Devil House

by John Darnielle

Ashton has this way of talking about things as if they don’t have any consequences. It’s contagious. I try to be on my guard about it.

There’s unexplored terrain lurking in known shapes, unmapped quadrants waiting to be located by means of simple shifts in perspective.

“Unknown” and “unseen” aren’t synonyms, but they’re linked by more than their prefixes.

They always arrive at the same questions—why don’t these young people care? how did they get like this? where were their parents?—but the asking of these questions is an exercise in self-portraiture. They’re not good questions; they’re not even questions. They’re ghost stories masquerading as concern.

The way our worries seem like they were smaller before we grew up is a universal feeling, or nearly so.