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“Look carefully upon the subject. See how it moves in a pre-ordained manner, how it acts in accordance to pattern. The function of a system is to function as a system- all else is circumstantial, context-dependent. The function of an artist, then, is to enact transformation upon that system. Our lot is to reach into a thing and make it anew, in whichever way we please- we establish new functions, replacing the default and the emptiness of function for function’s sake. Where before, it only existed to exist, we grant it purpose. Through form, function. Through function, artistry. Through artistry, meaning.

“Now, pick up your scalpels. The first cut is often the most difficult, and it will set the pace. Ensure that your protections are in place, lest the subject turn to wriggling.”

-Seventh Scripture, twelfth verse of the books of Lo-ahnn Daughtler, First Architect of Artistry

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Mid-afternoon. In autumn, that means there is much less time than ever feels reasonable before the sun sets. It may be a disgustingly warm autumn season, but autumn it remains, and it gets dark fast this time of year.

I decide to powerwalk into the unknown rather than stroll.

Phone, wallet, keys. Phone, wallet, keys. I go over the tools I have on me, the only tools I had on hand and could realistically bring. Phone- obvious utility, even if coverage is going to be shit at best, nonexistent at the most likely, and there’s always a use for a portable light.

Keys, already in my hand. Home, car, mailbox- not a lot going on, but enough to slip between each of the fingers on my right hand into a very poorly designed and improvised set of brass knuckles.

Wallet- so someone can identify me if I’m found dead in this fucking forest. Grim, but practical. And if I’m doing this, I’m doing it seriously. You walk into weird woods for weird reasons, there’s an expectation of at least a chance that you’ll get absolutely fucked. And that’s without factoring in bears.

There definitely aren’t any bears here. None have been this close to town in at least months, nevermind their oncoming hibernation, and considering the size of the town, everybody would hear from every hunter in a fifty mile radius about it if that changed. Definitely no bears here. Probably.

And I’m definitely not worrying about bears more than I’ve worried about any animal in years to avoid thinking of the other possibility. Nope. No sirree.

I’m doing just fine, yessir.

It’s fine. I made the choice, and now all I have to do is follow through. That’s the easy part, in my experience. That’s the part that I’m not worried about.

Which is good. Because there’s a house coming up through the woods.

The trees are… normal. Glowing with the colors of fall; red, orange and yellow, with hints of green still peeking through in places. Their bark is vibrant, crisped and sharp in the cooling air, and the wind blowing through them makes for beautiful music. The trail beneath my feet is a mix of bare dirt and gravel, struggling for supremacy over the path as slowly and inexorably as time allows and making a lovely crackling sound as I walk. The light of the sun weaves in between the branches, making the afternoon shine golden.

If I wasn’t so afraid, the day would be beautiful.

Which is good. Because there’s a house coming up through the woods.

I take a deep, deep breath, and focus on what’s in front of me.

At the end of the trail, slightly to one side, sits a two-story one-family home. Two floors, an attic, and a short little garage, its entrance closed and seemingly rusted shut that way. Half of the windows are shattered, one of them gaping open into shadow while the rest are boarded in old, half-rotted wood. The walls are tired, molded and worn by the elements, but still hold traces of a bright yellow paint that once decorated them.

It’s a dead place. It’s a place that’s been dead for a long time. The stairs up to the door are rotted through, the front door as boarded up as the windows and chained tight afterwards. It might once have been a lived-in place, an actual home, but that was likely decades ago, and what the house has become does not care to invite the living back through its walls.

And yet… I’ve come this far.

And my gaze, no matter how intensely the house emits its seething ambivalence to the living, is drawn back to that one window.

The one window that yawns open like a black mouth against the boarded-up face.

I’ve come this far.

Now, to see it through.

That’s the easy part, right?

I take off my jacket and lay it over the edge of the window. It’ll get filthy, but better it than me, and better to avoid any leftover glass that might dig into me if I’m not careful. I crawl over it into that yawning square, that window of pitch, and tumble out the other side.

Immediately, the floor buckles beneath me, and the smell of mold and rot crawl out of the broken floorboards and into my sinuses.

I sneeze, and then I retch, and then I start coughing, waving a hand desperately in front of my face. I haven’t played sports in a good decade or so, and the dismount is already pretty damn awkward, but I actually stumble as I try to take a step out of the dent I’ve made- only to immediately make another.

I back up onto the windowsill, the sharp edges of it beneath my jacket more stable and somehow ironically less threatening than the collapsing mess all around me. It takes a few seconds for me to clear my airways and wipe the tears from my eyes, leaning out of the window until I’ve recovered. .

The room is dark, even with clear sight. The light from the window, facing away from the setting sun, is the only illumination available, everything else filtered through wooden boards, moth-eaten curtains and a thick fog of spores. It’s barely enough to see by, but I almost wish it wasn’t. If it was entirely dark, maybe I could convince myself to leave.

The living room I’ve crashed into looks almost like an art piece. Whoever last lived here… they never packed up. Frankly, the space looks like they never left. There’s a couch that might once have been grey and is now a greenish black taking up center stage, its pillows ripped open by scavengers but still facing against a tv that’s been long broken. It’s an old-timey set, squat and thick with two antennas sticking out of it, both of them corroded. Behind the couch, I see a dining table, one of its legs eaten away until it’s collapsed and partially broken through the compromised floor, the chairs surrounding it more useful as kindling than seating.

I’m faced with hallways, now. Whatever I’m looking for, it’s not immediately apparent in the living room, but I’m already inside- now to follow through.

To the right, what looks like a foyer and kitchen, likely connecting to the garage.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

To the left, a hallway of true dark, likely headed towards a den and a bathroom. Or maybe a guest room?

Right ahead, to the left of the collapsed table, a stairway leading up, and a door next to it that’s closed.

And has a chain on the handle.

I can’t help but give a little laugh. Honestly, the premise seems like some kind of point-and-click games. One of those “choose your own adventure” stories. That’s… heh. At home, on my laptop, snuggled up cozy, I’d have ducked straight into the dark hallway, first thing. That, or dashed to the kitchen, trying to find some leftover equipment I could use as a weapon.

Here, I’m quaking in my fucking boots.

One wrong step, and I break an ankle. Or wake up a patch of black mold. Or there’s a fucking serial killer living here who I’ve already alerted to my presence by exploding the floor and my sinuses.

I can feel my heart beating in my chest like a drum. The adrenaline it’s pumping feels cold, like my body is trying to push thick lumps of ice through my veins.

I haven’t seen any signs of the supernatural yet. No weird veins, no meat-cameras, no blinking eyes in someone’s hair, no weird coincidences. Just a fucked up empty house that, even without any “threat”, is a danger simply from the sheer likelihood of getting an infection, or falling through the floor and getting trapped, or…

Or nothing.

I reach deep, as far down as I can.

A straightforward, regular life, where normal things happen and I’m me.

Or walking into the dark.

Fuck it, we ball.

I have to walk slowly, feeling out the strength of the floorboards with each step. The ones that creak, ironically, are usually the safest- it’s the ones that groan or outright exhale on contact that are ready to collapse into mush. Gradually, step by step, I make my way to the right, over to the kitchen.

The foyer and the kitchen behind it, connected by another door over to the dining room area, are just as liminal as the living room. Everything looks like someone just up and left it, but it’s a bit more disconcerting here. At the front door (which, I notice, is chained shut on the inside also- what the fuck?) there are a dozen pairs of shoes, sized for at least three different sets of feet, and a coat hanger with a fedora that’s halfway eaten through next to a thick leather duster. On closer inspection, there’s a winter jacket beneath that in turn, all polyester and artificial sheen- sized for a child.

I shudder, turning and walking over the mushy carpet of the foyer into the kitchen.

Here, too, is evidence of habitation. A cutting board, plates still sitting in the sink and reeking, a fridge hanging partially ajar. Slowly, I go from cabinet to cabinet, checking everything, and once again, finds myself confused by just how much stuff is there. Several cleaning chemicals have lost their packaging to time and collapsed into an acidic-smelling clump under the sink, and there are plates, cutlery, and cookware spread throughout the cozy home space. I wonder if I should open the freezer and fridge, just to check- but one errant sniff too close to the sink convinces me thoroughly of what a shit idea that would be.

Just a normal house. A normal, old-timey house in the middle of woods that can’t have had a field planted in them in over thirty years or more, which looks like the owners just up and left with the clothes on their back one day.

I make my way through the kitchen doorway back into the living room, close to the dining table. The floor here is even more treacherous, partially caved-in as it is by the weight of the collapsed dining table, but it also has something I need.

I reach down to one of the chairs, trying to find a way to spread my balance across an area and wincing at the sound the floor makes. I take a breath, coughing at the smell, and get ready to yank-

And the leg of the chair comes right off. Like wet clay.

I stare down at it. Give it an experimental swing.

It’s got moss growing on it, and it doesn’t feel great to hold, but it has weight. And, unlike the few kitchen tools I found, doesn’t offer a guarantee of tetanus.

Weapon acquired.

I can practically taste the rpg game in the back of my mind, telling me what I’ve equipped. Wooden Club: +2 Melee Damage, -1 Agility. Heh.

Focus.

I turn to the dark hallway. Then I face the stairs, heading up, and then the door to what I assume must be the basement, still chained shut.

Left, center, right.

Choose your path, adventurer.

I did technically receive instructions recently, back at the last literal intersection I stopped at.

I turn left, towards the dark hallway.

Better to explore the whole ground floor first, even if I don’t actually find a doorway into the garage. Maybe it’s not connected to the house properly. Either way, the stairs are a danger, and I’m not even sure how I’d get the basement open. Better to finish checking down here, even if I have to partially sacrifice my hold on my new club to get the phone light out.

I shine the light, and have to blink at the harshness of how bright it turns out, now that my eyes have adjusted. I look toward the open window in alarm.

It’s getting dark out. I don’t have as much time as I thought, especially if I’m going to make it back to the car before it falls to night.

All the more reason to focus on the ground floor. I can come back for the stairs some other time if I really need to, but it’ll take longer. Time to hurry.

I’m getting a feel for the flooring now, and out of the sun, in the dark of the hallway, it’s actually a bit more stable. No furniture pressing it down or light for things to grow in. I walk down the hall, shining my flashlight, and see another fresh set of three- a door along the hallway, a door at the end of it, and the hallway turning to the right at its end.

Moving quicker than I’d like, I open up the first door- bathroom. Empty, linoleum-white turned yellow-green, smelling of acidic chemicals gone to rot and stagnant water. Nothing much I can see in there. I close the door again, taking another step forward-

I stop, turning to stare at something just to the side of the doorway..

I hadn’t really processed them earlier, but… there are picture frames. Hanging in the hallway, along its length. The fear had me focusing on the doors, but the way I’m standing, checking the bathroom, the light from my phone reflecting off the glass…

There are four people in the photo. Two kids, one possibly a teenager, and two adults, a man and a woman. They’re holding close to each other, hugged tightly together in the picture, and through the staining, I think I can see a park or sunny background behind them.

None of them have faces.

The staining of mold is there again, but it doesn’t take up the whole picture. It dances in at the edges, plays at discoloration in the middle- and blurs each of the four faces in a perfect little oval, as if a finger pressed against each of them and smudged them away.

I shudder.

Yep. Time to get moving.

I keep walking forward, head down, avoiding looking at any other pictures. If they’re anything like the first one, I’d rather not see.

I stop at the end of the hall, eyes focused on the way it continues to the right. There’s another door there- a back door, perhaps, but kept in an incredibly strange part of the house. It, just like the front door, the garage, and the basement door, has a chain wrapped tightly around its handle, corroded but still intact.

For later, then. If there ever is a later. This place is fucked.

The last door starts to squeak, the wood groaning as I approach, and I reach my hand out to the knob-

Click.

The hinges squeal, low and quiet, as the door clicks open, my hand still an inch away from contact.

Ok. So that’s… that’s probably a sign.

Good or bad, I still don’t know. But I’ve come this far.

I give the door the lightest push with the club, waiting for it to swing all the way open before I step in.

My light illuminates a small bedspace. There’s a dresser, off to one side, but its drawers have been ripped open, several of them laying on the floor with clothes askew. The bed is unmade, messy, with sheets half-molded and thrown over each other, some of them torn. There’s a little closet, the door askew and open, and there are a few towels and small jackets fallen on the floor with the rest of the mess.

It’s the only room I’ve seen with signs of more than just normal degradation. This place looks like someone turned it inside out looking for something, and didn’t bother cleaning up the mess afterwards.

It makes the single patch of clear flooring all the more visible.

There’s no tv in the room. No outlets plugged in that I can see. But right there, staring me in the face, is the oldest piece of technology I’ve ever seen.

The tv in the other room might have been older, but it was broken, unidentifiable. This is different. This is a single piece of hardware, perfectly intact, somehow nearly pristine when contrasted against the moldy ruin of the rest of the house.

I’ve always been a nerd. Wikipedia dives are a very fun little pastime, and gaming is my current passion. It’s only the sheer weirdness of the setting that makes it take so long for me to recognize an Atare 2600.

One of the first ever home gaming consoles, made in the year of… 1977? A little over fifty years ago, maybe.

Around the time the house was abandoned?

I’ve never seen one in person, never touched one before, but I’ve researched them. 128 bytes of ram, compatible with the cathode-ray television sets produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It generates a radio frequency signal using a special switch box to act as the television's antenna, and possesses a controller, battery, and a place to connect memory-address pins.

In other words, a place to read a game cartridge.

Like the one currently plugged into it.

I move so, so slowly. My light tracks over everything I can see, refusing to leave even a single angle untouched.

I enter the room, slowly setting down my club… and reach for the cartridge.

It pops out easily with a click, landing in my hand like it was barely even in the slot. Like it was waiting for me.

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding, turning it over and putting my light on it.

There’s no sticker, no stylized depiction of an Atare game on it. Just a single word, carved in with scratches like a knife.

BLEED.