One by one by one, over years and years and years. Your halls are empty now. Your floorboards creak. Your walls groan. Your foundations are beginning to sink. It’s only a matter of time before the humans decide you’re better off abolished, and so bring their loud machines to pick you apart brick by brick by brick.
You’d accepted that when humans began running away from you just because you’d opened a shutter to let in some light, or when you’d open doors for them to allow passage through your lonely halls. This world and these humans have no need for what they do not know or understand; such things are fearful for them. And yet, in contrast to such simple logic, they hold within them an insatiable curiosity. That is, after all, why time and time again, humans return to you, a house with a supposed soul to behold the truth with their own eyes. Most leave in fear, but there are some who are struck by awe; the knowledge that there are things beyond their understanding (those are your favourites). They have endeared themselves to you in this way - even the loud ones who come with their long metal sticks and intent to do you harm. Any attention is good attention when you’re lonely, you suppose.
There is a smear in this group of humans. You can sense it; an excited unrest in the one who smiles too wide and shows too many teeth. He hides something from the rest of them, but you know. Having seen so many humans come and go over so many years—most good, some bad, but all of them so wonderfully curious—you know.
Run! you try to convey, through fluttering shades and flickering lights. Leave me on this night, so that you may live to see another!!
But such theatrics are the norm now, and they see your warnings as the signals of your old soul. They venture deeper, and that one human smiles wider, the knife at his back gleaming in your blinking lights.
The first one falls with a hiccuped gasp, choking on blood that rises to their throat. It spills onto your floorboards, seeping into the cracks and crevices until you can almost taste it.
That’s when the screaming begins.
And for the first time in your long life, you become enraged. Your walls shrink and grow, pulsing with fervent life; the angered huffs and puffs of restraint. The glass in your windows shriek from the strain as a second human falls with their fear still reflected in their glassy stare.
Not like this! It is never supposed to be like this!
It will not happen again!
Not in your halls that a family once called home. You are a sanctuary for those with wonder in them. For those who look at you with nostalgia and remember something from a distant past that you can not ever fathom. For those who gently touch your peeling wallpaper and smile. The ones who seek thrill. The ones who want to live.
You slam all the doors closed until they become stuck in their jambs. Your shutters close and meld with the walls until they become solid.
If this human thinks he can fill your halls with blood, then you will become the monster the town thinks you to be.
