The cellar door opened into damp blackness. I fumbled along the wall until I found a light switch. A single, bare bulb flickered to life, illuminating an empty, dirty underground space.
The trail of slime continued down the rotted wooden steps and across the worn cobbled floor, disappearing into a shadowed corner.
I’m not sure how long I stood there, knowing what I had to do, but unable to force myself to do it. In the end, it was only the terror of what would happen if I didn’t continue that made me take that first step.
The stairs creaked ominously as if the crumbling wood would give at any moment. When I finally reached the bottom, I took a shaky breath. Time to see if my guess was right.
Something lay in the far corner where the light didn’t quite reach. I turned on my phone’s flashlight, my hand trembling. I inched forward, trying hard not to startle the purple monster that had terrorized me for so long, but I needn’t have bothered. It lay still, no more threatening than a raw steak.
As my light played over it, I saw I was right—it was, in fact, a tongue. Enormous—easily three times the size of a normal one—and purple, even black in some places. What I’d taken for pustules were just enlarged tastebuds—at least, I think they were. It was hard to tell. If I looked too long at it, I felt like throwing up. The smell wasn’t exactly pleasant, either.
But that wasn’t why I was down here, not really. Anton had led me here for a reason. What was it?
“Underneath.” Well, a cellar was certainly “underneath,” but I got the feeling it was more specific than that. Underneath the tongue, then?
Suppressing a full-body shiver, I leaned closer, examining the floor under the tongue, hoping I could solve this riddle without having to touch it. It lay smack-dab in the middle of a cobblestone. A very large cobblestone. Much larger than any surrounding it.
Underneath.
I was going to need tools for this.
After a trip to the garden shed, I returned with a trowel, chisel, and a few other sharp implements. Using the trowel, I gingerly moved the tongue aside, terrified that at any moment it would wriggle to life, but thank God, it didn’t. With that insanity out of the way, I set to work digging up the cobblestone.
It wasn’t as hard as I feared. The crumbling mortar gave easily beneath my trowel. Still, it took a while, and my knees started to ache from kneeling on the stone floor, my back protesting as well. Finally, the stone wiggled in place.
My heart leaped. Despite the terror plaguing my time at the Baron House, it was kind of thrilling to finally be here. To reveal the message Anton reached beyond the grave to tell me. The dreams were true—here I was, where the portrait had sent me. Finally, I’d have answers!
After way too much straining, I manage to pry up the stone. I’d set down my phone, needing two hands for the task, leaving the vacated space dark. Grabbing my phone with grimy, sweaty fingers, I examined the small hollow.
Nothing. Nothing but dirt, dust, and lingering crumbs of mortar.
My heart sank. Had I really been through all this for nothing? Tears pricked my eyes.
Maybe I was going insane. Maybe the horror was in my head the whole time, and there were no window teeth or attic eyes or garden kidneys. The thought brought bile to my throat. I needed help—I ought to commit myself to a psych ward.
But wait—what about the painting, then? Why had my dreams brought me to the exact spot where it used to hang? And why had I dreamed of a man with a candle, the exact subject of said painting? That couldn’t have been a coincidence—could it?
I thought briefly of texting Jeanette, just to confirm my own sanity, but abandoned the idea when I saw it was three in the morning. Nothing screams “crazy” like texting an acquaintance about dismembered tongues before dawn.
Maybe things would make more sense in the morning.
I liked that idea—put off the problem for Future Allyn to deal with. I needed sleep, and some good, strong coffee before tackling old gothic riddles.
I picked up the stone, about to put it back, when a thought rose in the back of my mind, like a warm breath whispering along the back of my neck.
Underneath.
Slowly, as if in a daze, I turned the cobblestone over. It was difficult to see in the dim light, but I thought there was something carved on the bottom. Running a hand over the surface, I felt the tell-tale shapes of letters.
Setting the stone down a little more roughly than I meant to, I scrambled for my phone. By its blue light, I made out several lines of verse—the last two stanzas, I realized, of Anton Baron’s greatest poem. Hunched in the dank cellar, I read aloud what no other living eyes had beheld:
These walls, they are my body;
This ground my Hallowed soul;
Here I live eternal
With his blessing, I am whole.
Death is only slumber,
Time itself my will enthrone;
Once new life haunts the hallways
Of my house of blood and bone.
My blood went cold. I scanned the lines again, horror dawning. Scholars had always thought “My House of Blood and Bone” was metaphorical—how else could they interpret it? But it was clear now that Anton meant it in a very literal sense. I didn’t understand how he’d done it, but the Baron House was alive—and it contained Anton’s soul.
The ground beneath me shuddered. I barely caught myself, putting out a hand against the cobbled floor. It pulsed beneath my fingers, and I snatched my hand away. But there was no escaping it—the floor undulated under my feet, even as I scrambled upright.
All around me, the cellar writhed. Strange shapes protruded from the walls, elongating in twitches and jerks. I stumbled toward the stairs, dodging new growths. I’d nearly reached the open doorway when something caught my leg, bringing me down hard. Looking back, I realized the growths were coming out of the stairs—and they had hands. One gripped my ankle with bruising strength, while three others reached for me. An eye emerged from the wall to stare unblinkingly at me. A pair of lips joined it.
“Join us,” it said, the voice raw and echoing. The tenor of it made my skin crawl, and yet it was unsettlingly familiar. Like I’d heard it in a dream. “Join us, Allyn, and be eternal!”
I screamed and kicked at the hands, feeling bones break beneath my shoe. With strength borne of desperation, I wrenched my foot away and scrambled up the stairs.
Hands and eyes surfaced all along the walls, the eyes following as I struggled past, darting to and fro to avoid the clutching fingers. Lips formed from wood and wallpaper, speaking in unison: “Join us! Join us and become More!”
“Fuck off!” I screamed, unsure if the House could even hear me. I tripped over an arm and fell hard, my shins cracking against the floor.
“Don’t be afraid,” the House said, its voice soothing and unnatural. “You’ll understand soon—the world will understand, soon! All will join us in eternal life!”
As terrifying as it was, something else horrified me even more—my own mouth was moving, my own voice joining the chorus. The strange sensation I’d felt earlier returned—the sense that I was not myself. No, that I was more than myself! I could feel the grasping arms as though they were my own, see through the unblinking eyes to stare at my own shocked face from dozens of angles.
Despite my unwillingness to join this madness, it seemed I already had.
So, I did the only thing that made sense. I fled.
The back door was closest. I stumbled through the kitchen, disoriented beyond belief, but the animal instinct to survive drove me forward. I nearly fell against the stove in my flight and seeing the burners sparked an idea. I turned on the gas, then rooted around in the nearby drawer for the long-taper matches. Hands sprouted from the floor, pawing at my legs, and I ripped the entire drawer free in desperation, holding it awkwardly as I drunkenly wobbled to the back door.
I reached out to open it, but the knob wiggled under my hand, blinking into an enormous eye. With a scream of frustration, I bashed it with the drawer and began kicking and beating at the door. It gave way with an answering scream, the frame spurting blood where I’d forced the bolt through. I hurled myself through the opening and fell onto the dirt, breathing heavily. Out here, the secondary senses had faded—but I wasn’t out of the woods yet.
All around me, the trees undulated, shivering as though about to burst free of their bark. The flowers shook so hard their petals fell in handfuls. And where my ear pressed to the dirt, I could hear the unmistakable rhythm of a heart beating, the pulse growing stronger with every second.
I scrambled to my knees, taking a moment to snatch the matchbox before gaining my feet. Looking around, I realized with a sinking heart that it wasn’t just the garden—the long grass of the open field was palpitating, bending toward the Baron House as though in yearning.
And the House itself—God! The House!
Hands reached from every surface, clawing at the air. Eyes of every size popped open, rolling and staring by turns. Mouths split along the walls, opening into gaping holes, uneven teeth clustered like ivory barnacles.
“All will be eternal!” The reverberating voice echoed across the open space. “All will join in one great living body!”
It wasn’t going to end. The House intended to consume everything—unless someone stopped it.
Unless I stopped it.
Feeling small and fragile, I stepped toward the Baron House.
The open wound of the kitchen door had transformed into a mouth so big it could swallow me whole. It grinned as I neared.
“You see?” It said, the words repeated above and below and around me. “You want to become part of us! It’s so much easier to not have to think—to simply belong! Where will you go, Allyn, if you abandon us? No one will have you. No one wants you. But we do. With us, you can be eternal. With us, you can be whole!”
The most terrifying thing is . . . I considered it for a moment. Everything it said was true—nobody wanted me. Not the family that had disowned me when I came out. Not the man I thought I’d spend my life with, who couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just be a girl. Not the friends whose compassion I’d stretched to breaking. If I walked away, where would I go? There wasn’t a place for me in this world. Inside the House—I’d been frightened. I’d been confused and overwhelmed. But I’d been special, too. The last lines of the poem could attest to that. Once new life haunts the hallways / Of my house of blood and bone. The Baron House had been waiting for me. Anton Baron himself had led me to this in my dreams. Maybe this wasn’t all a coincidence.
Maybe I was born for this.
And yet, even as I thought it, I knew it was all a trick. Even if I was somehow “special,” the key to a century-long prophecy, the House was only using me. Once it swallowed me, I’d be its prisoner, as surely as Anton was now. I would be the first of many, many casualties, my psyche trapped inside this monstrous form. Nothing was worth that.
I took out a long-tapered match, my hand surprisingly steady. The match flared to life with one strike. “I am whole,” I said and threw the match in.
*
I woke up staring into a sky gone gray with the rising sun. My chest hurt and I had trouble drawing a deep breath, but I was able to move my arms and legs, at least. My face and hands felt raw, and I realized the front of my shirt was charred. Remembering what happened, I rolled onto my side and looked up at the House.
It was burning. That was the intention, of course, but there’s something very wrong about watching a house burn. Especially one with facial features.
None of them seemed to be moving, for which I was grateful. Whatever terrible Thing had inhabited the House, it wasn’t immune to fire. Wood blackened under the cheery flames and a thick column of smoke rose into the lightening sky.
I should call the fire department, I thought. I patted my pockets for my phone, but it was gone—I must’ve dropped it in all the chaos. Well, someone would see the smoke eventually. I thought of heading for my car, but I couldn’t stand up, not yet. I needed a moment. A long moment.
Meanwhile, I watched where the smoke dissipated into the clouds, turning the sky white and dirty. Jeanette, I realized with regret, would be out of the job. At least until the repairs were done, if there was anything worth salvaging. Mr. Nielson would probably have a heart attack when he heard, and the thought filled me with grim satisfaction. I’d told him something was living in the House!
Still, I was without living arrangements now . . . but I had a feeling the university might provide some accommodations. This was, after all, their fault.
I thought bleakly about my laptop, but honestly, it was old and out of date. What little work I’d done was saved to the cloud, though I doubted I’d return to it. I had new ideas.
And as soon as I got a shower and a clean set of clothes, I’d start setting them to paper.
My House of Blood and Bone
In a dark-winged city
Beyond the mountains known
There sits an ageless king
Upon his crimson throne.
His call is heard by sailors
And heroes of renown.
Its echoes haunt the hallways
Of my house of blood and bone.
I sit within my garden,
‘Midst the flowers and their loam,
And listen to the whispers
Of my dear and damnéd home.
His words take root and blossom
From their mortal soil sewn,
But I am still the master
Of my house of blood and bone.
The winds and waves still bluster
Through the looming gates of horn,
His knowledge weighing heavy
As a crown of gold is borne.
And I before him bowing
For my nature to atone,
As I receive the blessing
Of my house of blood and bone.
In veins, I tell the protends
As the augur speaks in tongues,
Each sign an oath immortal
Etched in liver, heart, and lungs.
Within me lies the portal
Man so long ago disowned,
As here I kneel a hostage
Of my house of blood and bone.
The sea and sky I searched here
For the dark and damnéd growth;
I’ve seen the roots of evil
Thrive in saint and sinner both.
‘Neath the skin diseases
Creep in cell and marrow own,
But I shall not surrender
To my house of blood and bone.
The price of genius burdens
Though I paid it long ago,
But he is not contented
Just to claim the debt I owe.
Time ticks ever onward,
Green o’er my grave has grown,
And yet I still remain here
In my house of blood and bone.
This flesh, it craves and harrows,
‘Til the mortal heart’s undone,
And God’s eternal grace concedes
The Devil here has won.
Yet it is not the Devil
Who this desperate soul does own,
But the very tainted marrow
Of my house of blood and bone.
These walls, they are my body;
This ground my Hallowed soul;
Here I live eternal
With his blessing, I am whole.
Death is only slumber,
Time itself my will enthrone;
Once new life haunts the hallways
Of my house of blood and bone.