Russ stood in front of the abandoned mansion while having second thoughts about accepting the dare from his friends to spend the night in the supposedly haunted place. Boards covered the windows, but it seemed as if the darkness inside the house was trying to push its way out between the wooden planks.

The gate of wrought iron in the stone wall surrounding the overgrown property was rusty and stubborn to open, but Russ pushed hard enough for it to give way. Like the wail of a banshee, the dry hinges gave off a screech as the gate swung open. Knee high grass covered the broken sidewalk, growing up through the cracks. With every step he took toward the house, he thought more and more about snakes and spiders hiding in the grass, waiting to bite him.

Withered remains of dead vines were twisted around the porch railing and pillars while leaves were scattered everywhere. The warped steps creaked under his sneakers as he climbed up to the porch.

As he reached for the front door handle, Russ realized the door was still slightly open. He hesitated, considering again his decision to go inside and spend the night. Everyone he knew was out trick-or-treating, but he was about to go into a creepy house. He wouldn't even get any candy out of this. Russ was about to turn around when he remembered how his friends had jeered him, daring him to go. If he backed out now, they'd never let him live it down.

Taking a deep breath, Russ pushed the front door the rest of the way open and went inside before he could change his mind again. The instant he was within the entryway, the door slammed shut with a thunderous bang. He tried the handle, but it proved useless. The door was immovable; it might as well have been nailed closed.

His heart was beating so fast, he could hardly hear anything else. Russ spun around, putting his back up against the door and facing the utter darkness of the mansion. The dare didn't matter to him anymore; he wanted out, but with the front door stuck, he had to find a different exit. Not knowing if he could find his way in the dark or what might be waiting for him in the abandoned house, he froze in place.

After a few minutes and nothing had happened, Russ began to calm down and think clearly. He felt like an idiot when he remembered he'd brought a flashlight with him. Digging into his bag, he brought out the flashlight and fumbled around before he found the switch to click it on. The small cone of light seemed pitiful and insufficient in the wide spaces of the interior; it glinted off the dusty crystals of an old chandelier hanging above the entryway, shown across framed portraits of long forgotten people, and illuminated a grandfather clock. The timepiece's bells rang once, their sound lingering in the air. Russ focused his light on the face of the clock and found the hands were nowhere near the hour and the clock shouldn't have been ringing. Looking closer, he discovered the pendulum wasn't even moving. The clock had run down but still seemed to be working on its own.

The entryway had three exits, but only two were accessible as the door to his right was locked, denying him entrance to the library. He paused as he wondered how he knew what was on the other side of the locked door. Russ didn't remember being here before, but he felt certain he knew what was there. The confusion over how he could possibly know what rooms were where in a house he'd never set foot in before almost made him forget his fears for a moment.

Ignoring the bizarre thoughts for the time being, Russ used his light to examine the other exits out of the main entry. Directly in front of him was a wide staircase leading to the second floor. Each of the wooden handrails had been carved and stained to give the impression of being a long snake stretched out on top of the balusters. Russ had to take another look because for a second, he could've sworn he saw one of them start to move.

Even if he was wrong, Russ decided not to risk getting any closer and went through the door to his left. Moving along the wall, he walked with a slow and careful pace into the parlor. Sheet covered furniture, the ghosts of years gone by, filled the room with antiquity. When his flashlight caught his reflection in a rectangular mirror on the far wall, he nearly scared himself to death. He checked on the windows, but the old boards nailed over them were surprisingly secure and stable.

On the far side of the carpeted wood floor of the parlor was a moderately sized kitchen. Like the rest of the house, it was completely dark beyond the cone of brightness from his flashlight. The temperature was several degrees colder in the kitchen as if someone had left the freezer door open. A soft vibration rippled through the room, starting in the floor and moving up through the cabinets, growing in intensity until the entire kitchen was shaking violently.

The cupboard doors flew open, and the plates and dishes stacked neatly inside began to take flight, leaping out into the air and shooting straight toward him. Silverware drawers jerked open, their metal implements becoming piercing darts. Plates either shattered around him, broken pieces being thrown out like shrapnel, or struck him painfully with direct hits. Raising his hands proved a useless defense against the countless incoming projectiles as he was bruised and cut by the dishes and stabbed and poked by the silverware. Russ ran from the room with the dinnerware raining down on all sides of him.

Sheets in the parlor pulled off of tables and chairs, lifting in to the air in clouds of dust; they formed into chains of linen and tried to entangle and hold him. Fleeing for his life, Russ clambered up the old staircase in the main hall to the upper floor. The snake-like railings tore free from the wood structure of the stairs, twisting around in an attempt to capture him in a constriction of their coils; he barely evaded them.

Reaching the second floor, he tried door after door, but they were all closed and locked, all but one. With no choice, he darted inside and slammed the door behind him.

The boards of the wooden door began to violently shake and twist as if something on the other side were hitting and pushing against it. An ominous groan came from the wooden door, and Russ knew it wouldn't hold for long. No windows offered him an escape, only a ladder to the small attic space. Scaling the ladder quickly, he dropped the covering hatch back into place as the door to the room below him broke apart in a million splinters.

Russ dragged over a heavy box and tried to cover the hatch leading back down in the hopes of preventing whatever it was from reaching him. He crawled backwards on all fours when the hatch received a mighty impact, shaking the box on top of it. As he moved away, Russ' hand touched something cold and metallic on the floor. He turned to look.

His flashlight glinted on something metal and reflective. He recognized the object he'd encountered as an iron. Dust and old bloodstains covered the once polished steel.

Similar to a whale rising from the deep and into the light above, forgotten memories surfaced from the depths of his mind. Russ had been in this house before. He'd died in this house before. He remembered how he and his friends had taunted a boy named Toby into spending a night in the supposedly haunted house. An argument between Russ and Toby had turned violent.

Russ put his hands against his temples trying in vain to keep the recollection from continuing, but it was no use. He remembered how he'd chased Toby up the stairs, into the upper room, and up into the attic space where he'd killed him with the iron.

The heavy box was shoved aside, seemingly by itself, and the attic hatch was blasted apart as the ethereal figure of the murdered boy rose from below. The form of Toby was gray and transparent, but swirls of black wrapped around him like ribbons of seaweed entangling a sunken ship. His ghostly fingers closed around the iron and raised it over Russ.

Russ was frozen with fear and couldn't move as the iron was repeatedly brought down upon him. Pain, so much pain; it was all Russ could think about as the ghost of the boy he'd killed exacted retribution.

   ***   

One year later...

Russ stood in front of the abandoned mansion while having second thoughts about accepting the dare from his friends to spend the night in the supposedly haunted place. He entered the already open front door, and it slammed behind him, trapping him inside.

The violence of Russ' life had come back to haunt him in death, and the fear and pain he'd inflicted were his to receive during an endless cycle in his own private Hell. His spirit had been trapped for ages and would linger on forevermore, doomed to relive his victim's last hours on Halloween night year after year unto the farthest ends of eternity.