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Bakerstreet was a normal, perfectly ordinary street. It was located close to the center of Weslton, which was also a perfectly ordinary town. And the furries who lived there were all ordinary and plenty. But at the far end of Bakerstreet, where the houses were bigger and the gardens wide, was a dark spot, out of the ordinary. That spot was the old house of Bakerstreet 27. The haunted mansion. The ghost villa. Fredies home. Adventurous children and cynic elders had plenty of names for the two story house which was but as ordinary as the others, save for its permanent vacancy. The glass windows were stained with ages of dirt, the fence was since long rotten to treacherous stomps, hidden in bushes of wildly growing grass. A hedge to the left and a bush to the right might have been commendable decoration once, but have grown into something thorny, bulging and dry. The front was rain washed and covered with dark grayish, almost black moss. Most of the shutters were closed but rot-eaten and falling apart. There was a small window right below the roof, and the children whispered into each others ear that sometimes at night they could see a big shadow standing inside.

Their parents would lecture them for telling such lies. Or not to believe them. The later was true for Jasons mom. He was a weasel boy freshly turned 12 a week ago. He had some friends roughly his age and recently they had been very fond of playing near the house at day and telling each other horror stories at night while staying over. Millie was oldest of them, and the mean ferret had great joy in teasing the others. So after leaving from last nights stay at his house, she told Jason "You are only a man if you prove it! Today when we meet at the ghost villa, you have to go in!" Jasons mother had overheard this by chance. Millie ran off right away, leaving Jason behind with his worried mother. "You will not go into that house, you hear me?" Jason lifted his hands indignantly, groaning "But Moooom!" "Don't you but me on this, little man!" She was holding a finger in front of his face, which usually left him with obedience or getting grounded. Jason sighed and looked to the ground. "Yes Mom." She nodded and gave him a final glare before she returned to her other motherly duties.

Three hours later Jason stood in the grass of the haunted mansions front. His heart was beating so hard it almost drowned Millies and the others voices chanting. "Go in! Go in! Go in!" Most reluctantly he put a foot in front of the other, slowly approaching the house. If there is a place you always stand but in front of, it becomes like a picture. If you then ever enter that place and walk into that picture, it becomes more real than anything else. Suddenly he smelled the decay of the wall and the moist that clung to it. Through the stains in the windows he made out vague shapes inside the building. And the closer he got to the entrance door, the more he could feel that nothing living had been for many years.

He looked up and through the window in the top. His grandmother had told him once a story about this house. She said that a family had lived here. Father, mother and a little girl much younger than he was now. Some day some passerby noticed an alarming shape by the top most window. And when the police investigated, they found the father hanging right there. The mother was caught in delirium, Jasons grandmother said, and was brought into a hospital where she spent the rest of her days. "And the girl?" Jason hand asked. His grandmother leaned down and whispered, "That was the strangest yet. The little girl was never found. Some say she ran off and far away when she saw her dead father. But who knows? Maybe she is still in there." He was six back then, and got so scared he ran crying to his mother. She comforted him. Also she had given his grandmother a lecture worse than any he had so far witnessed being given in his life.

Jason wasn't six any more. He was twelve. Taking a deep breath he stepped forward and on the front landing. His friends chanting had ceased as they all held their breath. Reaching out Jason took the door knob and pushed. The hinges screeched as the old thing swung inward. The little weasel took another step. Jason was inside the haunted mansion.

From the door a long corridor of light fell into the dark. The floor was covered in a thick carpet of dust. Nothing had disturbed it for years, but now the incoming breeze threw little waves of dust into the air and into the darkness. In this contrast it was very difficult to make out anything. So Jason turned and slowly closed the door until it was only a hands width ajar. It was enough to keep most of the light outside, and now he was able to let his eyes slowly adjust to the darkness. Blinking now he began to make out clearer shapes and outlines. There was a staircase to the right and ahead of him. Two doors faced each other to his sides. At the far end he could make out another door, which probably lead into the garden. Peeking up the stairs yielded nothing but shivers running down his spine. The blackness was undisturbed by the relative brightness of the ground level. It disturbed him that it seemed not even from the top level windows any light got into that lurking patch of darkness. For some strange reason though, it seemed just as dead as the rest of this house. And that was what allowed him to move at all. The house was dead. Creepy, but not hostile.

Realizing his heart beat had actually slowed down, he looked around once more. The walls were empty, though outlines of pictures that had been hanging there long ago could be seen. The wallpaper was a faded green with a simplistic flower like pattern. The doors were of dark, heavy wood, much like the staircase and rail. For no reason at all he chose the left door and opened it. Peeking inside revealed some sort of small kitchen, much like the one his family had at home. It was furnished, even. From the door he was able to make out a stove and a small table with some chairs at it, but the details were obscured. The room was particularly dark. Slowly he skulked forward. He reached out and touched the rim of what might have been a dinner table a lifetime ago. Still squinting his eyes he looked around, but the darkness was persistent. Eventually his gaze drifted toward the dirty window. Through half opened shutters he saw bright stars hanging in a pitch black sky.

Realization made him jump. He stumbled backward, something broke. He heard something skitter away with tiny claws. Gasping he turned around, looking into abysmal blackness of what should be a corner of the room, where he felt something looking back at him. His heart was beating in his throat, and breath came in brief fits. Staring wildly into the blackness while he clawed into the rim of the table, silence fell once more. His wheezing was the only sound, while everything around him had fallen into a blackness which was but slightly illuminated by the starlight from without. Jason winced as the ceiling creaked heavily, four times in short succession. Was it steps? Before he got to wonder any further, he heard a girlish giggle from the corridor. Staring at the kitchen door he saw a soft glow on the other side. Swallowing for spit to ease his dry throat, he slowly approached, drawn like a moth to the candle. The glow was very bright in the surrounding darkness, yet it didn't blind the eye. And when he shoved his face past the door frame, he eventually found its source.

In the corridor, next to the staircase, stood a little vixen girl. Her orange fur had the same white glow as her black paws, and she was dressed in a neat little skirt. She looked at him with big eyes and a soft smile, yet everything about her unsettled Jason to the core. Still looking at her, he went right for the front door. His hands frantically searched for the handle, but there was none. Forcing his eyes off of her he scanned the door in what light the gloom offered, just to confirm there was no handle. His claws dug into the crack between door and frame, but it did not work. Sobbing once, he clawed at the door where the handle should be, impotently trying to open the door out of this haunted mansion.

"I can get you out." The little girl announced. His heart cringed hearing her, but his scratching ceased. Sobbing and reluctantly he turned around. "Please." His voice was shriller than hers, pierced with sobs. "Let me out. I want to go home." He begged her, but the little vixen only giggled. The girl could be no older than five or six years, he realized. "You have to play with me first!" she said. Jason sobbed even more. "No." he cried. "I don't want to play. Let me go. Please. I want to see my mommy." But the girl only laughed with her innocent voice. Entirely ignorant to his fear, she playfully got to stand on one leg and hopped toward him. She stood right in front of him then and had to stand on her toes to give him a little icy pad on the chest. "You're it!" The light popped out, and the girl was gone.

Jasons breath came with a wheezing sound, gulping oxygen down until his lungs threatened to burst. Nonetheless a clawed hand seemed to press down on his throat, pushing him down while he suffocated on darkness. He closed his eyes for what little difference it made, and pinched his arm. It'll go away, he thought, it's just a dream. Wake up, Jason, please wake up. But all the pleading didn't help and when he winced a stinging pain was left throbbing in his arm where he had pinched himself. Slowly he opened his eyes to the spooky corridor. At least he could see a little better now. There was the staircase and the doors, the walls and ceiling. All of them but black boxes with no detail nor texture. The floor under his feet creaked and the sound made him yelp. Staring down in shock he watched himself put one foot in front of the other, then take another. By his own will. Reluctantly and yet somehow driven by fear itself he began to seek the girl. Or so he tried to convince his mind.

Looking up the staircase revealed nothing but the gaping maw of nothingness. It still seemed only dead up there, but to it was added a sensation of cold. So the little weasel slowly walked past the staircase, still clutching himself in a tight embrace. He was shivering. Though he couldn't see it, there was something leading this way. Some footprints, some noise, something that wasn't there to his five senses and yet lead him. Slower yet he came around the far corner of the stair case, looking down into yet another maw of darkness. Compared to the upper one, though, this one was not dead in the same sense. Neither was it staring at him like the corner in the kitchen had. It was warm, somehow. In a way that reached out for little Jason, embracing his belly, squeezing his intestines. He swallowed, for in this un-dead darkness he knew the girl was hiding. Somewhere in the darkest recesses of this vast blackness.

The first three steps were noiseless, but the last step made another awful creak. The darkness down here was blinding, and shivers ran up his spine and clawed his neck like an echo of the creak. He imagined hearing a real echo of it fading into the old building. It vanished. Sudden thunder cracked, shaking him and the staircase. He screeched, and another boom slammed down. The third made him recognize it for the heavy steps he had heard before in the kitchen, the fourth - coming down in succession like snapping trees caught in an avalanche - made him aware the stairs right above his head where its source. On the fifth he fled down the stairs, more terrified of whatever made the noise than of anything else. He hit an object squarely that gave a hollow thud and knocked the air out of him. The sixth came down on the landing just above his head. He jumped on the spot, turning around and staring up to the brighter rectangle of grayness where the stairs began. His breath was less than a buzz of frequent wheezing. Everything was silent. Nothing happened. Some old hinges creaked, the rectangle of grayness thinned with a whoosh of air blowing into his face. And with a final thunderous crack the door slammed shut.

Jason sat in front of the object he had hit, curled into a tight ball of fur and terror. He had screamed until his throat hurt. Then he whimpered miserably. Now he just sat there, sobbing, breathing lightly. Slowly rocking back and forth. Every time he peeked out over his knees, the darkness was still there.

It took a lot effort to get moving again. He would get up, he told himself, to the front door and smash it open. Or the back door. Or any window, it did not matter. He didn't want to play anymore. He set one foot in front of another and fell onto the floor that shouldn't be there. He screamed, shrill and furious. His hands patted the floor, he reached out. Nothing but an old, dusty concrete floor. The staircase was gone. He searched ever more, crawled forward, back, in circles, there were no stairs. He found walls, and some rotten shelves. But no stairs.

A giggle to his right distracted him and he gasped. A few steps ahead a white fox tail just brushed past a corner. "You're it, you're it" the little girls voice sang. Bristling he got up and desperately dived after her. Her ghostly glow came into view now and then, gave him hints of the path. So he chased her, round another corner, down a small corridor, through creaking doors, over a crate of jars that jingled as he knocked it with his foot. She just kept running. "That's not fair!" He yelled eventually. "You're supposed to hide in ONE place!" But the girl just giggled. More than her tail he didn't get to see, though. She was always just out of view.

While he stood there, still bristling, he noticed that chasing her had done something to him. Nothing out of the ordinary, actually. The darkness had been pressing down on him. It was a curtain, no, an abysmal maw that had swallowed him whole. And a prison with walls he could not see, a maze with traps he could not sense before he ran into them or set them off. Now, he had run a whole lot in this darkness. He somehow had gotten used to the existence of space in this darkness, which made it seem less pressing. He was still looking for the girl, but didn't like her game at all. There were corridors, and corners, and doors alright. So why not explore them instead of chasing that slippery vixen.

He turned right and stretched out his arms. Her glow had been a help so far, but now he would go on without it. His hands traced the wall while he slowly returned the way he had come. He knew he had come from further back and then right, but here he found a passage leading to the left he had previously run past. The girl called "Hey, boy! If you want to get out, you have to find me!" Her voice was awfully full of joy and calm. In a playground on a sunny day, he might even have enjoyed that voice and playing hide and seek with her. But it was dark here, and she was dead. Jason a man almost grown, he understood that. Finding an unknown solemn streak in himself, he pressed on.

It was silent for a while and he could go on without disturbance. There was another crate he had to dodge. Down here, shrouded in darkness, everything was either a barrel or a crate. Or a shelf, as one of those he just bumped into. He heard jars jingle, something rolled and a bottle slammed down next to him. He winced, shielding himself against possible splinters, but nothing happened. A sour smell flew in the air. And then he heard steps. Not above him, behind him. He turned to see, simultaneously creeping behind the shelf as far as possible. But he couldn't see a thing. The steps came out of nowhere, as if someone had been standing there all a long. And just so, they stopped. Still some distance away, yet his fur stood on end and he suppressed to whimper. After some moments he crept out of his hiding place and went on. The girl called: "Don't go there." He yelped, but not so much because of her voice than the vision he saw of her right next to him for a second. Looking down to where he had seen her yielded nothing but darkness. Catching his breath and convincing himself of determination, he moved on. Her voice came again, from behind. But her calms was gone. She sounded distressed and pleading. "Pleeeease! Don't go that way. Come back." But he was frustrated, afraid of every ghostly thing behind him, and sick of the darkness despite his new found courage. Jason moved on.

Until he saw light ahead of him. It wasn't a ghostly glow, but the soft flicker of candle light. It shone through the crack of a door. He heard the vixen whimper and run off. Hoping for an exit, or at least some comfort in the light, he reached the door and without much hesitation went through.

Before him was a fully furnished room. Almost centrally placed was a round table with a candle on it, next to which stood two chairs. In one of them someone sat. It was a man, an adult, judging by his statue. But something about him made Jason hush and stare quietly. The man hummed a soft tune in his low voice. Jason saw the little girl sitting on his leg, but she didn't glow. Actually, she was naked. Her head and back was covered only in her bright orange fur. The man held her close, while his other hand was between his legs and moving slowly up and down. Covered below his soft humming was her quiet crying.

The vision faded. Gone was the warm candle light, the soothing humming and the alien scent which had come from the man. Once more he stood in darkness. Something was different though and after some time he noticed that a little natural light surrounded him. Like starlight, but he didn't manage to point out where exactly it came from. Again the pressure of the darkness had gone a little off of him, and he found heart to move on. It was silent for now, and he found that he was in just another cellar room. For the first time it occurred to him that no basement in the street could ever be that big, which added some to his discomfort. Jason found another door, through which a corridor lined with boxes and chests fled further on.

Something crept its way into the silence, and he perked his ears to listen while moving on. The sound followed him, but it was too quiet to make out any details. It grew louder over time, until he understood. Steps followed him. They were not those booming stomps from before, nor a soft padding you would expect from the girl. It were all too natural steps from a grown up. Jason winced, stopping his progress. He turned around to peer down the way he had come from, past some boxes and shelves. Boosted with adrenaline and fright, he even saw his own footprints in the dust, but only a little way into the darkness. The steps came closer. Their nature was casual, neither in haste nor slacking. He strained his eyes. They were close now, he should be able to make out something. And then he noticed the footprints which appeared next to his. Only footprints. He whimpered, they were but an arms length away. For a heartbeat he believed to see someone reaching out for him, but he was already on the move. He ran, the steps remained as casual as before, following him with unrelenting purpose like a death sentence.

Soon he could see the glimmer of candle light, and with it he heard the silent sobbing of the little girl. It seemed to come from the same open door as the light. Allowing himself to slow down Jason approached the scene carefully. The little girl was sitting inside on the floor. The light didn't reveal much, but what he saw was enough to recognize the kitchen he had been in before. There was a tall women sitting by the table, a lynx by the looks of her. In her hand was a bottle of clear liquid, which reminded Jason of those his parents drank by night sometimes. The little girl whimpered. "Please, Mom." she sobbed terribly. "Don't let daddy hug me." The lynx snarled. Her words were slurred. "Shut up! Be grateful your father loves you at all." The women took a deep gulp from her bottle while the girl sat there, quivering. Jason watched in confusion as the vision faded. But the quite whimpering and sobbing of the vixen remained.

A heavy hand touched his shoulder. He yelped and would have jumped away if the hand hadn't stopped him. Glancing over his shoulder he saw no hand nor arm. But right behind him the darkness had thickened, forming the outlines of the man he had seen before. While he looked features detailed themselves, as if Jasons eyes were adjusting to dim lighting. Soon he would see the face of a fox. Which smiled down to him. But the eyes were full of sadness, and tears seemed to wet his cheeks. Then the pressure on his shoulder was gone, and with it the image of the man.

By now Jason was strangely adjusted to the whole situation. The darkness didn't seem at all alive anymore. Neither was it dead. The basement was filled with a clear nights light, coming in from windows he actually saw. And still he heard the quiet crying of the little girl. The sound was close by, he realized. Looking about himself, he found it to come from the corner to his right, just ahead. Slowly approaching he saw that there was yet another shelf behind which the girl must be hiding. It was no use to try moving the shelf, and the sound came from a little above, too. So he tried and found his way to climb up some of the shelves boards, mindful to watch it holding his weight. It did, and half way up he found a little hole in the wall against which the shelf stood. It was but big enough for a child as little as the vixen. But he heaved himself up and squeezed his head and shoulders into it as far as he could. It was dark inside, just as dark as this adventure had been short after he first entered the basement. The sobbing was very close by, and he reached out. "It's alright." Jason heard himself say, his voice strained but certain. "I found you." His fingers brushed her velvet fur. Vertigo claimed his senses, as oblivion claimed his body, and he fell.

Dimly he could hear voices yell. He also heard a lot of shoving and scraping of wood and stone. Sudden light shone brightly red through his eyelids. He squirmed and moaned, his head throbbing with a terrible headache. Jason blinked and all to slowly his eyes adjusted to the light of an early afternoon. He heard his fathers voice and other men. "I found him!" The closest said. Someone grabbed his shoulders and helped him get up. Someone else cried sudden and shocked, which alarmed Jason and he looked around. The man, a grown bear, covered his mouth with one hand and held the other outstretched, pointing with one finger behind Jason. Slowly the young weasel turned his head, and though he shivered at the sight he remained silent. With sudden clearness he saw he had fallen into some sort of a cubicle which was now revealed beneath the brittle and broken boards of the kitchen floor. With him sat a little corpse, huddled in the back of the cubicle. Decay had not been kind to her features, and yet Jason recognized the little frightened vixen, who had come here once to hide forever.