Elaine's Washing Machine

"2:30" was the hour displayed on the digital clock as the young woman woke up in a jolt, followed by a scream, gasping from what seemed to have been a horrific nightmare.
She breathed heavily and looked around her bedroom to assure herself everything was as it should've been. Nothing more but a dreadful, anguished nightmare after a long day's work. She slowly sat up on the bed, her spine touched by the cold breeze of the brushing wind behind her back from the open, creaking window. 
Gradually, she eased down and calmed. Everything appeared to be fine and all in check, but still she tried to figure out what that dreadful dream was that had deprived her of precious slumber for over two nights. With her tired eyes, she then looked at the clock sitting on her bedside desk as it displayed "2:32", and sighed in anger and despair.
"I can’t keep sleeping like this anymore," she whispered to herself. She leisurely rose from her bed, stretched up her body, and bit by bit walked down the familiar path to the kitchen to grab herself a glass of cold water. 
She turned on the kitchen light to adjust her sight from the familiar sense of darkness. She then grabbed a cup and poured some fresh water from the fridge into it. 
As she was drinking from the cup, she tried to understand the nightmare she had, and why it kept coming back. But then her mind deviated towards her grayish bathroom, and along with it, the old washing machine that resided next to the old door.
The woman, Elaine, living in her new house for a while, had recently obtained an uncommon and unusual gift from her late grandmother, who had passed away only a few months ago. It was an old and corroded washing machine from the 1990s that was still operating, despite being a bit tarnished and outdated. Something that wasn't a typical gift to deliver, but nonetheless, the young woman had decided to keep it, given the fact it was still functioning and useful.
As Elaine put the glass of water upon the kitchen table, she wondered to herself for a minute, "Why did she give me this dirty old washing machine instead of her other items?" But then she shrugged it off, believing that there was nothing wrong with a simple and old washing machine, and that it was likely just a weird gift from a family member.
"I might as well make the best of my free day. I'll try to sleep again later." She said as she took the steps towards her living room located at the other end of the house, and sat down on her cozy and soft couch. She grabbed the remote for a few episodes of her favorite show on Netflix, the delicate noise of the TV filling the uneasy and silent room with some pleasing sound.
This went on for what felt like an hour or two, the colorful TV screen filling her eyes. That was when Elaine thought she felt the same shady, eerie feeling that she'd felt in her freezing bedroom. But this time, it was different, something that really sent shivers down her spine. It wasn't the chilling breeze from the window, but rather, the strange and inexplicable feeling that something or someone was watching her from the corner of the hallway in her house.
She tried to ignore that feeling once more, thinking it was simply a figment of her imagination, something that occurs from time to time. But the feeling kept growing stronger and more menacing, as if it was attempting to reach her. 
"Look at me, look at me, LOOK AT ME."
Elaine desperately pushed herself not to look, but the voice in her mind kept telling her to glimpse. So without any hesitation, she turned her head and gazed at the side of the hallway where the bathroom and bedroom were, but there was nothing. Nothing peeking at her, no movement, no sound, and no sign of anyone else. The hallway was empty, except for her and the house. She let out a sigh of relief, considering that she was just going a bit wild after the nightmare and uneasiness of the house lately.
"It was only a bad dream, nothing more..." She reminded herself, in order to ease her fear and stress.
After thirty more minutes of watching her show, she decided to turn the TV off and try once again to sleep, hoping that it might work this time. As she got up and walked right back into the hallway of her small house, the damn washing machine came back into her mind. She saw it as part of that dream. 
Presuming that something else was in her bathroom, she grabbed the nearest knife from the drawer of the kitchen and step by step walked her way toward the source. That feeling of dread and fear came upon her once more as she reached the door of the restroom, ready to face what was on the other side. 
Before facing death itself, she steadied her breath and harshly kicked the door of the bathroom, storming inside to fight whatever was in there, only to discover that nothing was. Just a relatively clean bathroom, with a toilet, sink, and rusty washing machine that stood right next to the door. 
Despite noticing that there was nothing in her bathroom, she kept her grip on the knife, just in case. Examining her surroundings, she sighed in a moment of relief once more, hoping that this was it. However, that moment of relief and reassurance came to a terrifying conclusion as she stared right at the rusty and stained washing machine in fear and anxiety. 
She gently approached it, and that was when she noticed it; small splatters of blood. Prints of it all over the machine. She couldn’t see what was on the inside because the clothes were tangled up in there.
Before she could think of what the most logical thing to do was, her attention drew her closer to a faint noise that was gradually growing louder. It was a voice, a somewhat familiar female one that seemed to be coming from within the machine itself.
As she listened carefully, the voice began to multiply. Soon, there were two voices, both saying the same thing over and over again. "Open the machine, open the machine, please save us," in a very desperate and urgent voice, as if she was the only one who could help.
She hesitated for a moment, unsure of what to do next, but then her curiosity got the better of her. She decided to open the machine’s door and slowly pull out each garment and cloth one by one. However, as she reached for the last piece in the machine, she suddenly froze in terror. Her eyes widened and she gasped, stumbling backward until she hit the wall next to the toilet. 
She started to scream as if she were a character in a horror movie. There, right in front of her inside that cursed and damned washing machine, were the disfigured, decayed, scarred corpses of her deceased grandmother, and... herself? But how was that even possible if I am alive? Is this even real!? What the fuck is this?? Elaine's mind tried to rationalize the whole thing, but nothing could explain the fact that she and her dead grandmother were there. She felt this was a long and awful nightmare.
She looked carefully, in fear and disgust, at the corpses, noting that their necks were twisted, their skin was pale and cold, and that their dead eyes were staring at her. The smell coming from the corpses was so strong that it caused Elaine to turn into the toilet and vomit from the shock and disbelief of everything crashing down on her.
Elaine wiped her mouth and eyes from the vomit and tears. In a rush, she got up quickly and shut the bathroom door as hard as she could, while keeping the knife in her hand, and ran back to her living room, trying to grab her phone and call someone for help. But the dial went to voicemail.
That was when the banging started. It came from the bathroom. The voices started calling for Elaine to join them, to be one of them, inside the machine.
"GET AWAY FROM ME,” she screamed, holding the knife to the hallway in preparation for self-defence.
As she said this, the voices and banging stopped, just for a moment, as if to snap her out of a terrible dream. Then the door broke down and with it, blood seeped into the hallway of the house, causing the site to be in disarray. 
From the bathroom, the thing that wore Elaine and her grandmother’s decaying and disfigured faces appeared a few meters away from her, staring at her with dead, hollowed eyes. At that moment, Elaine just stood there, paralyzed with fear, her greenish eyes fixated upon this grotesque entity that stood right before her.
Despite the dimly-lit hallway, Elaine’s eyes could not help but see the creature’s unsettling appearance clearer than before: it stood around seven feet tall, and its skin was an eerie shade of pale green that almost seemed to glow in the dim light.
The heads of herself and her dead grandmother were attached to the same body, twisted into an inhuman visage. The eyes were hollow and void as the night itself, showing nothing more but empty darkness.
Elaine couldn't help but feel a shiver run down her spine as she continued to stare at it, feeling trapped within its grasp. "W-what are you!?" she screamed at it, prepared for the opportunity to kill it. 
The creature no longer stood still, and started to approach the young woman. The sound its foot made was ear-shattering, and frightening. As the beast slowly got closer, she saw that its legs or feet were a bit similar to hooves, but each time it walked, the sound of splintered bones was heard. In her standing point, Elaine held onto the knife tightly and proceeded to launch herself towards the monster’s neck, and managed to stab it. though was no use as though the thing felt nothing. It then grabbed her by the limb and broke her arm. ‘’YOU… BELONG… WITH US…’’ it muttered in a raspy, gravelly rotten voice.
‘’NO!’’ Elaine screamed in pain and rage as the thing started to gradually and painfully grab her by the arms and legs, preparing to rip her apart. Elaine thought for a moment that maybe, she would wake up to see it was nothing more but a dreadful agonizing dream.
Just before the beast had nearly achieved its moment to kill, The young woman hastily grabbed the knife in a moment of adrenaline from the pain and the chance of survival and stabbed the thing in the eye socket in the head of her disfigured doppelganger. The monster dropped her down and let out an unpleasant ear-piercing screech due to the knife’s blade in its second head.
Elaine, despite being in excruciating pain, started to run to the safest place she could think of where the thing wouldn’t be able to get her. Once inside, she quickly grabbed the drawer closest to her and used it to latch the door. She forced it with all her might, enough to ensure that it wouldn't be able to get in. Despite the searing pain coming from her broken arm, she tried to reduce it with whatever she had in stockpile in the guest room and luckily she found some bandages to cover the arm with.
All the while she heard the disfigured and grotesque beast wandering and screeching from the living room, the kitchen, and anywhere in the house aside from the guest room, with the sound of the bones from its feet still cracking. She just wanted to wake up thinking this was the nightmare that had ruined her slumber, but it didn’t matter, she just wanted it to be over.
It kept going for hours upon hours of torment and hell until eventually, the screeching and footsteps stopped. Elaine steadily got up from where she sat, and bit by bit stepped to the door and pushed the doorknob. 
Elaine approached the now decimated living room and saw the blade she used to stab the beast on the crimson-colored floor and seized it once more. The house itself looked as if a hurricane had come and demolished everything. Elaine then gently walked to the area where the hallway should be. 
She looked at the ground and stood there, frozen in shock, so much so that the sight made her heart skip a beat. There, on the concrete floor, were footprints made of blood, covering the once-unsoiled floor in a crimson color, that led back into her bathroom. 
It seemed that the monstrous abomination that wore her face and her grandmother’s had returned to its lair, inside the washing machine. 
A few days after the event, Elaine barred the doors to make sure and hope that the creature from the machine wouldn’t return to finish the job, but it didn’t. 
Instead, for the next few years, Elaine was tormented more and more with agonizing dreams of the event, only to wake up to relive the suffering over and over, the thing no longer tormented her within the physical world, but her world of dreams. At that point, Elaine kept asking herself ‘’Did my grandmother know of that thing, did she suffer the same dreams as I do? Was that machine a monster by itself?’’ tons of questions went on her mind, but no satisfaction came from it.
Elaine is now in her 80s, sitting in her wheelchair as she watches the view from her front window, looking upon the clouds and sun, thinking of the memories and the one fateful day when her life had changed.
Her granddaughter Emily, is moving soon to a new apartment somewhere in Pennsylvania and she thought to herself what would be the nicest house gift. that's when her mind deviated to the same thing her grandmother passed down to her. The item that had stolen her life. The old, rusted washing machine, that resided and sealed in the old and dark bathroom.
Category:Items/Objects
Category:Dreams/Sleep
Category:Beings