Surprising himself, without even feeling as if he’s decided to, he takes an unsteady step toward it, nearly falling. He still struggles to articulate his thoughts. He cannot say why he’s walking toward the house, why it might be anything other than an instinct to get inside, to get out of this weird deserted world, but he’s also aware that all of this, whatever it is, feels so much like a dream that only dream logic can possibly apply.
He doesn’t know why, but the house draws him.
So he goes.
He reaches the front steps, steps over a crack running along the lowest one, and stops before the door. He waits there a moment, not quite knowing what to do next, not quite sure how it will open, or what he will do if it’s locked, but he reaches for it –
It swings open at his lightest touch.
A long hallway is the first thing he sees. The sun is really shining now, filling the clear blue sky behind him – so warm that it must be some kind of summer, so warm he can already feel it burning his exposed skin, too pale, too fair to be under such harsh light – but even in this brightness, the hallway almost disappears in darkness halfway down. He can only just see the staircase at the end, leading up to the floors above. Before the stairs, on the left, is the doorway that leads into the main house.
There are no lights on inside, and no sound.
He looks around again. There’s still no drone of machinery or engines from anywhere, but he notices for the first time that there’s no buzz of insects either, no calls of birds, not even any wind through the foliage.
Nothing but the sound of his own breathing.
He just stands there for a moment. He feels hideously unwell, and so weak, so tired, he could almost lay down on this doorstep right here and sleep forever, just forever, and never wake up –
He steps inside the house instead. Hands on either wall to keep himself steady, he moves slowly forward, every second thinking he’s going to be stopped, that he’s going to hear a voice demanding to know what he’s doing trespassing in a strange house. As he stumbles into the shadows, though, his eyes not adjusting to the change in light as fast as they should, he can feel dust under his feet so thick it seems inconceivable that anyone has been here in a long, long time.
It gets darker the farther in he goes, and this seems wrong somehow, the blast of the sun through the open door not illuminating anything, just making the shadows heavier and more threatening to his bleary eyes. He fumbles on, seeing less and less, reaching the bottom of the stairs but turning from them, still hearing nothing, no sounds of habitation, no sound of anything at all except himself.
Alone.
He pauses before the doorway to the living room, feeling a fresh thrust of fear. Anything could be there in the darkness, anything could be silently waiting for him, but he forces himself to look in, letting his eyes get used to the light.
When they do, he sees.
Caught in a few beams of dusty sunlight from the closed blinds at the front, he sees a simple, plain living room, merging into an open dining area on his right, leading to a doorway through to the kitchen at the back of the house.
There is furniture here, like any normal room, except it’s all covered in dust so thick it’s like an extra cloth draped over everything. The boy, exhausted still, tries to make the shapes match up to words in his head.
His eyes adjust to the light more, the room becoming more of itself, taking shape, revealing details –
Revealing the horse screaming from above the mantelpiece.
A crazed eye, a tongue like a spike, trapped inside a burning world, looking at him from behind a picture frame.
Looking right at him.
The boy cries out at the sight of it because all at once he knows, knows beyond a shadow of a doubt, the realization coming like a tidal wave.
He knows where he is.
3
He runs as fast as his exhausted feet will take him, staggering back down the hall, stirring up clouds of dust, heading toward the sunshine like –
(like a drowning man reaching for air –)
He can vaguely hear himself calling out in distress, still wordless, still unformed.
But he knows.
He knows, he knows, he knows.
He stumbles down the front steps, barely able to stay upright, and then not even barely. He falls to his knees and can’t find the strength to rise again, as if the sudden rush of knowledge is a weight on his back.
He looks to the house in panic, thinking that something, someone must be coming after him, must be in pursuit –
But there’s nothing.
There’s still no sound. Not of machines or people or animals or insects or anything at all. There’s nothing but a quiet so deep he can hear his heart beating in his chest.
My heart, he thinks. And the words come clearly, cutting through the fog in his mind.
His heart.
His dead heart. His drowned heart.
He begins to shake, as the terrible knowledge of what he saw, the terrible knowledge of what it means, starts to overtake him.
This is the house where he used to live.
The house from all those years ago. The house in England. The house his mother swore she never wanted to see again. The house they moved across an ocean and a continent to get away from.
But that’s impossible. He hasn’t seen this house, this country, in years. Not since primary school.
Not since –
Not since his brother got out of the hospital.
Not since the very worst thing that ever happened.
No, he thinks.
Oh, please, no.
He knows where he is now. He knows why it would be this place, knows why he would wake up here, after –
After he died.
This is hell.
A hell built exactly for him.
A hell where he would be alone.
Forever.
He’s died, and woken up in his own, personal hell.
He vomits.
He falls forward onto his hands, spitting up the contents of his stomach into the bushes on the side of the path. His eyes water from the effort of it, but he can still see that all he’s throwing up is a weird, clear gel that tastes vaguely of sugar. It keeps coming until he exhausts himself, and since his eyes are already watering, it seems only a very short step to weeping. He begins to cry, slumping back down to the concrete face-first.
It feels, for a time, like drowning all over again, the yearning for breath, the struggle against something larger than himself that only wants to take him down with it, and there’s no fighting it, nothing that can be done to stop it, as it swallows him up and he disappears. Lying on the path, he gives himself over to it, in the same way that the waves kept demanding that he give himself to them –
(though he did fight the waves, up until the very end, he did)