Home Invasion

I came out of the tiny cottage and finally yawned with abandon. The vista unfolding before me was a sight for sore eyes.

Photo prompt courtesy Sue Vincent

Reaching here when we did had turned out to be an excellent decision. The fresh snow had covered our tracks better than we could have ever hoped, and the ground now looked untrodden by man or beast. Now all we had to do was stay inside…and wait.

Even though the girl was not expected for another couple of hours at least, I didn’t want to take any chances, so I went back inside and closed the door, leaving it unlatched from inside of course, just locking it using the duplicate key that the girl’s Cook had helped us obtain.

Not that we were afraid of the girl, of course. Far from it. She was just a piddly little thing, and there were three of us, all much bigger and scarier than her. But then, past experience had shown us that it was best not to take any chances, especially when dealing with wily creatures like her.

What if there were some grown-up men coming back with her? We could handle them under ordinary circumstances, but what if they were armed? Too many unknown variables. You can’t prepare for everything. And so, you prepare for what you can, and hope for the best. As we were doing.

My reverie was interrupted suddenly by the excited voice of my son, who had one eye glued to a tiny crack between the curtain and the window. “She’s here, she’s here,” he whispered animatedly, “and she’s alone.”

Like a well-oiled machine, we all took our positions. She would enter soon, and then, she would suffer, just like she had made us suffer years ago, and then disappeared from our lives. It had taken us a lot of effort to locate her, and we’d had to call in a load of favours. But it would all be worth it….Ohhh, so worth it! None of us had any doubts about that.

We froze as we heard the jangling of her keys on the door. We heard her enter the living room, keep her stuff on the sofa, and start walking towards her bedroom. The moment of truth was finally about to arrive.

“Strange,” we heard her say, “I could have sworn I had left my bedroom door open this morning.”

I hit my hand on my head. It was my responsibility to keep everything in the house as it had been, so that she would not get spooked and run away, just like she had done on that fateful day. But anyways, what was done, was done. We could only pray that this memory lapse would not cost us too dearly.

Thankfully, she didn’t make to much of the closed door, and so, casually opened the door, and walked in. It was then that she saw the three of us, and her face went white, first with recognition, and then with fear.

“You…….” she gulped, as she saw my wife sitting on her chair, which had shattered due to her weight, me lying don on her bed, which looked like it had been in an earthquake, and our son calmly eating a bowl of porridge.

“Hello Goldilocks,” I said, as she finally experienced what she had put us through so many years ago, and fainted.

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Written in response to the #writephoto Prompt – Untrodden at Sue Vincent’s Daily Echo.

 

 

 

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