The forbidding stone mansion, known as High Towers, stood alone on a hilltop, lost among the shadows of skeleton trees. The trees were all dead. There hadn’t been anything alive around there in twenty-three years. The trees had claws for branches, and they would rip holes into the clothes of anyone to pass. They’d scratch whoever it was until they bled to death. And, as if to be more thorough, half of the trees lay on the ground, where they could get at the visitor’s legs, ankles, and feet.

Vines that were long extinct, clung to all sides of the building’s tall, cold, stone walls, making it impossible to see any of it but the barred windows, rotted door, and caving roof.

Steep cliffs surrounded three of the mansion’s sides. The only side of the mansion that appeared to remain attached to the rest of the world was the front. A fence with sharp arrows pointing straight up along the top, circled High Towers at the bottom of the cliff, ready to impale anything that had the misfortune of falling off the cliff. Already quite a few pieces of trash hung off of it, from back when people would toss stuff over the edge, just to see if it would really get stuck. There were spider webs wound between the arrows, though the spiders had deserted the place long ago.

A winding stone path led up to the front door. Only a few of the stones in the path remained in one piece, and even those had large cracks running through them. They lay there; ready to shatter into a million pieces, as if they were made of glass, should anyone step on them.

No grass grew on the ground. It was merely covered in earth and pebbles, the slippery kind that make people trip and fall flat on their faces.

The whole place had the feeling of being dry and dehydrated, for it hadn’t rained there in longer than it had inhabited life. The wind was howling, and it sounded faintly like the wail of a crying child. There was a storm brewing in the distance. Thunder clapped, lightning lit the sky, momentarily casting shadows across the ground, though, the rain hadn’t reached the mansion on the cliff yet, and it was doubtful it ever would.

Lonely Emily Thornton, scared and lost, arrived at High Towers late that night. She was small and frightened and cold. This was the first building she had seen since she left home, and she was more than excited.

She had run away from home three days ago. She’d just left without planning any of it out. If she had stopped to think it through, she might have realized that she was going to hit uninhabited territory after only three hours. She also might of thought to bring a bag full of clothes, food, a toothbrush, and maybe even hunting materials – not that they would have helped much since there wasn’t anything to hunt. She was empty-handed and starving. As it was, she had been too mad at her parents for splitting up and fighting over her to think clearly. The only thing on her mind at the time was getting out of there. She longed for a human companion. Something, anything, to show her that she wasn’t the only living thing left on the planet. She wanted it so badly that when she saw the crumbling building she saw it in it’s original glory; a beautiful stone mansion, with towers that touched the sky, every window glowing with light from within, the sounds of a party reaching her ears, and a large oak front door with a beautiful country scene carved into it.

She took a step forward, slowly, as if in a trance. Her foot came down on one of the stones of the front walk, and with the sound of glass shattering, it broke into so many pieces it probably would’ve been damaged less if someone had intended for it to break. Emily jumped and looked around, realizing, to her dismay, that the mansion she had seen was a figment of her imagination, and that the real High Towers was falling apart. Still, hoping desperately to find some sort of human contact, she approached the front door, each of her steps smaller and more hesitant than the last, until she finally reached her destination.

Just as she reached for the rusted old doorknob, the massive oak door swung open, and there stood Sir Colin Sweetwater. Emily froze, and looked up, extremely surprised. At first, Emily thought she’d imagined him, too. She pinched herself and blinked a couple of times, trying to make herself snap out of it. When, she realized that Sir Colin wasn’t going away, that he was really there, she felt extremely stupid, and even more confused. Emily stopped and stared at him. He was tall, about six feet, with dark hair and even darker eyes. They had a mysterious glint to them, as if they were hiding a secret that she couldn’t even hope to imagine. His clothes were old-fashioned, colonial old-fashioned, the kind that you only see in the movies and in costume stores nowadays. Emily suspected that he had gotten the clothes from a costume store, but why he would be wearing them completely escaped her.

Oddly enough, Sir Colin didn’t seem to be surprised or taken aback by her reaction at all, in fact, the way he smiled at her confused expression made him seem rather amused, almost as if he expected her to react that way. “Hello. My name is Sir Colin Sweetwater, but formality bores me, so you can just call me Sir Colin. Welcome to my home,” he said with a sweep of his arm, indicating the crumbling mass that was once a building. As he did so he glowed with pride, as if it was at the height of its glory, a beautiful mansion that only the wealthiest of people could afford.

Emily, more confused than ever, didn’t know how to respond.

“Please come in. Make yourself comfortable. You look like you could use a rest on your journey,” Sir Colin said, glancing up at the large storm clouds darkening the sky.

Emily followed him dumbly into the house, still in shock from his sudden appearance and his easy-going disposition. She was so confused and startled that she wasn’t thinking straight. Had she been in her right mind she would have been more cautious about entering the strange house. But she wasn’t in her right mind and desperately needed a place to stay and shelter from the storm.

Looking nervously in every direction, Emily followed Sir Colin down what used to be the front hall, and up a crumbling, winding staircase. She didn’t see anything suspicious, aside from a strange man who called himself Sir Colin Sweetwater and who seemed not to notice that his house was caving in around him. On the walls she saw rows and rows of fading portraits of people she took to be this strange man’s relatives. Behind the portraits, she noticed that the walls had never been painted, and had several large, gaping holes in them. When she took the time to look at the stairs she was climbing, she nearly jumped out of her skin.

When she had looked at the stairs she had seen the foot-wide holes going right through them and the crumbling rock that came off of the steps with every move she made. She momentarily considered racing back down to the bottom, but thought better of it. Instead, she decided to do the opposite, and race up to the top as fast as she could, because by then she was much closer to the top of the stairs than the bottom. She ran as fast as she could, which was more than difficult considering she hadn’t eaten or slept in days. When she finally got up to the landing at the top of the stairs, she collapsed, panting like a dog, trying to catch her breath. As much as she wanted to be out of there she wanted more not to go down those stairs again, and this was still the only form of shelter for many, many miles. She marveled at the fact that she was the only one who seemed to notice that the stairs were crumbling beneath their feet.

Sir. Colin smirked at her foolish behavior, and slowly continued to make his way up the stairs, once again acting as if this bizarre occurrence was perfectly normal and he had seen it countless times before. When he reached the landing, he stood over her, still smirking, and in an extremely calm voice offered, “Since you so obviously have no place to spend the night, I would think it unkind of me not to offer you my house as a shelter for, well, as long as you need it, really. I don’t get company often, and when I do I hate to see them go, especially if they’re as exhausted and starved as you are. How about it?”

Before she could respond, Emily found herself being led down the hall by the insanely calm Sir Colin. She passed more portraits, their occupants blurring as she sped by. She nearly tripped on several occasions, and had just done so once more when they finally stopped. She looked around and found herself in what used to be a bedroom.

“You can stay here,” Sir Colin suggested, though to Emily it sounded like refusing wasn’t an option. Sir Colin then hurriedly turned around and left the room, pausing only to smile sweetly and close the door behind him.

Emily looked around the small, crumbling, dirty, room. A rotting wood dresser sagged in the corner to her left. A four-poster bed slumped against the wall opposite her. To the right of the bed, in the wall, was one of the barred windows she had seen from outside. To its right another portrait clung to the wall, this one of a depressed-looking old lady whose expression was one of pure boredom. The painter had even depicted her rolling her eyes and sighing. In the wall to Emily’s right, stood another door; identical to the one she had entered through, except for the fact that when she opened it, it led to a closet, not a hallway. The closet was lined with the same rotting wood that covered the floors, and was only about a two-foot square. The floorboards beneath her feet creaked and groaned, and sounded like the complaints of someone in great pain. The walls, just like those in the hallways, were bare and falling apart. No rug lay on the floor, only a layer of dust that had footprints in it. The footprints seemed only to enter the room, as if none of their owners had ever left, but instead remained in the gloomy little room, perhaps reading a book or napping in the bed. This confused Emily, but she was soon distracted by the fact that this was to be her new home. It wasn’t much, but at least there was shelter and the promise of food. Right then and there, she decided that this was probably the best place she was going to find without going back home, and that she would stay there as long as Sir Colin would let her.

After staying for two weeks at the mansion, Emily noticed that Sir Colin Sweetwater, the master of High Towers, often disappeared mysteriously in the middle of the night. Many nights Emily would suddenly jump up out of her bed with a question about the house or its master, and go looking for him. She would look in the room she took to be his, with its massive bed and towering dresser. She would look in the other smaller rooms, identical to hers, right down to the dusty footprints. She’d look in the kitchen, with its wood stove, the living room, with its enormous grandfather clock, and the dining room with its mile-long table. She searched every crumbling hallway and every rotting closet. She put so much of her energy into searching for him, that when she finally gave up and accepted that he was nowhere to be found, she had completely forgotten her question. The only reason she kept looking that long, was because Sir Colin’s mysterious disappearances scared her almost as much as his sudden appearance had when she’d first arrived at High Towers.

Every morning when he came back, she’d bombard him with questions about where he’d been, how long he’d been there, and whether or not he was going back the next night. He would simply smile his little smile and his eyes would twinkle, as if to say, “How foolish! You will never know where I go at night. Not in your wildest dreams could you hope to guess.”

This would make Emily feel stupid, and fall silent, at which point Sir Colin would tell her, ”All in good time. You shall know eventually, but until then I must request that you cease fire, and stop attacking me with questions on this particular subject.” With that he would walk off to read, or cook, or occupy himself in some other way.

On one such day, Emily vowed to herself that she would catch him in the act and find out where he went when he disappeared.

The next night, Emily, looking out of her bedroom window, watched him disappear into the night. He stopped only once. He paused for a moment, glancing back at the house, checking to make sure that no one was following him. He then turned around and headed off down the front path, taking no care to avoid the broken stones that lined it, though there was no sound of shattering glass, no echoing noise that would have even awoken the inhabitants of the small town Emily had come from.

Emily waited impatiently until Sir Colin had reached the end of the front walk. He seemed in no hurry to get where he was going. He took his time, and to Emily each of his steps seemed to be smaller and take longer than the last. When he finally reached the end of the walk, she bolted out of that tiny little room, and down the hall. She didn’t stop until she reached the crumbling staircase. By then she’d gotten used to it, but even she wasn’t stupid enough to just go bounding right down it. She took them one step at a time, moving slower than a snail, though she suspected she was still going faster than Sir Colin. On each step, she took at least a minute and a half carefully transferring her weight off of the last step onto it. There were fifteen steps, which meant that she took more than twenty minutes getting down the stairs alone.

That’s what she blamed it on later, the stairs. She thought it was all their fault that it happened, all their fault that when she finally reached the front door and flung it open, Sir Colin was nowhere in sight. She was stunned. She could swear that he wasn’t going fast enough to get out of sight for at least another hour. She couldn’t figure it out, unless, had he sped up after she left the window? But why would he have done that? He didn’t know she was watching him. He couldn’t have. Could he? A million questions rushed into her head, none of them accompanied by an answer. She was baffled. She was petrified. She was completely confused. Her head hurt so much from thinking about it that she decided never again to try to figure out something about Sir Colin that he didn’t want her to figure out. He was too clever, too sneaky, too smart. He’d seen what she was planning from a mile away, and there was no way she was ever going to be able to outsmart or trick him.

One night, a crypt-keeper, whom Emily vaguely remembered visiting Sir Colin once, came to high towers with a photo of something he’d found in the graveyard, and gave it to Emily. Puzzled, both by the arrival of a visitor and the photo he bore, Emily glanced down at it. All she saw was a dusty gravestone on a newly plotted grave. She couldn’t figure out what it had to do with her. She looked up to question the man, but he wasn’t there any more. By that time Emily was so used to people mysteriously disappearing and reappearing that she just shrugged it off and turned her attention back to the photo in her hand. She tried to make out the sketchy writing on the gravestone and when she finally depicted the messy little words, she froze in shock. She stared at the photo in disbelief. The name engraved in the stone was hers, Emily Thornton. Her first thought was that it was another Emily Thornton. She’d never heard of any, though she figured there must be one out there somewhere. That idea was wiped from her mind when she looked at the dates of birth and death on the tiny little stone in the picture. The date of birth was none other than her birthday, and the date of death was exactly two days after she’d run away from home. But, how could she be dead? It was impossible! There must be some mistake! She wasn’t dead! She was right there, in the flesh, perfectly alive! She even pinched herself as if to prove this fact.

The next morning when Sir Colin mysteriously returned without Emily seeing him do so, as he did every morning, Emily was waiting for him. As soon as she was aware of his return she ran to find where in the massive crumbling house he was. When she found him reading in the dining room, she didn’t say anything, she merely thrust the picture in his face, folded her arms over her chest, and stared at him. He didn’t even have to look at it to know what it was. He simply returned the photograph to Emily’s hands and sighed.

“I suppose you’ll be wanting an explanation,” he said.

To this Emily just gave him a glare that said, “No, duh!”

“Well, I’m so sorry, I really am, but I can’t offer you an explanation until one month after the date of death in the picture, which is next Friday, June 13th. That’s the rules.”

“So now there are rules?” Emily practically shouted.

“There have always been rules. You just haven’t always been aware of them,” Sir Colin replied.

“Aarrgg!!!” Emily screamed in frustration, and stormed upstairs to go sulk in her room. This was not turning out to be the most pleasant place to stay after all.

Finally, June 13th, the long awaited day arrived. Emily had stayed up all night, watching the minutes on the clock in the living room tick by, until it finally struck twelve. As soon as it did so, she turned to her left where Sir Colin was sitting beside her on the lumpy old sofa.

“All right,” he sighed, “you must be about ready to die with anticipation – no pun intended. My name is Sir Colin Sweetwater, and what little I’ve told you already is true. There are a few rules. One is that in finding out you’re dead, you must see your gravestone, not be told, not overhear people talking about, and not unknowingly walk in on your funeral.”

“That actually happens to people?” said Emily in amazement.

“Yes, that’s what happened to me. It’s quite an unpleasant way to find out. That’s why I’m stuck here, but I’ll get to that later. Another of the rules is that you can’t be told about your death, the rules, etc. until exactly one month after you died. My job is to make sure no one breaks the rules. If they do, they’ll be forced to wander this earth forever, or at least until someone else makes the same mistake. If you break one of the rules, not only can you not leave this earth, but also you must take on either my job, or that of the crypt keeper that delivers the photo of the deceased’s tombstone.”

“But how could you take care of all the dead people of the world? I haven’t seen anyone here this whole time and at least thirty other people must have died this past month.”

“That is true. That’s why there are millions of other people with the same job. They speak every language known to man, and are stationed all over the world. On average, someone with my job gets replaced after about twenty-three thousand years of this job. It would get very boring indeed, were it not for the confused expressions and hilarious things the deceased they’re caring for make and do.”

“This might sound like a stupid question, but how did I die?” Emily asked.

“You traveled too far in the wrong direction. On the second night of your journey, you slept under a tree. One of the trees branches had been waiting to fall off for centuries, and that’s when it did. You were killed instantly without even waking up.”

“There’s one more thing that’s been bugging me,” said Emily after a pause. “Those footprints in my room…”

“Ah, yes. This comes up every time. They belong to the people that have stayed here with me. When they enter the room, well, the only way to explain it is that they’re not really completely dead yet. Part of them is still clinging to life, not enough for them to return to living, if that’s what you’re thinking, but enough for them to still shatter the stones in the front walk and leave footprints in the dusty floors of my mansion. They only stay that way for about thirty-six hours though, and since no one ever arrives here within a day of their death, they go into the room leaving footprints, and exit leaving no trace of their departure.”

“W-when do I leave?” Emily asked nervously.

“Tonight you will go to sleep in your bed, as usual. Tomorrow, you will wake up no longer in this world.”