The Withering House (Part 2)
The letter was found sealed with a thick knot of black wax, its surface bubbled and cracked like burnt flesh.
The crest stamped into it, something circular, winged, vaguely ecclesiastic, was so eroded it seemed to scream not of heritage but of mutilation, as if time had tried to erase whatever lay beneath and failed.
The envelope sagged in the hand, strangely pliant, the texture of wet vellum or swollen skin steeped too long in murky water.
It smelled faintly of mold and salt, of something buried and half-risen.
No footprints marked the path to the rusted mailbox, which stood crooked in its bed of weeds like a decayed tooth in a diseased mouth.
There had been no rain in days, no visitors in weeks, yet the paper within was soaked, cold to the touch, the ink crawling in rivulets like veins, bleeding through each fold like something trying to escape the confines of the page.
Still, the words endured, jagged and erratic, as though written by a hand long unfamiliar with the surface of the living world, the strokes too heavy in some places, trembling in others, bearing the unmistakable weight of something unspeakably wrong.
This is what it said:
---
My dearest Evelyn,
It is quiet here. This kind of quiet that seeps into the bones and sours the marrow. Time doesn't move the same way, but it coils and uncoils like something asleep but dreaming. I do not know how long I have been walking, only that the ground beneath me is no longer earth but a slick, veined thing that pulses when I press my heel too hard. I've learned to walk softly.
There are no stars. There is no real sky. It's just a canopy of dark, stretched taut like the inside of a lid, and when the wind comes, and when it does come, it carries with it the sound of screaming far below, like insects caught in crystal. I don't look down anymore.
You would not recognize what I've become, Evelyn. I am thin now, but not in the way of hunger. Things have been taken from me, like small things, subtle things: fingernails, eyelashes, pieces of myself I don't remember losing.
My shadow walks beside me, but sometimes I catch it staring back instead of following, and I think it remembers a different life than mine.
But I'm close now. So close I can hear the house groaning at night, can feel the old floorboards weeping beneath Isaac's feet. He walks like I used to, cautious, curious, afraid to open the wrong door. Has he found the crack behind the mirror yet? Has he heard the knocking? The fourth knock is the one that matters, Evelyn. Never before.
The others here, or what few remain, have grown quiet. They watch me from the treeline, faceless things stitched in burlap and ash, whispering in the voice of your lullabies. One of them wears your gown, did you know that? It drags behind her in the soil, soaked and shuddering. I think she envies you. Or remembers you. Or perhaps wants to.
I have found the way back. The door opened to me when the moon peeled its skin and bled its marrow down the tower walls. I stepped through. I left myself behind. I am more than what you buried, and less than what you loved.
Isaac understands, I think. He will help you when the time comes. He always listened better than I did. He has your eyes, wide, knowing, filled with that old fear you carried in silence.
At times like these, it still holds its beauty. And from the quiet corners of my heart, I am genuinely happy for you, and for the son we share.
Tell him not to fear the voices. They belong to us now.
I will come for you when the wind turns black and the clocks bleed rust. When the roots twist up through the parlor floor and the crucifix cracks in half, you will know it is time.
Keep the mirror uncovered.
Keep the lights dim.
And if the knocking comes, never answer until the fourth.
Until then, I remain, in flesh or memory, Yours. Always.
Richard
----
The letter was burned in the fireplace before the next dawn, but the smoke curled the wrong way as it rose, sinking downward, hissing, leaving behind a soot that refused to be scrubbed clean.
And still, the mailbox remains open.
And on some nights, when the sky bruises violet and the wind dies entirely, a fourth knock echoes through the attic of the Langford house, though no one's lived there in years.
After she read the letter, something in the girl broke.
At first, it was her silence, a sudden stillness, unnatural and complete, like breath being held in the lungs of a corpse.
Then came the blood.
It spilled slowly at first, seeping from her ears in delicate rivulets, dark and warm, sliding down her neck as she sat trembling in the corner.
But when she began to scream, the sound tore itself out of her throat like something that didn't belong, raw and jagged, as though she were vomiting up a memory too ancient for her to contain.
Her hands, shaking, pale, curled into claws, and she raked them down her arms until the skin split in long red ribbons.
She howled about voices, about someone whispering from behind the walls, threading words through the cracks in the plaster, breathing stories into the grain of the floorboards, into the light fixtures, into her skull.
"He's inside the house," she sobbed. "He's inside the walls."
When they tried to restrain her, she sank her teeth through the fabric of her sleeves, biting down until she tasted blood and cotton.
The restraints didn't help.
She thrashed and shrieked until they had no choice but to sedate her, but even then, her hands kept drawing in the air, circles, angles, spirals.
Always the house, always the tower room, and in every drawing, no matter the medium, crayon, pencil, charcoal, there was always the same thing: the topmost window blackened completely, smeared over with thick, jagged lines, and behind that shadowed pane, watching from the darkness, a suggestion of eyes.
They burned the letter that night, thinking it might cleanse whatever had followed her home.
The flames hissed and spat as if burning something alive, and when it was gone, they buried the ashes deep in the woods.
But the smell, the thick, unrelenting stench of wet soil and rot, never left her room.
It clung to the bedsheets, it seeped into the paint on the walls, and when they repainted the entire room, twice, it came back the next morning, stronger, almost sweet.
She never spoke again.
Now, months later, she only sits by the window with her knees pulled to her chest, scrawling the same image again and again: the Langford house, the crooked tower, the blackened window, and the thing that waits behind the glass.
She doesn't eat unless it's left on the floor beside her.
She doesn't sleep unless every mirror in the house is covered, and sometimes, at night, her mother swears she hears her daughter giggling softly to herself, not with joy, but with the shrill, breathless edge of someone who has seen something so terrible that laughter is the only shape the fear can take.
Word spreads, as it always does.
The letter's story lingers in whispers and dares, passed from one trembling mouth to another by firelight and flashlight, in hushed tones after curfew.
Locals now say the next full moon will align with the very same phase from the night Richard Langford's final letter arrived.
That something waits beneath that alignment, beneath the peeling tower roof and the mailbox lid, rusted and yawning like an open wound.
Teenagers dare each other to walk the gravel path, to touch the rotted wood of the gate, and press their ear to the ancient mailbox.
Most hear nothing.
But some have heard the scratching.
Delicate at first, like claws or wet fingernails dragging along paper, but building louder and more desperate, until it becomes frantic, like something trapped just behind the thin membrane of reality, trying to claw its way into the open air.
And once, a child came sprinting down the path in the dark, breathless, shaking, their eyes so wide they didn't blink for hours.
They swore it had whispered their name.
And that night, before the moon reached its peak, their parents found a letter waiting for them on the kitchen table.
Sealed in black wax.
The next full moon rose bloated and jaundiced, its pallid light staining the dead field with a sickly glow, as if the earth itself had grown ill beneath its stare.
The weeds, brittle and grey, shifted rhythmically through the air was still, bending not to wind but to something slower, more deliberate, like breath being exhaled from beneath the soil.
The house at the end of the gravel path loomed like a rotten tooth on the horizon, its silhouette fractured and uneven against the sky, as though the land had tried to forget it and failed.
The tower window, once thought broken and hollow, now shone with a faint gleam, muted and veiny, as if glass had regrown across its frame like scabbed skin healing over an infected wound.
That night, four teenagers from the nearby town, high on bravado and denial, dared one another to walk the cursed path.
They wore their youth like armor: flashlights in hand, snacks crinkling in their backpacks, one of them clutching a camcorder with half-charged batteries and shaky confidence.
They joked about ghosts, scoffing at the old legends, laughter rising too loudly into the empty field.
Jonah, the tallest and most self-assured of the group, led the way, shoulders square, chin high.
He was the one who said the stories were bullshit.
He was the one who said, "Let's knock on the fucking door."
But none of them ever reached the porch.
Not all of them.
As they crossed the rusted gate, the mailbox emerged from the dark like a figure crouching in wait.
Its wood sagged, black with rot, and its post leaned as if exhausted.
Jonah, grinning, tapped the box with a stick, and the sound that echoed out was wrong, as if the box were hollow far beyond its physical dimensions, like the sound had been inhaled.
"Creepy," someone muttered.
Jonah only laughed, then crouched to yank the flap open.
Inside was a letter.
No black wax this time. Just a stained envelope bound in thread, thick, black, and knotted in a pattern that made the eye twitch to look at.
The string looped and crossed itself in strange ways, like it had been tied by hands that didn't understand human fingers.
Jonah hesitated then, only for a moment, perhaps sensing the wrongness in the air, the stillness thickening behind him, the subtle pressure that suddenly made the night feel too close.
Then he yanked the envelope free.
The moment he did, the flashlight in his friend's hand flickered and died.
Then another.
Then the camcorder glitched and whined, static washing over its tiny screen before the image froze on a frame none of them had taken: the house, perfectly centered, but with a figure in the tower window, tall and narrow, its head tilting as if mid-turn.
They screamed.
The third flashlight burst in a white flare before going black.
Someone bolted.
But Jonah just stood there, staring at the letter in his hand, his mouth opening slowly like a puppet being shown how to speak.
His lips began to move, no sound at first, then something like a whisper, or wind through bone, thin and slicing.
They say only two of the four made it back to town.
One ran until his lungs tore, collapsing in a ditch miles from the house with bloody froth on his chin and eyes rolled back in terror.
He wouldn't stop shaking. He couldn't say anything except the same phrase: "He turned around. He turned around. He looked at me!"
The second came home barefoot and mute, with his palms blistered as though burned by steam.
When they forced him to speak, he said, "Jonah opened it."
The fourth, Jonah, was never found.
But the camera was.
It showed up on a doorstep three days later, wrapped in wet cloth that smelled of earth and rust.
The final frame, frozen and jittering, was of the tower window.
Glass glinting, moonlight behind it, thin as a breath on water.
For a moment, it looked cracked, but it wasn't, just smeared from the inside, fogged by something that had been breathing too close for too long.
And there, pressed flat against the pane, were two pale hands. Fingernails blackened, skin bloated and tight, as if soaked too long in water that had forgotten warmth.
One of them still clutched a letter, damp and sagging, the ink bleeding like veins through paper.
The other hand twitched.
Jonah took it.
He shouldn't have.
The moment he did, something in the house shifted, not loudly, not violently, like a breath sucked inward by rotting lungs.
The glass cleared. The hands were gone.
But the stain remained, and so did the letter, now resting in Jonah's trembling grip, as if it had only just been written.
The others told him to wait, begged him even, just open it in the morning, when the sun's up, when it's safe, but he only laughed, the sound sharp and misplaced beneath the bloated moon, and slid the black cord free from the envelope's throat.
The parchment inside was damp, soft as something half-rotted, and let out a faint tearing sigh when he unfolded it.
That's when the words began to move.
Not in English, not in any language meant for mouths or breath.
The letters twisted on the page like worms surfacing in wet soil, reshaping themselves again and again, endlessly shifting, as if the message was alive and unsure of how to speak.
Jonah went silent.
His flashlight flickered, then blinked out.
So did the others.
All at once, the field was plunged into a darkness so complete it felt thick, cloying, pressing into their ears and throats like a rising tide.
What happened next is scattered, disjointed, pieced together in jagged retellings from the mouths of the three who made it out, though none of them ever truly returned.
Maria ran first.
She doesn't remember choosing to, just that her legs moved without her.
She said she caught a glimpse of something rising from the tall grass, not walking but unfolding.
Long, impossibly thin limbs bent at angles that fought against sense.
Its body was draped in garments that looked like they were meant to be clothing, coats layered over backwards collars, pant legs that ended in cuffs on its elbows.
Its face was shaped like a man's but split vertically down the center, like tree bark peeled open to reveal something raw.
It smelled like wet stone and something older than rot.
Tyler said the ground broke.
He swears the field cracked like glass, splitting open from the base of the mailbox to the porch, revealing a staircase that spiraled downward into blackness too deep to measure.
The steps writhed, as if alive, and pulsed faintly like a second heartbeat.
He saw Jonah walking toward it, his body stiff, eyes rolled back, mouth stretched into something too calm.
He moved like a man wading into a warm bath, twitching, head cocked slightly as if listening to something no one else could hear.
And he was smiling, like a man reunited with someone he lost long ago.
Cassie didn't run at all.
She froze, paralyzed not by fear, she said, but by a sudden stillness that poured into her bones like cold mercury.
She stared at the house, at the window above the door, and saw Evelyn, pale, motionless, dressed in a thin white shift that clung to her body, soaked in something dark that didn't glisten.
Her mouth was open, not screaming, just open, wide, jaw dislocated like a snake's.
And something inside her chest was moving.
Something beneath her ribs, pressing upward and out, stretching the skin like fingers pushing from within.
Cassie doesn't blink anymore.
She sits in a hospital bed near the edge of town, motionless except for her hands.
She draws with broken crayons when the nurses aren't watching.
Black squares scratched in repetition, but never doors.
The police came, they searched the house, the field, and the woods behind it.
They found nothing in particular, no bodies, no blood, there was even no sign that anyone had even stepped off the gravel path.
Except for one thing.
A letter.
Left perfectly upright on the crooked mailbox post.
No dew touched it, no mold.
The paper was dry, almost warm.
Bound again in black cord, but the knot this time was simpler, neater, like it had been meant for someone specific.
The envelope bore no name at first, but when the chief inspector leaned in to look closer, the ink began to seep upward from the fibers like blood rising in a bandage.
To the One Who Watched.
It has never been opened.
No one will touch it. Not now.
Not since the deputy who carried it inside went missing the next day.
Not since the other officer found his uniform folded neatly on the attic floor of the Langford house, dry as paper, and the floor beneath soaked through with water that smelled like graves.
Some say the letter is still there.
Still perched on the mailbox, unmoved by wind or time. Even the rain parts around it.
And if they're foolish enough to pass by just before dawn, when the sky is still slate and the birds are silent, they might hear the rusty flap creak open, slowly, like something waking.
And then they'll hear it.
A sound no one forgets.
The breath of something old exhaling from the dark within.
As if the mailbox were lungs.
And it remembers their names.