INT. AN ABANDONED RIVERFRONT HOUSE — NIGHT
for: @illfates
It was nothingness that Shaw found in the cabin and nothingness that had stayed. Its rooms had been cleared out long ago though not quite bereft of life, either. A dining table fit for six, the empty frame of a television screen with shards of glass lying carelessly on the vinyl flooring, walls that held onto lopsided picture frames of a family whose fates were now unknown. So, life had passed here, but it was weeks, months perhaps, when these four walls last had a visitor. Days were hard to surmise without a watch, and as months passed, it was only more complicated by the passing of the seasons. On the off-chance a clock would remain hung on the wall the minute and second hands were just as lifeless as the space it occupied. Walking wordlessly to the living room floor, Shaw glanced up and found a clock beating still.
Half past six. Outside, the sun had long since sunk. Winter had come.
Shaw took the next few steps toward the flight of stairs. Wood. They swallowed. To have survived this long required guts and deft thinking—but even they could not predict the way in which the wood would croak, if it would protest with the doctor’s disruption. But they had come so far already to find a place to rest, and anyway, what was a few more steps? And if it had croaked, what did it matter? Let the monsters come perhaps. The day was too long already. They had already lost too many. What’s another life for the monsters to take? Let it be theirs. It should be their time already.
With bated breath, they took one step, and another, and another. The steps remained stubbornly quiet. Shaw did too. It would not be such an easy death for them, no; perhaps somewhere what gods were left were laughing.
The floor revealed two bedrooms, with doors both open to their hinges. No signs of life here—not even fruit flies on rotten fruit or ants beneath floorboards—even as the bedrooms contained some vestiges of it. The smaller room of dinosaur wallpaper, a desk table brimming with paper and playthings; the larger room for the parents where a large mattress blessedly remained. With minimal force they dusted off the right side of the bed and allowed themselves to lie in it. Here, in a stranger’s bed, in an abandoned riverfront house, in the dark hour of winter, Shaw would at last rest.
Soon, far too soon, there was little noise in the house but the steady breaths of one fast asleep.
