Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. Running Room Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

RUNNING ROOM

Childhood leukemia took Gillian Stein’s cousin, Ruby, in a flash. Gillian met this with panic. Minor illness found a willing imagination and an open port at which to anchor. Body and mind betrayal, systematic decay where there was no decay. Therapy helped. To appear functional was paramount. To say the things that soothed, to ease the people around her, this became her normal.

Forced normal hardened into a permanent visage. The mask she wore. Without the mask, she’d never have achieved what she had—the face of English studies at Wilhelm University.

Constant warnings, grimy little daggers, fed the brood borne scum within. Men and women eyed her position, angry and jealous lessors. Once you get your beak wet, you’ll need to do this on your own. Eyewink. Sinister grins behind those shining smiles. Crushing handshakes. Forgotten preference in coffee dressing for the third time in a week.

Inside was a shaky world teetering on crumbling pedestals. Unfit for duty, this was a body crafted for much less, a world without stress or chaos, and yet, the mask pushed on. Trembling hands and knees covered, short panicky breaths corralled like livestock, the speeches and meetings, decisions, things hidden, and still, nothing compromised.

Gillian Stein was a success.

Running cleared the weighty dirt of her mind.

Alone at home surrounded by invisible demons.

Alone at work surrounded by visible monsters.

Alone running, outpacing the unhealthy spores that trailed like comet tails.

—

Moving to the old country house gave her space. Hours free to spend along the ancient paths winding over her property and the vacant neighboring farms. This was bliss. Big men with sandpaper hands and expectant smiles worked the land, but nobody lived in the old rundown homes that she passed. Massive operations swallowed family farms and milked the rectangular parcels of greens and golds.

Her tiny patch of home dwelled in a gridlock of fifty-acre quadrants. Her spot, though larger than necessary, was quaint. Nobody minded if she ran the interlocking trails and former fence lines. A running woman would do no more harm than a running white tail deer, and there were plenty of those.

Home, sweaty, bits of grass and grains clinging to her sticky skin, the notion of filth came on in a wave. Gillian scrubbed, wishing she had the stamina to run to the grave.

Air-drying under the sun, naked in her living room, television switched onto CNN. A young woman had been sexually assaulted while running in the park where she used to run. On-screen, a tearful confession begged that the man who did this face his crime and that anyone with information come forward.

The filth worked into frenzy. The description of the attacker sounded like every man Gillian had ever seen on the park trails. Washed out faces and forms, all fit the mold of this monster. The woman on the set begged, as if she bore the guilt, as if she ought to beg at all, as if humanity did not have a duty to mind one another.

Gillian looked out the window, imagining runs on this victim’s trail, her trail. The thought of sex made her cringe, dead skin rubbing together, exchanged fluids, broken vessels mingling blood.

Never.

Uncomfortable in the open, she hurried to her room to dress.

Sex.

This was another truth that her mask hid well. Through university, Gillian lived alone in a small dorm room. She did not party, but she did not scorn. She feigned prudish, when inside, the come-ons from drunken boys wholly revolted her.

After years of living in the dorms, she took a job at the university and moved into faculty housing. Popular belief suggested this was a fit for early teachers, those with green horns and deflated bank accounts. Gillian had less unease there and still, she needed space to unveil her true being.

As it was expected of her to do, once within her means, she purchased the old home and rented the services of sweaty men who drank from sixteen-ounce Tim Hortons coffee cups in between moving and packing her limited existence. The university was a two-hour drive from the house and the vacant space of fields and monstrous machines. This meant she needed dual households and kept a sterile bachelor condo to accommodate life during the school year. She could walk to work and on weekends and all summer, there was the farmhouse.

—

Along a trail of hip-high grain, Gillian ran. This was a new route for her run.

She stopped to glare at an old house of white clapboard that reached into the sky three floors. Skinny and strange, intriguing. Boarded windows and life expelled. She’d seen this place once before, but it was different on foot. The first time she sought her new home without the realtor guiding her, there was panic and this led to confusion. Halfway up the lane from the road, she’d braked and gawked at this oddity.

For a tick, a snide voice inside said, this is home, this is befitting.

It was a mistake and an idiotic thought. She reversed out the driveway then, but not this time. The house drew her gaze as it had on the first occasion. Eyes lifted and stayed up, rather than focusing on the uneven terrain. Shadows flickered behind the cracked front door. Gillian’s heart double bumped as she tripped over a septic cover–hidden like an assassin in the long grass, the greyed wood snatching away her balance. The fall was painful. The filthy, sickly sensations caught up to her.

The assaulted woman from her former park.

The nasty men lurking in the guise of athletes.

Gillian swung her gaze a full three-sixty from her knees, flopping then onto her butt. It was a space of overgrowth and human vacancy. Only the deteriorating frame of the former home loomed near.

Danger-seeking eyes zeroed on the cracked front door. It was quiet beyond the gentle swish of grainy grass and insect activity. The smell was summer, clean and fresh. The air was balmy though it was only 8:15 AM.

It was only a home. Inanimate. Harmless. No attackers present.

Up to her feet, brushing at the Nike shorts with the spandex underwear built beneath like a second skin, third skin. A long scratch ran the soft tanned flesh of her left knee. Straightened and stretching out any newfound kink, a dog growled far too close by.

Stiff with sudden adrenaline, Gillian’s eyes scanned the home. There was no movement. The growl ceased. A trick of the inner filth, catching her stalled on a run…

The dog barked. A big dog. A dog surely weighing more than she weighed.

“Quiet, Rufus!” said a small childish voice from within the home.

Gillian sprinted toward the ancient rock wall, away from the tall farmhouse.

Most summer days she ran twice. After supper she would enjoy the evening air, hopefully find herself in a flash storm of cleansing rain and magnificent electric light. Often enough, the universe obliged.

There would be no run this evening.

—

Summer was not a complete vacation from the mask. She drank wine, though found it bitter. Wine being a social expectancy, a piece to her ruse, and practicing drinking let her appear another satisfied sipper in any situation. In bed with the glass of turned grape juice, she read from Joyce Carol Oates’ Mudwoman until it was time to sleep. Gillian fell away noting a kindred spirit in the lead character of the novel, perhaps the author.

“Sorry ‘bout Rufus, lady.”

Gillian awoke feeling surrounded and vulnerable, even alone in the arranged solitude. Alone in one of three bedrooms in the timber-frame spread. There was no breeze and the storm had long given way to chirping birds and boisterous insects. They paid her no mind and she paid them back an equal sum.

The dreamed sensation faded, leaving behind only stale breadcrumbs.

—

Off in a direction away from the tall home, away from the imagined child and that barking dog, Gillian jogged. Nipping her ankles were her tormentors. Faster, she pushed and it was good. The whitewashed mind is a place void of filth. Aching legs brought her home again and the routine was a safety blanket. The days of summer were short. At a table set for one, hands in a teepee before her brow, Gillian pondered a long-dead Ruby and the afterlife.

Was Ruby somewhere?

Was she hiding in a farmhouse?

Why would she be in a farmhouse?

Did she roam the Earth?

Not likely.

It was not Ruby she heard. She’d recognize Ruby’s voice.

—

On the trail, her mask demanded stability. There was no girl, was no dog, surely.

It was muggy and the damp air soaked her lungs as she paused to catch her breath. It had been a sprint because she dared not bear the question of its existence any longer. The house hadn’t disappeared. Part of her hoped it had, despite its presence proving a modicum of stability.

A great shadow loomed behind the house like a haunted wedding train. Boarded windows and a door splintered from the frame made a face. Up, flecking white paint and the pale orange roof shingles.

Gillian rounded the building. It took nerve to approach. The reinforcements defied her self-assurance. It was imperative that she look inside. In the long grass, the crickets ceased their chirp as the danger of humanity neared. Every window had a dutiful rectangle of greyed wood. Kids had once played with rocks, most likely. Perhaps teens took up socially unacceptable behavior herein.

A knot in the plywood had fallen away and Gillian targeted. A peephole was the necessary medicine to snuff dreadful mental weakness. The wooden surface held running slivers under Gillian’s gentle touch. Heart pounding, blood throbbing in her throat and skull, she leaned forward to peer through the hole.

A long hallway. Yellowy, water-stained wallpaper bubbled from ceiling to floor. There were three doors, heavy brown doors, solid and antique. Two were closed while one at the far end remained open. Nine wooden hangers rode a rusty bar in the closet. One article—a simple white gown—clung to a hanger while the others endured the naked existence. Spilled items filled the foot of the closet. It was a wedding dress, though not a bride’s dress.

Along the hallway, there was a small table with a fat leather-bound tome atop the skinny black legs. This intrigued Gillian, naturally, much more than the dress. Dusty cobwebs filled the corners and the shorter gaps of wall space. Webbing clouded what little she saw of a banister handrail rising off into the unseen. There was a scent imagined, something musty and rotten, but long dead, like a decaying rodent trapped inside a time capsule.

There were no signs of recent existence.

Gillian blinked.

The wallpaper flattened and freshened. The strewn items in the closet rode hangers. The book was gone. The dress was gone. A formally closed door opened. A small girl, by appearances still in her single digits, broke out. She shouted, “Rufus!”

An eye filled the peeping view and Gillian staggered backwards. She smelled it a half-second before the sound rang in her ears. The dog began barking.

As was her answer to most things, Gillian set her legs to work.

—

An upfront attack was hapless. The recent visit offered a tested proof, futility undeniable. Better to forget and forego the trail to that particular home. Stay away and overlook.

But how could she?

Unable to sleep, Gillian arose to a warm night with a high three-quarter moon. Walking, away from the aged farmhouse and toward a path before unnoticed. Into the woods. Summer, there was no fear of bears or cougars. They fed on easier prey than human woman. The snakes feared her equally as she feared the snakes.

Still, she quickened her pace.

The swish and crunch beneath her feet played a quiet soundtrack. Trees filtered the winding trail to a single lane. Gillian ducked and swiped at the hanging arachnid moss. Filthy stuff clung, bridges for eight-legged vampires.

A fat spider scurried along Gillian’s bare, boney shoulder. She convulsed, shaking with disgusted violence. She ran, ran through the trees and stopped to catch her breath once safe. From the shadows ahead, a dog growled. The nightmarish beast stood the size of a Saint Bernard and then some, cloaked in an ominous midnight aura. It wore the musk of wet dirt and natural canine.

“Rufus! No!” shouted a voice from behind Gillian. “Get in here!”

The beast lowered its vast head and trotted toward Gillian. Still and terrified, eyes followed the damp back. Brown and black, tail lopped short, fur matted with blood. Rufus turned his open mouth as if to bite but continued past Gillian without contact.

“You can come in too, if you like. But you gotta watch out for Dad,” the small girl said.

Gillian turned. It was the house, but she’d run the other way, had done so to avoid this building. It was the house and it breathed again. The grass cropped, an old truck in the lane, paint more fresh, though certainly not actually fresh. In front of it all was the girl. The first clear vision: four-feet, pale, polished skin, and an auburn mop atop her head, two tight braids reached for her shoulders.

A bodily betrayal, she followed the girl and the dog. Up to the doorway of the refreshed farmhouse.

How did she get here?

How did this happen?

How had a trail to elsewhere brought her back?

“Gertrude!” a manly voice hollered from deep inside.

The girl jumped with fright and slammed the door.

Gillian stumbled and spun. Hands reached to soften the landing. A duvet wrapped her as she lay face down on the hardwood floor next to her bed.

—

The name and the location took Gillian into town after Google proved incompetent. Gertrude, the title lingered like an especially bad taste. Rufus and Gertrude from the farm across the field and through the bush.

Mask donned, thick and heavy for the librarian, Gillian sought assistance with the archives. The teenager operating the desk led her to a room in the basement. Dampness and rodent feces laced the scent with familiar foreboding. In the enormous, decades-old scrapbooks, Gillian began at a conscious random. Her subconscious estimated the age of the wallpaper and the dress the girl had worn.

Nothing is random, the deep mind moves in silence.

For three days, Gillian scanned faded headlines before she finally located the story of William Hannity, Marie-Claire Hannity, Arnold Hannity, Steven Hannity, Gertrude Hannity, and Rufus. Arnold and Steven survived the scattered shotgun fire and were under intensive observation and care at the time of the story.

Marie-Claire, Gertrude, and Rufus died on site before the police arrived. An officer named Walter London discovered William Hannity after finding the family and shot him six times at close range. A thinly veiled opinion littered the news story—Walter London was in the right and saved the court an unnecessary burden.

“Closing time, lady,” said the young seasonal librarian with a bubble gum smack.

There was always tomorrow.

—

Gillian ran by the house twice before returning to the archival scrapbooks.

This was not how it was to be.

“Lady, you’re the only one been down here the whole dang summer!” said that same young librarian from the days leading up.

The musty newspapers remained, but the stories were gone. The Hannity family crime had disappeared.

Gillian’s mask was suddenly slick against the skin of her mind, slipping. After a deep breath, she shrugged to the librarian, her mistake, obviously. She searched through the day and found nothing pertinent. Before the snarky teen had another chance to order her away, Gillian parted from the library.

After supper, she ran directly to the farmhouse, to the peephole. It was a dank and dilapidated structure, nothing more. Frustrated, she slammed a palm against the boarded windows, rounding toward the entrance. She kicked the door. It swung crookedly inwards from the splintered frame.

An empty front hall. The cobwebbed banister witnessed from a new angle. The bubbled wallpaper spoke of time and vacancy. The air from within wafted stagnant heat and she backed away a step.

Fully and completely exhausted by the situation, agonized by the mental foray, Gillian turned and stomped from the doorstep. After a dozen steps, she pivoted on a heel and turned back to stare.

Why not enter?

She ran for the door as if pushing against hurricane winds.

“Run, lady. Dad’s in a mood,” came the whispered voice of Gertrude. “He already got my mom. Better not come in—Rufus, no!”

The dark bark echoed.

Spun again, instinct drove Gillian from the home.

—

August ninth, time to begin prep work for the upcoming semester. She packed her car for a week in the city, a week fully beneath the mask of normality. Real issues. Pertinent items reigned. The workload exceeded expectation. Stressed, she ceased her evening run and toiled eleven-hour days. One week became four and the semester began.

It was too much.

It was not!

It was, and the filth danced hand-in-hand with insecurities, further tormenting a battered soul.

She could do this.

Gillian laid her head on a pillow.

Had she made the right decision?

Did it suit, was she not too fragile for such a position?

The neat, air-conditioned room with the ivory paint and perfect corners cocooned her in what was and should be. There was a TV, a desk, and a bookshelf that rose to the ceiling. There was a fiction pile next to the kitchen counter. It revolved, trading titles after consumption. There was an alarm clock with burning red numbers.

Struck by realization, Gillian sat forward. The farmhouse remained open. It was minutes to midnight and that home could not stay open all year, not when she was too busy to live there. Thieves or vandals were apt to steal or destroy the objects that she’d accumulated.

Through the windshield of her Mercedes, lights flashed and lulled her with a hypnotic effect. Head rolling and snapping back, she managed, driving on instinct rather than sight. Halfway up the laneway, she came to and stared at the old farmhouse that was not home. This was a place that belonged to someone else, a place of ill repair and abandonment. It was tall and odd, but familiar, of course.

She huffed at the former fear.

Parked, she gazed at the open front door and the gentle light pouring outward casting welcoming tendrils. This was where she belonged. Of that, she had no doubt. There was an invitation. For the real her, the one beneath the mask.

That was right.

None could argue that.

This was a place unchallenged.

A bing-bing-bing announced the car door open while the keys remained in the ignition. There was a chance to turn around yet. A strange and unfitting thought, leaving home.

Why leave?

Door closed, she crossed the lawn, knowing to avoid the septic tank cover. Up the single concrete step to the open door, a name fluttered within.

Hannity.

It tasted all right. Was this the name under her mask? Had she worn a mask so long that she forgot who she really was? It was unlikely and yet…

Hannity was a heavy sound to wear, so heavy that it had to be.

Hands on either side of the doorframe, Gillian leaned in, still in the shorts and t-shirt that she’d worn to bed, slip-on flats over her sockless feet.

A small girl sat on the floor at the foot of the staircase, hands holding a seeping mess pouring forth through her fingers, poisoning the white dress with crimson. This was Gertrude.

Gillian knew this little one.

“You shouldn’t come in,” the child whispered, her lips red and shiny with blood.

Nearby, from the kitchen perhaps, a door slammed.

Gillian winced at the sound and then smiled. Perfect mask presented, just in case she’d misread the invitation. “You don’t understand,” she said and stepped across the threshold. “This is home.”

XX