The Yellow Hazard Protocol
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The rental came with a key she hadn't asked for, small and brass, unlabeled. It opened nothing in the house. On her third night, she tried it on the basement door, which she'd assumed was painted shut. It turned. The stairs went down, and down, and the air that rose smelled like her grandmother's kitchen, though her grandmother had been dead for eleven years and had never lived in this country. At the bottom of the stairs, her flashlight revealed a snug brick room of decent size, with walls bristly with cobwebs. Hanging from a hook in a corner was an iron kettle, rusting at its hanging point. The latch to the outer door was gone, slowly pitted by slumber, and the latch to the inner door was made from the teeth of some crafty gear. Next to the gear, a succession of caulking irons, handleup, standing on their ends, followed the wall. Under a row of fallen bricks was a slab of oldiable earthlike dark material, covered with pressed weed and grass. Suitable for burying a dog. She threw pitch and paper provisions into the basement, as though it were a boat, and scrawled outside what she would have read entering such a place, YELLOWHAZARD. On the last wall, a deep smear of blood, winter's first, never washed clean, but re-blossomed come spring.
I would apply a yellow hazard to such a house
I would apply a yellow hazard to such a house
I would apply a yellow hazard to such a house
Good. You want to own your actions. You may try the house. It stands vacant.I'm also tempted to offer a warning about what's in the house:
For the same reasons I said Hill House would be a bad idea.But my favorite? Amityville.
I confess, are rather hesitant to take you up on your admonition. I posted it a comment on the thread.
Your decision is different and perhaps your privilege. Let me tell you the start of the dark little story I intended that comment to try to guard against.
Part I
She discovered it because of the smell of blood mostly. It was October 10th. Yesterday it rained and the ground had wept a soft unending drink to all the roots and the smell of no real woods that Mississippi holds best drifted up along with the back of the house always smelling of wood fire and old skin. The smell of most baths. Lakes of it. Pennies. There are times you can turn away from our town and stop breathing with all glory. The woods are just right. Just what they ought to smell like and the riverly smells of river and its musty old denizens and muddy-sky willow-pole things that line it. And the trees won't even remind you of tea and blossoms curled over like dead lips. But the day was wrong, because the river hasn't been wrong for years now. They buried news that seems long ago, a civil rights worker drowned when his car slid into the water. September 22nd. They showed a body with silt tangled in his hair, into mold. He had bled there so long that a body this well tended could still have a bodily press to its life force. And Halloween is coming.
Like you I have faced the same choice of invitation that she faced, but that she cannot heed. She limps in the fade of family and cares not that her family have gone, making untraceable their exits, or unavailable, or both. She is no longer allowed to parse the textures of her own life, having been shaved to a convenient incandescence, and she is not gifted like you to see past appearances. She would bid you, if she could, to believe her oaths and detect the thread that runs through the tale. Briefly, it is this: man by man, woman by woman, victim by victim, she can tell you every little mirror-bit of how it seemed to her in that house. She will tell you every old surface and nook and secret that was visited by the finger of the killer who ascended the steps of her house.
It is a matter of what you see for yourself. Let me then tell you of my discoveries.
Part II
There was a boy outside that October 10th. He was my double. Together we refrained from disguise by our marks in his case and mine. He was a clumsy kid with bushy mussy hair, four nipples. I had always despised that kid, by play with him He took to stuttering as I took to doing as he did to be better not for any re-son but in case he waited for other things upon that rea-son. He saw me by sight-light at first, and the two of us had a yell at odded hours, until he had seen debated suspicions of normal mantra that night and he didn't know what did do. His face was his own. Eyes the wrong size in the wrong◆ About the ending
❧ About the title