A House of Silent Ornaments (Short Story)

 I figured there was probably no place better than my own blog to share some of my short gothic stories. I will stagger them so they don't all hit you at once, I figured I'd also share some of my poetry here too. Why not?

So here is the first draft of... 

A House of Silent Ornaments

(First Draft) 

It was with a dreadful and stupefied awareness that I first beheld my surroundings, seated as I found myself at a long and antique oaken table, the atmosphere oppressive with the staleness of centuries. The air was not merely still but embalmed, as though even the notes of dust had been commanded to linger in suspension, each a minute testament to the tyranny of stillness. 

My limbs were heavy with an unnatural stiffness, so profound that I fancied myself bound by invisible ligatures sunk deep into the sinews. To raise an arm was to court the sensation that some hidden part resisted, ill-fitted to the task of motion. The chair in which I sat was of Victorian workmanship, its carved legs resembling talons and its back crowned with Gothic tracery, so that I felt less seated than confined. 

Before me lay a plate of porcelain, delicate and white, yet bearing no mark of knife nor stain of sustenance. It seemed to me an object wholly ceremonial, for it carried none of the wear of honest usage, but stood rather as an emblem of emptiness itself. Beside it rested a knife and fork of dulled silver, their surfaces reflecting no light save a single gleam cast down from above. 

That gleam emanated from a chandelier which presided, spectral and aloof, over the chamber. Its many crystals were arrayed like frozen tears; each droplet suspended in a grief beyond mortal measure. No flame burned there, nor in the sconces that flanked the walls, whose iron mouths held only the shapes of extinguished possibility. The very ceiling into which the chandelier was fastened had been swallowed by shadow, so that the whole apparatus seemed to hang, unsupported, in a void. 

I turned my eyes to the wallpaper, and there recoiled with a sickness not of the flesh but of the mind. The design was a labyrinth of filigreed vines and arabesques, whose intricacy betrayed no human patience but rather the fever of some monstrous fancy. As I gazed, the writhing patterns folded and overlapped until I fancied they formed faces; pale, bloated, and grotesque, pressing outward as though from behind a veil, their mouths open in soundless cries. 

I sought to rally memory, to anchor myself with recollection of some journey that might explain this present captivity. Yet of origin or prelude there was no trace. It was as though I had been thrust from the womb of oblivion directly into this accursed hall, clothed not with identity but only with bewilderment. Indeed, I found myself less a traveller than a prisoner of circumstance, awakened into a world whose very fabric was denial. 

A silence prevailed which was more terrible than any clamour. It was a silence not of absence but of refusal, as though the walls themselves forbade sound from existing. Even my own breathing seemed uncertain, issuing so faintly that I doubted whether it truly disturbed the stagnant air at all. 

At length I rose, though with such effort that each motion of limb seemed a violence against myself. My hips resisted; my knees bent with reluctance; the act of motion was a negotiation with parts unwilling to obey. Yet instinct, inexorable and blind, urged me to escape; and so, I quitted the dining room through an archway of darkly polished wood, and passed into a kitchen. 

This chamber was vast and well-appointed in a style befitting the nineteenth century, though utterly devoid of life or labour. Counters stretched broad and barren, with no trace of flour, fruit, nor utensil; shelves gaped empty, their dust revealing faint impressions where objects once had stood, suggesting not neglect but removal. It seemed less a room abandoned than a stage struck of its props, the theatre left hollow when the play was ended. 

The fireplace was black, but not with the char of recent fire; rather it bore a dryness so profound it seemed never to have known flame at all. No lingering odour of victuals haunted the air, nor even the faintest ghost of smoke or steam. The emptiness was total, and I shuddered, sensing that no meal had been prepared here for decades, perhaps for longer than human history itself remembers. 

I called out then, a weak and wavering cry, scarcely daring to hear my own voice in that stifling hush. It broke against the walls and returned to me in a hollow parody, bereft of echo, as though the sound itself were ashamed to inhabit the space. There was no answer. 

Beyond the kitchen stretched a corridor, long and dim, whose lamps were lifeless and whose panelling bore a polish untouched by hand for untold years. A vista of doors lined either side, their brass knobs greened with verdigris, their surfaces cracked and shrivelled with the weight of time. The very grain of the wood seemed to twist into distorted semblances; faces, figures, and grotesquerie’s that leered and withdrew as I passed. 

At the far end of that corridor stood the front entrance, tall and forbidding, its panels carved in motifs of vine and serpent that writhed with disturbing vitality. Hope flared within me, raw and frantic, and with the urgency of a prisoner glimpsing freedom I flung myself upon it. 

But the door was sealed as though with the ages themselves. Paint had hardened into armour, hinges into welded iron. I clawed and pulled, struck and pressed, but the structure yielded not an inch. My hands smarted with splinters, yet left no honest mark of blood. Only a dull throb remained, unconvincing, as though the body remembered pain without truly feeling it. 

A horror stirred in me, vague yet relentless, for I sensed that something within myself was awry. The exertions of my limbs bore none of the heat, the tremor, nor the sweat of human labour. Instead, I felt only a strange weariness, as though some inner mechanism faltered under stress. 

I thrust the thought aside with vehemence, whispering to myself that fear had deceived my senses. Yet the suspicion remained, burrowing inward, that the prison was not merely of walls and doors, but of my own being. 

I staggered back from the unyielding door, trembling. My chest rose and fell with hollow regularity, but no breath seemed to stir the air. And in that moment, I knew with sickened certainty that the house had denied me not only escape, but explanation. Whatever had cast me here, it meant me to remain. Always. 

Driven by the failure of the door and by the dread of silence, I turned from that unwavering barrier and stumbled back into the corridor. The line of doors, each tarnished and inscrutable, appeared now less as portals than as sentinels; mute witnesses to my bewilderment. One by one I tried them, compelled by a feverish need to discover something, anything, that might explain my plight. 

The first opened upon a bedchamber whose curtains were thick with dust, their folds stiffened into immovable pleats by the accretion of time. A great four-poster bed dominated the room, its canopy sagging, its coverlet gnawed into tatters. Yet what most appalled me was the presence upon the pillows: a collection of small figures, arranged in mock repose. They were of porcelain and cloth, fashioned in the likeness of children, though each was marred by some defect of eye or limb. They lay as though abandoned mid-play, their heads turned towards the doorway, their faces fixed in silence. I recoiled, for it seemed to me they regarded me with expectation, as though awaiting a command that never came. 

The second chamber was a parlour, furnished with chairs of faded velvet and tables upon which no dust dared settle. Their surfaces gleamed unnaturally, as though polished not by hand but by some invisible process of decay that consumed all else. Upon the mantelpiece stood a regiment of tin soldiers, arrayed in lines so precise they might have been fixed there since the dawn of time. Yet their faces; crude, painted things - were worn away, leaving only the suggestion of eyes and mouths that blurred into hideous anonymity. 

More rooms revealed themselves: a nursery where rocking chairs stood dishevelled in a circle about a cold hearth, their motions arrested mid-sway as though an unseen company had risen in the instant before my entrance; a gallery hung with portraits whose subjects were not men and women but children, each rendered with unnatural precision, their gazes lifeless yet piercing, as though they had been commanded to stare across centuries. 

Everywhere I turned, the ornaments were present. Toys, dolls, miniature houses, rocking horses, faded drawings pinned to walls; all bore the aspect of offerings abandoned to time. They were not the innocent relics of childhood, but things wrongfully severed from their purpose, and in that severance grown monstrous. I felt myself intruding upon a mausoleum consecrated not to the dead, but to that which should never have lived. 

At last, I came upon a stair ascending into shadow. Its steps were narrow, perilously steep, and groaned beneath my hesitant tread. Yet some dreadful instinct compelled me upward, as though the answer to my torment lay not in escape but in confrontation. 

The attic spread before me vast and cavernous, its roof slanted low, its beams black with the slow seepage of years. The air was stale, thick with a dust that seemed not to have shifted since the rafters were first set. Here there was no pretence of habitation, only the naked bones of the house, looming like ribs about a hollow chest. 

Only two objects occupied this desolation. 

The first was a rocking horse, child-sized, painted once with the likeness of a mare but now so faded that its eyes were mere white orbs. Its surface was cracked, its mane reduced to a few strands of coarse hair, yet it stood upright, as though poised eternally at the brink of motion. 

The second was a box of warped boards, pushed askew against the wall. When I stooped to lift the lid, it yielded with a sigh of splintered wood, and within lay a collection of things so wretched that I staggered back. There were scraps of doll’s clothing, buttons with no garments, cracked heads of porcelain whose empty sockets gaped upward, and limbs detached yet preserved in eerie cleanliness. The whole was less a chest of toys than a reliquary of abandonment, a shrine to neglect. 

Upon the beams above I discerned faint markings. At first, I took them for scratches left by some rodent; but as my eyes adjusted, I perceived they were drawings; childish scrawls executed in crayon or chalk, their pigments long faded. Yet the shapes they traced were not the innocent figures of play. Stars with too many points, circles broken and rejoined at impossible angles, faces whose eyes multiplied in unnatural profusion; all were rendered with the innocent boldness of a child’s hand, yet conveyed geometries and proportions that defied the sanity of adult reason. 

A trembling seized me then, for I knew not whether I gazed upon the idle doodles of some long-dead youth or upon sigils of a power vast and inhuman, scribbled in sport yet potent still. The rocking horse loomed in my vision, its painted eye sockets seeming to drink the dim light, and for a moment I fancied it watched me with mute commiseration. 

It was then that the silence, so long my torment, was broken. 

From the depths of the air there arose a sound unlike any I had ever known; not the roar of tempest nor the roll of thunder, but something swifter, vaster, and more inexorable. It came not from outside the house but from above it, descending with a force that shook the rafters until dust poured from every seam. The timbers groaned, the beams quaked, and I felt the very fabric of the house strain against a power immeasurable. 

I clutched the wall in terror, for though the sound was of a storm, no wind stirred and no rain fell. The air remained heavy and unmoving, even as the rafters trembled with that unearthly clamour. The floor beneath me shuddered, a vast crack running jagged across its breadth. I stumbled, fell upon the boards, and the pain of impact rose sharp in my skull. Paralysis seized me, my limbs refusing command. I lay helpless, staring upward, as the roof itself began to split asunder. 

The rafters above me quivered as if gripped in a seizure, their ancient timbers protesting with groans that seemed to echo from beyond their own material. The thunderous sound grew, no mere roll across the firmament, but an encroaching, all-encompassing clamour, the very vibration of existence buckling beneath a descending will. 

Yet still no wind stirred. The dust which cascaded from the ceiling did not scatter but fell in slow, deliberate drifts, as though reluctant to descend. No breath of air moved to justify the tumult. It was as if the storm existed only in sound, not in substance, and that the house itself was the sole target of its dread announcement. 

I clutched the splintered boards; my body seized in a terror that forbade movement. The rocking horse loomed across the attic’s breadth, its head inclined toward me as though in mute sympathy, its stillness more accusing than comforting. Around me, the childish drawings seemed to pulse with a vitality stolen from the storm, their impossible geometries writhing in the dim light. 

And then, with a violence too sudden for preparation, the roof cracked open. 

The fissure ran straightly across the length of the attic, the boards riven as if by some cosmic talon. Darkness gaped beyond, not the familiar void of night but a lightless expanse without depth, a gulf into which the mind recoiled from gazing. The sound swelled until I felt it not in my ears but in my very bones, rattling the cage of my skull. 

I longed to cry out, to shriek against the horror, yet my voice clung uselessly to my throat. My tongue was heavy, my jaw unresponsive, as though terror itself had sealed them. Still, I struggled, emitting only a muffled moan that was swallowed by the vast uproar above. 

It was then I perceived the nature of the sound. Not storm, not thunder, but laughter; the laughter of a child magnified to unendurable proportions, its cadence both joyous and cruel. The gales of mirth swept down in invisible torrents, rattling the beams and shaking the house as though it were but a fragile toy. 

I pressed myself against the boards, wishing only to sink into their fibres, to vanish from the dreadful voice. Yet even as I prayed for oblivion, the fissure widened, and through it descended a form so monstrous in scale that my reason tottered upon the brink. 

A hand emerged; vast beyond conception, pale as dead porcelain, its surface smooth and unyielding, its nails shining like crescents of ivory. Down it reached, slow yet inevitable, brushing aside timbers and rafters as one might scatter cobwebs. Dust and splinters cascaded in its wake, but the hand remained immaculate, unblemished by the ruin it wrought. 

Its fingers groped through the attic with dreadful purpose, questing, searching. Their shadows fell across me like the bars of a colossal prison, and I felt my heart convulse in its cage; yet whether from terror or from some strange recognition, I could not tell. 

The hand descended closer. Its sheer enormity dwarfed me; each finger was thicker than my torso, each knuckle a pale mountain of smooth flesh. It moved with an awful deliberation, and I knew, with a certainty beyond denial, that I was its object. 

I tried to flee, but my limbs betrayed me. They flailed in grotesque pantomime, stiff and unresponsive, as though some invisible restraint governed their motion. I sought to crawl, to drag myself across the boards, yet progress was pitiful; a lurching, halting scramble that carried me but inches. 

The fingers closed around me. 

Cold they were, and unyielding, pressing into my sides with a firmness that brooked no defiance. I was lifted from the floor, dangling helpless in that monstrous grip, the attic receding beneath me like the stage of a vanished theatre. The rocking horse, the box of broken ornaments, the sigils upon the beams; all dwindled as I rose, borne aloft into the uncharted dark. 

For a moment I beheld the house entire beneath me. Its roof had split asunder like a lid removed from a casket, revealing its chambers in obscene cross-section. I glimpsed once more the regiment of tin soldiers, the dolls upon the pillows, the portraits of staring children; all arrayed as though awaiting this final unveiling. They were not furniture nor decoration, but companions of my imprisonment, fellow captives of that colossal will which now reclaimed me. 

The laughter swelled, reverberating not through air but through the very fibres of my being. And in that laughter, there awoke within me a truth too monstrous to endure, a truth I had sensed in fragments, but never faced entire. 

For I felt then, with sickened clarity, that my flesh was not flesh. The pressure of the hand did not bruise nor break me, but held me as one might clutch a fragile ornament. My limbs did not flail with the supple panic of life, but bent stiffly, awkwardly, as hinges rather than joints. My mouth opened in a silent scream, yet no breath stirred, no cry issued. 

I looked upon myself and knew at last. 

I was no mortal, but a toy. No traveller, but a doll imprisoned amongst the ornaments of a forgotten nursery. The house was no dwelling of man, but a penitentiary for cast-off playthings, consigned to silence until their master’s whim recalled them. 

And now the master had returned. 

The hand, immeasurable and implacable, lifted me through the fractured house into a realm of laughter and light so vast that my mind quailed. Above me loomed the colossal visage of a child; a child whose scale defied sanity, whose eyes shone with the blinding innocence of a star, and whose mirth was the thunder of worlds undone. 

I was drawn upward, inexorably, into that gaze. And in the final instant, before reason fled utterly, I understood the dreadful mercy of my imprisonment. For silence had been the only gift; silence had spared me the laughter. 

Now the laughter was mine forever.