Haunted, Hunter

Two kids meet, one eyeless from a life tormented, his little eye watching everything scared and distant, and another legless, slowly climbing towards irrelevance, though she doesn’t it yet. They both walk and wheeled up a road to a house on top of a hill. A manor barely stands and barely exists, but in shattered glasses, and rotten wood, and in thunderous clamps it invites them over.

There lives a ghost, an entity that can eat us and kill us, the girl says.

The boy nods his head, then shakes his head, then cries because he is alone and forgotten, and then laughs, because he has gotten over it.

If it kills us, then all we have to lose is our lives, which is not enough to scare me, and if it doesn’t kill us, then we can continue living, and maybe something can be fixed, he says.

They both go into the house. They see the cursed realms that there have lived. Ghosts and tongueless children, mourning their ever present, shadows lurking and biting each other’s heads, serpentine roads leading to nowhere and everywhere, rooms of hellfire backdrop light. A screaming incessant, a tortuous walking, a wall drenched in sweat and bones, and blood, from the noses, from the smiles, from the souls forgotten, and in the middle of it, a giant mirror where…

One can see the things that are most disappointed in you, the girl says.

All the mistakes you have made and will ever make, and even knowing them, you will make them, it is not a way to prevent them, but a way to agonize about them, even before they happen, the boy says.

So they hold each other’s hands, shaking and shivering, screaming in silent terror, but without any other hopes of ever getting a home, they decide to stay there, becoming another part of the mansion of the damned.

It is a strange, erratic process, but it becomes, as an eternal night, a clawing out of dreams, a flashing of every pain they have both endured despite their ages. They cry and lie in bed together, because they only have each other. They are friends and they cry on each other’s shoulder, while the howls of the house shine through, from under the light of the door, to the ceiling falling on top. A sense of asphyxiation cries with them, like being locked up inside a box that gets tinier and tinier, and a heart that grows bigger and bigger, ever thumping, the blood spills out, and the teeth from nowhere, from the darkness, shine like moon, and a roar, a whistle, a rhyme from an age they never knew…

I thought we were going to die, the girl says. But she is surprised, when she wakes up, and the bed is comfortable and smooth, when the house is small, though broken, and the sun shines above them, insipidly, but warmly.

I think they took pity on us, the boy says, and they both look at each other, and first they laugh, and then they cry, for there is nothing more ridiculous and pathetic.

But they hold hands again, they eat whatever garbage they find, and then they continue on, in search of a little bit of peace, and happiness, and sense of self-worth.