skeletongrrl: I N T R O D U C I N G: THE HOUSE THAT HOLDS. after this point lies a ever-shifting cur

skeletongrrl:

I N T R O D U C I N G: THE HOUSE THAT HOLDS. after this point lies a ever-shifting curation. when something grows comfortable, it becomes honest. this is the law. ( psd by @inspurations)

GENRE: postmodern cosmic horror
POV: first person
THEMES: love. want. possession. taking. holding. the single law.
CONTENT WARNING: body horror, death, one massive liminal space and all that entails.

Before me sits the House, that impossible mass of grey and black, its many windows peering back. Each one is the color of pitch, some black gem that absorbs all and reveals nothing. I have been waiting here for two days on this place I can only describe as a kind of macabre porch, a slab of desolate white rock that stretches out from the door. That door, too — that wretched thing, taunting me with its lack of locks, with the light that creeps underneath it, promising whatever lies on the other side is bright. Light itself bends around it. It is a half-foot taller than me. Sometimes it looks solid. Sometimes it looks like liquid. I have stood in front of it several times during my lonely vigil here, and each time a quality shifts.

The legends say that the House changes on its whims. They say that it is alive, that it feels and thinks but not as we do. In the same way its physical landscape is unknowable to us, so too is its mind. Warroes wrote of it first in his seminal Treatise On Outer Spaces, which I have read many times in preparation for this very expedition. He never ventured into the House, of course. He was, however, lucky enough to be a mere thirty-five years old when the House opened during his lifetime, and so he was there on this same doorstep that I sit when it opened.

“You may expect that it would be a great pit,” he wrote, “fitting of a devourer of things. You may expect the reek of acid rising in its guts, its front hall an esophagus and its doorway a mouth. Yet what I saw was nothing so traditionally grotesque. Indeed, this construction, which I have called the House that Holds, so named because it neither chews nor digests but seems to merely possess, is resplendent with light. The glimpse I saw of its interior reflected the infernal angles of the exterior. It is said that the House once stole a sun for itself. I thought that it might keep the sun in its heart or its stomach, in the same way we keep boilers and steam huffing away in our ships to battle the cold. But perhaps it keeps that captive star there in its front hall like a burning trophy. What further testament to the power of its captivity does it need than to tame the wildest beacon we know, mere steps from its threshold?”

Perhaps he was right. I have long been skeptical of Warroes, as some of his later expeditions were proven to be false. All of those, however, are after the House. I wonder if what he saw here changed him somehow - that it made everything else less of an aspiration, or the wondrous terror he felt settled so deep in his bones that he could no longer allow himself to leave the lights of home.

I know I have felt afraid here, in a way that is new even to me.

TAG LIST:@glittcrpeach/@inspurations / dm or reply to be added!