Description of an Abandoned House: a Short Story

The Town of Dawndale wore the night as its cruel second skin. It had been twilight hour and the moon was full, casting emotionless shadows along the horizon. Under the cover ni of darkness, hazy grey clouds deteriorate under the fluorescent silver beams of the moon, as if they were shadows to be banished. The intense rays of white shimmer loomed over the lifeless town of unseen phantoms that lurked the eerie streets, immersed with the subtle symphony of hollowing trees. Standing before me, guarded by black steel railings, stood the decrepit, abandoned old house with it’s boarded ground floor windows and smashed first-floor panes. There was a chilly, musty damp smell about the place standing amidst a gloomy backdrop of cloudless ambiguity. In this essay I’ll make a description of an abandoned house.

As I stood, gazing at the dilapidated manor. I shivered, as though, ice had replaced my spine. The cold air seethed through my entire body, beneath the layers of warmth. Dark shadows surged the still air, along with the faint smell of death that hung in the chilled darkness of night. Whispers of lost voices echoed all around me, alluring a gloomy ambience. The abandoned house stood composed, as if in chosen solitude as if residents were a luxury it could forgo. Against the bleak clouded sky, the crumbling walls were nothing more than a ghostly silhouette of some previous existence. The spirit of the house had rescued itself by sleeping in the walls, by retreating into the wood free from dust and cobwebs. It was no more than a skeleton of its foundations, wearily standing in the stagnant air wishing the morning light would come all the sooner to warm it’s forbidding spirit.

The glass itself was a brackish glaze, inviting the mind to see the settled dust even at a distance. Consumed by the undergrowth of rampant ivy. I walked cautiously up to the house. If there ever was a path it was gone, buried. My ankles were tickled by the tendrils of weeds that had broken through the cobbles. The air smelt as if it hadn’t moved in years, festering like a stagnant pool of water. I shone my torch inside, the only movement being the dust my boots had dislodged. Shattered glass lay worthless in a thousand pieces, while the faint rays of moonlight radiated through the black haze covered in grim. The depth of the empty halls echoed my footsteps. Glinting lights left on aluminate the halls only just enough to see by. Water drips someplace, making an empty pinking clamor that is difficult to overlook. The walls move and squeak and the lurking emptiness of the building is unavoidable. The exhaustion of the entire thing sits on my back, an overbearing weight. I shiver with the overhanging suddenness and continue to walk through the cloudy corridors.

The harmony of what once lingered screamed out of the ancient ruins left buried in piles of dust, that fluttered the still air of infinite time. Creased fabric and dim colours revealed its true silhouette of endless hues by twinkling beams of white flares. Hidden songs of lost laughter remain silent in the void of invisible souls crying in eternal agony, waiting to be unleashed from the bars of hell. The imprints of human existence dwell within the walls, with quiet whispers of memories uplifting the dread of silence. The decrepit staircase arose at the peak of the second floor, with its dazzling chandeliers that dangled from the ceiling like the bejewelled corpse of a giant spider, glistened to the reflections of the moon. A traditional staircase of embellished raw wood of mahogany like hues and spiral railings of black musk, inherent its natural beauty of past experiences.

In a moment glimmer of perpetual reality, shadows of faceless figures emerge in the distance, floundering imprudently through each room, while the quiet whispers of dawn trails softly behind every impeccable touch of human obscurity. The silvery wisps of shrouded souls echo the halls in vain, surging the air with cold chills, intensifying as the time ceases to tick. The howling trees sway its last dance of agony, while the lonesome ghouls of ravaging nightmares slowly fade in the far distance, like lost souls wandering in the high skies of unreachable existence. Alone in the silence, the symphony of the subconscious calling in deeper. Subtle sounds of light winds carelessly bellowing under the house of darkness, deterring the lasting hails of moaning walls. At long last the night no longer young, now stolid, and weary.

Works Cited

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