mr.mincemeat@syteka.UUCP (mr.mincemeat) (10/13/83)
There is this pair two people Husband and wife they are And living not gladly In the house of his father Who was weird, and Is dead of strange causes. The wife is not happy, The house being old And strange also Imbued as it is With shades of the dearly Departed dead scholar and taker Of notes, many pages now stored Expectantly waiting In dusty array in a small room upstairs. After a space and Over wifely objections The son and young husband Begins to explore these tomes- Diffident at first And them more avidly as His interest, some might Say obsession- His worried wife is one- Grows and soon As more and more his Time is spent among the Books and papers And strange sounds are heard and Stranger odors smelled By the dutiful wife With beautiful tormented eyes The man grows odder And it seems his appearance While never too fine His wife is the first to admit Becomes bony and gnarled Somewhat like the dead father The last time she saw him Before his untimely demise. But only somewhat And her husband says Uncharacteristically communicative For his newfound persona, His father went wrong, did not take The right path... This some few days Before scratching comes at her door, While she sleeps at night, alone, Her husband busy as usual With books and strange smells- She is indeed frightened, and Calls, cries out to him; He comes then through the door On which he had been scratching Wizened beyond belief Greenish and studded With protruding hornlike things And leering and gobbling Deep in his throat Leaps for his wife Who dodges, runs gibbering With fear through the house Her husband this thing in spiny Pursuit and growing ever more Withered and like something dead Until she is cornered In some seldom used storeroom And his attenuation reaching its zenith Leaves him at last only Bones which fall clattering Unjointed and lumpy And become unwholesome dust while his Wife puts her fingers deep in her mouth Screaming all the while and staring and staring As the dust sinks into the floor itself And the floorboards begin moving and seemingly live And she hears the doors slamming Throughout the house and Suddenly even the Door to this room shuts Tight by itself as the lights Die abruptly and the floor's Undulations are matched by the wispy And dry quiet dead chuckling So much like her husband And her own voice shrieking In the tones of the damned. mr.mincemeat {ucbvax,hao}!{menlo70,hplabs}!sytek!toms ...decvax!sytek!toms