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Our first place Middle School category winner was written by Andrew Mecum of San Marino, California, a sixth grader of the Polytechnic School in Pasadena. |
Leroy Denham walked past the spa in the Piazzo Hotel in Venice, where his family was spending a week seeing the sights and tasting Italian food. They had arrived last night to find a lobby with paintings of happy children, children so happy they didn’t look quite normal. They went to a receptionist, a fat, stocky man playing computer solitaire who looked a little too pallid to be normal. He rose and said, “Mr. and Mrs. Denham, please let me lead you to room 15 for the night.”
It seemed strange that the receptionist already knew their names and what room they would be staying in, so the family asked the receptionist how he knew this. The receptionist said that it was a complimentary service for the customers to enjoy their comforts as quickly as possible.
The receptionist led them up to their room, passing many more paintings of happy children along the way. They saw one family with their room door open; the parents were crying. Mrs. Denham asked why the family was crying.
"Terrible accident," the receptionist answered. "They just lost their son.”
The Denhams got to their room and found it very comfortable, but it still seemed strange that all the paintings in the room were of happy children. They really weren‘t happy paintings at all, Leroy thought to himself. Despite this, the family quickly showered, brushed their teeth, and went to bed.
That night, Leroy couldn’t get to sleep. There was something abnormal about the room’s appearance. Then he thought he saw the weird receptionist in the upper right corner of the room with a dagger in his right hand. Leroy sat up, screaming, and when his parents rushed in and Leroy told them what had just happened, they comforted him and he went back to bed.
The next morning, Leroy woke up thinking, “Well, that was stupid. I dream about a receptionist carrying a dagger, waiting to stab me? Wow.”
Leroy spent the morning wandering around the Piazzo while his sister used the hotel wi-fi and his parents used the gym and spa, and then he decided to go back to the room. Along the way, he saw strange shadows where there shouldn’t have been. He saw lights flicker and dim.
By the time he got to his room, he was truly spooked. When he sat on his bed, he saw a movement to his right, and a tiny voice yelled, “Help me!” Leroy whirled to his right and found that all the children in the painting were gone except for one, and he now had a shocked expression on his face. Instead of a comfortable room, the boy in the paining was in a dark mansion, looking out from behind a barred window.
Suddenly, Leroy felt a cold feeling creep up his spine and into his brain. It intensified, numbing his entire body until he couldn’t move. He sat frozen, staring at the picture, where the little child was now banging on the bars, saying, “No! Don’t come in! It’s a trap! Please! I‘m stuck in here!”
Leroy felt himself being whirled around and around as if he were spinning around a black hole. The child grew larger . . . and larger . . . until he could only see the child. The child filled his vision, obscuring him from anything else. Finally he could move again . . . but this time, he was the child.
Leroy tried to move around, but he was stuck inside the painting with a pained, forced smile, gazing out of the mansion and into the hotel room. The other child was right next to him, and he was just as horrified as Leroy.
Leroy’s parents rushed into the room after a few hours; they had been searching for Leroy all day. When they saw him stuck in the picture, they cried out. Mrs. Denham took the picture down and kept it in her suitcase. To this day, Leroy Denham is stuck in that painting in his house. He is forced to smile for eternity, but sometimes his expression is a mix of being happy and sad.
The Piazzo hotel is run down and out of business now, but some say that paintings of happy children still hang on its walls. If you happen to go by there someday, and you peek in the windows, and you begin to whirl around and around, be careful to not be another paintings victim for eternity.
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