Sometimes a random photo prompt just…spawns something. This one originated on Twitter.
It had been a house, once. Now it was the remains of a house, disintegrating like an old corpse left to the mercy of the elements. It had been like that his whole life, ever since the first time he’d stumbled across it as a kid and been at once terrified and delighted to have found something so outside of his life’s—up to that point, anyway—usual experiences.
He hadn’t realized, as a kid, that finding a skull in an abandoned house meant something. Or that the something was probably really, really bad. He’d just thought it was neat, part of the place’s ramshackle creepiness, and then one bad day when everything had gone wrong and he’d felt like his blood was boiling in his veins and those empty eye sockets had been staring at him with blank contempt…he’d kicked it.
The sound the skull had made as it rolled across the filthy floor had been…unique. And weirdly calming. Or maybe that had just been the cooling rush of shock from realizing that he’d literally just kicked someone’s head across the floor.
He kept coming back. Trees threw their leaves through missing windows, animals wandered in to leave droppings on old floors, moss ate its way up the weathered walls, the ceiling sagged more and more as it teased an eventual complete collapse of the house’s second floor. The skull migrated from one side to the other of what had once been an enclosed back porch, sometimes with his help, sometimes without it. Once he found it outside and kicked it back in. It belonged in the house.
And the house belonged to him. Not literally. Spiritually? Maybe. He felt…possessive of it.
No Trespassing signs appeared on the property. He hadn’t put them there, but he approved. Nobody but him should be visiting the house. Well, occasionally he did bring someone else out. But that was different, those weren’t visitors—they were guests. Company for the lone, lonely skull. Eventually, anyway. As a kid he hadn’t known how long it would take for a skull to emerge from the body that had housed it, as an adult he understood that without help from some quarter the decomposition process could take a long, long time.
Not wanting to wait, but knowing he needed to be careful, he picked his guests’ resting places carefully. The ground around the old house was dark and damp and covered with thick layers of rotting leaves; he folded the carpet of leaves aside like a blanket, made shallow furrows in the rich soil, and then tucked his guests in like children being put to bed with just their heads sticking out. That sped things up considerably, and as soon as the skulls emerged stripped and hollow from spring-melting snow he’d give them a practiced kick and then move the ones that detached into the sagging porch like a soccer player scoring goals in slow motion. He’d go back for the detached jawbones and stack them in a corner just because he wasn’t sure what else to do with them, the original skull’s lower part having been long gone by the time he’d found the house.
He’d never found the house’s basement, more of a damp-earth root cellar than anything, the entrance of which was tucked under the cracked and warped kitchen floor. Even if he had found it he wouldn’t have gone inside for fear of being injured and trapped—he’d never been up to the second floor either, for the same reason. If he’d dared to descend the warped wooden steps, though, he’d have found that he wasn’t the first person in possession of the house to have carefully tucked in guests who weren’t meant to leave.
The gnawed jawbone at the foot of those steps suggested that only one ever had.