Chapter 1
The house lay on the edge of town, where the forest bled into the streets. It wasn’t easily visible to the cars driving into town, being partially swallowed up by the trees. Maybe once the lawn had been well-kept and empty, but nobody had lived there for a long time. Instead, the trees and overgrown weeds kept the house firmly in shadows. The ground was half-covered in slimy piles of fallen leaves, browned by autumn and turned into the bases of puddles by frequent freezing showers. Any explorer intrepid enough to climb through the half-rotted underbrush and around the spidery tree limbs would finally catch a proper view of the house.
It looked like the type of place that had once been owned by someone quite dignified - several stories tall, with hints of color in the peeling paint that had withstood the test of time, and possessing a distinctly Victorian air to it. Now, however, it was more of an empty shell than a dwelling place. Shattered glass lay on the inside floors beneath window panes, broken by burglars eager to strip the house of its valuable possessions. One corner of the house seemed to sag, the roof sinking down and the creaking walls held up only by the last remnants of supporting columns. Time and weather, along with animals, had worn various holes into the sides and roof, with the stairs leading to the front porch almost entirely lost to a particularly large one, exposing the gaping area under the porch, almost certainly now home to a variety of wildlife - at least, that’s what the droppings suggested.
The house could be entered more safely by a side door that required no stairs, and which had had the doorknob completely removed at some point, likely by a vandal. And vandals had certainly been in the house. Furniture had been knocked over haphazardly, nails hung in walls where paintings would once have been, and cupboard doors swung open to reveal nothing left inside but dust. Any personal touches that had not been stolen were scattered across the floors, mixed in with leaves and twigs blown in through the open windows, so that all the aura of liveliness had been sucked out of the house, leaving the inside feeling hollow and dead. The music and laughter of living inhabitants no longer filled the air, replaced by a steady stench of rot seeping from the floorboards, the walls, the leaves on the ground. There was at least one rat’s nest in the corner of the living room, and a hole in the ceiling that suggested a squirrel might dwell in the room as well. A fine layer of pale dust covered everything in a grey tone, and the years had bleached the anything the dust had not. Many rooms were almost entirely empty of contents, having been picked clean by opportunistic “visitors” or taken away by the house’s last owners.
Although there were two upstairs floors, people left them alone, preferring to remain near the ground. The most obvious barrier that left the upper floors untouched was that the staircase had rotted away. Perhaps when the house was a little younger, people had improvised ladders, but too many cold drafts blew down into the first floor through holes in the ceiling, which left people feeling unsure of the strength of the floor beneath them were they to venture up into the heights of the house. Presumably, the higher floors looked much the same as the lower ones - devoid of color, objects, and life.
Some people also ventured down into what passed for a basement - a small, one-room cellar with shelves where food had once hid - but most people left it alone. Going down into the cramped room, where the sunlight didn’t reach, was an off-putting experience, and since the room was small and empty, there was no real sense of reward. For those who did, there was a set of cellar doors that led out into the backyard. It was almost identical to the front yard, but instead of a thin line of trees leading to the road and the nearby houses, a thick ring of them lined the overgrown weeds, with only the forest stretching out behind, fiery autumn leaves fading in the distance into shadows.
