Welcome back to the fifth chapter of the Roommate from Hell series. For those of you who are just joining us, there will be a little recap. However if you would like to start at the beginning, please read "RfH Ch. 01: That Thing in the Corner," followed by "RfH Ch. 02: Between Secrets and Semen," then move onto "RfH Ch. 03: Plans Best Laid," and finally check out "RfH Ch. 04: Household of Three" to get fully up to date before starting this chapter.
As always, we do not condone the words or actions of any of the characters.
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There are many roads in this world. We do our best to map out a route that will send us somewhere pleasant, but sometimes our choices take us down roads that do not lead to our intended destination.
Me for example, I thought I was driving to my parent's house to announce my plans to marry my long time girlfriend; Cindy. Had I known our true destination at the end of this road, I would never even have started the truck.
But for now there was only me, the love of my life, and the long forest road stretched out before us as we listened to Journey in my old pickup.
I found myself glancing out the window into the trees. Nothing in particular had caught my eye, yet for reasons I will never understand, I looked away for only a second.
One second too long. I heard my fiancée scream "Look out!" But it was too late. We hit... Something. What ever it was caused the truck to roll and threw me from the cab.
I found myself laying on the side of the road. My head was facing the wreck. I could see Cindy hanging there in the overturned vehicle, trying to escape. The entire front end had been smashed in, and the dash had her legs pinned to the seat. I could smell fuel pouring from the ruptured gas tank. The expanding puddle made contact with a sparking brake-light wire and ignited. The flames rapidly spread to the cab, and I could hear my fiancée panicking as she struggled desperately to escape.
"David, I can't get out!" She called to me. I tried to get up, I tried to help her, I tried to dash headlong into the billowing flames, but my body was completely unresponsive as it laid there stationary.
"David please help me! Why are you just laying there?! It burns! Please don't let this happen to me!" She begged as the flames bit into her flesh. I struggled to move, but I couldn't, because I hadn't.
When my wife died in this car accident last year, they had found me on the side of the road unconscious. I had mercifully slept through her agonized screams as she was burnt alive just ten yards away from me, but there would be no mercy this time. I would now have to experience every second in excruciating detail. I had caused the accident, I had let her die, I deserved this.
"I'm sorry." She wailed in between her suffering shrieks as she slowly succumbed to the fire. I could smell her skin burning, her hair singed away, and her body roasting in the enormous heat. I remained motionless, unable to even cry until the sound of approaching sirens woke me from my lucid paralysis.
At that point I could only lay on the ground trembling until I noticed that I wasn't alone on the side of the road.
Rolling pathetically to face my silent witness, I found my roommate Melissa standing there with the same expression she had worn the night she left. She justifiably gazed in horror and disgust at my refusal to even attempt to save my dying fiancée.
"What the hell are you?" She murmured once more, and I finally awoke.
"Well that one was weird." I muttered into the darkness of my empty bedroom. Although empty is a bit of a stretch, as that thing in the corner wordlessly perspired in agreement. Normally a fixture of the living room, the mysterious organism had been slowly migrating through the wall into my bedroom ever since Melissa up and flew away. Perhaps it was fleeing from the remains of its previous abode, perhaps it was trying to keep an eye on me, or perhaps it was just lonely.
Normally I'd be revolted by the invasion of my personal space; that thing and I hadn't exactly gotten to know each other on the best of terms. But after seeing what it could do to protect those it served, and being exposed to the horrific reality that there are things out there I desperately need protection from, I opted not to resist its soggy advances.
Besides, maybe I was a bit lonely too. This whole place felt so empty since my roommate left, and that inescapable feeling that I'm being watched provided to me by the living, breathing, growing monster in the wall helped ease my feelings of desolation.
My alarm hadn't gone off yet, but there was no way I was going to get back to sleep after a nightmare like that. So after stretching wearily, I decided to get ready for work early. As I sat up I noticed my slippers placed at my bedside.
This also had been going on since Melissa left, and I could only assume that the mysterious creature had taken it upon itself to pull them out of the closet for me every night. It reminded me of a trick my dog did for me I when I was growing up. So when I first saw them laying there at me feet I groggily commented: "Good boy Hank." It was originally just a joke, but as time went on I found myself regularly referring to that thing in the corner by the name of the late Golden Retriever, and it didn't seem to disagree.
"Thanks Hank." I mumbled as I put on my slippers and lumbered to the shower.
My indifference to the strangeness of this situation was not an attitude born overnight, but developed from months of living with insanity, and the insane. I thought things were weird when I showed up to move in a couple months ago and there was that humungous creature growing out of the damn wall. Since then I have witnessed magic, demonic possession, and a violent sexual tryst ending in murder.
Strange was no longer the exception. In this madhouse, strange was the new normal. Speaking of new normals, it had been three days since the incident that had demolished our living room, and inexplicably caused my roommate to flee. All things considered, I thought we'd grown a lot closer through our shared experience. But just when things were heating up, she suddenly freaked out on me.
I don't know why. Had I pushed thing too fast? Had I said or done something wrong? Why had she given me that look? She was the one flying around on a broom stick with the power to control the very gates of hell in the palm of her hand. Why was she suddenly so afraid of me?
"What the hell are you?" Her last words to me echoed in my memory. The more I thought about it, the less it made sense.
Showered and dressed, I dropped my slippers off back in the closet and exited my bedroom. The place wasn't much better than it had been the night we'd accidentally invited a demon into our house and had to banish the damn thing back to hell from our own living room. The perfectly circular cut in the floor that had previously lead to the fiery pits of the underworld was lazily marked out with caution tape; the sole safety precaution to keep people from falling into the apartment of my unfortunate neighbors below. The furniture was strewn across the room in pieces, and there were human-shaped gouges in the walls where the demonic being had repeatedly bashed us into them.
The wall facing the street was absent entirely, as it had been since that hell spawn tossed a couch through it. I nodded cordially at one of the laborers setting up frames for the replacement wall from the scaffolding that covered that entire side of the building.
"Good morning sir. Quite a quake we had the other night." He commented socially. It turns out that banishing a demon is no simple task, our building and several others nearby had been damaged in the process.
"It was quite a doozy, for a minute there we thought we weren't going to make it." I answered honestly.
"Yeah, my grandma lives down the street from here, and she felt like her entire house was going to come down. I thought her place looked bad, but it looks like you guys got the worst of it." He offered sympathetically, observing the remains of my once comfortable living quarters.
"Yeah, I'm real sorry about your grandma." I offered apologetically, I felt somewhat responsible for this unnatural disaster.
