It was an ancient house, but not one of aged beauty and faded glory; it was the sort of ancient that applies to crypts and catacombs: musty, decrepid, ruined, dead. Cobwebs strung themselves between wooden support-beams and filled dark corners, whisping like ghostly apparitions. Each of the sun-bleached boards of the porch groaned in its own unique fashion, creating a chorus of creaks and cracks. What glass was not broken had settled, and what stone was not already dust became such at the slightest pressure. It was a house that seemed too decayed to stand, yet some odd magic maintained its rotting form; a zombie in the most literal sense. I cautiously creeped through the entryway, my footsteps creating cacophonies like light fingers on a condemned organ. I felt the house react to every step, as though I was climing through the wound of some dying beast; the very foundation seemed to cry out with each subtle footfall. Once past the doorway and through the entryhall, I found myself in a substantially sized chamber, as dark and cold as the abyssal void. I lit up my flashlight, the beam piercing the dark and revealing a brick fireplace. Ash had settled within and around it, caked and cemented so firmly that a less discerning eye could mistake it for stone. In the sea of charred remnants a single item caught my eye: a slightly burned doll, the only tie to life in this otherwise dead house. Seeing it as such, I took it from its ashen grave, clutching it like the hand of a dying parent.

Withdrawing from the fireplace, my attention then turned to the room’s furnishings. Three faded, dusty armchairs, one smaller than the others, stoically set round the fireplace, staring at my intrusive form like guardian statues. Whatever color or personality these chairs once held was likely sucked away as the house aged, but their posture depicted an erie semblance of life, as though whoever once sat in these chairs was still there; watching, waiting. I moved past these upholstered residents, creeping towards a wooden door to the left of the fireplace. The door had no handle, only a hole where one should be, and the room beyond was similar: No beds or tables or carpets or drawers, only creases and lines and patches where they should be. Despite the lack of furnishings, this room had the most life – or some crude mockery of life – out of the rest of the house. Scratches on the crumbling floorboards told of former movements, replacements and rearrangements of furniture, scars on the skin of a body well-worn. The stains told another story: wounds never healed, arguements never settled, rages never satiated. One spot in particular, a browned stain in the center of the room, attracted my attention. Whatever substance had spilled here rotted the wood, leaving a soft, circular indentation in an otherwise dry corpse. Turning my gaze up from this wound to the cieling, I found a similarly browned mark, directly above this intriguing stain. My mind flooded with answers; it seemed that in a house left to rest, an unanswered question still stirred.

I left the room back into the chamber with the fireplace, brisking past the chairs toward the dark staircase on the other end of the room. I felt their gazes follow me; I wonder if the chairs knew what I was about to discover. I climbed the railless stairway into the darkness above, quickly turning at the top into the chamber that I believed to hold the answers I sook. I instead found a child’s bedroom. Against the far wall was a small bed with a chest of toys at its foot, knocked on its side and emptied. Whatever other furnishings were in this room had been removed, but the decorations on the chest told me this was a girl’s room. I then panned my flashlight away from the bed to the object of my investigation: a single skeleton with a small knife lodged in its ribcage, strewn across a browned stain. I felt a strange dread run through my body – not just from the sight of a corpse, but what rested under its hand. A picture frame, face-down: a memento of the final thoughts of a dying man. I slowly moved towards the skeletal remains, my mind in constant conflict with my steps; everything in me wants to run off, but my feet carry me forwards. I kneel down over the picture frame, protected from dust by its deceased carrier. I cautiously pull it out from beneath the hand, lifting it into the light.

There is no picture, only the frame. There is no life, only a dead man in a dead nursery on the dead floorboards of a dead house. The chairs are dead, the knife is dead, the fireplace is dead, the doll is…

I look to the doll, still clutched in my hand. Its soft, ashen form brings me comfort, settles my unease. I turn it over in my hand and find the last semblance of life in this crypt of a home: a name, stitched into the back of the doll’s left leg:

“Emily”