Withered

by A.G.A. Wilmot

“She herself is a haunted house.”

Killing was for the living. And she would kill this house—their house—by any means necessary.

So, like all great artists, they decided they’d fake it until they made it.

The key to surviving, though, to making it through, is in knowing that a step backward is not the same as falling backward.

Over years, as a mattress takes on weight from dead skin and oils, so does a house grow dense with the memories of all who’ve dwelled within. Their experiences seep into the walls, the plumbing, even the foundation; their fingerprints along surfaces and banisters are musical notes, scattered and unstaffed.

“It’s like coming back to a book you once loved and finding a bookmark still there, right where you left off, but you can’t really remember the plot or the characters or anything.”

It’s equally true that every haunted house was once a human whose spirit or essence has come, through force or happenstance, to embody the very space in which they once lived.”