
or shifting, the soil moving. Blood pumped and spilled from his wound, 
splashing the floor, and he saw a few of the animal corpses walk slowly 
into the room to stare at him. 

What he didn't see, was the corpse of the owner emerge from the gloom at
the top of the stairs, and walk slowly down to join Daniel. He was 
basically a skeleton with stretched skin. Empty eye sockets and sparse 
skin were something Daniel could not see any more as bony fingers 
entered his mouth to choke him. After a few seconds, Daniel was dead, 
and the owner walked out into the garden, and was joined by the 
menagerie that were in the vicinity of the sound of the drum. Only two 
never heard it, and they were on the bathroom window ledge, a dog and a 
bird. All the other animal corpses milled around him, and he looked 
down at them with pride, then looked up and would have smiled if he 
could, as Daniel shuffled across to join the family. 


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