The Road to Maine is Bloody Part 22

She almost let out a scream until she realized it was a curtain on that window swaying in the breeze coming through the window she’d left open a bit to air it out yesterday. Ashley let out a sharp breath, relief flooding through her and she grabbed the black and gold oval door knob, turning it to the left and pushed the door open, the door creaking loudly as it swung open, immediate clouds of dust from the wood floors billowing up in the musty smelling air.

She sat the bucket on the floor and looked around, trying to decide where she wanted to start. Deciding on the kitchen, she grabbed the bucket and walked down the hall, glimpsing at the walls that were yellow with age and there were bare spots where pictures had hung for many years while she was growing up. The pictures long gone, packed away in a box that was now at her house, stored in the attic in some way so she didn’t have to relive the years of torment with her stepfather.

When her parents had divorced, her mother had thrown away all the pictures of her with her real father, leaving no trace of him inside her childhood home, figuring better days were ahead of her, not knowing how wrong she would be. When her mother hadn’t been home, she’d taken some of those out of the trash and put them in a box in her room, hiding it in her closet, behind her clothes that hung there.

Her mother never found them and she didn’t look at them again until she moved out of her dad’s house and into her own place. Ashley felt her Dad was remorseful about the end of their marriage but refused to acknowledge it. He remarried but divorced two years later when Kathy cheated on him. Ashley never met her and she was glad, she’d heard she was very snooty.

Ashley spent the next four hours cleaning the house from top to bottom until it literally shined. She replaced the yellowed curtains with new one’s she’d bought when she was still home, replacing them with thick red velvet one’s. The last room to clean she’d purposely left until last was her mother’s bedroom, the one where her mother spent the last hours of her life. When she turned the brass knob and opened the door, she dropped the bucket, her mother’s body lay in front of her, in a pool of blood and Pennywise looked up snarling, blood dripping from his pointed teeth & torn flesh hung from his lip. Ashley screamed.