Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. It's Just a House Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

IT’S JUST A HOUSE

Hockey stick blade reared back behind my right ear, shaft tight in my grip, I eyed the net before swinging through with everything I had. The orange ball, hard as stone from the mid-November chill, blazed past the goalie’s flailing right arm, flopping Road Warrior catcher flimsy on his hand, and glanced off the corner of the post where it met the crossbar. The ball cut across the Edenville skyline and smashed through the front window of the Kircher House.

My guts sank to my feet. For the whole sum of the nine months I’d lived in Edenville—a family record as my father had to move for work, typically twice a year—that house had loomed over my neighborhood, its stained-glass windows like eyes that bored into my soul.

“That’s our only ball,” said a boy named Michael before swiping his Canucks Starter jacket sleeve beneath his nose.

When I looked at the building, it seemed to laugh at me. It was a Tudor house, almost big enough to meet the label of mansion. The framework was of cracked and peeling black paint. Moss covered every wall, leaving gaps where the windows stood prominent and bright. On the lawn was a faded Century21 sign with a secondary sign hanging from rusty hooks reading BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. The window the ball had smashed through was on the front door, right next to the handle and locks.

“Go get it, new kid.” This came from a ninth grader named Shane Benoit who lived on the block. He was three years older than the next oldest of us playing road hockey, and we all acted like the coolness of his maturity might be contagious.

“It’s locked,” I said.

Everyone knew nobody had gone into the Kircher house in years, not kids anyway, because when kids went in, they never came out. Adults were immune to whatever witchery existed within—common knowledge.

My jaw dropped open, anxious to say no, offer up some of my allowance to buy a new ball, tape all the sticks in penance, mend the holes in the nets, anything to avoid going inside. Instead, I dropped my stick and started walking toward the house.

Too quickly I reached the step that rose from the sidewalk onto the property. There were stubby stone pillars that rose to my chest—I’d been about 5’3” at the time. Ivy twines wrapped brown fingers around the grey stone beneath. There’d once been a gate, the rusty hinges remained drilled into one of the pillars. As I passed between, my mind roared a continual mantra of IT’S JUST A HOUSE! IT’S JUST A HOUSE!

The cracked cement beneath me seemed tacky, as if tasting from the soles of my sneakers. Dead beetles had collected across the slightly darker square of grey where a welcome mat once lay. The door was burgundy wood with cast iron accents. The handle stuck out like an oozing cold sore. It was new, steel made to look tarnished and old, though in impossibly impeccable condition for it to plead that case.

The hole in the glass was smooth and round, almost begging for my skinny arm to reach in. I gave a quick glance back to the others who stood totem pole stiff, watching me with serious eyes and gaped mouths.

My arm refused to reach up and through that hole. “It’s only a house,” I whispered, adding, “You’ll be cool.” When that didn’t work, I said, “Girls will know you’re brave.” That did it and I reached through. The deadbolt paddle was frosty to the touch. It turned stiffly, thumping out of its groove. As I drew my arm back, my flesh grazed the glass and a hairline cut bubbled crimson crude. A hiss escaped my tight mouth, and I rubbed at the stinging wound. My sudden anger at being hurt fueled my resolve and I turned the knob and pushed.

The door was heavy, and I put my knee against the wood. A sticky crackle from weather stripping soundtracked the moment. The scent inside was of mildew and something fishy, which made me think of the countless crayfish I’d caught in my nine years on the planet. It was dim inside. The wallpaper bubbled on the walls and there were spots where ceiling plaster had cracked. Cobwebs filled gaps on the banister and drooped from the foyer light. Otherwise, even at my meager age, it was obvious to me that this was a fine building.

The floor was stone tile and the ball had come to settle amid sparkling stained-glass fragments about five feet beyond the door. I moved further inside, my shoes crunching on glass. My left hand clutched the heavy door as I bent and reached, stretching as far as I could. So close but so far, meaning I had to let go of the door.

As I’d done as a small kid, racing to his bed after flicking off the light switch, I counted, “One, two, three,” and took off. In my panic, I kicked the ball as I swung down to snatch it. Behind me, the door creaked, was in motion. By the time I had the ball in my grasp, the door had closed behind me.

Heat and light and a sluicing, smacking sound filled in from deeper within the home as I bolted back to the door. It was so, so heavy now that I could hardly budge it. The sounds drew nearer, and I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder.

—

“Hey, Derek, come on in, I’ve got the info on your flight and room,” Clarissa Jacobs said, leaning out the door of her office.

After clicking save on the script for a presentation I’d have to give in a few days, I made for my boss’ office. Clarissa had always been fair and cordial, and the transparency with which she ran our division was nothing short of refreshing. There were two chairs on the guest side of the desk, and I fell into the one on the right.

“You all packed?” she said.

“Yep. Had to buy a new coat after checking the Yukon weather.”

Clarissa huffed, grinning. “You’ll need it on the site.”

The site was a Rare Earth find in 2019, and to be fully compliant with the climate guidelines of 2022, a specific crusher/x-ray machine had had to be manufactured and shipped north. When it got there, the men at the site put it together incorrectly, stalling the unearthing of a steady supply of ytterbium, lanthanum, and gadolinium. They took the machine apart and were now awaiting one of the engineers who’d helped develop the thing to come by and monitor the construction and then process, after giving a peptalk to help motivate the crew. That engineer was me.

Clarissa handed over the plane tickets, rental car information, and emailed receipt for my stay at a B&B. “Sorry, there’s no Hilton up there. This is the only place with a room available. Most of the crew live in temporary camps. Not going to lie, it’s a rough spot. Folks aren’t happy about being stuck there knowing they could simply blast with water instead of digging.”

Hydraulic mining was not only more dangerous, was detrimental to the environment. The leftovers polluted eco systems and the act of blasting caused earthquakes. It was also what the brunt of the crew were used to—most had come from gold and coal mining backgrounds.

“Right.”

Clarissa winced. “Also, you’re not going to like it, but your flight was rescheduled. You leave YVR at a quarter after four.”

My eyes flashed to the computer monitor turned just enough that I could read the clock on the corner. It was already 3:35 PM. “Holy, I have to get moving,” I said and spun on my heels.

“Quarter after four in the morning,” Clarissa said.

In the doorway of her office, I stopped and read the ticket.

“You’ll get in well after six and the trip from Whitehorse is another two hours. Might as well grab breakfast before you leave the city…nothing between Whitehorse and Eden.”

Frowning, I half turned in her doorway. “Eden?”

“Officially, it’s County Twelve, but the locals call it Eden. I guess there are about thirty permanent residents. They live off the land and the tourism trade. No Starbucks up there.”

—

Everything was bright, bright white around me when I awoke in the hospital room. My head ached and my arms were freezing from the ice packs they had strapped to me. A moan played up my throat before I recommenced bawling—I’m certain I’d been bawling and wailing before I slipped from consciousness within the Kircher House.

A nurse came to my side, hushing me and offering water. Moments later, a police officer hurried in, his utility belt rattling beneath his hard-packed gut. Both he and the nurse asked me questions and offered me things, but I continued wailing until my mother got there. She asked the nurse and the cop to leave me be as she cradled my head to her chest. Once I’d settled, I heard Shane Benoit’s voice saying, “…only in there like two minutes,” and “No, we didn’t hear anything until he started screaming.”

This brought a fresh bout of tears and wailing, though I couldn’t say over what. There was a blank spot in my mind concerning what had happened. No, that’s not quite right, the spot wasn’t blank, it was gone, leaving behind a hungry hole that my conscious sought eagerly to fill with all the worst possible things.

When I got home, that empty Tudor seemed to laugh at me, its tongue detaching and licking at that gap in my memory, luxuriating in the jagged edges from the tear. And then, just shy of four months later, the sign on the lawn featured a bright black and yellow sticker reading SOLD. Six weeks after that, a crew of men in dirty work boots arrived with jacks and pry bars. The house was lifted from its foundation and basement. One morning I awoke to find a blessedly empty lot across the street, they’d even taken the pillars. By the end of the summer, a new house was there, a bland two-story building with vinyl siding and absolutely no Tudor angles, accents, or window styles.

Its presence was the cue for my subconscious to return to normality, at least on the surface.

—

“Air Canada Flight Eighty-one Eighty-two to Whitehorse is now boarding at Gate C Forty-three…”

My ears perked and I pushed from the padded seats in the general vicinity of Gate C43. After a brief Facetime visit with my daughter, Phoebe—currently enrolled at U of Victoria, go Thunder, and about to move out of student housing into a house with five other girls—I’d popped three ZZZQuil pills and managed to force five hours of rest out of the evening and night. It wasn’t enough. For the last hour I’d yawned almost steadily, through an espresso and then through an americano. My two hopes were to sleep on the plane or wake the hell up.

The seats next to me were blissfully vacant and I luxuriated in the space. Though red eye flights tended to be a pain, they had a way of running on time and with little aggravation. All the passengers in the seats ahead of me and all those behind me were peaceful. The stewards were quick and efficient. We’d sat on the tarmac maybe three minutes before the pilot rolled up into place.

Takeoff was rocky. Upon leveling, we immediately hit turbulence. The speakers pinged and the captains voice filled the plane: “This is your captain speaking. I hate to be the bearer of bad—” The world seemed to fall out beneath us, all around me people let out little gasped yips. “Excuse me, bad news. We have a pretty bumpy ride ahead of us for the next hour or so. I’ll ask—”

The bottom fell out again and my head swam. It was as if something had been pulled loose, the scab picked from the wound to my memory. The Kircher House…I hadn’t thought of it in years until about a week earlier, and something about falling triggered a partial memory I’d assumed gone forever.

I closed my eyes to the shaking plane around me, seeing the orange ball in my hand the moment before I turned. My legs gave out…no, the floor gave out and I dropped. The splash that washed over me was cool and lumpy. It reeked of iron and rotting meat scents. Blackness surrounded me until a candle lit at the other end of the room. A sluicing, suckling slap of what sounded like a dog licking its chops drew closer, bringing with it the light.

I scrambled to find the lip of whatever this pool was that I’d fallen into. The flame grew, stretching itself into a pair of hands with wriggling fingers, stretching itself far enough that I saw the thing’s face, stretching itself—

“Oh, goodness! I’m so sorry. Let me clean this up.”

A steward stood over me with an empty cup in her hand. Orange juice dripped down my face and chest. The air had smoothed, but it wasn’t exactly a leap to assume we’d hit more turbulence while I was strolling down memory lane. She began patting me down with napkins, my mind elsewhere, almost wholly focused on drudging up the face behind the hands of flame from that lost memory.

—

What had to be the truth of the matter hit while I stood at the Fox car rental desk. My memory was wildly untrustworthy and the awful burn scars on my arms were the only thing that pointed to the fact something indeed had happened inside the Kircher House. Those burns could’ve come from a radiator. Perhaps I’d stumbled once inside, my arm’s thrusting between the steel coils of an ancient heating system.

Feeling a little better, I climbed into the four-year-old Nissan Pathfinder and pulled my cellphone from my pocket. Firstly, I connected to the vehicle via Bluetooth—I doubted very much I’d get many urban radio offerings that far north—and then opened a prior Google search to my destination. When I hit START, it directed me out of the parking lot and onto the highway where I’d drive for 160 KM without turning.

At 7:31 AM, my music stopped as my phone began to ring. The Bluetooth voice said, “Incoming call from Phoebe.” I plucked the phone from the cubby behind the shifter and hit ANSWER on the touchscreen.

“Hey.”

“Thank god. I had the worst dream. There was this rough looking kid chasing you with a hockey stick, shouting, ‘Get the ball, new kid!’ and there were these other kids behind him shouting. I thought it was like a plane crash omen or something,” my daughter said, a little out of breath.

My guts crashed to my ankles when I heard her quoting Shane Benoit, but for her sake, I offered up my best imitation of a chuckle. “Sounds like some crazy dream. But, nope, not an omen; the plane landed.”

“That’s,” she yawned, “good.”

“Go back to sleep, you’ll need your energy for the big move, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Love you.”

“Love you too,” she said, drifting. “And watch out for kids named Shane with hockey sticks.”

At that, I gasped. My mouth became a sticky, wet oven. “Shane?” I said.

“The other kids, they were yelling at the one with the stick, ‘Make him go, Shane.’ Totally silly. Nobody’s named Shane in real life anyway.”

This was so close to truth that it shifted my thinking for long enough to say, “Huh, I guess so,” and then start into another round of goodbyes. My music returned and as Silk Sonic fumed over a woman, I considered the highly unlikely possibility that it was all coincidence.

Two dark hours into my trek over the frosty white tundra, I stopped in a village called Carmacks. The sun was still only an idea for the future, despite that it was creeping up on 9:00 AM. There was a hotel, which appeared to be the only business open, so I parked and stepped inside, discovering the alluring aroma of breakfast frying on the grill.

A trim man in a black t-shirt came to take my drink order. This couldn’t be a long stay, so before I answered, I snatched the menu from between a Heinz ketchup bottle and a napkin dispenser.

“Can I get the Campfire? With coffee and water.”

The man nodded. “Be about eight minutes,” he said.

The dining area had a couple older men sitting at a table in the corner and at a table near the register was a young woman sipping coffee and looking like she was ready to go back to bed. While I waited, I withdrew my phone. The internet wasn’t a thing people had back when the Kircher House incident occurred, so I’d never really looked into the place.

Two reception bars would have to do, and to limit the number of searches, I input everything I knew. Only 301 results came back. The first three were real estate ads. The fourth was an archival news story on the sale of the Kircher House from the Edenville Gazette. My food and coffee arrived at some point outside my notice while I read. One-handedly, I forked hashbrowns, cut sausage, and tore at an egg before shoveling it all home while I followed the name Pastor Adolf Franz Kircher, discovering only family tree sites with pay walls and a historical figure that went back into 1600s Germany.

Food finished, I sipped from my coffee refill, letting things settle in my stomach and bladder before I headed out again—there was only half an hour or so left of my trip, but no sense pissing on the side of the road, or worse, when I could sit a moment to see if it would be necessary with a toilet handy. To kill the minutes, I searched for what might’ve been a relative to the owner of the home that had returned to plague my mind.

The first offering that wasn’t in document form was from a true crime website. The Pastor Adolf Kircher of the 1600s was suspected of sexually abusing children but was hung by his neck and then burned at the stake for cannibalizing vulnerable members of his congregation after hundreds of human bones were discovered in the man’s basement—a basement full of torture devices and texts on the dark arts. Beneath the type was an old woodcut image of a Tudor style house, one that looked like any and all Tudor style houses.

“Weird,” I said and finished my coffee.

Light had begun to kiss the distant horizon, and the wind had picked up, blowing hard enough that I had to halve my speed for the rest of the trip. This worked out for the best, as the smidgen of light offered to me lit the flat world enough to see a world of wildlife I did not want to hit with the rental.

Rather than check-in at the B&B, I went straight to the site. Men sat in trucks smoking cigarettes and vape pens as I pulled into the lot of the warehouse. Inside, men and women stood around a flame-throwing space heater. It was only a hint warmer inside.

“You Castle?” a big man said from behind a scraggily orange beard.

“Derek Castle.” I held out my hand to shake, then we got to it.

—

We worked through lunch. When the big, shed doors opened to bring in another piece of the huge machine, it revealed a steely grey world, blown snow and ice crystals slashing across the sky like TV static. A shiver played upon the sum of my flesh—if the weather remained like this for three days, there was no way I’d catch my flight…if flights would even be going out. It was on my mind because I’d read up on the weather before my trip, storms could last weeks in the almost-arctic wastes.

For the remainder of the day and into the evening, as we put the final pieces together, I had an eye on the weather—though by 3:45 PM, full dark had again taken over. At 6:00 PM, we paraded to the cafeteria trailer and loaded mismatched bowls with lumpy, grey stew, using mismatched spoons to shovel it into our mouths. Edible was the only honest compliment I could’ve made and this shined another light on why the crew was in a mood. By 6:35 PM, six of us marched back to calibrate the machine so that, after I made my speech and presentation, the mining could recommence tomorrow morning.

Just before eight o’clock, sore, cold, and exhausted, I hopped into my rental, flipped on my wipers, and rolled to the destination I’d searched beforehand on my phone. A moderately large house only five minutes from the site. The structural shapes clicked in, but I was too tired to feel offput by a Tudor design, even where most of the homes were clapped together bungalows on stilts. Through the wrought iron gate and the stone pillars on either side, up two cement steps, and to the door. I put my hand on the knob as a gust of wind screamed out behind me, carrying the words, it’s just a house.

I shook off the absurdity of the hallucinated utterance as well as the windblown snow. There was a deacon’s bench by the door, and I dropped heavily to unzip my boots. Footfalls shushed down a set of stairs beyond my sightline. A man in a navy-blue bathrobe appeared. He was old, pale, and had one of those faces that always seemed familiar. On his feet were fuzzy black slippers. He had a piece of hard candy in his hand and took an extra suck before speaking.

“You’re Derek Castle, yes?” he said, his accent was European, playfully tinted enough by his lilt that I couldn’t immediately sense from where it originated.

 “That’s right,” I said, my eyelids feeling weighted by sandbags.

The man nodded. “I’m Frank and this is my home. Only one room remains. It is not as nice as the others, sorry.”

“Does it have a clean bed?” I stood.

“Oh yes.”

“That’s as much as I can worry about tonight.”

Frank led me by a slim stairway to the second floor, by the common area, and through a large kitchen. He opened a heavy wooden door and pulled a string light, all the while explaining breakfast and the bathrooms. The stairs down were steep, and my luggage was awkward in the tight space. The floor at the bottom was cold, cold cement, decorated by area rugs. The walls were cement, too, and everything was immaculately clean. From one corner jutted a closet-sized room, walls of pale paneling.

“Your washroom,” Frank said, pointing his hard candy stick. His finger roved to the other corner where another wood-paneled room jutted from the cement foundation. “And your room. If you need anything, I’ll be upstairs.”

My head bobbed in a loose nod as I shuffled into the room. A hanging bulb overhead revealed a single bed with brown sheets, a nightstand equipped with a clock and a lamp, and a bar to hang clothing. Door closed behind me, I stripped to my boxer shorts, found my charger in the front pocket of my suitcase, and plugged in my phone. The bed was springy beneath me, the coils singing a tune with each adjustment. After pulling the sheets out from an aggressive tuck, I lay back, instantly beginning to drift.

—

Black all around me, I opened my eyes. “How did they dig a basement into the permafrost…and what do they do during thaw weeks?” I said aloud.

As if startling it down, a lukewarm drip hit my forehead. I swiped it away aggressively, momentarily disgusted before I decided it had to be condensation from a pipe in the unfinished ceiling. According to the red digits on the clockface, it was just after midnight. I flipped away, stretching out. Another drop hit me, this time on my neck. I began to roll over to reach the lamp, and another drop fell, this one finding my slightly open mouth.

“Ugh, uck,” I said as I spat out the tinny tasting moisture.

As I reached a blind hand out to the side table, three quick drops pattered against my scalp. When the bulb lit, I squinted against the sudden brightness. One eye closed, I looked to the ceiling. A great, gasping inhalation made my head spin. Above my bed was a dead polar bear, bound to the framework of the underside of the upstairs floor. I leapt to my feet the same moment a wet sluice sound played out like gum chewed into a microphone. The bear’s abdomen open, spilling out its innards with slapping, wet smacks; organs and intestines playing out in gooey ribbons. Coated in foul smelling gore, I backed to the door. The knob was there, but it refused to turn.

For a moment, I was trapped in a disgusted, confused limbo. A second later, the bear really began to bleed, gushing out a tidal wave of blood. It was deep crimson and chunky with clots where the fluid had congealed. The awful surf was quickly to my ankles. The knob refused me still, so I began thrashing my shoulder against the door. It was like bodychecking concrete.

“Help!”

No sounds volleyed back above the din of the seemingly endless flow of blood. It had risen to my hips and still, it did not slow.

“Help!”

Up to my chest, the lit lamp bobbing along, threatening to electrocute me. I gave up on the door and punched at the panel wall. My fist smashed through with little resistance and on the yank backward, I grabbed the wood, reefing it aside. After a stance adjustment, I punched the inside of the far wall panel. It popped out, nails tink-tinkling on the cement floor beyond. The blood gushed out around me as I shimmied sideways between the wall’s boney framework.

The blood had run enough that even in the much larger room, it was already back up to my knees. Sloshing with big awkward steps, I made for the stairs. Three feet from reaching them, four white balls rose from the blood, bobbing like ice cubes in a vodka Caesar. The one on the furthest right began a slow spin, eventually revealing two empty eye sockets.

“Skulls,” I whispered a heartbeat before the first launched at me, biting into my shoulder. “Ouch!”

A second fired from the crimson surf and I lifted my hands to block its snapping jaws. Pain flashed through me. The pinky of my right hand was gone. Blood spirted from the nub in boiling bursts.

“Help!”

The next two skulls rose, taking a more precise approach, swooping around my head like bats. In tandem, as my left foot reached the first stair up, the tops of my ears were bitten off. Blood oozed down into the canals, invading my sinus with heat and scent. Another skull latched onto the back of my ankle and began twisting, spinning like a fan blade until the tendon popped and rolled up my calf.

“Ahh!” I shouted uselessly as I flopped onto my knees and hands.

In the moment’s pause, the skulls were on me, munching away my flesh as my blood slick hands slipped from the stairs I was trying to climb. Through the gap beneath the banister, I tumbled, landing with a hard, dry smack. My hands came up to my face, my harried breaths threatening to hyperventilate my system. I remained there, fetal, knees to my chin, arms raised high, for several seconds before I realized the change.

I looked between my uninjured fingers. Dark but for the light coming from the lamp in my room; there was nothing untoward, all the blood was gone, the skulls were gone. Hands on the cool floor, I pushed myself upright, not even a twinge from the tendon the skulls had torn—hadn’t torn. It had been a nightmare.

According to the clock, it was only 1:11 AM. I climbed back into bed, once again exhausted. It wasn’t until I reached to turn off the lamp that I noticed about a half-inch of my right pinky was gone, the flesh healed over.

—

Breakfast was hearty: sausage, meatballs, a bowl of fabulous stew. Fruits and vegetables were a rare commodity that far north, so I questioned nothing of the offering. My mind was stuck on my finger and that horribly vivid vision. My brain presented a variety of hoops for me to jump, to explain the injury. Losing a piece of finger seemed like an impossible situation to forget, but I said nothing about it because it had to have happened long into the past given the healed flesh. Three of the crew sat at the table with myself and a young woman who was pale as the Yukon landscape. There were two empty seats, and once we all had plates, Frank occupied one of the seats with a steaming mug in his skinny little hand.

“Where’s Joe?” one of the crew said around a mouthful of meat.

“He left us last night,” Frank said.

Chewing the delicious, salty meat, I craned my head to look out the window. A yard light exposed the storm. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask where he went, but I swallowed the question.

“That means, Mr. Castle, if you’d like, you can move your things to a cozier room upstairs,” Frank said.

To this, I couldn’t agree fast enough.

—

The toilets were busy at lunch break, so I returned to the B&B, and for the first time saw it in the full light of day. It was the Kircher House, undeniably the Kircher House. My guts roiled and screamed that I find a toilet, but I was pinned in place by terror, sitting behind the wheel of my rental.

A bubble of gas slipped free, giving me a very hot, very smelly final warning. As I swallowed the terror and kicked open the door of the SUV, I thought of Shane Benoit, could hear his voice ordering me inside. On stiff legs, ass clenched, I hurried between the stone pillars, through the wrought iron gate, and up to the door. Once inside, panic replaced terror. Boots off, I bolted to the bathroom I’d seen that morning when I moved my things.

Door locked, jacket tossed to the floor, I planted myself on the cool toilet seat. The incredible rush reminded me of the bear from the night before. That dream that did not feel like a dream. That dream that stole a piece of my finger, or the memory of losing a piece of my finger. Where I sat, my cellphone rang in my pants pocket. It was Phoebe, video calling me. For a moment I considered ignoring it, but decided I’d tell her I’d call her back.

“Hey, hon, I’m kind of—”

Phoebe’s voice overshadowed him. “It’s harder than I ever thought, being here, but I’m—” She swiped her right hand beneath each eye and took a deep, harried breath as tears cascaded her cheeks. “I’m surrounded by—” She paused again, the tears flowing free and her chin quivering. “I’m surrounded by support, but it doesn’t make the hurt of losing my friend, my support, my father any less.”

What I was looking at hit me then. “Phoebe? I’m alive!” I said.

On the screen, my ex-wife appeared, crying as well. She held our daughter as I squeezed the phone tightly. It was my funeral. I was seeing my funeral. This house, this house was a fucking menace, and I couldn’t be in it another minute. Toilet paper in hand, I leaned forward, only to find myself sucked back. My phone clattered to the linoleum floor. One hand on the cupboard around the wash basin, one hand on a windowsill above me, I pulled. The strain was horrible, and it only got worse when I gained a few inches of traction; my anus prolapsing and hanging below me like a horrid stubby tail. A wail left me and I fell back to the seat, the flesh below dipping into the murky waters a moment before the toilet broke beneath me, porcelain slicing into my ass and thighs. Water pooled around me as I lay on my chest, my backside humming agonized hymns. I reached for my phone, only to discover the screen cracked and lifeless. From the corner of my left eye came movement. I turned in time to see a scummy lily pad of feces swell like blown Hubba Bubba. As I jerked away, gasping in a great breath, my mouth opened wide enough for the shit bubble to launch between my jaws. Gagging, writhing, hands to my throat, I kicked around the bathroom floor. Never in my life had I tasted something so awful and yet so, so me. The bubble grew, like a squeezed water balloon, filling my sinus and throat, choking me. A moment before I could blackout, it popped and hot, hot feces blasted onto my tongue and out my nostrils and ears. Horrible, and yet, the sense of relief at its passing was familiar…until it continued. Shit hitched each attempt at breathing, causing me to cough until I began vomiting.

By the time it ceased, I lay in a viscous puddle of foul, greenish brown waste. Moving was beyond me and I closed my eyes to drive up my energy. When I finally looked around, I was upright on the can, wad of toilet paper in my hand. As I wiped, I panted at the pain of brushing against a series of very angry hemorrhoids that hadn’t been there before I sat down.

—

My bags in the rental, I hadn’t bothered to tell Frank I was leaving and never coming back to that awful place; somewhere in the back of my mind I’d already linked the name with Franz, as in Pastor Adolf Franz Kircher. Bowlegged, I continued my workday with the crew, monitoring and minding the slow process of teaching a new machine and its various duties to a team of individuals.

By 6:00 PM, the crew was tired but now had the hang of the machine, well enough that, since there was a moderate lull to the storm, I might drive down to Whitehorse. My phone refused to power on—the screen had only a sliver crack, and still—but surely there’d be a room, or even a flight.

As the current load was piling out in pebble form, two women began shouting. A punch was thrown. Hair was pulled. Instinctively, I hurried alongside the foreman. Seeing it too late, one of the women picked up an icy stone and pitched it. The second combatant ducked, and the stone nailed me in the forehead between the eyebrows. As I tipped back, my hardhat fell away and I landed solidly against a toolbox.

—

“Thank heavens you’re awake,” said a voice with a sly European lilt.

When I opened my eyes, I was looking at Frank. Muffling my vision was a wad of bandage between my brows, muddying my mind was a throbbing pain at the back of my skull. It hit me full on then, bringing with it intense panic: I was back in the Kircher house.

“I need a hospital,” I said, trying to push upright.

Frank held me down. “There’s no hospital here. It’s best you stay put. Would you like some stew, there’s plenty of Joe left.”

At this, I blinked rapidly.

“Oh, don’t worry, you’re far too much fun to feed upon, at least physically.”

Swirling, whirling, sickening, that meat we’d eaten at breakfast was human. I hadn’t been able to place it because I wasn’t a cannibal—not until that moment—but it had been a miner named Joe. My fists and legs seemed to act of their own will, lashing out at this little man. He popped back with surprising agility, as his smirk became a sneer.

The second I reached my shaky feet I was launched backward at the will of twisted ropes of bedding. The mattress coils fired through the padding, fish-hooking my ears, nose, and mouth. Frank drew nearer, his head swelling hugely from the collar of his shirt, his jaws dislocating as his mouth gaped enormously to reveal a tiny man on a small crocodile with an even smaller hawk riding his right shoulder. Frank’s tongue elongated, reaching for my abdomen, searing my flesh, branding me as it touched.

In a craggy, rasping voice, the old man riding Frank’s tongue said, “Seitterp ym, deef.”

The crocodile turned its maw sideways and gathered the flesh of my left breast between its teeth before it twisted and tore down to the bone. My scream was sloppy and formless thanks to the mattress coils pulling my face wide. There was no time to dwell on the pain in my chest as the hawk perched on my forehead. I closed my eyes to the awful sensation of that beak snapping and slicing my eyelid. Blood stung with hot tendrils until I could no longer blink with my left eye. The hawk paused only a moment before spreading its serrated beak and slamming it into my eye. Dark, but I saw down the hawk’s throat for two heartbeats—there were all the boys from the block in Edenville, holding hockey stick shafts with pitchfork blades over their heads as they cheered on the carnage. The cords of my eye then detached and the hawk flew to the old man’s shoulder.

“Enid ot nrut ym,” he said and began crawling up my chest and over my chin. “Teews eugnot.”

With oily tasting hands and filthy fingernails, the old man grabbed my tongue. He brought it to his mouth, his thick, yellowy drool oozing down my throat. The first bite was not the worst. The ninth bite was the worst—he was in my throat, anchoring himself with my uvula. Blood drained down my throat, and I understood then that the house had no intention of letting me go.

—

I came to on the deacon’s bench by the door. My vision was poor, a bit fuzzy. I probed at my left eye with a finger, only to discover glass.

“You checking out?” a gruff and manly woman asked from the hall connected to the foyer.

Beyond her, the house was different. A trick, I was certain. My tongue was too swollen to answer her with words, so I nodded. Boots on, I stepped through the steel door to the set of steps that led to the ground below. The house was now on stilts and had no obvious style to it. It was like most houses out there in that wasteland nowhere.

Night was heavy, but the weather was cooperating as I took the slow, slow route back to Whitehorse, the road thick with animalia—thankfully there was but one turn for my phone refused to power up. I’d lost a fingertip, my asshole ached with an itchy, sour throb, my left eyeball was gone, and my tongue felt like a slug in my mouth. The house remained heavy on my mind, but not as heavily as letting Phoebe know I was still alive…letting me know that she knew.

My tongue was normal enough to purchase a red eye back to Vancouver. Once landed, I got a ticket for the next flight to Victoria. By noon, I was on the Island in a rental car, my phone inexplicably coming to life the moment I left the airport. Pulled over, I dialed Phoebe. The call when directly to voicemail. I found Phoebe’s new address amid a week-old text message and followed Google’s instructions on how to get there.

A U-Haul truck took up half the street and I began looking for parking, knowing without Google’s say so that I’d arrived. There was a spot about 20 yards past the truck and I took it. Thankfully, nothing had affected my feet or legs, so running was hardly an issue. Maple trees loaded with browning leaves blocked my view until I came around the truck.

“It’s just a house,” I whispered, pausing but a heartbeat.

Stone pillars and an open wrought iron gate led up to a Tudor house with stained-glass windows. My heart leapt into my throat as I drew closer, kicking aside a bright orange hockey ball as I walked. From inside, I heard wet sluicing and slapping sounds. They were sexual and yet brutal, as if those inside were fucking with strap-on knives. The scent was thick: briny, metallic, fetid. I paused in the doorway, trying to call out to Phoebe but finding my voice as unwilling to cross into the Kircher House once more as my feet.

XX