Haunted House

By: Tsz Yu Tsang

In the 1920s, there once sat a house atop a marsh. As opportunities in the big city became more appealing, its owner packed his bags and left.

The house fell into shambles soon after it was abandoned, as if crushed by its owner’s absence. A thunderstorm had struck lightning through the roof, opening a skylight in the middle of the living room. Soon, the rainwater snuck its way in, seeping through the crevices until the entire house began to unravel.

The lights in the kitchen shattered on their own, pale shards lining the black and white tiles. Rot ate the wooden support beams, until the entire house creaked in the wind. It bemoaned its own losses, stagnant in its helpless state. What is a house without people to live in it? As it sank into the ground below, a cold resentment began to spread.

By the time the porch had been halfway devoured by the soft ground it lay on, the house no longer welcomed visitors. Birds that sat on its threadbare roof would mangle their claws, caught between the twisted wood. The people driving on the road nearby would be warded off by the stench of decay. Lonesome teenagers, looking for a troubling place to explore would soon find their friends trapped in one of its twisting hallways, never to be seen by the light of day again. It wasn’t surprising that the news began to report stories on it; this nightmare house, consumed by hatred and bitterness.

One such teenager was J. Robinson, a 16-year-old boy who told the world about his encounter with the house. “Even the windows had teeth,” he claimed, “cause all the glass was shattered. It only had these jagged spikes stuck to the frame. My friend tried to crawl through it cause the door collapsed; it tore his shirt wide open and cut his side up too.” The newspapers lapped it all up. High risk was high reward.

As teenagers and tourists alike flocked to the house, it fell into a deep sorrow. Its walkways grew long and twisted; unsure of what to do with itself, the house gave more and more turns away to its halls, letting them burrow a nonsensical path through the house. A sinkhole grew in the living room, where the dripping water had begun to erode a plummeting void at a staggering pace. Soon, this hole broke into the basement; once blocked off with peat and debris, it now offered another level of excitement to these foreign explorers.

The walls warped and bubbled, wrapping around the rooms wider and wider in an attempt to recover the damage done. The doorways were filled in, healed over like a thick white plaster. Some explorers who stayed the night in an attempt to catch any signs of ghosts or paranormal activity would wake up to find themselves trapped in an insulated bubble. These were the lucky ones. The rest of them would be taken over by the house, forever encased in its walls. They never woke up.

In its absorption of humanity, a patricidal cannibalism of the ones who built its very foundations, the house grew intelligent. It took on a voice, hoarse and whispered by way of the wind blowing through its broken windows. The missing people turned up dead, spit back out onto the deteriorating front porch. The eyes set upon it grew by the thousands.

One group of explorers wanted to discover how the house was changing shape so rapidly. Surely, an inanimate object wouldn’t be capable of changing its very walls overnight.

They entered the living room. Nothing moved. They went into the kitchen. The black and white tile remained the same black and white tile. They tried to break into the sealed off rooms, but their pickaxes and hammers barely punctured a hole into the wall surface.

When they got down through the sinkhole into the basement, they heard a faint thudding sound. It droned on, and on, and on, ceaselessly. Almost like a heartbeat.