In Lieu of Actually Playing...

The Haunted House –

A Brief Interlude

Moonless nights and dark happenstance – the link between the two is not lost on Ekaterina nor Stark – for they have been raised up and wrapped in omens and portents, trained in the unfathomable path of wizardry.

In his shambolic moments of transport, when the ringing quiet vibrates most sublime – Stark can sense, like a sound heard in his back teeth – the very motion of the stars. He can hear, for he has been taught to hear, the breath-stealing chorus of the fading stars – whispering in the chasm of space. The chilling song is quieted by the motion of the moons in the heavens, but on mid-season nights, when the Verdant and the Cyan and the Carmine moons are far off below the horizon – and the Samnite moon has turned Fulligin in its sinister aspect – touring across the sky widdershins – then the merciless tones of the of the ancient stars booms like an organ and he feels the knot of comforting terror bulge up from his stomach, finding its proper place in his throat.

Likewise Ekaterina, a witch governed by the tides of blood and season feels the absence of the moons like the absence of breath, like waking to a stillbirth, she is comforted, briefly and only just, by the familiarity of the grotesque loss, such agony her longtime companion. A now she is consumed by strange forces that have withered and revivified her in equal parts unequally and is full up of feelings, feelings of doom and catastrophe and terrible endurance.

The two wizards have gone off the path in Hundown after dark, broken the unspoken taboo - with the wizard’s foresight they took with them the talisman that keeps at bay the worst of the night’s stalkers – the Jack-o-Lantern, lit to provide the barest light in the moody, shifting dark. The Lantern bears only a little light and at its periphery the monstrous presence from across the hill – the fiend-thing that is seen from the corner of one’s sight or not at all darts and shambles – a confusing, even sickening juxtaposition of the youth’s skipping gait and the ancient’s hobbling step. It cannot approach and so it calls out – it’s voice a terrible thing redolent of the stars and the earth’s own movements. The call pierces poor Ekaterina, now used to it’s strange caress – it firms the ground beneath her feet, makes her skin taught, her wrinkles and scars vanishing. And at once her hair recedes into her scalp, her nails withdraw into her fingers and toes – youth has come, time has shifted for her – and she is left writhing in the dirt.

Stark – to whom such music is an old companion – is undeterred and calls upon the starlight to limn the specter. It glows with the faerie fire and the wizards can see that it is a patchwork of old and new, young and old, all in motion, all changing. The light startles it and it flees into the night – back, they hope, across the river.

So now their initial exploration has turned into a necessary mission – to find shelter. Fortunately Hundown in its present state is overfull of empty homes and they, with little effort, enter the stone cottage they had meant only to examine. The cottage was once, likely, pleasing and good, a home – perhaps for many people, for generations of a family raised and buried on the banks of the River Shrike. Now it is vacant, the door hangs drunkenly and rotten hinges, the shuttered windows rattling where they are still intact.

Within the house they are confronted by the once-comforts of a once-home. Mouldering carpets are piled thick in the entryway, the larder is empty now but the shelves are thick with grime and rot and everywhere there is a thick film of undisturbed dust. Mold has grown and died – the home having become the residence of the darkling life that thrives in ruin, only to be dispossessed in turn by time’s inexorable turning. Now the house is solid, a rock building with an intact roof, with decayed but enduring furniture. They slump to rest on the abandoned beds, falling at once asleep, neither fearing death or savoring life. If they rise with the sun it will be by the same miracle that makes the sun rise.

When dawn comes a cheery light cascades through lacunae in the thatched roof, the rooms for all their decay are not without their own color. The house, is pleasant after all – a forgotten shrine to some domestic life denied to adventurers and forbidden to wizards. Nevertheless Ekaterina and Stark take their moment to enjoy the decayed and rotten rudiments of home life that their professions allow. The rain barrel is full, the water is clean and good, there are chine dishes, crystal goblets, easily cleaned and sufficient to provide them some homely comforts. They sit on the musty sofas and begin to admire their home. It is full of damaged books, bird nests, mouse bones and mushrooms, the walls are smeared with a strange and growing slime, the hanign paintings have blistered so that they seem to depict diseased monsters – in short, it is the perfect hideout for a pair of traveling wizards.

They turn their thoughts to inspect the grounds – feeling after so much rest, and at last in beds well, good even. There is a smashed and rotting gazebo, that shelters the saplings that are destroying it from within, there is a well, and wide porches, a fire-pit and there are graves. 11 graves and six of them share the same year – a plague year. Only one has no death-date carved – but what transpired here is no mystery – for the corpse of the last resident lies atop the undug grave – a skeleton in tatters surrounded by the skeletons of dogs and rats – no doubt the pestilence that killed the man was sufficient to end the lives of the creatures that came to feed off of his remains.

The two contemplate the body, briefly, and then consider their house. They take their moments, retrieve their supplies from Hundown’s shops, set themselves in order. The weird call of domesticity – alien and unavailable to wizards has taken hold – like a strange invitation, like the memory of something from within the womb. Meals. They cook, they relax on their sofa, begin to read the rotting books – which all make excellent sense, nevermind that they are falling apart, their pages scrubbed clean by time and weather. They find dust in the old jars, but it is good to eat, they cook it over the cold ashes in the fireplace. They fall asleep in the mold encrusted beds – again and wake, again – rested. They are a family now – they’ve known it, since childhood – they grew up singing those same songs? Didn’t they.

It’s a confusion – Ekaterina looks, to Stark, like a sister he remembers having, once – and Stark, for all his peculiar quirks has always been a brother to Ekaterina, she remembers his first tooth, his first words. They gather water from the well, pick fruits from the orchard – garnish their meals with cobwebs and dust. They exist in this state of mundane domesticity for days, or a day – for some time beyond recognizing.

And when the Sabbath day comes they know to go and pay respects to their lost loved ones – mother, father, grandfather, grandmother, and on – they come from a long line. But there is father’s body – lying on his grave. He’s trying ever so hard to dig his way down, to bury himself. Of course he can’t – digging only with his bare skeletal fingers, the bones cast off so his hands are just a rattling collection of bones- like so many dice. How can he dig? And yet he tries and tries. They think to take pity on him, invite him back into his house, put him into his bed, read his favorite stories. Give him a taste of the comforts of home – for he’s slept out here on his own grave for years now, for so long.

The two wizard-siblings lift him up, carry him inside and as he crosses the threshold flesh returns to his limbs, his face returns – stern but kind, a gentle, genial man – he’s always been fair to them, always been good. They fix him dinner and sing to him, and he goes to sleep in his bed, again.

In the night the two of them confer. They know what they must do. They are wizards after all, and it is their right and their authority to change their histories, to write new chapters for long-lost days, to play a part and wear the mask – but now that father is sleeping Ekaterina looks at Stark and he at her and they know that they are not kin – they remember themselves and their purpose. And so, lamenting, only briefly the imaginary lives they led, all in service of the unseen powers of life and death and ineffable magic – they go into their not-father’s room – they find the man, sleeping and they draw their knives and scatter his bones, peeling them out of his flesh – not flesh – but a dream of flesh, illusion. They draw out his viscera, it puffs away into air as they do so, and all along he screams and cries and pleads for mercy. They hush him and assure him – this is mercy. For a keepsake they each take a knucklebone – and in the morning they bury him in his grave.

The haunted house at the edge of town is theirs now, the rite completed, the restless dead laid to slumber.