Housemates Audition

"Gerard? We're late…Gerard, where are you…?" the girl whispered tentatively, her warm breath shimmering for a moment in a cloud of steam as she slowly stretched her pale fingers across the floor in search of her companion.

"Gerard?" she mumbled again, shivering as icy fear chilled her more deeply than the ungodly cold winds of the night. Her unscathed hands ran over the dirt-caked, gravely ground more frantically, her eyes unable to make out any shapes in the shadow she crouched in.

The girl sighed in relief as a faint scuffling behind her head gave away the presence of her only confidante. She held still for a moment, allowing Gerard to scamper lightly onto her shoulder. His tiny clawed feet found their familiar holds on her right shoulder as he secured himself for the movement he knew was coming.

The girl quickly ran her bony hand over her pet rat's bristly fur as she stood, emerging from grime and graffiti caked alleyway corner. She bade her neighbors, the putrid vomit-splattered dumpster and the stack of empty boxes, goodbye as she stepped silently over the geometric concrete slabs for the last time. After all, she would never be returning to this disgusting, smelly, dead-end, forgotten crevice of the world that, as she realized only now, she would never be able to forget.

She kept to the shadows, her knee-length sheet of ebony hair shielding her friend, Gerard, from both the cold of the city night and the unforgiving eyes of snooty urban passerby. Even prostitutes and minimum-wage cubicle-dwellers didn't accept something as lowly as a rat. That was one thing the girl liked about Gerard: he would never leave her.
They were both the same—outcasts.

She tilted her head towards the well-traveled ground and controlled her gait, ignoring the imposing feeling of life being exuded from the various parties, cars, arguments, and obnoxious number of bars that littered the street. She was utterly confident in her own abilities—she knew how to walk with more silence than a ghost, how to maneuver with more grace than a swan, how to breathe without disturbing even the dust in the air. Not to mention, for once, she had a purpose.


The girl didn't stop for even a moment to savor the silent, empty, blackness that meant she had escaped the clutches of the screaming city when she reached long fields of grass, dead flowers, and weeds. Here, there were no streetlamps to light her way, and no people to bar it. Without any warning besides the tensing of the small but well toned muscles in her legs, the girl took off at a full sprint, heading, with no perceivable hesitation, into the darkness that she considered her home.


Some fifteen minutes later, the girl stopped running as quickly as she had started.

She was here.

Her large, dull brown eyes stared up at the menacing abandoned mansion before her. She could not only see it and smell it—antique wood paneling releasing a not too unpleasant musty fog into the otherwise crisp cornfield air—but she could feel it. She could feel the opportunity pulsing from the heart of the imposing structure as if its time-worn glory had no purpose but to call to her deepest, most well suppressed desires.

All of a sudden, her free will seemed to vanish as the house called her in. Gerard whined softly, digging his claws into the girl's shoulder as he tried to warn her of the dangerous trap she knew she was walking into. But…she couldn't stop.

"Sh…" she soothed, raising her hand to touch the rat's head as her bare feet continued forward against her will, dead grass and twigs making no sound under her weight. "It's okay…" she breathed, trying to convince herself as much as her companion. "We have the virus…it's okay…"

The girl gulped slightly as she continued forward, not making a sound even as she, shaking, climbed the eight steps between her and the mansion.

And then, only moments after her calloused toes touched the beaten floorboards on the dirt-covered threshold, did she realize. She was in control.
She didn't want to stop.

She didn't even jump as a crackly artificial voice disturbed her muted thoughts.

"Welcome, Christine, to Housemates."