Dead Skin — Caleb Byrum
short story ☆
short story ☆
Bricks lay neatly to make the labyrinth that is Lennox Hall. A house born from bloodshed and in its place a monster emerged from the gory soil who hungers for one thing.
Blood.
It has sat here and digested dozens for a hundred years and it may well sit for a hundred more. Bram knows he is but lamb to the slaughter to the house whose doors slammed shut and locked the outside word out—or maybe the monsters within the walls.
Bram walks down the halls of his childhood and thinks back to when his father would play the piano and his mother would walk in holding a new Frankenstein cookie recipe made of whatever she could find. His fingers flex around the hammer held firm in his grip.
They are all here now.
Past, Present, and future all blurring as one. A child runs down the halls with gap teeth and a massive grin. A moody teenager walks up the stairs yelling but no sound leaves his mouth. and Bram himself sits in the parlor watching it all happen.
They all walk the halls together, time blurs as one in Lennox Hall. Not linear but all around us like rain at once—or perhaps they are simply spillage from the storm that time is.
Bram slides his hand along the wall. He can feel the skin pilling off the wall gathering in little clumps in the crevices of his hand. He begins to claw at the corners of the opulent and intricate rose wallpaper his mother had adored. He tears at the house’s skin and it begins to peel.
He bashes the wall in with the hammer before letting it clatter to the ground and watches the house begin to repair itself almost instantly but not before thick black tar weeps down to collect at the baseboards staining it an almost inky hue. He digs his nails harder into the house’s skin and he can hear the house scream, the house’s flesh pulses as it desperately tries to close the incision Bram’s has started.
“I hear you.” He whispers. “I hear you breathing in there.”
The house screams and it rings in his ears; reverberating around his skull and settling deep inside his bones as he feels the warm ooze coat him from fingertips to elbow. His fingers brush at something firm and it doesn’t take long for his fingers to latch onto it.
The squelch of the house’s flesh causes hooks to sink under Bram’s jaw and pull his face into a grin from sadistic glee. He grips something from inside the walls and begins to try and dislodge it from the fleshy walls that ooze blood.
Bram tries to tug his arm back from the wall and feels a sharp sting as something from the other side tugs back. His arm is stuck.
He is stuck.
His grin drops from his face, the hooks loosening as blood and fear begin to spill down his neck and coat his chest that holds his now too fast beating heart. Something in the wall is tugging hard on his arm, its nails digging into his skin as fear finds a new home. The fear that spilled down his chest begins to bubble and burn away at the flesh and sink into his ribs and internal organs leaving him a fearful ruined creature.
“This can’t be happening.” But even as he says it, He knows it not to be true, the house is alive why could it not grab him back? Was he the only one with arms that can pry inside its flesh? The house tugs so hard it feels like his arm may rip right off his torso.
He feels himself sink like quicksand into the wall, his arm is sunken deep inside the house’s cavity between the walls and soon his leg is tucked inside. He feels himself sink deeper and deeper.
He must look like a monster emerging from the walls and not a creature thrashing so desperately to escape them. All he has left is bits and pieces of his face, his leg that tries to push himself out, and puzzle pieces that shape out his torso but even those he begins to lose quickly.
As he takes his last breath, the halls of Lennox hall fall silent again.
Caleb Byrum (He/Him) is a queer writer, and reader from a shitty small town in California . Professionally he is a student working on remembering the difference between They, There , and Their because he seems to have early onset dementia and keeps forgetting. Personally they craft fiction for teenagers and former teenagers who're buried underneath a stack of unfinished books.
