The House with Red Walls
On the second floor of the house with red walls, there is a long hallway, unlit and dusty and empty but for the faces that hang from one wall. Go ten paces, twenty, more faces; they hang there bleeding, so supple they might flinch, their eyes staring hollow. Thirty, there’s a turn: the corridor goes on. Eventually the row of faces ends, and then soon so does the hallway, fraying into nothing.
You have already imagined the extraction, some butcher-barber’s workshop, tables of coarse-grained old wood stained deep, the chair with leather straps, an obsidian scalpel to make the first incision and a knife with a bone handle and a scale-thin curved blade to slide under the skin.
On the ground floor there is the great ballroom with its black and white chequered flooring. Its walls are the deep red of a blind man’s wine. Bodies dance to unseen music, their limbs arrayed radially, pleated skin skirts swaying.
Eyes bead the curved ceiling of the reception hall. The carpeting of the upswept stairs has the texture of a tongue.
In the old kitchen something has broken. Blue and purple arrow-like leaves crowd out of the crack. They grow slowly but appreciably. The staff have abandoned that corner.
Your bedroom has nothing monstrous to it, just the faint smell of ozone and night air. It gets hot in the summer so you keep the window open. The stiff mauve curtains billow in and out as the house sighs. The walls are the red of something you remember from long ago.
From the outside, the spires of the house stab the sky like fingers lifted in prayer. A light is burning in the highest; someone watching. Noöne knows who the lord of the house with red walls is. Only their demands are transmitted in hushes from servant to servant, through carpeted hallway and coughing stair.
The gardeners don’t hide their bitterness, spitting and hissing through sparse nublike jutting teeth. They are bent over and bubonic like gargoyles warning of syphilis — they know all of this should belong to them. They whisper soothing words as they trim the fruit trees and softly stroke the peaches’ fur.
There’s sometimes guests in the gardens, lost and politely bewildered. Sluggish slow worms slither to warm under the rocks. In the centre of the maze, laid out in three dimensions with bridges and underpasses and subtle slopes, a fern flower blooms as white deer with eight legs line up to drink from the rainwater-filled dry fountain.
The moon that rises over the house with red walls is no moon at all. Gusting wind bangs with invisible fists against the roof’s endless black slopes. A guard squeezes into a protected nook and lights a cigarette, then peers through the smoke into the rustling dark. Something is moving there but that’s nothing unusual. The wall behind him has the unhealthy flush of inflamed skin.
This vignette has previously appeared in Yuggothic Delusions Ogdo.