Chapter 499
The old house stood on a hill overlooking the town, its windows like vacant eyes staring into the gathering dusk. Inside, Kaelen moved with the slow, deliberate care of one accustomed to quiet.
Dust motes danced in the beams of his flashlight, revealing the decay that had taken root over years of neglect. He'd inherited the place from a great uncle he'd never met, and a strange unease had settled over him since the day he arrived.
The previous owner left behind not belongings, just hollow echoes and an odd dryness in the air. It was a peculiar feeling, like the house itself was exhaling a forgotten breath.
It wasn't simply old, it was tired. A scratch resonated from within the walls, and Kaelen stopped his movements.
It wasn't a rat. It had a dry quality, like claws on old paper.
The sound was brief and easily missed. "Just settling," Kaelen murmured, though his mind felt no comfort.
He forced himself to continue the inspection. The wallpaper was peeling in long strips.
Each exposed corner offered more to examine and yet less of the room's true nature, it felt as though its hidden parts were always obscured just behind each torn piece. Later, as Kaelen tried to eat, the scratching returned, this time, louder.
It wasn't just a scratch. It sounded more like something moving inside the walls.
The sound shifted and moved through the house, becoming harder to ignore. His hunger had evaporated with the growing uneasiness in his chest.
"Alright," he said, getting up from the table. "Let's have a look."
He ran a hand over the walls, knocking lightly at intervals. Behind one section of drywall, a void thrummed and scratched back at his knuckles.
It wasn't wood, not metal; it had a strangely organic vibration and feel to it, like a heartbeat trying to become sound. He stared intently at the wall.
He was sure it was a hollow space and the cause of the noise. It felt more than just a space behind the wall, there was a sense of anticipation coming from it.
It was like the air was pregnant with unknown consequence. He reached for his phone, the digital numbers feeling alien and useless.
He called a local handyman who had a solid rep for these old places. A man named Marcus answered.
"Hello, you called from the old house? It sounds pretty rough I hear. It'll be quite the expense getting all that looked at," his tone was a mix of knowing humor and tiredness.
It was like every house in town hid something no one wanted to look too closely at. "Yes, it is. I'm hearing sounds within the walls," Kaelen responded, "scratches, shifting noises.
Is that normal?" Marcus chuckled a dry, humorless laugh. "Normal? In that house?
Listen, son, you leave that be. Walls keep secrets, best not to go diggin'." Kaelen hesitated.
"You sound like you've seen this before?" He could feel the silence on the other end, it made the air around him thicken with discomfort and foreboding.
"Some things are better left lost." Marcus' voice was final. The line went dead, leaving Kaelen staring at his device.
He made sure his connection was alright and went to call back, only to find that Marcus wouldn't pick up. Kaelen shook his head; strange.
He knew Marcus knew something, and whatever it was, it gave him enough apprehension to just stop talking. He considered whether that alone should give him a better warning than any normal concern.
That's what drove Kaelen further, an interest into the unseen parts of the house that others avoided so plainly. Kaelen retrieved a hammer and a pry bar from the shed.
He felt a strange combination of dread and something like excitement at this undertaking. He told himself it was curiosity, but deep down he knew it was more.
It was a reckless urge to understand something unknown. He pressed the cold metal of the bar into the plaster, pushing firmly against it.
The brittle material finally shattered, allowing a gaping space to open. He pressed into the drywall more, finally tearing it off completely.
He felt his insides turn with unease. The hole revealed not wood or pipes but a dark, fibrous material unlike anything Kaelen had ever seen.
The interior of it seemingly pulsating ever so slowly with each beat of his own heart, in this house the walls echoed everything in a deeper way. It looked as though the whole house was beginning to form inside that small, unassuming crack.
A foul stench rose from it. An acrid and thick aroma that felt like spoiled meat left out under a midday sun, not exactly of rot or decaying substance.
It smelled far worse than something made of this earth and organic matter, this came from some distant realm of pain. The fibrous walls grew into something akin to veins that moved in unison as if the very home was alive.
From within the opening, a pair of yellow eyes appeared, and they moved with strange, unnerving movements that followed every gesture from the dumbfounded Kaelen. Something inside this material looked to be studying and mapping him from the inside out.
It slowly pushed more of itself out. A long, segmented body wormed into view, followed by a multitude of smaller, clawed appendages.
It was unlike anything biological. It had an unnatural way to it as it moved like something between an insect and some twisted plant matter.
It was almost as though a collection of sinew and muscle just made the effort to move out into his plane of existence. Its entire being held a chaotic appearance as the creature shifted.
Its body constantly attempting to unravel its many segmented parts in a way that hurt Kaelen's head just to observe it, but its actions felt measured. It just looked unnerving, a chaotic display of unnatural form and function.
Its calculated intent felt tangible. Kaelen stumbled back, knocking over the old bookshelf and watching old dusty books scatter.
He fell onto his behind; he couldn't look away. A thin membrane pulsed where its face should have been and its jaws opened in a series of too many places.
It looked wet with anticipation as it spoke, in a tone of quiet sorrow, "You shouldn't have done that". Kaelen didn't move; his breaths hitched in his chest.
His thoughts seemed frozen, with that cold pronouncement having stopped any normal functioning in him. He should be reacting in terror, in disbelief, yet it wasn't registering.
What was this horror? Its shape formed with greater ease in the presence of the air, and Kaelen found himself wondering if it couldn't do so prior to him doing his action and cracking open the wall.
If not, then its intent had been far more premeditated and cruel, having lain in wait only for the opportune time of Kaelen. "Wha... what are you?" Kaelen asked with a shaky and soft cadence.
His question was weak with dread. "The house remembers all who came, all who left, and those that never will," It said again, in its sad yet dry, and oddly resigned tone.
"You weren't supposed to find me," it completed. Kaelen wanted to scream, yet even that reaction felt out of his reach.
He could just sit here and listen. Its long, fibrous body stretched, moving in a fluid that defies any normal physical rules.
The ends of its multitude of limbs pushed deep into Kaelen's mind, its tendrils digging with malicious precision through any kind of defense that the poor man could offer. Each tendril feeling like his own history being meticulously taken piece by piece with each movement.
Memories were just not memories anymore, they were now objects, things that the creature could move and study with a cruel curiosity. It looked and re-contextualized them within the parameters of its intent.
Kaelen felt as if pieces of him were coming unraveled. He recalled small memories as being replaced with hollow imitations.
A vague sense of his grandmother, gone. He could no longer clearly recall her face or voice or a singular moment they ever shared together.
It was simply missing as if the world just rewrote that history in its image and will. Each strand the creature made felt akin to this experience.
It was this gradual and slow removal of his inner being in full, without him having a single say. The creature's touch brought with it an unspeakable chill.
It felt like it was actively unraveling the core of Kaelen's identity, stealing the details of his life and twisting his present into a terrifying mess of fragmented awareness. It seemed distant and pointless all at the same time.
With each new fiber connecting, each new touch brought more holes to his heart, the gaps growing slowly within him where they felt most vital and precious. Kaelen watched, unable to respond as its limbs drew deeper and deeper within his being.
It just spoke one phrase as he was taken. "Forgotten…." the words vibrated through him as the sensation turned into complete, utter white noise.
His eyes lost all control of the direction they wanted to gaze. He couldn't blink, move his fingers, toes.
A sense of warmth and comfort came to him as the creature spoke in that desolate tone once more; "you will be one of us soon". The next day, a demolition crew arrived to begin their job.
No one had reported Kaelen as a missing person, nor could the town even bring him into memory. It's as though they've always lived in this state, with everyone they meet being who they've always known.
They all had no history, no past of a life before. Just a set of basic, almost machine-like patterns they went about.
In its cold efficiency, a very human act. They brought down the house.
Brick by brick, they dismantled the strange place, piece by piece until nothing remained but a flat plane, like Kaelen himself. He was removed completely as though his brief, small experience was always doomed for its eventual erasure.
No one even felt sad, there wasn't anything or anyone in the memories of all the people within the nearby town for them to recall that ever lived there. His whole presence, as an individual that held his own stories and moments that truly did mean something in life was just a stain, an embarrassing memory.
In the vacant place left by the old house, there wasn't any new life. It just sat, a dead flat expanse.
No trees, no bugs. It was always that way.
All that ever happened was a crew of construction workers dismantling something they had always known wasn't there. It was in that bleak empty plain.
A fitting, ironic grave for what had come, a complete and utter state of nothing that wasn't anything ever before in time.