The cold was bone deep and grating, impossible to ignore, though each of the boys tried, glancing at the others from the corners of their eyes to see if their companions had succumbed, whether they could surrender. There was one at the back of the group of half a dozen, spangle limbed and all knobbly joints and awkward angles. He made no effort to hide the effect of the chill; his arms were wrapped tightly around himself and he was shivering, teeth chattering. He had nothing to prove to the others. And yet, he was there. They'd made the suggestion, thrown down the gauntlet, and known all along that he'd come along with them. He hadn't disappointed his tormentors. It was fear that drove him here. Fear that they would punish him, fear that they would make life harder for him then it already was. And a small, meager, hope, that he could stop the way they tortured him. The house they stood in front of was immense. White washed, with columns decorating the front aspect of the building, large bay windows, and a slate roof. It exuded an air of luxurious depression, abandonment, an impression of a fat woman slowly wasting away, her dress rotting away into rags at the same time as the flesh melted from her bones, glory disappearing into neglect.

“Come on then, Jones.” Laughter spread like the ripple of wind through dead branches: hushed, but harsh, and yet quickly stifled. The bigger boys glanced at each other from the edge of their peripheral vision, pretending comfort, but uneasy, and all of them unwilling to take that last step. The awkward titters spread through the group again, then one of them grabbed Jones and pushed him forward.

“Go on, open it then.” Their eyes gleamed with brash eagerness; the manic, empty, gaze of those who were frightened, but forced themselves forward anyway. They leaned forward as the boy, Thomas Jones, took steps into the amphitheater they had created around the door, eagerly watching. The door was pushed open. Slowly. It was silent, though they might have expected resistance from a lock, and an alert from squeaking, rusted, joints. They exchanged worried looks, none of them willing to put voice to the thought none of them could suddenly get out of their heads. The Manor had been abandoned for twenty years, at least. The last owner had moved before they were born. As the door opened, a hush descended upon them like a blanket. The air seemed heavier, hotter, suddenly. It settled over them, and none of them made a sound. The evanescent moment lasted until Jones took another step forward. His foot landed on the wooden boards inside the house, dust billowed upwards and outwards, swirling and pouring through the air, shining in the lights from the lanterns a few of the boys carried. The zephyr from the outside, the first fresh air the house had breathed in twenty years, picked up the dust and carried it inside. The movement spread, until suddenly it seemed like there was something almost... alive about the house. It had woken.

At his back, the other boys started goading Jones to go further inside. They harried and hurried him, whispering threats of punishment, accusations of cowardice, promises of glory. He let his head be turned, and moved further into the house. The world held its breath. Nothing happened. Jones turned slightly, gestured for the others to join him, a gleam of the beginnings of hysteria gathering in the darks of his eyes. They dithered and procrastinated, each one avoiding looking at the other boy and each other, each of them suddenly fascinated in the grain of the wood, the smoothness of the banister, the color of the ceiling. There was the smell of something... putrid beginning to gather in the young boy's nostrils. Shivers running up and down his spine, he knew the smell, he hated the smell. He wanted to leave, right then, but he knew he couldn't do that. His mind was filled with the smell, his eyes could see the pustules, the blackened and bruised skin, he could hear the labored breathing and that rattle that foretold death and made you wait, holding every one of your own breath, until they got slower, and slower, and slower, and stopped. The panic built in him. One by one, the others joined him, and gained the gleam in their eyes, looking around wildly, nostrils flaring, eyes shining, hands clenched. The symptoms of fear were the same in all of them. Fear unified them.

The Ringleader started taking those first few uncertain steps further into the building. He turned around, facing the rest of them, his eyes a little wide and his smile uneven, forced. He kept cocking his head and looking around, as if he were seeing things out of the corner of his eye... but dismissing it.

“Come on, then. A book, each, from the library. The one who turns back is a coward.” He gave a burst of rash laughter that no on else took the liberty of joining in with. They all knew the stories about this house, about what had happened here, a hundred and fifty years ago. How the last owner had fled, twenty years ago, after only a few months of attempted renovations. Like all of them. And the library? That was at the center of everything.

One by one, they followed the leader, walking in a smattering of groups of two and three, while their ringleader stepped out with forced confidence, chin up, stride long, and a cloak of desperation clutched about him. No one was fooled by his patchwork confidence.

As they moved further and further from the front door, wandering through the house, hoping to stumble on the library and their prize, the stench of decay, of disease, of infection and illness and rotting flesh grew more pungent in Jones' nostrils, and slowly, faint sounds of someone breathing grew, right behind his ear. He was scared to turn his head. The other boys seemed to be the same. Skittish and unnerved, they jumped at shadows, looking around constantly. They knew there was no one there but themselves, but they just had to make sure.... Dust lay thick over everything. As they walked through the corridors and hallways of the house it billowed at their feet, making more strange shapes and images that they flinched at as they saw them out of the corner of their eyes. The flickering, unsteady light of the lanterns didn't help matters. They picked out some shapes to cast their glow upon, but left ragged corners and edges of darkness that the boys all avoided looking into. The glow of the full moon from the long bay windows they passed pressed a glow into the house as well, but it was a cold, sterile, light, not cheerful like the mini flames they carried in their lanterns.

When the levee broke, it was dramatic. One of the boys, near the back, suddenly yelped, as if he'd seen something. Another, hearing the yelp, shouted, and yet another screamed, starting to spin around, as if trying to catch a sight of something. The leader of the boys almost dropped his lantern, ferociously patting down his legs and his chest and sides and arms, brushing off imaginary terrors as he screamed and screamed. The stink of old destruction loomed sharp and fierce in Jones' nostrils and he started whimpering, spinning around, sure the source was about to come clear, in one moment or the next. A flare of light in the clouds of dust the boys were kicking up suddenly solidified into an eerie creature of mist and dust and sparkling particles. Renewed cries sprang up as boys caught sight of the being, hovering before them. Screams of 'spiders!' or 'wolf!' were individual to the boys, but all of them ran, except for Jones. He stood before the being with his eyes wide with horror, stiff with his terror, and paralyzed, unable to move. The smell that had been clear and thick in his nose since they arrived was stronger then ever. To Jones, it seemed like the scent was alive, and wanted nothing more then to shove itself up nose and down throat, and turn his stomach, as well as infuse his clothes with its residue and leave a remnant of itself there to torment him. The thing of mist and dust smiled, sadly, and reached out to Jones. There was wordless appeal in the thing's eyes. A grin cocked its lips, but that was probably just because because its lower lip was missing, and the upper was drawn back in a rictus of pain. The hand it extended to the boy was skeletally thin, bones easily visible from beneath the gray skin, lacerations decorating the length of the arms, twisting about her forearms like snakes. Cuts that held no blood, only occasionally bone gleaming through, silver in the light. Jones watched the thing wide eyed.

“M-m-mother?” He asked weakly, then turned his head and emptied his stomach, messily and without control. It didn't speak, just withdrew its extended arm, embracing itself and touching its chest, its heart, in a grotesque parody of motherly love. Jones finally felt the paralysis leave his limbs, and he bolted, heading for the doors. He could still smell it, though. Every ragged breath he took was thick with the stink of his Mother's decay. His ears were full of the sounds of her final breaths. There was a skittish echo to the pounding of his feet, as if something followed him, something solid and real, but Jones couldn't bring himself to turn around.

He threw himself at the door the others had disappeared through, tugging and straining at the handle, pulling at it even after he accepted that it was locked behind the cowards and he was trapped. His mind flashed back to the staircase, wide and white and pure, innocently gleaming in the moonlight, the one that they'd climbed as they approached the house. He remembered the height of the staircase, and how all the windows were higher then the ground floor, and he knew that he'd die if he tried to fly from them. He turned around. Slowly. The thing was there, it was advancing on him, slowly, its grotesque grimace a sick mimic of a caring smile. Just accept it, it seemed to be saying. Its arms were spread, welcoming. Just accept it. Join me in Death.

“No! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!” Jones screamed, trying to make it leave him alone, and broke into a galloping run, ungraceful and far from dignified, full of desperation and a need to get away from the stench and the thing that had the body of his Mother. He'd tried as hard as he could to help her and his Father get better. He'd tried! It wasn't his fault! Phantoms followed him through the corridors and hallways, the swinging light of the lantern in his hand casting shadows over the walls that twisted and distorted the shapes of the paintings hanging there, abandoned, and the signs of what had happened, one hundred and fifty years ago. Impossibly, Jones could see them. Here, someone had slashed at the wallpaper with something sharp. A belt knife, or a sword. There, they'd slashed at the curtains, broken windows, knocked the table to the floor and trampled it. The mutters of an angry mob echoed from the past as Jones' footsteps thundered down the corridor. He didn't know it, but his wild flight took the same pathway as their determined onslaught. He passed wall sconces that had been wrenched from the wall and broken, the faint scorch marks of incinerated tallow on the wooden floorboards. As Jones crashed around the corner, hearing his Mother's footsteps tearing up the distance between them, he knocked into a side table, sending it crashing to the floor, shucking its porcelain bowl and the fungal remains of whatever had once been in there.

The smell that had bothered him the whole time in this house grew suddenly stronger, and Jones stumbled to a halt as he caught sight of the man that stood before him. Abruptly, he started crying. It was his Father, in the same putrid state of affairs as his Mother. They'd died together, now they walked together, to torment their only living child.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry...” The boy murmured over and over again, raising his hands in a placating gesture, slowly backing away from the man who'd raised him, who'd died from the same sick and twisted killer as his Mother. If they touched him he'd catch it too, and he'd died in the splayed limb paralysis and jerky convulsions they had, growing skeletally thin and having his flesh peel open in long strips and the stink of rotting meat suffuse his being, even before he died. Death would be a release, from that. But he didn't want death. There was a door at his side. He slipped inside, and realized, to his horror, that his parents had shepherded him here, to the library.

Phantom flames licked the walls in the fireplace, but also on either side of it. The smell of decay and infection was strong here, but his parents weren't, and that's all that mattered. They weren't going to make him pay. As the door shut behind him, a draft blew through the library, ripping and pulling at his hair and carrying with it the enraged scream of a petulant, spoiled young man. The apparition appeared, floating over a pile of bone fragments and dust that had been somehow untouched by the vicious wind that had torn through the room moments before. It was screaming, railing and ranting and cursing him, gesticulating violently. Its clothes were old: breeches and boots and a tailored coat with a peculiar cut, 150 years out of fashion. Heavy velvets, dark and violent colors: crimson, purple, a heavy, dirty gold. Lace hung heavy at his throat, at his wrists, incongruous with his behavior. The smell grew warm and heavy around Jones, and he vomited again, unable to cope with the memories that flooded him at the change, because now it smelled like his parents had, when they were dying. It smelled alive. He was watching the man who'd been murdered so brutally in this very room, forced to watch him, the young man who'd been ripped limb from limb by the villagers who'd been pushed over the edge by their young Lord's rape of a young woman who'd refused him. He'd stood here on his death-day, confident that he was untouchable, and laughed at them, ordering them to get back to the fields, full of his mud and their shit, and raise his crops.

Abruptly, Jones realized that the young man was laughing, and that his appearance had changed. Now, he had the same diseased look as his parents, his flesh rotting from the bones that would not rest. He took slow, measured steps towards him, and the smell increased. Two fold. Four fold. It doubled and doubled and doubled, until Jones was dry retching, and it was all he could do to stay on his feet. Then remain upright as he knelt. And then, lift his head from where he crouched, on all fours. The nobleman was standing over him, reaching down as if to cup his face in his hands, almost tenderly. He knelt in front of Jones. The smell was so strong that he thought it was searing his sense of smell from his nostrils. The nobleman's hands hovered a millimeter from the surface of his face. He leaned forward, lips parted, about to give the boy the kiss of death, and Jones' terror was a force that erupted. He had breath. Ghostly breath. The smell of it reminded Jones of the tales of the four horsemen he'd been taught about. Disease, Famine, Death, War... There was something fundamentally evil about his bearing, his appearance, his scent. He leaped to his feet, pushing past the ghost in a rush of frigid, impossibly cold air that engulfed him momentarily. Backing away from the ghost as he continued to advance on him, he swung his lantern at him, keeping him back with the threat of fire. The lantern slipped. He let go of it. It flew through the air in a perfect parabola of flight, and landed, crashing open and dousing the pile of bones and dust in lantern oil, before setting it alight. The nobleman's ghost froze, and then opened its mouth in a soundless scream, a cry of agony, of terror. The fire consumed him, flickering in eerie, ethereal shades of red and yellow, green and blue, purple and orange, combinations of the vivid shades scattered across and throughout the fire, as the bones were devoured by the hungry flames. The ghost's presence, the sense of evil that hung about the house in the stench of him, the heavy foreboding feeling of the supernatural presence disappeared as the ghost did, the fire leaving nothing more then a black patch of burnt floor, and a faint smell of burnt hair.

Jones wept for his parents, for his guilt, for the travesty that had taken them from him. He remembered their faces before the disease had ravaged them and recalled the beauty of his Mother's laugh and the hearty jolliness his Father carried everywhere with him like a cloak about his shoulders. He remembered the day they'd succumbed to the disease, how they'd assured him that they'd be fine, the way he'd insisted on caring for them... and he wept. Because they were gone. They'd been taken, and he'd been spared. He didn't know why, but it was something he'd have to accept. It was the hand of God. Not punishing him... but sparing him. For some future works. Slowly, he shed the weights of grief and guilt from his shoulders, and made his way out from the depths of the finally empty house.