The next morning, Sarah woke up alone in bed.

"John?" Sarah asked to see if he was nearby, and after she didn't get a reply, she got out of bed to find him. She looked in the other two bedrooms and the bathroom before heading downstairs. Sarah found a sticky note on the front door.

"Getting breakfast be right back," the note read. John loved to write notes to Sarah and never wasted an opportunity to write one.

Sarah smiled at his little note but a loud bang from upstairs made her jump, and she was paralyzed for a few seconds. Another bang got her moving. She inched her way up the stairs.

BANG!

She got to the second floor and was overwhelmed by the brief silence.

BANG!

She could tell that it was coming from the master bedroom.

She got to the door, and the banging became one continuous noise. Each boom was followed by another and another. Sarah opened the door to see that one of the shutters was loose and the wind was blowing it against the house. She let out a sigh of relief and approached the window with the wild shutter.

Just as she touched the handle to the window to open it, the shutter froze in mid slam. She froze for a full minute before opening the window and securing the shutter from... the wind? Yes, definitely just the wind. When Sarah closed the window, she saw the dark outline of someone standing in the doorway behind her in the reflection of the window.

"John?" she asked turning around to find no one there. She walked out of the room but still couldn't find anyone. She went to the bathroom to also find it empty. Just when she was about to turn to leave, she noticed the sink faucet was dripping. As she as she turned off the water, the bathroom window shattered, and glass rained down on the floor.

"JOHN," Sarah shrieked as she pushed her back against the sink counter.

Then, a few of the shards of glass shot up towards her, and she had just enough time to raise her hands to shield her face. The pieces slashed across her open palms and a few pieces managed to slip through her fingers and shoot across her face, and a single shard lodged itself in the center of her left hand.

"FUCK," she cursed out in pain. She ran out of the bathroom and down the stairs. The last step shifted backwards just enough so she would miss it, and she fell and landed on her side at her husband's feet.

"What the Hell is going on?" John asked standing in the doorway to the kitchen pulling earbuds out of his head.

"The window... in the bathroom..." Sarah said panicked at what she just experienced. John helped her to her feet. "We should..." she started to say, but he had already started up the stairs.

"Stop," she pleaded as she chased after him.

"I'm just going to take a quick look," he said.

Sarah gasped as they got to the open bathroom door as she saw the shocking scene. It was pristine. The window was not shattered and not a single piece of glass lay on the floor.

"It shattered... I was standing right there," she said confused. "That's what cut my face and..." she looked down at her hands to see the piece of glass was still stuck in her palm. "Look," she said raising her hand to him.

John pulled her hand up to his face to inspect her hand. He opened his mouth to try to give a response, but the piece of glass cut across her hand and flew between her index and middle finger. The glass hit the window and made a small, brief ripple as it rejoined with the rest of itself.

The pain hurled Sarah to the ground, and she let out a blood-chilling scream.

"We need to get out of here," John said what his wife had been trying to say the whole time. 

"Where would we go?" Sarah asked as they rushed downstairs.

"We'll stay at a hotel," John said as they got off the stairs. We'll figure something out. Let's just get out of..." he said as he opened the front door.

Instead of being greeted with sunlight, they faced a wall that blocked their escape. Then, both windows on either side of the door darkened as the walls stretched to block them too.

"No no no," Sarah said panicking. "Are we trapped?"

"Back door," John said. "Go out back."

"What's happening?"

"Let's focus on getting out before figuring that out."

Then, the floorboards moaned under them before they splintered apart, and the couple fell into the dark basement. Sarah hit her head and would wake a few hours later.

***

When Sarah came to, she was laying on the basement floor surrounded by moving boxes and floorboards.

"John..." She moaned. She turned to see John laying a few feet away. A chunk of wood was impaled into his neck, and a pool of blood had already formed around his head. His glazed eyes stared at Sarah.

Sarah instantly forgot about her minor injury and rushed to her dead husband's side. The chandelier in the foyer lit the basement, and the furnace across the room howled to life.

She turned towards the glow of the fire, and John's head titled as if he was looking too.

"John?" Sarah asked as she noticed the movement, but his head only moved because the splinter in his neck shook its way out of his flesh. Once the chunk of floorboard was free, it and every other piece floated up to merge as on again.

As the puzzle clicked back together, the light from above was slowly blocked out, and once it was done, the only light in the basement came from the furnace. Using the little light she had, Sarah managed to find her way to the stairs and back into the foyer.

The door was still blocked, so she went to the kitchen. She turned on the lights to see a box of doughnuts and a bouquet of roses that John had gotten that morning. Before she could react to that scene, the floorboards started shaking, and she jumped back just as the floor and everything on it fell into the basement as the foyer did earlier.

Then, Sarah heard a strange whistling; it only took her a few seconds to realize that it was the gas blowing from where the oven and stove used to be.

She jumped into the foyer and ran towards the opposite end of the house. The living room windows were blocked, so she continued into the study, which was filled with boxes and didn't have any windows (but they would have been blocked anyway). She cowered in the corner farthest from the kitchen and hoped for the best.

It didn't take long for the gas to reach the furnace. The blast of the explosion shook the entire house, but it only destroyed the left half of the house.

Sarah waited a few seconds and then left her little safe zone to try to escape. She ran across the living room and made it to the front door without incident. The door was no longer blocked, and she stumbled down the stairs and into the yard covered in debris from the explosion under a full moon similar to the one that was in the sky when Thomas was killed. Sarah ran to the road before looking back at the house. The sound of distant sirens fille her with relief.

Just as she thought that the nightmare was over crossed her mind, the debris floated back to the house and fit back together. By the time the emergency vehicles arrived, the house looked perfectly fine.

Sarah tore her eyes from the house and looked back down the road to see the emergency lights coming her way. She had made it to safety, but she would go on to face other terrors (but those stories are not mine to tell).

A/N: Thanks for reading Story 1. I still need to revise and edit the story, but feel free to comment your thoughts on the current version. The original draft didn't have as much detail in Marilyn's past, but she gets her own story later.