Post by James on Jul 4, 2012 21:48:59 GMT -5
Tim the Poltergeist watched the silver SUV disappear down the long winding driveway with sadness. It wasn’t that he had grown attached to the Williams family. They were as annoying and loud as any other family that had lived in the country house for the last two hundred years. It was just that they were so amazingly delicious and filling. Two twenty-something parents with three young children meant that Tim had never gone hungry. All of that fear, depression, anger, disappointment and sadness was like a revolving all-you-can-eat buffet. He was genuinely going to miss them.
Shifting his form back to transparency, Tim floated lazily through the empty landing of the old house. The wooden floorboards were polished and almost sparkling. He had stood at the wide window as he grew steadily more opaque. The children had looked up and screamed, seeing the strange man staring down at them from the house that they had stood in only moments ago. Skin slacked, his bones pressing outwards against his imaginary flesh, Tim had smiled down at them. The mother had stumbled back against the car when she looked up; the father rushing to the driver’s seat to take them far away from the home before he could even wave at the poor humans. Still, he could smell their fear as he followed the winding wooden staircase and slipped straight through the closed front door. And it smelt delicious.
The house was an impressive structure from the view from its fine, evergreen stretching garden and snake-like, gravel driveway. Wide and tall, it had the narrow doors and windows of the famous Tudor style. The monotony of the white walls was regularly broken up by black timbering, chimneys running high into the air from the steeply pitched roof. It looked quaint. Tim drifted through the thick, heady sense of fear, breathing it in deeply. Looking up at his home, he smiled. If he was destined to remain on Earth for all of eternity, he couldn’t have picked a nicer place.
Perhaps he could have chosen a nicer name, but Tim had now been with him for forty years. After four decades, he didn’t have much choice but to adopt the name that was given to him by some bumbling psychic. One family had finally freaked enough to consult her help, although obviously not sufficiently freaked to flee the house that they had bought for a bargain. She had told them that he was a ‘departed soul’, a former owner of the house who had been tragically murdered by his son. If he was capable of sympathy, Tim would have had it in spades for the poor, creatively challenged woman. Yet, the psychic decided on the name Timothy and the papers loved it. Tim the Poltergeist was too good of a headline to pass up for even newspapers that didn’t have a red top.
Those were some wonderful years for him, the poltergeist thought, drifting back inside the naked home. People flocked from miles around to come and visit the house and see if he was real. He had fed like no other time before. It had made the Williams family look like a grubby little starter from some cheap restaurant. He would frequently float through the house, pelting visitors with objects. Gleefully chuckling, he would appear to trespassers on the ground. They would scream as he hurtled towards them, his mouth gaping wide. Once, twenty years ago, schoolchildren had broken into the grounds. When they left, sobbing and screaming, they were shaking and Tim felt as if he had just eaten five Sunday roasts.
Fame didn’t last forever, though, even if you were a malicious spirit that should have long since departed from the world. The papers soon stopped writing about him. Ghost hunters abandoned their hopeless quest of catching him. Teenagers started frequenting the run down cinema that sat disused on the outskirt of the nearby village. Even priests stopped arriving to bless the house, obviously deciding that throwing water around just wasn’t working. Soon, Tim was left alone once more with the various new owners of the house. It wasn’t bad; they still provided ample enough food. However, those glory days still lived tauntingly long in his memory.
Looking around at the empty lounge, Tim grinned at the occasional scratches upon the floor where tables had once been pulled across the room. Children got particularly frightened at magically moving furniture. He wondered if the next owner would have children. Hopefully, there wouldn’t be a delay till the next buyer arrived. Famine was a harsh thing. Glad that he got in one final feed before the Williams left, Tim floated slowly up through the storeys of the house. It was a clichéd till the end, but Tim preferred the attic.
((Right. This is by nowhere near done, but I'd really like some input on the beginning. I like the idea, but I'm not sure if I really like how this is written.))
