After my parents had moved to a new town, I was forced to make friends all over again. It was my last year in high school and I didn’t know anybody. I ended up finding a crowd of kids who liked exploring abandoned buildings and smoking weed. There were worse fates, I guess. It was far better than being the new kid with no friends at all.
I found the old house on the edge of town, far down a dirt road that seemed to serve no purpose. I was riding my bike at the time. The next day, while we were at school, I reported back to my friends about it during lunch.
“We’ll go tonight,” Mike said, grinning at me.
“Steve always finds the most random crap,” Howie said, looking down at his tray. “Remember the time you found that underground tunnel in the mental asylum?”
“Yeah,” I responded. “That was pretty bizarre…” But this new house would be far stranger than anything before.
***
Four of us ended up going. Mike was always the leader, and also the only one with the car. His parents were wealthier than any of ours and had bought him a Cadillac on his 16th birthday. He was also the giant among us, standing well over six feet tall.
Howie was chubby and short. He was always cracking jokes at the worst possible time and getting in trouble. But I loved having him around. He was always in a good mood, always trying to raise everyone’s spirits.
And then there was Lillian. She was, by far, the smartest among us.
She came out with us sometimes, always wearing goth clothing. This week, her hair was dyed black with red streaks down it; next week, it would probably be something totally different.
We pulled up in front of the house, Mike squinting at it through the windshield of his Cadillac.
“Holy shit, that place is huge,” he said. In the dark, all I could see was its silhouette. Everyone else stayed silent, simply staring at the place. A chill ran down my spine. In the dark, it seemed far more ominous than it had in the bright afternoon.
“I hope we don’t find a family of inbred meth-heads living in there,” Howie said. “What is this road even for? There are no other houses on it. It doesn’t seem to go anywhere.” I had wondered the same thing. We all got out of the car, gathering our supplies. Each of us had a headlamp we usually used for nighttime explorations. Turning them all on, the yard lit up all at once.
In front of the house, across the massive, unkempt yard, I saw a sign I had missed the first time I had driven by this place on my bike: “Absolutely no trespassing. Trespassers will be absorbed.”
“What the fuck?” Howie said, laughing. “‘Trespassers will be absorbed’? That’s a new one. Absorbed into what? The cosmic soul? Hell? Or maybe the Russian military?” I looked around, feeling watched. In the forest next to the house, I saw a pair of white eyes, low to the ground. Whatever it was skittered away as soon as I turned my headlamp towards it. Probably just a possum, I thought to myself.
“That sign is likely just someone’s idea of a joke,” Mike said, putting his massive hand on Howie’s back. “Why don’t you go first, motormouth?” Howie looked up at MIke, a look of concern crossing his fat, jovial face for a moment. Then he turned towards the house and began walking. We followed close behind him. I was next to Lillian.
“You grew up in this town, right?” I asked her. She nodded. “Have you ever heard of this place, or this road?” I thought back to the faded road sign we had seen when we pulled onto it. “I think it said Gnawbone Road.” She frowned slightly.
“No, but this town’s nearly a few hundred years old,” she said, pushing a strand of hair out of her face. “There’s probably a lot of places like this we don’t know about. One time, before you moved here, we found an entire graveyard in the forest. The trees and brush had nearly reclaimed it, but there were still dozens of tombstones mostly intact. There wasn’t even a trail to it. It was like the whole thing had simply been forgotten and left to nature.”
By this point, Howie had reached the house, going up the rickety, creaking stairs. The front porch wrapped around the house. Old Victorian turrets stood high, blocking out the stars and the dark, nighttime clouds. The peeling red paint of the house had mostly been worn away over time, leaving stained wooden boards peeking out underneath.
We followed close behind. I saw an old rocking chair on the porch, still moving back and forth. Must be the wind, I thought.
Howie put his hand on the doorknob. For a moment, I hoped that it would simply be locked, and then we could just turn around and forget about this whole thing. But it wasn’t. The door opened silently, swinging in.
“Holy crap,” Mike said behind him, looking over Howie’s head into the darkness. His headlamp moved up and down as he checked out the front chamber. “Look at the size of that chandelier!” Lillian and I moved up close behind him and Howie. A huge glass chandelier still hung from the ceiling, covered in spiderwebs and black dust.
Underneath it, a massive staircase went up to the next floor. Dust covered the floor. Among it, I saw footprints. They looked fresh. They only went in, I noticed. Whoever it was must have taken a different way out.
“It looks like we aren’t the only ones who have been here,” I whispered. The rest of them examined the footprints as well.
“Maybe it’s just a daytime caretaker,” Mike said. “Let’s go.” We all stepped in, closing the door behind us. A faint musty smell permeated the house, along with something more repulsive- something like rot and spoiled meat. It wasn’t overwhelming, but it was definitely there.
“OK, where are we going first?” Lillian asked, her voice calm and unbothered. I wished I could have that level of calm.
“Let’s go left,” Mike said, pointing. “It looks like there’s some sort of old library over here.” Ancient-looking books were stacked in shelves up to the ceiling. Many of them were water-damaged or falling apart. Lillian moved apart from us, examining them with a frown.
“Why would someone leave all these books here? And the chandelier?” she asked. I shrugged, coming up next to her.
“Maybe all that stuff is just worthless,” I said.
“And not a single homeless person or kid has come here to steal the stuff they left behind?” she said. She had a good point. She pulled out a random book. Looking over her shoulder, I saw the title: “Human Sacrifice and the Black Arts.” The one next to it on the shelf read, “The Teachings of Moloch.”
“Pretty weird,” I said. But Lillian was no longer listening to me. She had opened the book and was reading it with wide eyes. Turning around, I saw Mike and Howie had gone.
“Oh shit, Lillian,” I whispered. “We lost them. How in the hell could we lose them? They were just right here.” And then I heard screaming coming from another room nearby. She dropped the book and we began to run, turning our headlamps this way and that.
We ran into the kitchen and saw Mike sprawled across an old table, his throat slashed from ear to ear. He was still alive, gurgling, his eyes frantically moving from one end of the room to another. The table appeared to be drinking his blood. Every drop that fell on it disappeared into the wood. He began to seize, his eyes rolling back in his head. Within seconds, he had stopped breathing, his fingernails and lips turning blue under the intense glare of our headlamps.
“Howie! Where are you?” I screamed. I didn’t know whether Howie had killed Mike or someone else was in here with us. I couldn’t see how Howie would do that to any of us, though. My mind moved towards the latter idea.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” Lillian said, her hands trembling. “We need to call the police. We need to get out of here.” She reached into her pocket for her phone, dropping it on the floor in her panic. She picked it up, turning it on. “No service.”
“Let’s just go,” I whispered. “You go first.” I put my hand on her shoulder, feeling her chest heave as she began to cry. “We need to go, now.” I spun her around and began pushing her towards the front door. I looked back one last time, and saw Mike’s body deflating like a balloon. His blood spilled out of him faster and faster- which seemed strange, since he had no heartbeat. The table appeared to be melding with his body, his head and chest liquefying and stretching out. Within seconds, he had disappeared into the house itself. All the blood and gore had been cleaned up. Even his clothes were gone.
I didn’t share this with Lillian. I just pushed her faster. We saw the door was closed. I ran past her, trying to open it, but it was locked. I kicked it as hard as I could, putting as much force in the area around the knob as I could, but it was like kicking a metal wall. I shrieked with the pain as the force of the impact ran back up my leg.
I checked my phone, my hands trembling. It said there were zero bars in the house. I tried to send a text out anyways, first to 911, then to my parents. Both failed to send. Perhaps it was the fact that we were in the middle of nowhere, or perhaps the house had some sort of metal that interfered with cell reception. But it seemed no help was coming. Lillian began to cry harder.
“No help is coming, no help,” she sobbed.
“Get it together,” I said through gritted teeth. “We aren’t dying here. We have to find Howie and get all three of us out together. Do you have a weapon on you?” She shook her head, then she pulled out a lighter. “That’s… that’s not really a weapon, Lillian.”
“Maybe if we start a fire in the house, then people will see it, and help will come,” she said.
“With us inside?” I asked, aghast.
“I don’t know, I don’t know…” she said, crying harder. “I don’t want to die here, Steve. It isn’t supposed to be like this.” I put my hand on her shoulder.
“Let’s go explore and find another way out,” I said. Then I thought of the windows. “Maybe we can smash our way out of the windows!” She perked up at this. “There was a fireplace in the library. I think there was an old fire poker set next to it. We could use it as a weapon, or smash out a window with it…” We both ran to the library, and indeed, there was a whole set of fire pokers. One of them had a curved blade on the end, while the other was straight and sharp. I gave her the sharp one and pointed to the front window.
“Try it,” I said, my hopes soaring. She grabbed the fire poker. Bringing it back like a baseball bat, she swung with all of her might. Just like the door, it bounced off, the sound of ringing metal echoing through the room. She yelped in pain.
“It’s like some sort of bulletproof plexiglass or something!” she yelled. “What is this place?”
“Grab the poker anyways,” I said. “It’s time to explore the upstairs.” We trudged through the eerie darkness, shadows bobbing and dancing across the hall as we made our way to the ornate staircase. Grabbing it with one hand, I slowly started to ascend. Then a scream pierced the silence. It sounded like Howie’s voice.
I started to run up the stairs, hearing Lillian close behind me. We turned this way and that, looking down an endless hallway with many rooms branching off of each side. This house seemed so much larger on the inside than it looked from the outside.
The carpet on the hallway showed snakes and vines. They began to writhe and undulate, the patterns moving on their own. They began to separate, snake heads peering out of the carpet as if they had come from underwater. Their slit eyes glowed in the light of the headlamps. They hissed, dozens of them slithering towards us at once. We weren’t getting past them, I knew. I turned and nearly fell down the stairs in my haste to get away, stumbling and grabbing onto the handrail as my back leg smashed into the wood. It sent a fiery jet of pain up my body.
Looking up, I saw Lillian still standing in place, horrified, her mask open in a silent scream as snake after snake coiled around her legs, going upwards. They bit into her flesh, spitting and hissing. Blood ran down her body. Soon she was covered entirely and fell over in the hallway, the mass of coiling snakes being dragged into the carpet by vines. As soon as her body had disappeared underneath the surface, the snakes and vines began to return to their original positions, and within seconds, I saw just a regular carpet again. She had been absorbed.
“Fuck,” I said, hyperventilating. I was all alone, I knew. I heard no more signs of Howie either. I thought about what to do. Desperate, scheming, I ran back towards the library. I felt in my pocket for my lighter, and grabbing a book, I began to pull pages out and run the flame under the corner. They caught quickly, the old, dried out paper going up in an inferno. I grabbed more books and tore out the pages, throwing them on the flames, intent on burning this house to the ground. The fact that I was still inside it didn’t register in my panicked mind. I knew that if I did nothing, I would die here. I had to destroy it.
Then from behind me, I heard a voice- low, jovial and mocking.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Howie said. I turned, seeing an expression of lunatic rage marring his face.
“I’m destroying this place,” I said. I paused for a moment, looking at him. “How are you still alive? Lillian and Mike are dead. The house ate them, I think.” He laughed.
“I know,” he said. “The house needs to be fed. It’s been in my family for generations. We always keep it well-fed in the end.” I gaped at him, uncomprehending. “You’ll be it’s last meal for the night…” He walked forward, pulling a bloody knife from his pocket. My fire poker was on the ground next to me. As he ran at me, the knife pointed straight out, I swung down, grabbing the fire poker and smashing it into the side of his head as hard as I could. I heard a crack when it connected with his skull. He fell, the knife clattering across the room, the flames bouncing off its stained metal surface.
The room behind me had begun to transform during our fight. Looking back into the shelves of library books, I saw them changing into a mouth. The wall opened up, the plaster morphing and melting. Two black eyes looked out at me, furious. Ancient, rusted nails formed into teeth. The wall began to bow outwards towards me. The fire grew larger in front of it, catching the carpet and wood now. I knew I needed to get out. But the door wouldn’t open for trespassers, and neither would the windows.
Suddenly, I had an idea. Sprinting away from the demonic face in the wall, I grabbed Howie’s unconscious body, dragging him by his legs to the front door. Using his hand, I gripped the knob. With a prayer, I tried to turn it- and the door flew open. Since he wasn’t a trespasser, the house wouldn’t keep him locked in.
Looking back at his unconscious body one last time, I swung the fire poker down on his head. I heard another crack as the side of his skull gave way, a jet of blood pouring out through the hole. I threw the weapon into the hall, running back towards the car. I tried the door, realizing it was locked. Mike had the keys on him when he had been absorbed.
Watching the house turn into a blazing inferno behind me, I began to walk down the dirt road- dirty, disheveled, and frightened, but alive.