Chapter 19: House of the Collector – Part 2

The young man was alone. As his eyes began to adjust to the darkness, he saw the formless shadows of furniture on either side of the hall; a shelf here, a table there, a cabinet at the far end.

He turned around and hurried back to the door, pushing on it, but it would not budge. When he looked down the hall again, he was still alone. It was impossible. Only a moment earlier there had been three people with him, an old man, a woman, and a girl, and there had been a lantern ― light, they’d had light! Where was it now? Vanished into thin air, along with the people. He was alone.

But the house was not quiet.

Old wood talks, the older the louder, and the walls of this house were keen to make their age known. The floorboards squeaked as the young man walked. The walls groaned as though a vast weight was pressing on them, pushing them in to try and crush him, and they were only just holding. The doors creaked as they swung open in wide, smooth arcs. They were so eager to move that they opened before the young man could lay his hand upon them, and they closed themselves behind him.

The first time that happened, he passed through the door several more times to make sure it wasn’t going to lock itself, and to his great relief it opened with ease each time.

That relief did not last. Nothing happened in particular to kill it; rather, it was the sheer vastness with which nothing happened that did so. The young man walked from room to room, doors opening and closing before him, stepped from floorboards onto fur rugs and back onto floorboards again, passed by tables and chairs, one motheaten old sofa, walked up wooden stairs and down, and nothing happened.

The house kept going, on and on until it had to have stretched farther than the maze of trees outside, and the young man did not see a single sign of life. He did not hear shuffling footsteps or ragged breath, he did not hear the voices of his companions, he did not hear wind rushing in gusts through the tiny gaps that must have been somewhere in the walls, and he did not hear the flickering of a candle or a fireplace.

He did not see the light of one, either. He did not see much of anything beyond the looming shadows the darkness afforded. Nor did he smell much, other than the musky old air, the scent of damp wood heavy on it. He was truly, fully alone, without light or food or water, or any sign of who he was and who he had been and where his home was.

He stopped midway down a corridor and looked down at his hands, trying to discern what he could about them in such low light. They were smooth and pale, with long, thin fingers that ended in well-kept nails, painted some dark colour he couldn't make out. He thought they looked rather marvellous. Curling one of them, it fell by second nature into an odd, half-open position he thought perfect for holding a wine glass, and he decided that, wherever he was from, he had been very important there.

That meant people would be looking to him. He had been snatched away to some shadowy realm whose makers meant to taunt him like this. They suppressed his memories, stole his name, hurled him into a dark forest and a darker house, snatched away what poor companionship fate had granted him, and now they hoped to torture him in this dreary old home as he grew hungrier with each passing minute.

But people would be looking for him, because he was important, and they would find him, and the perpetrators of this petty, cruel joke would be dragged before him for sentencing, and he would see to it that justice was brought upon them. He nodded to himself as he began walking again, a smile curling up one side of his face. At least, there is something for me to look forwards to at the end, he thought with glee,

That thought carried him forwards for some time, but eventually his hunger began to rise again, and he realised that it would do no good at all who was looking for him if he starved before they found him, so he began shouting.

‘Hello?’ was the first thing he thought of.

‘Captor!’ soon followed it.

Then, ‘Coward! Show yourself, whoever you are!’

After that was, ‘Woman?’ and, ‘Old man?’

‘Girl!’

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And finally, ‘Anyone?’

None of his cries drew any response. The house creaked as it always did, and the darkness persisted, the quiet broken only by the young man himself. What if the others were all dead? What if time in this place was warped, and they had all starved and rotted into nothing before he had taken his first step since entering the house?

It was as that thought laced a low dread in his mind that something finally happened.

He smelled the food before he found it. The tantalising aroma of cooked meat and baked potatoes drifted through air, mixed with spices and herbs he knew not the names of, and for a moment he thought it was a trick, some kind of illusion conjured by the people keeping him here. But when he ascended the short flight of steps up into the room the smell was coming from, his gaze fell upon the table, and he knew it was no trick.

The air had carried clues of only a fraction of the vast meal before him. The meat and potatoes were closest to the door, spices sprinkled over them, but beyond them there was large pan full to the brim with soup made of turnip, barley, carrot, onion, and butter bean, and next to it a pie, brown on top, with some of the gravy in the filling stained around its two air holes. Farther back was crumbly white bread and thick brown, each wonderful in their own ways, and peas and sweetcorn mixed together in a tomato sauce filled with cooked olives and peppers, and a layered platter piled high with small cakes baked of chocolate and capped with silver icing, and crumbles of berry and apple, and piles of fresh fruit, and bottles of wine and champagne, and glasses already filled, and the young man stared at it in awe, his mouth falling open for a few seconds, until he remembered to close it.

It was a blessing, a reminder that even here in this strange place, the world could know mercy. Grinning to himself, he reached out towards one of the small cakes, and as his hand touched it, it crumbled through his fingers into ash.

‘No, wait,’ he said, reaching for another, but it too crumbled.

He moved to the fruit, and that burst into wisps of smoke before he could touch it. The drinks boiled in their glasses and bubbled onto the table. Mould rose in a thin yellow layer upon the bread, the pie withered into a blackened husk, and as the young man turned towards the soup, his hands outsretched as his mouth watered relentlessly, he saw that the vegetables in it were gone, replaced with fingers and hands and eyes and nails.

Clamping a hand over his mouth, the young man stumbled back from the table until he was pressed against the groaning, creaking wall.

From the door he’d come in through, he heard the sound of shuffling footsteps. Then, the slow tapping of a stick against the hard wooden floor, and the faint rasping breaths of a torn throat. Shadows far deeper than the darkness around him leered from that doorway, stretching, straining into the room and towards him as he backed away from them.

His eyes skirting to the table, he looked for cutlery but found none. In its stead, he picked up the pot that held the soup, and the metal sizzled against his skin and he dropped it with a yelp. The soup splattered across the floor, over his shiny black shoes, and seeped through the cracks between the floorboards.

A long wooden staff appeared through the doorway, grasped by a hand wrapped in old, sagging cloth. Atop the staff was a metal band with a row of spikes reaching up towards the ceiling before bending forwards a little, which the young man recognised after a moment as the head of a rake. As the end of the shaft hit down against the floor, its owner pulled itself up the final step and into the room, with what seemed to be great effort.

Those deep shadows cloaked its form. The young man’s gaze could not penetrate it, but the faint echo of a shape came to him somehow. It was tall, so tall it had to hunch over to stand in the room, and it leant on the rake like a walking stick. It advanced slowly, each step small and dragging, timed to the raw, thin sighs of its breath.

It stepped into the remnants of the soup, the shadows drifting over the scattering of its gruesome ingredients. As it advanced, the darkness moved with it, and, crouching at the back of the room as he was, the young man glimpsed behind it as the shadows drew away from where the soup had been, and the floor there was bare.

The young man opened his mouth to scream, and the figure leant forwards in a sudden burst of speed. The sounds of rustling and the crackling of something old and dry crept from its shroud as it reached out a single finger and placed it against his lips.

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