A Room of Dusty Bones

They found a hidden room in the abandoned old house: they didn’t own the house but they had to be there, workers who opened things up, replaced and fixed things. The house always was a sore thumb in the neighborhood, a strange castle, and everyone always thought bad things happened there—murders, madness, miscarriages—and they were right, at least the workers found when they opened up the walls and found the hidden room, with the antique wallpaper in the faded saffron (the kind that had arsenic in it) and the chains rusted on the walks and the bathtub (clawfoot) and a box of stained knives and a more than a few dusty bones. And it wasn’t a good idea to be in there, they knew, but they were told to go in, bring everything down. But when they went in the walls cracked open, and they found more hidden doors leading to more hidden rooms; passages, catacombs, dungeons, with naked horrors still screaming, and they realized the place wasn’t abandoned at all.