Bogleech.com's 2014 Horror Write-off:

" Welcome Home "

Submitted by wednesday

You are a man. You are wearing a suit so you must be important. You are standing dead centre on a plateauing narrow black tar road in the pouring rain, so your car must have broken down and you are now looking for help. This is the only explanation that makes sense to you. Why had you forgotten this is beyond you.

You begin to walk. The road you are on is lined with thin white barked trees dotted with knobby grey eyes. It feels like they are watching you as you walk. And walk. And walk. Until you come to a very large Victorian style building surrounded by a rod iron fence. You approach the building. The gate to the fence is open. A bolt of lightening cut across the sky behind the building. You do not remember your name or where you came from but you knew what you just witnessed was very cliche. Thunder rumbles over head.

You make your way towards the door. You knock on it and there is no answer. Normally, you would have waited a bit and knocked again but something feels wrong in with your head. You are having trouble thinking. You reach for the doorknob, with intention of just seeing if the door is locked, instead you find yourself twisting the knob completely and open the antique wooden door.

You come into a front room. It is barely dimly lit. It is just enough for you to make out what is in the front room. A side table, some small framed pictures, a narrow rug that ran the span of the front room dissapearing further into the house and green and lavender wallpaper that you find positively hideious. You do not see the source of the light.

You glance over at the framed images when you hear something. It is faint. The softest, most distant voice as though it was coming from far, far back in the house whispered;

"Welcome back."

"Hello?" You respond, not exactly certain that you heard anything at all. The voice repeated itself. You without thinking much about it begin to walk further into the house, into the unlit left hand hallway, where you are certain the voice came from. You glance at the photos as you pass.

Your stomach drops.

You are in every single one of the photographs on the side table. And, you are standing next to some...one? You do not look any closer. You want to get away from this table. You move quickly down into the dark hall.

As you move down the hall the light moves with you.

The hideous wallpaper continues down the hall as does the carpet which you can now see is lined with a similar green to the wallpaper with floral designs on a black backing. The flooring is wooden and a warm yellowish brown.

"Welcome back

You hear it again. There it no doubt about it. The voice is just slightly louder this time but there is absolutely no doubt that you heard it.

There are oval framed portraits on the wall. They are of you. You and whoever it is standing next to you. You feel too much urgency to find the owner of this voice to examine them further. The hall continues on, wrapping around to the right.

"I've missed you."

The change in what the voice is saying causes you to pause. How long have you been walking thoughtlessly through this endless hall following after ever growing louder Welcome Backs? You realize that your feet are aching. The voice sounds like it was just a few feet away. You take in your surroundings.

Nothing has changed but the amount and shapes of framed portraits. There are long rectangle ones, square ones, round ones, small and very large ones arranged in away that left just half an inch of space between them all. You are in all of them.

And with you is someone you cannot see properly. The face in each and every photograph is obscured with a smear of black.

The voice repeats itself and you continue carefully now down the hall, paying closer attention to the photographs. The space between the frames lessens as you inch down the winding hallway until the walls are covered completely by the various sized frames.

"You always do this."

The voice coons and your eyes are trained on the photographs as you walk. You notice something is off about the photographs. The further you walk your face in the photographs become more obscured until it is just an inky black smear.

The dim light stops moving with you as you move. You are standing in the dark. Something is moving, shifting above you.

"You belong to me."

Something is descending from the ceiling. You run forward and hit a wall. You also hit the frames. A lot of frames. You rebound off the wall as the frames fall off. You pick yourself up off the floor as whatever is descending finishes coming down in front of you.

The light returns now. It is brilliant. It is blinding. When it dims enough for you to see, what you see in front of your mind cannot comprehend. The thing in front of you has many legs, far-too-many-legs and looks as though it is made of flesh and of blood but it moves mechanically towards you, parts of its body flounder limpy about unsupported by muscles or gravity . Where a head should be is just a swirling mass of darkness.

"You always do this." It speaks to you in a concerned voice, "You forget who you are and run away from me. Welcome home."

You run. You run as fast as your aching legs will carry you. You push past your pain. You run.

And it runs after you. Calling after you. You slam into walls and knock down more frames. You can see the image of the person clearly now, even in your panic, as you pass photos by. You can see that the other person was the creature this entire time.

You make it out of the house somehow.

Breathlessly, you take in your surroundings. You are in a nice neighborhood with stately houses. The road beneath you is brick. Where were you just now? Where are you now? Who are you? You do not remember.