by Cat Knight
The moment she stepped through the door she had seen… well, she wasn’t sure what she had seen. She had been, for a few seconds, someone else, but being in that person’s head was like being jabbed by a thousand needles from every direction, over and over again, while trying to act like nothing was amiss.
Clair shook herself. It didn’t matter now.
Strange things happened in this house, and brief hallucinations were the least of her worries. She turned on the torch and looked at what was ahead of her.
It seemed familiar. She supposed she had been here before. But the familiarity was vague; more like a recurring dream you can never quite remember than somewhere she knew well. She was standing in a vast front hall.
Maybe once it had been opulent – in fact she was fairly certain now that it had been – but it was a ruin. The walls varied between grey and brown, claimed by mould, mildew and time.
The floorboards were broken in many places, with gaps into darkness below. It was cold in here; colder than the morning outside had been.
Despite the rising sun and the almost certain presence of gaps in the walls, there was no sign of natural light. All she had was the torch.
She turned and tried the doorknob behind her. It burned cold in her hand and half surprised her with a jolt as it refused to give way, locked now. Somehow, she had expected that. A thought tempted her to leave, but she was stuck in here now. Even if she wanted to leave she was going nowhere unless the house wanted her too.
The most likely conclusion was, that she wasn’t leaving, probably ever. But the one Claire preferred draw was that there was a way and it was through this house. And, the house would not claim her as it hadn’t before — she would leave with Sarah’s body.
Raising her bag over her shoulder Claire started to walk, taking care to mind the gaps beneath her feet. Logically there wouldn’t be anything but dirt and insects under there, but this place didn’t operate on anything that could be construed as logic.
She paused at the foot of the stairs. They were placed centrally in the hall, and around either side were doorways. She figured the best option was to search every floor end to end and hope that enough memories would come back to her to tell her where she had last seen Sarah. Glancing from side to side, she then moved to the left, noticing a slightly ajar door in the shadow of the staircase.
As she observed it she heard a loud, unmistakeable creak from above her. Involuntarily, she held her breath. Her heart rate picked up and her skin prickled. Was she alone in this house?
She could not honestly know the answer to that question, short of being sure that this was not just an old wreck. But if there was another person in here, was the safer option to alert them to her presence or not?
She glanced behind her, at the locked front door. It wouldn’t be a person and whatever it was knew she was here. There was no reason to call out then. No reason to invite whatever was surely coming.
Pushing onward she heard a snatch of what could only be high pitched laughter from above. Every instinct urged her to run for the locked door and beat on it, till it let her out; but her instincts meant nothing now.
The only way out is through. She walked through the doorway. Claire found herself standing in a long hallway, stretching down into shadow and then–
–it was so wonderful how the children ran up and down, playing and shrieking and chasing each other, if only they could be a little quieter to let her headache pass but it was so wonderful… and why was she holding that knife–?
For the briefest second the space had been full of light. But now the dark was back. It seemed thicker, somehow. Or had she imagined that? Somehow, she didn’t think so. Claire felt unsteady on her feet. One foot in front of the other, she started to walk, keeping the torch aloft.
She did not notice the door quietly swing shut behind her.
Chapter Five
There were a few doors along the hall. Careful to avoid the holes in the floor, Claire checked each one as she passed. The first opened into an empty room, as drab as desolate as the rest of the house. She left that and went to the next, where she found what seemed to be a children’s play room. Old, moulding dolls lay about the floor and at the far end was a towering, elaborate, but decrepit dollhouse.
Claire walked in, scanning the walls with her torch as she did. It was clear there were no people in here, but she looked over all of it anyway. The dolls, with their wide staring eyes and straggly remnants of hair, gave her the creeps. But, for whatever reason, it was the house that fascinated her.
The closer the got, the more she realised what she was looking at.
It was a perfect replica of the house she was in, down to the last detail. Somebody had crafted this with loving care. She reached out and touched it. It seemed reasonably sturdy, despite its destroyed appearance. She pulled it open and with the screech of a rusty hinge, the front swung out.
Inside it represented all the rooms that she assumed made up the house, upstairs and down.
Almost without thinking she found her current location and froze as she saw a small, wooden figurine standing there. The figure of a woman holding… she leaned closer. Yeah. That was definitely a torch.
Something was obscuring her face. She reached out a thumb to wipe it off and it came away sticky.
It was blood.
Above the figurine, the roof of the house was bleeding, dripping down on to her.
She got to her feet, turned around and was faced with someone in the doorway, someone in a dress, someone with a leering, skeletal face and thin hair dangling over it, someone who reached for her as she screamed and then–
And then was gone. The room was empty.
Claire shook uncontrollably. She called out, demanding to know who was there, but the house was silent. She glanced back at the house. The little doll was almost completely covered in blood now.
Her throat constricted and with her heart beating through her chest she hurried back out into the hall.
Outside the house, the sun would be almost fully risen by now, but there was no light. Even Claire’s torch seemed to be struggling to penetrate the gloom; she could only see a few feet in front of her.
Fear of what was to come gripped her and she paused before opening the next door.
The blood and the figurine with the torch burned into her mind and she wasn’t sure she was ready for whatever waited in the rest of the house. But then, ready didn’t matter. Not in a situation like this.
Evil had been done here it had nothing to do with her. She pulled away, forced her heavy limbs to move, to run back the way she had come. She felt dirty, she felt contaminated and in the dark, all she saw was the blood. She grabbed the door handle and tugged again and again but it didn’t move. She turned and now the blood was leaking from the room.
Slowly, it covered the floor and dripped between missing floor boards as it spread. Terror gripped her as she hit the door and cried out in futile rage. The torch slipped in her grip as she pounded. Helplessly she watched as it rolled over the edge and went through a gap in the floor and suddenly she was in darkness, not knowing how close the blood was, and when it would reach her and what would happen when it did.
Claire knew what she needed to do. She must retrieve the torch. Tentatively, she took a step forward hearing only her own heavy breathing. Gathering her courage once more, Claire closed her eyes and lowered herself into the gap.
Chapter Six
Claire expected to hit dirt or concrete. Instead her feet sunk down into something thick and gluttonous, something that, the deeper she went, she knew to be blood. How had it got so deep? The metallic smell filled the air and in moments her head was under. It was warm, but horribly so. It felt alive.
She tried to swim upwards but her arms moved so slowly through the thickness and although she kept her mouth closed tight it seeped through to her tongue. It was all over and around her, closing in and suffocating. Her lungs burned. She tried again to swim upwards, to get clear of it aga
in, but her limbs had lost all their strength. Sinking deeper she felt everything recede; the terror, the inability to breathe, the need to escape.
Would this be so bad? To just let go here and slip away? She had tried, after all.
She had suffered for so long and wasn’t it better to die doing the right thing than to live doing nothing? Nobody could ever blame her for giving up now. She had been through more than most could ever imagine and she was just so damn tired.
Her limp hand touched something solid. The torch.
And then it was all there again, burning through the slow rot of acceptance; the memory of why she was here, of what she had to do and what she owed, because while death would end it for her, it would not for anyone else. And that meant she had to fight.
She grabbed a hold of the torch and, with every ounce of strength she had, muscles screaming and lungs an inferno, she forced herself up and up. She opened her mouth to cry out. It filled with blood but she ignored it. She had to ignore it because no matter what it could not be happening, this was a trick, a way to try and make her give up, an attempt by the house to win.
Her head broke the surface. The arm that held the torch followed then the other, reaching upwards and finding the jagged edge of one of the holes in the floor. She tossed the torch through, reached up her other arm and pulled.
Clearing the hole, she scrambled out, not caring that the broken wood was tearing her clothes and her skin, not caring about the pain because the pain meant that she was still alive and the house had not beaten her. Not yet.
She collapsed on to her side, taking deep breaths, letting herself shake and cry and feel it all but laughing because she was alive and that meant that she still had a chance of finding Sarah’s body and getting out.
It took her a while to realise that something was odd. She was able to breathe fine. She sat up and, turning on the torch, looked down at her hands. She should be covered in sticky blood. The torch should be unable to work after that. But she was clean, if a little scratched up.
Standing up, she noticed something else, she had fallen through the hole in the hallway floor she was walking down. But somehow, she had emerged back in the front hall, through one of the other gaps in the floorboards. Shining the torch down through the length of the room, she again saw only darkness.
She moved the beam up over the stairs, to the landing at the top of the stairwell.
The house seemed to be in its prime and Claire thought she caught a glimpse of a woman. But, in an instant the woman disappeared. Claire felt the woman once more in her mind. She was coming to meet her husband and her children.
Before, when Claire had felt the woman she had put it aside and hoped that it was only her imagination. She was now certain she was something other than that.
Above her on the empty stairwell came a creak. Then another. And another. Claire shone the torch around, peering in the darkness. It sounded very much as though somebody was walking around up there. She knew what was required, she had to go up.
“Have it your way then,” Claire whispered, and walked on towards the stairs.
The first step seemed to give way a little beneath her foot, then the second did the same, years of decay weakened them and they bent beneath her weight.
She was careful to try and only stand on the parts that seemed the most stable. Gingerly she continued up, step after step until she stood on the landing.
And then, as if from right behind her, she heard the voice of young girl, somehow, intimately familiar.
“Come on Sarah, let’s see what’s upstairs!”
Claire spun. Her eyes moved back down the stairs and then along the hall again. Sweeping the old floors with her torch, she saw nothing. Just the decaying house, empty and still.
Closing her eyes, she breathed deeply to calm the thundering rush of blood that pumped through her veins. There was no doubt in what she had heard. Uncontrollable tremors shivered along her limbs. Whatever it was, or whoever she thought it might be would be waiting was at the other end of the hallway. It couldn’t possibly be what she thought, but the house played by its own rules. She focussed her eyes forward again, looking at the large pair of double doors just beyond the top of the stairwell, and continued toward them.
One of them was slightly ajar. Claire grabbed and pulled it wide open, exposing another hall behind it, as dark and derelict as the rest of the place. This time, however, she moved the light of her torch over to the rusted hinge, the nails holding it loosely in place.
She put the torch between her teeth then pulled on the door hard; once, twice, three times until it came loose from its hinges and dropped to the floor. She almost tumbled back down the stairs but she had made sure the house wouldn’t be locking her in here, in this space.
The hall opened up to several other passages, going in various directions.
Claire followed it down, pausing now and again, trying to work out in her head how it matched with the house as it looked from the outside.
The simple answer was, it didn’t. The house was changing at its will, something she knew she probably should have suspected long ago.
Claire closed her eyes again. Something seemed to be tugging at the corner of her memory, something a tiny bit stronger than vague familiarity. She had been here before. The floor and the walls felt familiar. Just ahead of her, in an outline so faint that they might have been made out of mist.
If she really looked she could almost see two eleven-year-old girls moving cautiously through the halls.
Claire gasped in shock, wanting to trust herself, to call out to them and warn them because she felt their confidence was growing with each second. She wanted to tell them that they were wrong that there nothing in here and that they would be okay. Because they would not be OK.
A deepening mist seeped up from the floor and rolled along the corridor, Claire’s heart raced, as the outline of the girls faded further into the fog. Moving frantically through the mist, the choice to believe in herself came instantly. She called out but they did not hear her. If she lost them, she feared they would be lost forever. She could not let that happen. Now as they disappeared from view completely, Claire stopped.
There was nothing else that she could do, but search the ever-changing rooms until the house gave up its secrets. So, with single minded effort, she chose a turn at random and followed it .
She knew that if the house sensed she was beating it, then the rug would be pulled from under her. She was therefore unsurprised to find that this time there were no doors lining the hall.
But there were frames, dozens and dozens of them. Damaged, emptied picture frames.
Most still displayed the torn edges of canvas that had been forcibly ripped out. Some held most of a painting, but where the faces of these serenely posing people should have been were only gaping black holes, as if someone had burned them out. She recognised the forms of some of them, those that had come before, those who had come searching for the body of Sarah, now a stark legacy to the village folk that had never returned.
She kept walking. Minutes passed and the hallways didn’t end, nor did the ruined paintings. Then, right when she was ready to turn and head back, she found a painting that was intact. It caught her eye immediately; even from a distance, even not knowing was it showed. Her neck prickle on the back of her neck at the sight of it.
There was some deep sense of terrible wrongness. Her hand tightening around the torch, she approached it.
It showed the house, stark against a turbulent grey sky. The land around it was overgrown and unkempt. This was not the place in its prime.
In front of the house was a tree, a tree Claire was fairly sure was not there in real life. And hanging from the tree–
She clapped a hand over her mouth to hold back the pained cry.
Chapter Seven
Hanging from the tree was Sarah. And standing below, placidly looking up at her, was Claire. Not eleven-year-old Claire, but Claire as she looked now.
She could not help the tears in her eyes, tears of sadness and shock and fury at what this place was trying to do to her.
The picture drew her gaze, but she forced focus away from the painting and kept walking down the hall. She would not fall into those traps. While ever she had the strength to stop it, she would fight. She would not let the house win. There was nothing this house could tell her that she hadn’t been hearing for fifteen years, from others and from herself. What had it told the people before her? The ones locked into timeless torn images? Claire couldn’t think about that now.
Instead she reached down deep into her soul and focussed on two little girls playing joyfully, before any of this ever happened. She didn’t stop her tread so that the house would know, but kept her pace.
It came as a surprise to see that up ahead the hall ended. Any sudden turns and twists were absent.
What seemed to be ahead was a large arched window. Dim light was coming through; moonlight by the looks of it.
The thought made her pause; had she been in here that long already? Surely not. But then, maybe time worked differently here. The window was framed with intricate patterns that could still be made out despite being eroded by insects and filled with dust. It matched one of the external windows, the ones she had always thought of as the eyes of the skull.
Claire wasn’t sure how any of this lined up, but she pushed away any inclination to try to make sense of this house as she approached the window. It would do no good, and only serve to confuse her.
Standing against the frame Claire looked out over the front yard against a velvet night sky where silver light shone dimly through thick hanging clouds. She knew the village lay not far away, but at that time she could not see it for the cloud.
She looked down into the front yard and her breath caught in her throat.
