My first clue should have been how I felt the second I stepped through the front door yesterday morning.
The house was empty, I knew it was empty. It had to be empty. There were no signs of broken windows. The door was locked, and nobody else had a key. So why, why the hell did I feel like someone else was there?
This isn’t my house, let’s be clear. It’s an old, listed building, all creaky floorboards and drafty windows. I’m just its lowly caretaker until the funds can be raised to adequately restore it.
Which, unfortunately for me, means that every other week I have to inspect every single one of its huge rooms, with shadows so thick that no amount of sunlight through the sizeable windows can penetrate. I have to make sure there’s no damages, no break-ins, no squatters or graffiti. Everyone knows that the place is uninhabited, it’s a sitting duck.
And just this morning, I locked myself in the building. Alone. With the sneaking suspicion that someone - or something - was in there with me. The wood that groaned beneath my feet with every step did nothing to dissuade my paranoia.
Even though it was still daylight, I switched on my phone’s torch. Just in case… I don’t know, in case something had a deadly fear of phone lights.
It didn’t help.
The ground floor seemed… fine. Nothing out of place. No extra trails through the dust lying thick on the floor that would indicate the presence of an intruder.
Checking on this place has been part of my job for over a year now. I take the same route every single inspection, and know the items in every space like the back of my hand.
Which is why, when I eventually completed my circuit of the ground floor and climbed the steep staircase to the next floor - careful to step lightly so any noise was reduced to the absolute minimum - I knew something was wrong.
Something pale and withered lay before me, right in the middle of my path. As if someone had placed it specifically for me to find. My heart threatened to pound out of my chest, roaring in my ears as I stood stock still, just looking at it. I was reluctant to get any closer, of course - but this is what I get paid for.
I could have called for backup, fetched someone to join me in checking the rest of the building, waited outside for them to get here. But I had that pervasive worry of… what if it was nothing? Just a scrap of plaster fallen from the ceiling? A lost page from a newspaper scattered in with the wind?
Somehow not making a fool of myself in front of my colleagues (god forbid being reported to one of my higher ups) ranked higher in my list of priorities than any kind of self-preservation.
I had to take a closer look. I had to.
The entire house seemed to fall silent as I took one step closer, then another. If anything, the silence was actually worse than the ambient complaints usually uttered by the old building. It felt like it was holding its breath.
I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. I’m not that brave. But as I lent in over it to take a closer look, nausea washed over me as I realised what it was. Pale, dried out, flesh. Skin.
As I recoiled from the offending scrap I noticed something else. Another scrap. In a pool of shadows just before the first doorway along the corridor.
But this one looked long.
The repulsion I felt is overwhelming, but somehow that was not the part of me that won out in that moment. It was one tiny, morbid dash of curiosity that drove me to examine it, despite the shaking that had overwhelmed every one of my senses.
Despite every inch of my body screaming to flee, I continued walking.
That hallway has next to no natural light, so little that even the torch of my phone couldn’t find its end in the gloom.
That was the moment when it would have been wise to phone it in. Take a photo and run. Let someone who gets paid more take care of it – whatever it is.
I took another step.
I was correct, it seems, in my observation that it seemed long. This scrap is more of a strip. Electricity jangled through my spine, through every bone in my body as I began to follow the impossibly long length of puckered, pale, skin.
I convinced myself that following it was better than looking too closely at it. At the wispy bits of some thread-like substance that seemed to be embedded in it. About halfway down the hallway, it began to curl.
It curled so much that it crossed over itself and snaked out of sight through a doorway. Through a gap between the frame and the door itself, the door that should have been closed.
And then I noticed it shift. Not the door, the skin. Just slightly, barely perceptible. But it moved.
I don’t know what possessed me to push the door open. To raise my phone in my shaky hand and survey what lay within the long abandoned nursery of this grand old home.
At the pulsating, violently red flesh – inner flesh – of the creature that was still laboriously peeling off what remained of its own skin.
I don’t remember making any noise, but maybe the door creaked as I opened it, because the thing turned and looked at me. With beady black eyes and a smile that was too wide, far too wide, permanently stitched into a face that had no other features.
Every time I close my eyes, I am once more frozen in place as it begins to split, vertically, where its skin has already been removed, showing blunt, yellowed teeth all of mismatched sizes. All the way down.
From within its mangled form, a single word seemed to emerge. A cacophony of dripping gore squelching one sound, insistently. Maybe I imagined it, a last gasp of madness before I fled.
I don’t think I locked the door behind me as I left, but I don’t care. I’m not even sure if it matters - I have no idea how it got in there, and I can only hope it doesn’t get out.
I’m not going to check, either way. I’m not even going back there next week, they can fire me if they want. I’ve already put in a request to change location - maybe they won’t notice that I’ve stopped turning up for long enough for my post to be transferred. If not, I’m handing in my notice.
Maybe I should lose the keys. Maybe I should throw a brick through the window and report that, so someone will go check. Maybe I should tell the truth and warn the higher ups, or at least whoever they get to replace me. I should try, even if they just think I’m trying to haze them.
I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. I don’t know what it was, or how it got there, or why it was peeling itself. And I… don’t know how it knew the garbled, groaning word that emerged from its maw - and I’ll never be able to stop hearing it. Much as I want to believe I misheard it, I know what I heard.
I don’t know how it knew my name.