The Withering House (Part 1)
Once, buried in a year no one could quite remember, stood a house at the end of a winding gravel path, seemingly less constructed than exhumed, dragged from beneath the soil like a corpse too stubborn to stay buried.
The land surrounding it was a wilderness of weed-choked grass and thistle, each stalk curling upward like arthritic fingers desperate to claw back toward something lost.
This house, a monstrous relic of Victorian design, loomed with a hunchbacked silhouette against the dimming sky, its red bricks weathered into a dull, bruised crimson, cracked open in places like dry skin stretched too long over forgotten bone.
The windows, tall and narrow with arches like funeral gates, were fogged from the inside with a kind of filth no rain could wash away, and most remained shuttered, sealed tight as coffins, as if the house were afraid of what might see in.
Paint curled from the trim in long yellowed ribbons, shedding like the skin of some dying beast, and vines as pale as drowned veins slithered up the sides, pressing inward against the glass with something less like nature and more like hunger.
At its peak stood a narrow tower, slightly tilted, defying balance like a snapped neck held upright by some unseen force.
Within that final room behind the blackened panes, something watched, not with eyes, perhaps, but with presence; a suffocating awareness that settled into the bones of anyone who stood too long beneath its shadow.
Even the mailbox, long since rotted into a spine of rusted iron and half-swallowed by earth, seemed to wear an expression of twisted disdain, as if grimacing at the fate of every soul foolish enough to reach for its mouth.
The townsfolk never spoke of it unless pressed, and even then, only in mutters behind cupped hands or beneath the noise of thunderstorms.
Children dared one another to touch the rusted gate, giggling until dusk grew too quiet and their laughter rang hollow against the wind.
Stories spilled from those who claimed to know: flickers of movement in the windows, the smell of rot on windless days, the strange, rhythmic thudding heard only at midnight, like something dragging its limbs across rotted floors in the dark.
Most stayed away, choosing the long road over the shortcut that passed its property, convinced the ground there remembered every footfall and waited to collect them.
But once, not so long ago in the grand scheme of horrors, the house had lived.
A family had taken root within those crumbling walls, though even that word, family, feels too warm for what they became.
Richard Langford, the patriarch, was a man of iron discipline and empty affection, a businessman whose smile never touched his eyes and whose voice could slice through silence like a scalpel through skin.
His wife, Evelyn, was spoken of as delicate, but never kindly; her stillness unnerved visitors, her silence lingered in rooms like perfume on a corpse, and though she moved through the house like a shadow, her presence was always heavier than her footsteps.
Then there was Isaac, their only child, a boy who grew into a man beneath the gaze of that crooked tower, and who, by most accounts, did not grow right.
He rarely left the estate, and when he did, people swore he walked as if the sky pressed harder on him than on others, bent, watchful, half-swallowed by whatever secrets the house had pressed into him.
Within those walls, the air never felt fully clean.
The silence was not a simple absence of noise, but a devouring thing, a hollow that drank every whisper, every breath, every song that might once have tried to rise.
No laughter echoed from within, no footsteps moved without that groaning timber protest.
There were no family photographs hung in the hallway, no signs of warmth in the parlors or bedrooms, just dust that fell thick as ash, and doors that creaked open slowly, even when no wind stirred.
Something in that place remembered grief so thoroughly that it had become indistinguishable from the architecture itself.
And yet... something lived on.
Whether it was memory, madness, or something far older and far less human, no one could say.
But those who passed too near often spoke of feeling watched.
A weight on the chest, a breath down the neck.
Sometimes, they would stop in the middle of the road and swear they'd heard someone whisper their name, and it wasn't until they looked back that they realized they were alone.
Or worse, they weren't.
One bleak October morning, under a sky the color of old bruises and a wind that moaned through the fields like something wounded, Richard Langford stood at the foot of the grand staircase with his polished leather case in hand, snapping the brass clasps shut with a finality that echoed through the hushed halls.
He kissed Evelyn on the cheek, not with love or longing, but with a detached precision, as if fulfilling a ritual he no longer believed in.
Her skin, pale and cold beneath his lips, barely stirred at the touch.
Then he turned to Isaac, his son, who watched from the landing with dark-circled eyes that hadn't blinked in far too long.
Richard gave him a nod, bare, perfunctory, absent of warmth or parting words, and vanished into the morning mist that coiled like smoke along the gravel path.
That was the last time anyone saw Richard Langford alive.
For a time, the house held its breath, waiting.
Letters came, typed on fine stationery with his signature scrawled in neat blue ink, but even these, too, withered into silence.
Two weeks passed before the correspondence ceased entirely.
After that, nothing, no telegram, no call, nobody, just the slow, suffocating realization that whatever had carried him away that morning had not intended to return him.
Isaac, already a boy more attuned to silence than sound, began to unravel.
His pale complexion turned waxen, his eyes sunken deeper into his skull, and he moved like someone wading through a dream too thick to escape.
At night, he walked the length of the upper corridors barefoot, murmuring in hushed, broken phrases that slipped beneath the doors like cold drafts, pressing his ear to the keyholes as though something on the other side might whisper back.
Servants began avoiding the tower staircase, claiming they often found him standing in the highest room beneath the slanted eaves, gazing out the warped window toward the black edge of the woods, as if drawn to some signal that only he could hear.
One footman swore Isaac would stand there for hours, unmoving, with his fingers pressed tightly to the glass until his knuckles bled.
And then there was the mirror incident.
A maid, fresh from the village and barely seventeen, fled the house one storm-thick night, barefoot and shrieking, her apron torn and stained with something dark.
She told the rector, her words choked with tears and terror, that she had entered the sitting room to stoke the fire and found Isaac crouched before a tall mirror, whispering.
Not to himself, she insisted.
To something in the glass.
A figure dressed in black, tall and still, its outline warped and dripping like oil behind the boy's reflection.
It never moved, never blinked, but its eyes, she said, her voice trembling, its eyes were nothing but deep, charred pits in a face that seemed burned down to the bone.
When Isaac turned and smiled at her, she ran.
Evelyn, once the ghostly but poised lady of the house, dissolved into a kind of fragile madness.
She no longer emerged from the master bedroom except in brief, disheveled wanderings down the corridor.
Her silvering hair hung loose, unbrushed and tangled across her shoulders like cobwebs, and her nightgown, stained at the hem, dragged behind her like a mourner's veil.
She no longer spoke in full sentences, only murmured the name "Richard" in a thousand different tones, accusatory, pleading, broken, and each repetition carved her voice thinner, until it rasped like paper torn too slowly.
Soon, she stopped speaking altogether unless the house was completely still.
She began locking herself inside the master suite, sometimes for days at a time, refusing to eat unless food was left outside the door on a silver tray.
Servants would return in the morning to find the tray untouched, or worse, half-eaten, with the cutlery arranged into strange, spidery symbols, the meat torn into pieces by what looked like fingernails rather than knives.
Then, one evening, the letters returned.
At first glance, they appeared the same: Richard's signature, his typewritten prose, the same elegant stationery.
But the words… they were off.
The letters were filled with phrases Richard never used, formalities turned upside down, pleasantries twisted into something cold, and watching.
The ink was smudged in places as if the paper had been weeping.
Even the dates didn't align.
The address was scrawled in a childlike hand, and one envelope arrived still damp, stinking faintly of earth and mildew.
But most chilling of all, each letter bore the scent of the house itself: that unmistakable mix of mildew, ash, and something faintly metallic, like blood drying on wood.
And though they came from hundreds of miles away, postmarked from cities Richard had no reason to visit, they began to arrive daily, always at the same time, always with her name on the envelope.
Evelyn never opened them.
She already knew who was writing, and she already knew he wasn't coming back.
The handwriting wasn't quite Richard's.
At first glance, it mimicked his looping precision, the practiced flourish of a man who signed contracts and love letters with equal care.
But something beneath the surface, some subtle trembling of the pen, some uneven curl of the descenders, betrayed an impostor's hand.
The letters were always damp to the touch, the paper swollen and soft as flesh left too long in water, with ink that bled at the edges and curled into greenish tendrils like mildew inching through old wood.
Each envelope bore a return address that did not exist, numbers that made no sense, a street name misspelled differently each time, a postmark so faded it looked stamped by something that had never breathed air.
And in every letter, always near the end, Richard wrote the same chilling phrase in those curling, weeping lines: "I have found the way back home."
He promised to return "when the moon peels its skin."
That cryptic promise, repeated like a prophecy written in rot.
Isaac read the letters aloud to himself in the parlor, long after the lamps had been extinguished, his voice thin and trembling in the candlelit dark.
The servants had long since abandoned the house, and the only company he kept was the shadows stretching across the walls and the grandfather clock, which had stopped ticking weeks before.
Sometimes he read the words gently, almost reverently, as if they were scripture.
Sometimes he laughed, a sharp, cracking sound that echoed strangely in the stillness, and sometimes he wept, his tears falling silently into the candlewax pooling beneath his trembling hands.
On the first night of winter, Evelyn vanished.
The house was silent as a tomb when a neighbor, worried by the sudden lack of movement behind the curtains, forced the side door open and entered.
Evelyn's bedroom was pristine.
Her bed was made so tightly that it might never have been slept in.
The fireplace was cold.
The curtains, drawn shut.
There was no sign of struggle, no blood, no overturned furniture, but on the floor, gleaming faintly in the dim grey light, lay her crucifix: bent into a twisted arc and blackened as if it had been plunged into flame.
Though fresh snow had fallen the night before, there were no footprints around the house, only a single, chilling anomaly: a thin, glistening trail of water, beginning at the base of the stairs and leading, step by step, all the way to the attic door above.
No one dared open it.
No one wanted to see what lay at the end of that wet path.
After that, Isaac sealed the house.
He boarded the lower windows and locked every door from within.
He did not answer knocks, nor acknowledge shouted pleas from relatives or parishioners.
The only thing that escaped from within those walls was silence and the smell.
The postman, unnerved by the sight of the perpetually open mailbox, finally stopped delivering mail altogether when he found the interior sopping wet despite a week of dry skies.
He claimed the moisture was warm, and when he touched the inside lip of the box, something beneath the wood pulsed.
And then came the stench.
Neighbors spoke of it in whispers, the reek that wafted on windless nights, an odor of wet soil, sour decay, and something older than rot, something that smelled not just dead, but forgotten by death itself.
Animals began avoiding the property entirely, birds circled wide, and cats refused to cross the threshold.
One brave soul, emboldened by whiskey and youthful bravado, stood beneath the crooked tower one night and swore he saw firelight flickering behind the glass.
But the tower room, stripped bare decades ago, had no fireplace, no oil lamp, no candles, just cold walls, old floorboards, and a window warped with age.
Still, something glowed inside, and worse, something moved.
Eventually, the lights inside went out.
Not dimmed but vanished.
No candles flickered in the parlor.
No shape passed between the shutters.
The house, once so heavy with watchful silence, seemed to exhale and then withdraw into itself entirely.
Just darkness sealed behind brick and wood.
But some say you can still see him.
Just before midnight, if you're fool enough to walk the gravel path that cuts through the field of clawing weeds, and stand beside the crooked, rust-veined mailbox, you might catch the faintest flicker in the tower room above.
A pale, unmoving shape at the window, framed in cracked glass.
Eyes that do not blink. Skin so colorless it glows blue in the moonlight.
He doesn't wave. He doesn't move.
He only stares downward, always, as if waiting for someone to return.
And if you stay long enough, if you brave the chill and truly listen, you might hear it: the slow, deliberate crunch of footsteps in the grass behind you, as though boots soaked in something thick and black were sinking into the soil with every step.
But when you turn, there's never anyone there.
And on some nights, clear nights, when the moon is round and full, and seems to glow too brightly for comfort, a letter appears in the mailbox.
Always sealed in black wax, which drips like tar.
Always addressed to Evelyn Langford, in that same almost-but-not-quite handwriting.
And always signed:
Richard.
Only one person ever dared open one.
A girl from the village, no more than sixteen, was goaded into it by friends.
She slit the seal with her father's hunting knife while the others huddled around her, laughing.
She read the first line aloud.
Then stopped.
Her face blanched.
Her lips moved, but no sound came. Her hands began to tremble.
The letter fell from her grasp and blew into the weeds.
She hasn't spoken a word since.
Not to her family.
Not to the priest.
Not even in her sleep.
But sometimes, when no one is watching, she scribbles with frantic hands on paper that she then tears into pieces, weeping as she burns each scrap in the hearth.
No one knows what she saw.
And no one, since that night, has dared open another.