Archive of Our Own

THE KITCHEN

There’s wine in the kitchen, but not just that. There's liquor. Water. Fruit flies slain dead across the countertops. Fruit, old and smelling of rot but by God it’s fruit. A dishwasher, a refrigerator, hand towels and old antique cabinet china, photos of a little girl scattered down the hallway; that’s who watches him as he runs an entire bottle of white Apothic dry from the spout; glasses unneeded (he couldn’t find them, anyway. What he did find, rather, was a cupboard of clean broken shards. From the bomb?).

It’s been a few days. Maybe a few months. Could be years. Who’s counting? Gallant certainly isn’t. When it’s nighttime the lights are off and when it’s daytime they don’t change, and the house smells like mildew and burnt rubber and the kitchen is always miraculously tidied the next day, or the next night, whatever he decides it may be.

The back of his throat burns as he savors the last droplets of alcohol, then by accident slams the bottle down a little too hard against the granite countertops and glass slices his forearm, spurting blood onto his shirt.

(Whose clothes are these anyway, that he wears? They’re too small or too big depending on what drawer he pulls them from. This shirt is practically suffocating him. Hurts his ribs. Prods. Invasive. Ugh.).

When he sleeps he’s drunk enough to lay down on the tile where he stands and let miniscule splinter shards of shattered glass poke his biceps until there’s a trickle of blood slithering past his nose and into the divets of the floor.

The maid seems less than thrilled to see him the next wake, her pug-face wrinkles crimping her skin as she sweeps the mess and scrubs the counters, shooing him away like an old dog to go find somewhere else to nap. He catches her wiping his blood onto her apron. He beats the oncoming hangover by collapsing on the couch in the living room and letting a spider crawl over his hand.

He assumes he dreamed of her: The Help. There is nobody in this house.

THE BATHROOM

The mirror above the sink has some kind of monster living in it.

Gallant finds this out as he pulls his eyelids apart and checks out the whites of his eyes under the flicker of the hanging lamp bulb, blinking back tears and huffing when he doesn’t find anything wrong. He presses his eyes shut, rubs the heels of his wrists against them, and opens to black spots in his vision. There, one takes sort of a human shape, and it isn’t until he’s rapidly blinked away the other spots does it frighten him; it’s a man he’s looking at– or– a manthing of some sort, the outline of a man but bleeding into the air like jet black ink.

The wind is knocked out of him as he gasps, stumbling back and tripping over his own feet, not quite able to catch his balance and falling backwards onto the tile. He hears it, the crack of his skull, ringing in the depths of his eardrums, throbbing up towards his temples, coating his fingers in blood when he reaches back to check the damage, but he can’t bring himself to care about that right now.

The man in the mirror reaches his hand out towards him. He doesn’t try to move away. It’s getting blurrier, anyway, and he’s pretty sure that it’s a hand, but it’s all black and glossy like latex (latex?) and the fingers twist in unnatural ways, curling in front of his eyes like jungle vines.

He tries to murmur something between who are you and what do you want but it comes out as a thick groan in the deepness of his throat. He closes his eyes, afraid to do so but cannot help it, and over his eyelids runs a long, elastic finger, trailing down his cheekbones and flicking off at the jawline. The afterburn cringes under his skin like hundreds of ants underneath him. It’s oddly… compassionate, half kind and half bad-intentioned (that in itself needs no evidence. I could just feel it, your honor).

Then it kinda hits him a little, how lonely he’s been, how nobody has laid a finger on him in what feels like eternity, and suddenly the hand of the demon doesn’t feel so bad, and suddenly his eyes are open and he’s staring into the darkness of a human shaped shadow hovering over him curiously, possessively, until he’s no longer so far as to stare, but now close enough to where everything in his peripheral is pure blackness. The kiss just feels like rubber, but if he concentrates he can picture that the wetness his own mouth left against the suit is another’s tongue dashing across his bottom lip.

And, God, he’s not even horny. Just lonely. His head is still bleeding as the shadowman presses the back of his shiny palm against the wound, and it shoots a migraine through his skull so hard that he can’t even remember what happens after that.

It’s not a mystery what happens after, though, even if it’s all lost on him. The next morning he struggles out of bed and barely makes it to the bathroom before vomiting down the tub drain. The mirror behind him clicks. A single piece of glass falls from the center and into the basin. Gallant wipes his mouth with his sleeve and picks it up, turning it back and forth against the overhead light.

Of course, nobody is in it but himself. Because it’s a mirror. He lies to himself a lot that day.

THE LIVING ROOM

The logs stacked in the green mosaic fireplace won’t light. Langdon had vaguely told him how the house had been on fire once, and Gallant had no reason to call bullshit. Sometimes, when the house is sure nobody is paying attention, he can smell the searing meat of human flesh scampering down the staircase, and he doesn’t have to see it to know that it’s there. For a few moments afterwards there hangs the putrid taste of scorching plastic in his mouth.

He lights a third matchstick and watches it pitfall into the furnace and extinguish. He scowls. Perhaps the house is tired of things like that. Or it’s just impossible to warm up to this place.

“I wouldn’t waste those if I were you,” Langdon lilts from behind his head, “limited supply. Pretty sure the stores might be closed for good.”

Gallant snaps to face him so hard that he winces and lets a hand fly to massage the crook of his neck, the next matchstick in line falling to the carpet. “Don’t do that.”

Langdon grins and tilts his head, the curled ends of his hair bunching around his shoulder. “It won’t light. I’d recommend you let it go.”

“Doesn’t hurt to try.”

Then, fleetingly, in the corner of his eye, he swears he sees a man standing beside him. Nude. Freshly showered. The flame in his hand is so bright and hot that Gallant can feel it from on his knees. It angers him almost, that this man is holding a lit match, that he gets the pleasure of heat fluttering across his fingertips. He’s gone as fast as he arrived, leaving no trace of reality nor hallucination nor anything to prove that anything at all just appeared.

Gallant stares across the room, confused, drowsy, (a little part of him says afraid), and Langdon snorts.

“It can.”

THE OFFICE

“Therapy? Really?”

“It could be helpful.”

“I mean I just wasn’t expecting-”

“There’s your first problem: you’ve learnt to expect things.”

“How can I not?”

“You can’t assume anything here. That’s not how this place works.”

“And you’d know because…?”

“Have I been wrong yet?”

“You haven’t exactly been right.”

“That doesn’t make me wrong. Would you like anything? Tea?”

“Sorry- there’s tea?”

“Earl gray.”

“You got coffee?”

“Not for you.”

“Why not?”

“You can have tea.”

“I’ll take whatever at this point.”

“Right. We’ll touch on that later too.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sugar?”

“Yes. Please.”

“Have you been sleeping well? Eating?”

“... I guess- I don’t know- this is weird.”

“What is?”

“This. Everything. Suddenly you want to talk to me- thank you-”

“It’s hot.”

“Yeah. I got that.”

“I didn’t bring you here just to observe you.”

“Then why…”

“I’ll do the asking.”

“Sorry. Jesus.”

“Good. Where were we?”

“Sleeping and eating.”

“Right.”

“...”

“You don’t like it here.”

“Not at all.”

“Why?”

“Because you uprooted me from human interaction and stuck me in this shithole- I mean it’s a nice house- but I’m so bored.”

“Expected.”

“Hypocrite.”

“Good call.”

“Can I get more sugar?”

“Wouldn’t you like to save some for next time?”

“... Next time?”

“We’ll be here a while.”

THE ATTIC

Even though he knows he should, Gallant doesn’t question the fact that there’s a dog in the attic.

He finds a red rubber ball on the floor next to draped furniture and tosses it into the darkness. The dog brings it back clutched in its jaw, drops it, then runs back into a corner. He’ll play fetch. Why not? What else is there to do?

He wouldn’t call himself an animal expert, he’s only ever had one pet; an old, aggressive cat with a bell collar and matted fur that his Nana put on a pedestal higher than him. It was an ancient cat. It always smelled like perfume. So he doesn’t know jack shit about dogs, but he has enough common sense leftover to know that this dog shouldn’t be alive. It’s chained up, limping, and dripping drool onto his shoes.

At one point, he tosses the ball and doesn’t get it back. “Come on, boy,” he calls out, hunching down on one knee and whistling. “C’mere!”

Dark corners, he’s learned, are not meant to be investigated alone, so he never finds the dog, and he never finds the ball, but he hears it barking as he steps back down the ladder and into the Hallway.

“Hey,” he says to Langdon one day in passing, “have you seen the dog?”

“...dog?”

“In the attic?”

Langdon doesn’t react, but his brows twitch and his nose scrunches enough for Gallant to notice it, which must mean he knows something. “There’s no dog in the attic, Gallant,” he lies.

Later, when Langdon thinks he can’t hear him, chains rattle from the ceiling, and the dog whimpers. He wonders if Langdon killed it until he sees it sprint down the Hallway one day, but then it disappears forever after that. It looked quite humanoid as it ran, he considers, but that’s impossible.

Is it?

THE BEDROOM: PART ONE

It’s Langdon’s bedroom that Gallant finds one day, which is only a half-hearted assumption, but he swears it’s the only room he’s never been in before. How could he have missed it? The door was left ajar when he came across it, beaming light out into the upstairs Hallway. He supposes he got distracted from walking– he needs to stop doing that so often, it makes him forgetful.

It must be Langdon’s bedroom because Langdon is standing at the window when he opens the door.

“You talk to yourself quite a bit,” he says.

Gallant furrows his brow slightly. “Really?”

“Mhm. You don’t hear it?”

Gallant shrugs. “Guess not.” He surveys the room. It’s hard to decipher whether or not it belongs to Langdon. It barely looks lived in. The only traces of something alive are the scratch marks littering his bedpost, which surely would have only come from some kind of wild animal. There’s shelving units with a few knick knacks, books and plants and such, and a laptop charging atop a wooden desk. There’s another door, which must be his closet, nailed shut with plywood.

When Langdon turns, his face is so much brighter than usual, and Gallant is almost startled by how lively he looks. The problem is that Langdon constantly looks no less than perfect, but now he looks of something divine, dare he say angelic, but he can’t exactly figure out what’s actually changed about him.

“Do you know why I chose you?” Langdon asks, turning his focus to the desk and slithering the tips of his fingers against the paneling.

“Because your options sucked.”

Langdon’s eyes twinkle. “You remind me of a lot of people that used to live here.”

Gallant stares at him with his own lids narrowed. “Who?” His spine chills as something thuds from the closet, but he keeps his attention to Langdon.

“Family. Employees. People who should have done anything but cross that fence outside.” Langdon turns again and draws back a dark curtain, and sunlight pours into the room. He nods his head for Gallant to come look out into the lawn.

Whether or not it’s a hallucination of the sort isn’t really a concern to him right now, because the mere sight of outside is enough to lift his spirits up enough to forget everything bad that’s happened and everything bad that’s to come. In the front yard, the grass grows green, cars fly down the street, and the Sun casts shadows of houses onto the land below.

“You see the gazebo?” Langdon asks, “There's a girl buried under there.”

“What-”

“And by the front porch; another. Not so much of a girl when she died, but she could really sell it if need be.”

Langdon smiles. Gallant has never seen him do that so sincerely before. “In this house,” Langdon starts, “there’s death. A lot of it. But it’s also history. And what comes after is a byproduct of those who came before. Death…” he inhales, “stays in this house.” Exhales. “For a long, long time.”

“Forever,” Gallant whispers.

“Forever, and whatever follows.” Langdon slides the curtains shut, and the room is dim again. “Sleep in here tonight,” he says, “you’ve earned that much.”

INTERLUDE: THE GAZEBO

From the outside, the house looks kinder than it really is, and he thinks he’s stereotyping simply because it looks relatively old. It should be the opposite. The older houses get, the scarier they tend to seem. But he’s not thinking of it as a house. The curtains flapping on the inside of a bedroom window look like a winking eye, and he imagines that if it were a person, it’d appear as an elderly widowed woman with a short cut of gray hair, spooling her hot tea with a spoon on the outer tables of a cafe, just watching the world go by and grow up around her. Her late husband is still in the ground, her kids have high paying jobs and live a layover flight away, but those are things she’s learned to appreciate. A windchime made of animal bones clinks together near him, the spoon against the teacup never done stirring as long as there’s a breeze.

A little girl, no older than ten, sits poised across from him under the canopy, stubby hands folded over her dandelion dress. Her feet sway shyly back and forth, heels beating softly against the bench. “You are going to die in there,” she states as if she knows.

Gallant chuckles. “Am I?”

Her large doe eyes watch him from under her lashes, and he gets a chill. The Sun is setting behind her, behind the roof of the house, giving everything around him a flowery pink hue. It’s beautiful out, he thinks. He wouldn’t mind living here if it was always like this.

“Have you been under the house?”

He shakes his head.

“Don’t. They’ll get you.” She stands up, not yet breaking her stare, and begins walking down the steps of the gazebo. “They don’t want you here.”

Gallant swallows thickly. “Who doesn't?”

Then, erupting from an open upstairs window, so loud that the curtains blow out above the lawn, is the shrill shriek of an infant wailing. Gallant cringes, craning his neck so he can take a glimpse inside. Just barely, he can make out the mobile spinning rapidly above the crib, and even more horrifying, a large, dark figure reaching down into it, giant, spiked horns almost hitting the ceiling as its raven black hands grab the swaddled child.

“You should wake up,” the little girl says, “the baby is crying.”

THE NURSERY

Gallant rocks the infant like it's the most delicate thing left alive, which it probably is, which makes him think about the bomb and the smokey parcels of dense air that hang over the Earth and he thinks the baby hears him thinking because it starts to cry, loudly, wailing like a sailor calling for land, and he doesn’t know what to do because he’s realizing he’s never really had to ever deal with a crying child before, so he shushes it and starts to hum a lullaby and it doesn’t shut up, and there, for a moment, is a wash over his body cold of something he could never have, because this isn’t his baby, but it must be somebody’s, and somebody must be here or else there’d be no baby and how did you survive? what is your secret? Why were you in the nursery? Why was he in the nursery? How did he end up there? Why did he survive the blast? What is this house? Where is Langdon? Where is everyone?

THE DINING ROOM

“Don’t look so disgusted,” Langdon says, “it’s lamb.”

“Where the fuck did you get lamb from?”

“Eat.”

Of course he doesn’t eat it. Because where the fuck did Langdom get lamb meat?

Langdon stares him down. “No appetite?”

Gallant picks up the bulk of it with his fork, turns it around, looks for spots a little too pink or a little too bloody. The unfortunate part is that it smells amazing. It also looks, from what he examines, perfectly cooked. Still, he grimaces. “I’m vegetarian.”

“Gallant. You think I’d poison you?”

“I think this isn’t lamb.”

“Fine. It can be whatever you want. Now eat. Enjoy your steak.”

He waits for Langdon to take the first bite before he even considers doing so, then wonders if that’s even a good idea at all, because he doesn’t know too much about Langdon’s eating habits but he feels safe enough to assume human meat isn’t exactly a turn off for him. Langdon isn’t paying attention to him anymore, delicately feasting on his lamb in complete silence, picking up his glass to sip wine, then plucking his fork off of the plate again.

“When’s the last time you’ve eaten?” Langdon asks him.

Gallant opens his mouth to answer then promptly shuts it. Is he supposed to remember? The Outpost, maybe? But that seems entirely too long of a time to go without food. How long has he been in the house, anyway? Surely, he’s eaten something. But when?

“That’s what I thought,” Langdon hums when he doesn’t reply.

Come to think of it, he hasn’t even been hungry. Not once. He takes his glass of wine and throws it back in one breath. “That count?”

“No.”

“I’m not twelve. You can’t make me eat.”

“I won’t. But don’t expect me to cook for you again any time soon.”

“Fine,” Gallant says, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms against his chest, furrowing his brow as the outline of his ribs prods him against his sweater. He sits until Langdon finishes eating, then stands, pushes his chair back under the table, and walks towards the door.

“Get some rest,” Langdon says as he leaves, as if he has anything to need rest for. “I’ll be in bed soon.”

Gallant doesn’t really register that.

THE BASEMENT

Gallant is worried that Langdon thinks he’s losing it.

He winds up in the basement one night and takes interest in the assortment of glass jars scattered upon rotting shelving units hastily installed into the walls. There’s things he swears should not be in glass jars inside somebody’s house, because that one on the right, that one, right there, kind of looks like brain matter? And the one next to it looks like the foot of a baby or something? Gallant shivers. Gallant is losing it.

Langdon creeps up behind him and rests a hand on his shoulder. “Find anything good yet?”

Gallant jumps, placing a hand over his beating heart. “Jesus.”

“Apologies.”

“What is this place?”

“The basement.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Gallant says, “but I mean metaphorically.”

Langdon drags his fingertips across the width of Gallant’s back, then slowly lets them snake down to his waist, then the jut of his hip bone. “I don’t know. What do you think it is?”

“Uh-” Gallant exhales. He thinks of the rubber demon in the bathroom and it has Langdon’s face this time, and God Langdon’s hand is still on his hip and he can feel his hair tickling the back of his neck. “Looks like a mad scientist lived here.”

Langdon chuckles. “It does, doesn’t it?” His other hand just so happens to find itself on the opposite side of Gallant’s waist. “This room has a lot of faces.”

“Uh-huh…”

Being touched now has this morally-off feeling that Gallant can’t pick up the source on, like Langdon’s hands are those of disease and wrath, infecting him, and it’s so unsettling but he doesn’t shove him off because sometimes being so angry that you feel sick can be a wonderful concoction if you’re anything like Gallant. The basement has a lot of faces, but apparently so does Langdon, and under the timorous beam of the swinging lightbulb Gallant thinks he sees plenty of them all at once when he finally turns to face him. Most of them are a little sinister, suspected, but some are completely unforeseen.

The slight twitch of Langdon’s upper lip looks like a lover. Gallant kisses him, regrets it, then does it again.

THE HALLWAY(S)

Walker is not afraid of anything. He cannot be afraid of anything when he is protected by the walls. He is unafraid of the floor, for it cannot fall out from under him. He paces beyond the boundary of destination. Where else is there to go? The Hallway, he thinks, moves him itself, far past where it could possibly take him. Walker walks, Walker walks.

Inside the walls, they whisper about him. Nasty things. He walks on by. The voices follow him everywhere. They are always right up against the curve of his eardrum like bugs buzzing their grievances. They emerge sometimes to relax on the shell of his ear and spit into their little legs and turn gossip into food for thought, then crawl back in to reprimand him again.

The Hallway regurgitates Walker into bedrooms and bathrooms and studies where he cannot walk anymore. Walker becomes Stander becomes Sitter becomes Confused becomes Gallant again, where he can also become Lost and Alone and Scared once more. At the doorway is always a door, where there is Hallway, where there are voices telling him to get gone.

Langdon is never, ever in the Hallway, which makes Gallant think that there’s more than one way to reach a different room, which makes him tread back into the Hallway. There, he walks.

THE CRAWLSPACE

Hello…?

… Hello…?!

Wait- wait wait wait- wait- stop! Stop! Open the door! Open the door!! I’m not supposed to be here!

But I’m here anyway. I’m here anyway. You are going to die in there. They don’t want you here. Don’t. Do you smell that? Once when I was a kid I found a dead squirrel in my backyard covered it maggots it was fucking gross it smelled like something that came from the core of the Earth I tried to touch it and a spider crawled over my hand and I smacked it away and ran inside and Nana wasn’t home and I think something ate it because when I found it the next day it was more bones than anything but it still made my stomach churn and I didn’t follow the speckled trail of blood leading into the woods because that’s where more dead things live and ew jesus I can smell it again can’t you smell it? It’s like it’s right in front of me.

I’m not supposed to be here

I’m not supposed to be.

I’m not here

THE BEDROOM: PART TWO

Langdon takes his hand and drags him to the basement. He doesn’t remember much after that. He wakes up in the master bedroom and panics when he hears crying from down the hall.

“Don’t worry,” Langdon whispers from somewhere, “go back to sleep. I’ll feed the baby.”