Hoarder

“God it must’ve been horrible lying down here for weeks.”

I gave Jessie a withering look as he got up to change the water in his bucket. When he saw that both Mrs Janners and I were sharing an uncomfortable silence he tried to act as if nothing had happened, but the effort was clumsy.

“I’d bought him a mobile phone,” the older woman said, her voice mousy and tired. “He just wouldn’t keep the damn thing on him. If he had perhaps…”

“No need to explain,” I replied.

“It’s just I tried to see him whenever I could but he wasn’t a nice…”

“You don’t owe anyone an explanation,” I said trying my best to appear empathetic and non-judgemental. “We’re here to just clean up and help out. Now, if there isn’t anything else we need to know I think it’s time we got on with things on our end and you can carry on with your day.”

“Oh,” she said as I took her by the arm and started walking her out of the bedroom. “Oh there is one more thing.” She turned from me and walked towards a small cupboard door beneath the stairs. “There’s a small basement down here where he’s got a few more things boxed up. Look the key’s just in the lock ready so,” she opened the door and gestured downwards. “It’s awfully dark so if you haven’t brought any torches I can…”

“Oh don’t worry about that we bring plenty of light in case something happens with the electrics,” I said. “We’ll make sure to clear the basement out. Is there anything in particular down there that you might want to keep?”

“If you find any photos can you put them aside?”

“Of course.” I smiled before taking her to the door and saying my goodbyes. After she left I went back and looked down the tiny basement stairway and made a mental note of when and how it would be best to approach that part of the job.

I found Jessie in the downstairs bedroom where he was still on his hands and knees scrubbing away at the faintly human-shaped stain in the floor. We had already disposed of the rectangular section of carpet that Mr Rittle had lain upon, and now we faced the daunting task of trying to clear out any seepage that had soiled the underlying wood floor.

“Sorry about that,” Jessie said when I came in. “It just slipped my mind and I forgot she was standing there. I know it wasn’t very professional but it’s just it’s weird, y’know?”

“It’s alright,” I said running my dusty hands through my hair. “Just be careful. If she hadn’t already paid us a deposit that could have cost us the gig.”

“You’re right,” he replied. “I’ve done this job for long enough I should know better.”

“Yeah but to be fair, this is…” Mr Rittle was unique to us in a few ways. Not only had he died a horrific and messy death, but he had a strange fixation of acquiring other people’s garbage and his enormous 43 bedroom manor was filled with trash he’d bought and stolen from anyone he could find. There was no rhyme or reason to what he kept or why. All around me stood stacks of misshapen books and stolen bin bags interlaced with leaflets and old food wrappers. Looking to my left I saw a bent and rusty nail framed with the Roman numerals CLXXIX engraved in the wood, while on my right was a small cluster of toenails arranged in descending of thickness. “This is something else,” I said, finally finishing my sentence. “When are the others arriving?”

“Pinnie text me fifteen minutes ago to say they were on their way but Jay’s still on holiday,” Jessie replied, standing up to change the bucket once again. Walking over I took a long look at the stain, pausing briefly to kneel down and examine a slight pitting in the floor, almost as if jabbed the wooden boards with a knife over and over. Seeing me fixated on the floor, Jessie returned and said, “Yeah it’s slow progress.”

“Aye,” I agreed. “But still progress. Keep at it.”

-

I unearthed the first painting behind a pile of laundry as tall as a man. The sodden mouldy clothes had rotted much of the canvas, spoiling the painting until it looked like a psychedelic nightmare. Despite the coverage, or perhaps because of it, the subject looked all the more haunting. It was a church, the outline dissolving into shadow-black mould. Alone, standing unusually tall by the front door, was the figure of barely visible man painted blacker than black, glistening through the canvas like liquid obsidian. The paint looked so fresh as to be wet, and I hesitated and stopped myself before I touched it out of mindless curiosity.

Holding it, I suddenly felt watched in the cramped confines of the towering filth. I turned to check the doorway behind me and for some reason I frightened myself by imagining the painted man standing in the corridor. It was a silly thing to daydream, but it bothered nonetheless and when I put the painting aside I made sure to turn it facing towards the wall.

Over the next few days another four paintings were found. The second was discovered by Pinnie who brought it over with a disgruntled expression. While he was usually untalkative something about his silence on this occasion struck me as sombre and depressed. When I asked if he’d looked at it he answered, without stopping to talk to me as he made his way back upstairs:

“Blood hideous thing.”

I took a quick peak myself and was startled by the faint impression of something juddering towards me through the frame. In fact, I was simply looking at a copy of the same painting I had found except the perspective had moved closer towards the church door, enlarging the subjects and creating, in my mind, the illusion of movement. A proper look revealed that the image was static (what else did I expect?) and while the figure and church door were shrouded in the usual darkness, the mould and filth had done unusual things to the spires of the church, lending them a subtle fleshy quality.

That same day, Jessie was found being sick next to the third and fourth paintings that were found as a pair. Quietly I moved the canvasses aside to avoid further damage and checked him out to make sure he was okay. He was insistent that it the intense smell coming from a jar of pickled-something he’d dropped, but when I looked at the two paintings he’d found I came to suspect otherwise. Much like the others they were of the same subject, each one bringing the church and the painted man closer and closer to the viewer in a most unpleasant way. Slowly the pastor came into focus until the blackness was broken with tiny flecks of detail; a squarish bit of off-white for a face, two long needle-like stabs for hands, and the tiniest fleck of red beneath his feet.

As the man came closer with each new painting, so too did the church and mould merge to create an increasingly surreal architecture. By the final painting, its spires looked like tumorous growths of bone and meat, standing unnaturally tall against an alien sky of red and violet bruises that burst across the canvas. It reminded me of every piece of rotting flesh I’d ever seen, and I felt a visceral urge to look away.

After that I sent Jessie home for the day, suspecting that the paintings had affected him quite severely. When he returned the next morning, he was quiet and baggy-eyed. Pinnie suggested to me that he’d been drinking but I had a gut-feeling something else was playing on his mind. After all, I’d cleaned up that jar and seen the cabbage-headed foetus he’d been holding and I knew the paintings were just one strange facet of this job. I started to wonder if it was sensible to leave each of us alone as we burrowed through this unnatural hoard.

“It’s like we’re journeying through someone else’s madness,” Jessie said one lunch and surprisingly Pinnie gave a nod of agreement. “I found a piece of paper today that just read ‘everything here has taken a life’ and I can’t stop wondering if it’s true, or if he just thought it was true, or if it’s a joke, or a prediction, or what?”

“How does a toenail take a life?” I asked.

“Infection?” Pinnie suggested gruffly. “My grandfather died because his belt loop caught a door handle and he went straight over, turning at the hip, and wacked his head on the floor. He was so scared of the drop he had a heart attack.”

Jessie let out a tempered snicker but immediately covered it with his hand. A moment later and I let out a chuckle and then, not long after, so did Pinnie.

“He just went over like a windmill,” Pinnie added after the laughter had died down before adding, as if it was some important reassurance, “Jay will be here tomorrow. We can get through this job even faster with him.”

Something about the absurdity of that lunch had calmed me and I returned to work feeling a little more grounded, except bad luck would have it that barely an hour after our conversation, I found the fifth painting. At first I tried not to look at it but I couldn’t help myself. I’d put it against the wall and continued working but my every movement felt watched. I could feel it there, behind me. Every time I bent down to grab something off the floor some instinctual alarm went off and I would snap up alert as if expecting something to…

I don’t know. I felt like a kid taking a long walk home as the sun was setting on a winter afternoon, briskly moving between each streetlight terrified that something would snatch me from the shadows in between. After I nearly dropped a whole box of milk bottles I was forced to admit that I was letting my imagination get the better of me and I finally leaned the painting back to get a good look at it.

As I did, the light from above fell across it in one smooth movement, the shadow withdrawing like a pulled curtain and I swear that figure shuddered out of the background and right up to the very front of the painting, his whole face taking up the window of the canvas. I cried out, let go of the frame, and it fell backwards with the thud of a church bell. The pastor’s face was leering up at me, a strange impression of a misshapen milky head framed by a sturdy-brimmed black hat, the face devoid of any real detail as if seen through a cataract. And yet it radiated hate, a pencil-thin mouth sneering at me through the incohesive brush strokes.

I was shaking when I pulled it back up, and much to my shame I later asked a passing Jessie to take it down to the others because I was too busy. I couldn’t quite bring myself to touch it again, not after I noticed the wet paint against the wall where it had been leaning.

-

“I assumed he’d been painting them,” Jay said holding the canvas with both hands. When I’d heard he’d found one just a few hours into his first day at the house I felt a lurch in my stomach but was relieved to find it wrapped top to bottom in brown wrapping paper, a thin piece of string tying it all together. In one corner was a label with Mr Rittle’s address.

“Could be a different one,” Jessie said.

“Should we look?” Jay asked. Before he’d begun working in the morning, Pinnie had taken him aside and shown him the paintings. Jay had yet to speak about their effect on him but I could clearly see a fear in his eyes as he’d asked whether we wanted to look at the sixth canvas.

“I think we have to,” Jessie said. “We’ve seen the others.”

“No,” I replied with a shake of my head, and both Jay and Pinnie voiced their agreement but Jessie piped up,

“It’s probably not even the same one. For all we know this was a Christmas gift. You guys can’t be serious can you? We really need to look at it.”

For the life of me I couldn’t understand Jessie’s angle, and I dismissed any argument and instead instructed Jay to take the painting down with the others while I kept Jessie busy on the upper floors. Personally, I felt immense relief to know the painting was hidden from us, for we were barely 8 rooms into the house and I already felt emotionally drained in a way that begged to give up on the job. And something about Jessie wanting to open it unsettled me; he’d never had a ghoulish streak before. Did he not feel the same repulsion that the rest of us did?

When the day ended he came to and asked once more if he could look, and I told him no. I ignored his complaints and told him he needed to keep his head focused on the task ahead, trying my best to emphasise the money we’d be paid for doing it. He nodded a faint agreement when I reminded him about his upcoming wedding, but as I watched him stagger to his car I wondered if I’d made any impact on him at all.

When he didn’t come in the following day I initially thought he’d just taken the day off. Normally I would have been furious, but I believed he had good reason on this occasion. Having spoken to Pinnie and Jay it was clear we were all finding this job unusually stressful, and I hoped that when Jessie returned he might bring back enough good energy to raise all our spirits.

Except at the end of that day, as I was locking up, I went to check on the reception area where the paintings were kept and noticed that the latest one in its brown wrapping paper was stacked at a slight angle. I approached it and felt a knot in my throat when I saw a fold of torn paper stuffed between it and the canvas beside it. By the time I leaned it back my stomach was in my throat, and I found no relief at what I found.

The paper had been torn open revealing the painting within, except now there was just the church door rendered in peculiar child-like detail. Around the edges veins of corruption curled just out of sight, like bloody smoke, but there was no pastor, no grim faced spectre standing guard. I reached out and touched the slimy paint and saw that it was still wet and wiped it away on a nearby desk. As I did so I noticed something rather alarming on the floor.

With everything being moved around, it was hard to say if the scratches in the wood were new or old, but I left the darkening house as quickly as I could, looking up at it in my rear view mirror only when I felt that I was far enough down the driveway to be safe. And yet I still nearly veered off the road at the sight of a black figure standing by the doors. Of course, by the time I straightened up the wheel and steadied the car I checked and nothing was standing there. I told myself it was just my imagination, but when the morning came I was not surprised to find out Jessie had failed to turn up to work.

-

We found no more paintings after that, but Jay, Pinnie, and I continued to work under an increasingly anxious mood. Together we had no problem avoiding the paintings and I desperately hoped that would be the end of the weirdness. But I quickly realised how wrong I was for nearly every room had a litany of bizarre and unsettling finds. There were scrapbooks filled with bloodied clothes, strange words carved into the walls, mirrors with delayed reflections, but they were the least of it.

The worst was the sex doll.

In all my years clearing out hoarder’s homes unpleasant sex stuff was incredibly common. When Jay first radioed in, telling everyone he’d found homemade sex doll, I almost felt a kind of relief. It almost felt like something we’d expect in a normal place. But even a simple cursory look at the thing made of padded foam and old women’s clothes, all covered with uncomfortable rust-brown stains, had me questioning Jay’s conclusion. Before I could say anything, Pinnie spoke up.

“Where’s its mouth?”

“Are you sure it’s wise to be touching it?” I added.

“Gotta have a strong stomach for this job, you told me that on the first day,” Jay said. “I mean, it’s a sex doll, right? It has to be? He’s an old man with urges and… and…”

It was an absurd facsimile of a woman, a misshapen lump of green, blue, and purple padded foam cut haphazardly into a misshapen hour-glass figure like an amateur mannequin. For a face it had a porcelain mask shaped like the image of a geisha, except instead of a demure thin-lipped smile there was a clownish red-lipped snarl beneath lurid spherical eyes. They were carved with great anatomical detail, glaring at me with the wide-eyed excitement of a nightmarish gargoyle. Set above them was a molten brow that sagged into an exaggerated frown.

“There’s no actual holes,” Pinnie remarked, picking the thing up and turning it head over heels. “Fuck!” he cried out, startling Jay and I and dropping the doll where the mask thudded against the floor. “There’s something sharp in it,” he groaned before sucking on his wounded thumb.

Gently, jay and I picked it up. I briefly noted a small chip above the brow where it had fallen, and carefully turned it over and examined it until I identified a long sliver of metal embedded in the doll’s thigh, resisting all efforts to remove it. The needle was pitted with rust, and at the tip was the slightest hint of a pearlescent shimmer that winked violet and crimson as I turned it over in the light.

“I can’t get the damn thing out; we need to be careful handling this thing. And Pinslow,” I added, “you need to look into getting a tetanus shot.”

“Infected by a sex doll!” Jay cried out, his whinnying laugh like nails on chalk. “That’ll raise some eyebrows!”

“It’s not a fucking sex doll you daft bastard!” Pinnie swore, still smarting from the wound. “It hasn’t gone any holes for… for, well, you know!”

“Well…” Jay muttered, holding the doll up once more so she stood amongst us, her inhuman face making uncomfortable eye contact with me. “What else is she?” he asked, and I realised his voice was not petulant, but pleading.

He genuinely wanted an answer.

I think we all did.

-

I was coming into work a little later than usual when I noticed something unusual. The sex doll had been pulled out of the skip and placed next to it, her eyes drinking in the barren garden that surrounded the home. For a moment I paused and momentarily wondered if somehow the expression on the doll’s face had changed to a grin. But then again, she looked different in full daylight, and I shook the thought from my head. Barely a second later and Pinnie strode out, his arms full with an old television that he threw into the skip with glee. Without speaking I gestured to the doll.

“Reminds me of Maria Lewis,” he said with a gruff laugh. “Same size, same shape, and just like Maria she’s got a nasty bite.” He held up his thumb and I grimaced at the open wound throbbing just beneath his nail.

“Christ,” I scoffed at the joke. “Well just like Maria she’s destined for the bin.”

“She deserved better than that,” Pinnie replied, going silent for a moment too long before appearing to remember that I was still there. “Maria that is, the real one, not that uh… not that thing.”

“Shall we put it in the skip now?” I asked.

“No, we should put the heavy stuff in first. I’ll chuck her in later.”

For a moment I was about to argue that the doll would hardly make a difference to the skip’s weight distribution but I decided to let the older Pinnie’s judgement stay in effect. And yet a day later, when the skip was loaded out for a new one and driven past me, I couldn’t help but notice the doll was not in it. She was standing beside the door once, her mouth cast in a downward expression of theatrical sorrow.

“Did you do this?” I asked Pinnie as he passed me by the doorway.

“Do what?”

“Changed her face?”

“No,” he answered innocently. “How would I do that?”

“Just… just make sure she’s in the next one.”

“Sorry!” he cried with an affected wince. “I forgot about her. Still, she’s hardly hurting anyone is she?” Pinnie carried on walking casually as if it was an honest mistake, but briefly stopped to readjust the doll’s unkempt wig without a second thought.

“Just make sure she’s gone tomorrow,” I shouted after him, to which he merely waved his hand in acknowledgement as though there was nothing to worry about. I hoped that was true but when lunchtime came and we all gathered outside I noticed the doll was missing.

“Some kids were eyeing her up,” Pinnie said when asked before gesturing to an upper story window. Now the doll leered down at us with a barely visible expression of joy. “Figured we can’t let them get a hold of her, ‘specially if we never got that dirty needle out.”

“She’s upstairs?” Jay asked.

“In her room. Her mum won’t let me speak to her though I don’t know why. We’d left the disco holding hands and now…”

Pinnie trailed off into a heavy silence and Jay and I gave each other a funny look. Unwilling to press the awkward silence any further, we ate the rest of our lunch without speaking. I later asked Jay to check Pinnie’s van for the usual flask, but he came back empty handed, and I was left wondering if something else was going on with the older man.

Sure enough when the day was finally over I went to check on Pinnie and found him sitting next to the doll, elbows on his knees and his head buried in his hands. I stood in the doorway for a moment, hesitating to speak.

“Are you okay?”

“Just tired is all,” he answered, looking up at me with bloodshot eyes. “And this fucking hand of mine is killing.”

The infection from his thumb had spread along his wrist and was making progress towards his forearm. The skin looked shiny and tight, close to bursting, and I told him he ought to take the following day off.

“Can’t do that,” he growled. “Got too much to do. Besides,” he added with an almost drunken slur, slouching upwards to put his arm around the doll, “I’ve got to walk Maria home. You’d think I might have forgotten her until now but no, she’s been in my thoughts every single night since it happened. Didn’t even go to her funeral but I never forgot. She’s in my thoughts more than anyone else’s.”

Quietly Pinnie burped and closed his eyes, a thick rope of drool making stalactites down his chest. Without waking him I reached out and took the doll and carried it downstairs, leaving the poor man asleep on the box he was sitting on. Once outside I threw the offending thing in with the rest of the rubbish, and just to add insult to injury I grabbed some nearby bin bags and hurled them on top of the doll, feeling satisfied that the job was finally done.

I found Pinnie where I’d left him and went to shake him awake when he lashed out with terrible speed.

“It were different back then,” he cried, his swollen hand snapping out to clutch my wrist with iron strength. I cried out and pulled back but he held on firm, that unbearably hot palm sending shivers up my spine. It looked like the hand of a bloated corpse, and I saw that his forehead was drenched in sweat and his eyes were burning with delirium.

“We didn’t know much back then as boys and we were always taught that girls would lead you on strange games before getting to the point. She never said no,” he hissed, his expression pleading with me in desperation. “It took years for me to realise, to understand why she’d done it and the part I played. But what had happened weren’t at all like I imagined, like what movies show you. I didn’t know, didn’t think. It weren’t until I saw the way her ma looked at me that the first seeds of doubt settled in.”

Suddenly the fire within him died and he sat back on the box, falling asleep almost as if he was under a spell. Shaking, I pulled my hand free and turned to see Jay standing in the doorway with an ashen white face.

“Did you see that?” I asked incredulously, but he ignored me, saying instead:

“I think I found the others.”

“Other what?” I asked.

“Come see.”

I left Pinnie slouched over himself and followed Jay to a small room one story up from where I’d been. Slowly he opened a door to reveal a cluttered display room with a horse-shoe shaped arrangement of cabinets and boxes all draped in colourful bed sheets. One of the sheets had been pulled back to reveal a horrible sculpture; it was a porcelain mask with ten needle-tipped limbs sprouting from the centre, its face twisted into a drunken grin. It had the same features as the doll’s, except with a very different expression.

“Looks like something a school shooter would make in metal shop,” Jay grumbled. “Look the legs are just welded bike chains and knitting needles filed down to a point.”

I didn’t reply. It was hard for me to repress my arachnophobia in the presence of those two-feet wide monstrosities. There was a busyness to the arrangement of their legs that worked its way right under my skin.

“Look there are others,” Jay said, pulling a second sheet away to reveal another mask nearly identical to the last, barring the expression. “They creep me out.”

“You’re telling me,” I muttered before pulling away another sheet. “Huh,” I grunted at the sight of the smashed glass and empty display.

“What’s wrong?” When he saw what I saw, he added, “Do you think someone stole it?”

Silently we pulled away all the remaining sheets until all twelve display cases were revealed. Six of them had been smashed and three of the sculptures were gone, but in one of the open cases I saw that a mask had been returned. Both Jay and I crowded around it and stared in silent disbelief.

“Is that blood?” Jay asked, pointing to one of the legs. It looked like a quill dipped in dried crimson ink. Slowly I raised my eyes to the face and took a sharp inward take of breath; there was a grossly familiar chip on the brow. “You don’t think…?” Jay started to ask but I walked away before he could finish. Silently, I went to the window and he followed, leaning over my shoulder to look down at the skip in the driveway. Impossibly, the doll was sitting on top of a pile of bin bags.

With a terrible stuttering motion, it turned its head to look back at us.

-

“How’s he doing?” Jay asked. I had just come from the hospital to check on Pinnie where he’d said some worrying things during my time beside him.

“He’s okay,” I replied. “Just delirious from the fever.”

“And no sign of that thing in the skip? Could it have been… could he have been the one…?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I just don’t know.”

“I saw it move,” Jay said and for a moment his words were left hanging in the air until I finally responded.

“Me too.”

“I did something bad,” Jay said, his voice almost mute. “Do you remember years back, my first few days with you. Do you remember finding all that copper in my van?”

“What did you take?” I asked, guessing where things were going.

Shaking, Jay reached down to the plastic bag at his feet. Instead of removing his lunch, like I expected, he pulled out a large clunky polaroid camera.

“I thought it was a joke or it was broken or I was just… I thought I might have been going mad but after that thing we saw yesterday I’m starting… what if it’s not? Pinnie had binned it,” he said. “But that’s not the point. It’s what it… look,” he grabbed a handful of polaroids from the same bag as the camera and handed them to me. One by one I shuffled through them like a pack of cards but saw nothing except slight variations of a barren desert floor, looking like something you’d expect a rover on Mars to send back.

“What of it?” I asked.

“I took those out here, facing the garden,” he replied. “I thought it was busted but… well, look at this.”

Holding the camera in both hands Jay took a photo and we waited as it printed. And yet the picture that came out was much the same as the others he held.

“I don’t get…”

“Now look,” he told me as he turned to face the house and took another picture. A few seconds later he handed me the photo.

“What the fuck is this?”

“Honestly,” Jay stammered, “it wasn’t until I brought the camera back because, y’know, I felt bad and I was putting it back in the skip when I must’ve dropped it and hit the button and it took a photo and… and…”

“You saw this?”

“Yes. It happened this morning. I’ve been holding onto it all day and I was going to tell you when you got back from visiting Pinnie but I’m still not sure I can make heads or tails of what I’m seeing.”

“It looks like the church out of those paintings,” I said. “Or something like it, I think.” The photo showed a bright white sky devoid of all features with a towering building looming over the frame, too large for any sense of height to be gauged.

“That’s not the worst of it,” Jay grimaced. “Here, I took this earlier.”

Jay took another white photo from his inside pocket and showed it to me. It was very similar to the last one, close to identical except for the clearly visible form of Jessie standing behind one of the second story windows.

And he was not alone.

-

“He’s gone,” I said as I laid all four paintings out. Somehow they had gotten worse, their frames and canvasses consumed by a throbbing mould that was a riotous explosion of colours. And yet despite the growth the church was still visible in at least three of the images, and the doorway was plainly empty of the painted figure. From beside me came the sudden and loud flash of the camera, and I turned to see Jay shaking a polaroid while he waited for it to develop.

When it finally developed we saw a rotten crumbling version of the same hallway we stood in, knife-like lances of desert sun blasting through open cracks in the walls and smashed windows. All the wood was sagging and in a rank stat of decay, while most of the trash had turned to ashen dust. But most odd was the roll of fabric turned into a makeshift bed on the floor, a tally scratched into the wood that counted to thirteen, and a series of tin cans laid out with water in them.

Sharing a brief look, Jay and I agreed to go upstairs where we slowly began mapping our way through the house. It was an peculiar and alien experience, marking out the broken floors and collapsed rooms, discombobulated to find that we were climbing stairs shown to be completely destroyed in the photographs.

But there were subtle signs of habitation, including recently disturbed footprints and barricaded doors. Carefully, we followed them until we reached the room where Jessie had been standing. However, when we took a photograph we found only an empty window, piles of sharpened sticks lying beside it. It wasn’t until I took a photo of the doorway we’d just passed through that I saw Jessie standing alone, glaring down the hallway with terror etched on his face.

I felt a flare of urgency and ran out into the same hallway. I felt helpless, unsure of what to do until I did the only thing I could and took a photo of the corridor. The picture that printed was horrifying, showing a lonely stretch of hall that broke suddenly into open air. Standing there, leering through the open hole, was a grotesque face, hauntingly reminiscent of the masks we had found. Whatever wore that visage was a monstrous thing, for the features were rendered upon a towering giant.

When I took a photo of the space behind me, Jessie had gone, fleeing just out of sight. I turned and snapped another, and nearly jumped at the sight of that horrible face looming through the corridor, its hairy head and neck squeezed ineffectually into the small space, filling the corridor with shadow as it tried to force its way forward.

“What’s it doing?” Jay asked.

I took another, saw that the thing had moved forward by a few inches, snapping wood and buckling the floors. Now, one of its hands was stretched outwards as if to grab something.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Is it reaching for Jessie?”

“No,” I muttered. “He’s gone.”

“What’s it reaching for!?” Jay again, taking an uneasy step forward.

I took another photo and saw that the giant was now just a few feet from where I stood. Something about its eyes, those round hungry glistening orbs with small harsh pupils and no irises, terrified me but it was nothing compared to what I felt when I realised that its face had been lit up by the flash of the camera.

“It’s reaching for us,” I said, my words immediately followed by the sound of Jay fleeing hysterically down the stairs.

-

“Jay!” I screamed, turning a corner to find the basement door beneath the stairs swinging open on its hinges. I ran up to it but hesitated at the first step. “Jay!” I cried again, hoping to God he’d reply to me from anywhere but down there. And yet as soon as the last of my echoes rang out into the dark, Jay let out a terrible shriek from deep within the basement. I took a deep breath to steady my nerves and descended.

It was more normal than I might have expected. Rows and rows of shelves had been laid out and filled with the usual rubbish that Mr Rittle enjoyed so much. Jars of fermenting medical curiosities, boxes of stolen Christmas decorations, ornamental gnomes with mud still caked on their feet; there was nothing down there that, at first glance, might be responsible for Jay’s disappearance.

But that earthen chamber was bigger than I first thought. The first room was typical in size, but in one corner was a jagged hole cut into the soil which led into another similarly sized room. And then there was another, and another, and another. Until then I had believed the manor house to be an impenetrable nightmare, but it turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg. I soon found new stairs leading to lower floors, haphazardly dug into the very peat itself.

Nothing was empty; there was no spare room and it was on the third set of stairs that I realised the rooms were getting larger and I had taken such an unusual series of twists and turns that meant I couldn’t be sure what the way back was. I started to wonder whether it would be okay to just leave, but I called out Jay’s name one more time, just in case. No one replied and in a final effort I swung the camera around from my neck and took a photo of the basement.

Unlike before it did not show me anything at all like the place I was standing in. In fact, this was a perfect replica of the very first painting I found in the manor. I had come to understand that the camera showed some alternate (or perhaps future) version of the place I stood, but if it did then nothing about the last picture made any sense. I took another, and grimaced to see that the painted figure had somehow appeared in the doorway of the church. Nothing about it corresponded to my location, and I came to realise that if the camera had any kind of logic or rules, it wasn’t anything I could understand. Feeling all hope wane, I took one last photo and saw that the painted figure had lunged forward, moving closer to the camera’s point of view.

I decided to take no more and let the photo fall to the floor. Hesitantly, I turned getting ready to leave and call the police when I faced the stairway with my torch and revealed a person standing at the top. Their face was obscured by something strange that glinted in my light, something metallic or ceramic, but the outfit clearly belonged clearly to Jay.

“Jay?”

I stepped forward, seeing how ragged and torn his clothes were, glimpsing his pallid torso coated in drying blood. “Jay are you okay?” I asked, but he stood there, shaking jerkily with his head twisted up to face the ceiling. Something was hovering over his face and his neck was bulging and throbbing as if his Adam’s apple had swollen and was roaming free.

When he lowered his head it was with unnatural speed. What happened was so fast I barely had time to process it, pouring through the images in my mind as I later ran through the labyrinthine corridors of shelves while my chest burned in desperate need of air. No matter what, the sight had been enough to send me running away without any need of comprehension. It was only later that my thoughts coalesced and I realised he had glared at me with the face of the masked sex doll.

His movements down the stairs were erratic and clumsy, and if he hadn’t fallen he may very well have caught me then and there. As he skidded face first down the lumpy steps I saw a glistening mechanism of metallic legs and clicking gears bloodily jammed into his broken distended jaw. Blood gurgled from his swollen tongue and lips; something had been forced down his throat and I could see its roaming legs shift and move beneath his grossly expanded gullet.

Given the way that he was moving, it was elsewhere in his body too. The mask wore an expression of a slavering hunter, blood borrowed straight from Jay flowed freely down its mouth and lent it a spectral appearance. I didn’t even wait for it to hit the floor before running, but when it finally caught up to me I saw that it clanked across the floor like a four legged spider.

I threw down shelf after shelf to slow it, but it skittered over any obstacle with the wretched speed of long-limbed arachnid. And yet I was quicker than it around corners, and I easily kept my distance until, finally, it disappeared from my tail and—while I was very much terrified that it might be hiding in any one of the numerous pitch-black nooks and crannies—I deliberately turned and started for the stairs.

It was waiting for me at the very top, screeching out as it raced forward. Something about its exertions had altered Jay’s body, I noticed his arms and legs were swollen and bones visibly moved his skin. As it grappled with me I understood why; to stop it reaching for my face I had to grab Jay’s arm by the wrist, desperately holding it back, except instead of holding it still I saw that something unsheathed from the very flesh itself. Sliding out from between Jay’s finger bones, pushing muscle and bone aside like tenderised meat, was one of the spidery legs belonging to the mask.

Horrified at the thought of it touching me, I threw the thing aside and let it tumble back down the stairs. By the time Jay’s corpse had risen more of the legs had pushed through the skin of his limbs and the cohesion of his body was giving way. The more this thing moved Jay around like a meat suit, the more it tore him apart. But at least I had a clear route to the exit, and I fled to the second set of stairs desperately hoping this thing would be too slow. But somewhere along the way I got lost again, and sure enough the clicking sound of my chaser was never far behind.

I’m still not sure exactly what happened, but somewhere in that basement I passed a tunnel, or perhaps a kind of grotto. I was a few paces ahead of it before my brain registered the sight and my footfalls slowed to a stop almost as if my brain acted without my conscious intervention. I came to a stumbling halt and glanced backwards to confirm I’d really seen what the flashing images in my mind suggested.

Mr Rittle was sat at a small workspace, smiling to himself as I ran past.

“Good evening,” he said politely, when I stopped and faced him.

Upon his lap was a pile of lifeless metallic legs splayed outwards like a crab’s, to his left he had placed a porcelain mask that had been delicately removed from one of the spiders. Without looking up from his work, he reached out and placed a small screw into alignment with a dozen others. Then, reaching into the machine’s guts, he began to turn a large winding handle that clicked with each jerking twist of his wrist. Each rotation caused the legs to flicker with spasms of life.

He looked up only when the thing that chased me stumbled into view, stopping momentarily to glare at me and then at Mr Rittle.

“Psst psst,” Mr Rittle chirped as if luring a cat from some bushes. “Come here now. Give it up.” Carefully he patted the space beside him and the monstrosity scuttled over and sat down in an awkward hunch.

“Now,” he said, turning to me. “Something you ought to know in your profession: sometimes it’s not a ‘hoarder’s house’, but rather it’s a ‘house that hoards’. Some buildings don’t exist in just one time or place and they are filled with things that come from all over creation. Do you understand? Dangerous things, fun things, all of the unique.” Silently he gestured to Jay’s twitching corpse. “Do you have any questions?” he asked.

“No,” I said, before turning heel and running for my life.

“That is the first intelligent thing you’ve done since stepping inside this place!” the old man yelled after me, his voice breaking into a bellowing chuckle. “But you’re not the only one who can leave!"

-

“Honey,” she said as she rolled over in the bed, coiling the duvet around her feet. “Please come to bed.”

Standing with my back to her, facing the silent garden, I lit the room up with another flash of the camera and waited a few seconds to see the developed photograph. I studied it for a few seconds afterwards and then dropped it to the floor along with a hundred others.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t think I will.”

He was out there, getting closer with each flash.

It has been a few weeks since I last saw Jay. Similarly, Pinnie has disappeared from hospital. There are mixed reports on that one. I found reports that doctors and nurses who worked on his ward suffered from a spate of suicides, and at least one mortician died under unusual circumstances. Speaking to an orderly, I heard that there were rumours something unusual had happened in the morgue in the early hours of the morning and while there was nothing concrete about what that was, he confirmed that the place had been sealed off for weeks and they were using a temporary morgue set up elsewhere.

But then again there were rumours of a half-naked man in hospital overalls running down a dual carriageway close to the house, and one doctor told me plainly that Pinnie had checked himself out and disappeared. Although when asked about the suicides, that same doctor had averted her gaze and said,

“It was hard on all of us.”

I acted on a hunch and asked if she’d seen Pinnie during his stay. For a moment she looked as if she might respond, but then she burst into tears and refused to answer any more questions.

As for me, well, I’ve had visits. He comes, most often at night, bearing strange things. My wife is getting irritated with the growing clutter and right now it’s only just a few boxes and strange ornaments. I want to tell her I’ll get rid of them. I want to tell her that the strange moods I’ve been experiencing will stop, that Pinnie and Jay will be okay, and that any day now I’ll go back to work and it’ll all be normal again. But most of all I want to tell her why any of this is happening. It’s just… I don’t know how?

I’ve tried throwing these things away again but what does it even matter? Sometimes I still throw away the most dangerous or hard-to-explain things—a bloodied knife, a bag of medical waste, a large package of heroin with a pearlescent symbol—but he just brings more. All my wife sees is a plain box sitting on the doorstep, but the camera shows me that wretched figure standing expectantly over his offering. At first I thought all he wanted was for me to keep these things but amongst his most recent gifts was a canvas, some used and ancient brushes, and a set of unlabelled paints that stink when opened.

I know what he wants but… I’m losing everything. It’s only just started but I know where it’s going. Bit by bit, my home is filling with the strangest things and pretty soon there’ll be room for nothing else.