SUBCUTANEOUS 1.9

It's been a while, but the autumnal vibe and fresh air of today has got me HYPE for some good old fashioned urban horror baby! Welcome back to VISCERAE! Also, if you haven't voted yet, DO IT NOW! Still got time, a lot of voting locations stay open until 7-8!

_________________________________________________________________________________

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. 

Ilia elects to powerwalk into the unknown rather than stroll. 

Phone, keys, wallet. Phone, keys, wallet. She goes over the tools she has on her, the only tools she 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 her hand. Home, car, mailbox- not a lot going on, but enough to slip between each of the fingers on her right hand into a very poorly designed and improved set of brass knuckles.

Wallet- so someone can identify her if she is found dead in this fucking forest. Grim, but practical. And if she’s doing this, she’s 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 been seen in years, 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 she’s definitely not worrying about bears more than she’s worried about any animal in years to avoid thinking of the other possibility. Nope. No sirree. 

Ilia is doing just fine, yessir.

It’s fine. She made the choice, and now all she has to do is follow through. That’s the easy part, in her experience. That’s the part that she’s 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 her feet is a mix of bare dirt and gravel, struggling for supremacy over the path as slowly and inexorably as time allows and making for a crackling sound as she walks. The light of the sun weaves in between the branches, making the afternoon shine golden.

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

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

She takes in a deep, deep breath, and focuses on what’s in front of her.

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, with 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 with a chain wrapped around the handle. It might once have been a lived-in home, but that was likely decades ago, and it does not care to invite the living back through its walls.

And yet… she’s come this far.

And her eyes, no matter how intensely the house emits its seething ambivalence to the living, are drawn back to that one window.

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

She’s come this far. 

Now, to see it through. 

She takes off her jacket and lays it over the edge of the window. It’ll get filthy, but better it than her, and better to avoid any leftover glass that might dig into her if she isn’t careful. She crawls over it into that yawning square, that window of pitch, and tumbles out the other side.

Immediately, the floor buckles beneath her, and the smell of mold and rot crawl out of the broken floorboards and into her eyes.

She sneezes, then she retches, then she starts coughing, waving a hand desperately in front of her face. Ilia’s never been the most athletic sort, so the dismount was already plenty awkward, but she actually stumbles as she tries to take a step out of the dent she’s made- and makes another.

She backs up onto the windowsill, the sharp edges of it beneath her jacket more stable and somehow less threatening than the collapse all around her. It takes a few seconds for her to clear her airways and wipe the tears from her eyes.

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 she almost wishes it wasn’t. If it was entirely dark, maybe she could convince herself to leave.

The living room she’s crashed into looks almost like an art piece. Whoever last lived here… they never packed up. 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, she sees a dining table, one of its legs eaten away until its collapsed and partially broken through the compromised floor, the chairs surrounding it more useful as kindling than seating.

She’s faced with hallways, now. Whatever she’s looking for, it’s not immediately apparent here, but she’s already inside- now to follow through.

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

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

Ilia can’t help but give a little laugh. Honestly, the premise seems like an adventure game. One of those “choose your own adventure” stories. That’s… heh. At home, on her laptop, she’d have ducked straight into the dark hallway. That, or dashed to the kitchen, try to find some leftover equipment she could use as a weapon. 

Here, she’s quaking in her fucking shoes. 

One wrong step, and she breaks an ankle. Or wakes up a patch of black mold. Or there’s a fucking serial killer living here who she’s already alerted to her presence by exploding the floor.

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

She hasn’t seen any signs of the supernatural yet. No weird veins, 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.

Ilia reaches deep, as far down as she can into her core. She lets out a slow, painful breath, trying not to cough again.

She looks back up at the dilapidated house, and thinks a mantra to herself.

Fuck it, we ball.

She has 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. Slowly, she makes her 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, she notices, 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 and a thick leather duster. On closer inspection, there’s a winter jacket beneath it, all polyester and artificial sheen- sized for a child.

She shudders, 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, she goes from cabinet to cabinet, checking everything, and once again, finds herself 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. She wonders if she should open the freezer and fridge, just to check- but one errant sniff too close to the sink convinces her 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.

She makes her way through the kitchen doorway back into the living room, close to the dining set. 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 she needs.

She reaches down to one of the chairs, trying to find a way to spread her balance across an area and wincing at the sound the floor makes. She takes a breath, coughing at the smell, and gets ready to yank-

And the leg of the chair comes right off.

She stares down at it. Gives 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 she found, doesn’t offer a guarantee of tetanus. 

Huh. Weapon acquired.

She can practically taste the game in the back of her mind, telling her what to see. Wooden Club (low grade): +2 Melee, -1 Agility. Heh. 

Focus. 

She turns to the dark hallway. Then she faces the stairs, heading up, and then the door to what she assumes must be the basement, still chained shut.

Left, center, right. 

Choose your path, adventurer. Heh.

She turns left, towards the dark hallway.

Better to explore the whole ground floor first, even if she doesn’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 she’s not even sure how she’d get the basement open. Better to finish checking down here, even if she has to partially sacrifice her hold on her new club to get her phone light out.

She shines the light, and has to blink at the harshness of how bright it turns out, now that her eyes have adjusted. She looks toward the open window in alarm.

It’s getting dark out. She doesn’t have as much time as she thought, especially if she’s going to make it back to her car before it falls to night.

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

She’s 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. She walks down the hall, shining her flashlight, and sees three features- 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 she’d like, she opens up the first door- bathroom. Empty, linoleum-white turned yellow-green, smelling of acidic chemicals gone to rot and stagnant water. Nothing she can see in there. She closes the door again, taking another step forward-

She stops. Stares at the wall.

She hadn’t really processed them earlier, but… there are picture frames. Hanging in the hallway, along its length. The fear had her focusing on the doors, but the way she’s standing, checking the bathroom, the light from her 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, she thinks she can see a park or sunny background behind them.

None of them have faces.

The staining is there again, but it doesn’t take up the whole upper half of the 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.

She shudders.

Yep. Time to get moving.

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

She stops 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.

She goes to open the last accessible door, what she’s guessed to be a guest room, and-

Click.

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

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

Good or bad, she still doesn’t know. But she’s come this far.

She gives the door the lightest push with her club, waiting for it to swing all the way open before she steps in.

Her 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. 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 she’s 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 she can see. But right there, staring her in the face, is the oldest piece of technology she’s 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.

Ilia’s always been a nerd. Wikipedia dives are her whole thing, and gaming is her current passion. It’s only the sheer weirdness of the setting that makes it take so long for her to recognize an Atare 2600. 

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

Around the time the house was abandoned, maybe?

She’s never seen one in person, never touched one before, but she’s researched them. 

This one has a cartridge in it.

She moves so, so slowly. Her light tracks over everything she can see, refusing to leave even a single angle untouched. 

She enters the room, slowly setting down her club… and reaches for the cartridge.

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

She lets out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding, turning it over and putting her 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.