The Dead House

I’m going to do something stupid. I—what’s happening to me??

At first it was dark. Not so dark that I couldn’t see, but dark enough that shapes had no meaning. I was outside standing in a blanket of mist. I could hear the ocean, and I shivered. The taste of a changeable storm hung on the air. As soon as I thought this, the clouds above me, which seemed alive and full of malevolent depth, moving fast like a stop-motion film, gave a deep rumbling groan—and ceased. Just froze in the sky.

I stumbled forward and tripped on an ancient step, which led to an enormous house towering above me, three stories high.

Dee, I felt that house stare down at me.

The windows gazed across the landscape, each fringed by the crumbling slate roof like eyelids. Even the console brackets had the sunken, eroded texture of all things that have succumbed to the oppressive passage of time. The weather vane, too, stood rusted and old, no longer a thing of pride, but a creaking slice of metal warped into no definite shape by years of long corrosion.

I reached for the handle and gave a push, and the door creaked forward with an eerie whine that echoed around the room. The house was bare, unfurnished and covered with a film of dust, velvety thick. Desolate leaves—the remnant of an autumn long past—breezed their lonely way along the floor, carried by the dank, rotten air. A giant chandelier in the wide entryway hung on an ominously rusty chain, draped with cobwebs that even the spiders had long abandoned. There was a looming sense of emptiness about the place. Even the mildew smell seemed oddly distant and weak, like the remembrance of a scent.

And yet… somehow I sensed I wasn’t alone.

I climbed the rickety stairs to the first floor, feeling more vulnerable and naked than I had outside, each foot tentative on the warping, decayed wood. I was momentarily afraid I’d fall through the floor into some pitch-dark basement with no doors.

The second story was just as gray and foggy as outside, and I half-expected to hear thunder rumbling through the ceiling. It was oppressively small, with long, narrow corridors that seemed endless and labyrinthine, punctuated by ancient and blackened candle sconces.

I felt a sudden yearning for Carly, so powerful that it hit me like physical pain. I called her name. “Carly? Are you here?”

I wanted her to answer. I was terrified when she didn’t.

I was so alone. Too alone.

Something subtle seemed to move behind the wall, and I stepped hesitantly closer, not entirely sure I wanted to look.

It wasn’t a wall at all, but a mirror covered in a coating of dust so thick that it looked like wallpaper. A smoggy version of my face stared back at me, wide-eyed. I wiped away the dust, leaving a gleaming streak of polished silver in the wake of my hand.

This reflection was not me.

The eyes were no longer clear and blue; one was bloodshot with a blown pupil that made it look entirely black, and the other was a faded gray—dreary, like everything in this forgotten place. A cheap imitation of blue. They were pitiless, unseeing eyes, wide with malice, the whites yellow and full of bile. Her skin, stretched tightly over her skeletal frame, tinged a yellow-gray as she leered, black liquid congealing out of a mouth that was too large as it grinned.

“Me,” she gurgled, and the black liquid seemed to emulsify as it fell from her cracked, red lips and landed on the floor in gobbets of mush.

It was the girl. The one who has been watching me. But she was rotting. Or was it Carly? I didn’t know. I still don’t know.

I took a startled breath. “Who—”

Without warning, her smile vanished, replaced with a garish scowl, teeth bared, her eyes flat and dead, but wide and manic. She reached out—through the mirror—and grabbed my throat. I felt her broken nails dig into my skin.

“Me!” she screamed.

I fell backwards; the thing dragged out of the mirror with me, and I saw that she was nothing more than a shredded stump of a torso—her legs and pelvis were gone, leaving ribbons of fatty tendons and muscle. Her half body thumped the floor wetly. I managed to wrench myself free and run farther into the house, along a dark narrow corridor and towards a wooden door that stood apart, brand-new, surreal, and gleaming in the dilapidated abode. I heard the girl dragging herself along the floor after me, her long nails clawing at the splintered wooden panels. I glanced back once, saw her hand extended, her mouth a yawning black hole, and screamed. There was no echo.

I burst through the door and found myself stumbling into the foggy evening, gulping down gasps of brine-tinged air.

Behind me the house stood suddenly far away, watching me. Now I could see that it sat on a hill, and both hill and house were on the verge of crumbling over a precipice into a cankerous sea far below in that slow, fuggy way of dreams I’ve read about so often.

The sea wanted the house.

The house wanted me.

The girl was nowhere to be seen, and I felt more alone than I have ever felt, even in the oblivion of nonexistence.