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"Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways, usually squatted upon some damp, grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock. Two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread. They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things."

--H.P. Lovecraft, "The Picture in the House"

As Amy stood on the threshold of the Creepy House, there were two things at the forefront of her mind. One, this was the dumbest thing she had ever done. Two, her friends were assholes. Three, Curt was cute, but he almost certainly wasn't worth this.

"Three things. I guess that's three things."

Creepy House was so named because it was a creepy house. No one had ever seemed to live here. Prior to Amy's excursion she had asked her grandfather what the deal with it was. He couldn't remember anyone living there either. He also mentioned it was just as decrepit when he was a boy as it was now. That didn't make a whole lot of sense. The house should've collapsed under the weight of its own decay long ago if that was the case. But here it stood. And here she stood.

Once past the threshold, things were remarkably worse on the inside. The sight before her was almost cliché. Cobwebs everywhere. Furniture covered by white sheets. (What was the point of doing that, anyway? "Gotta keep the dust off the furniture that's going to sit in this moldering mansion for decades. Never mind the spider shit, though.") Dirty, yellow paper covering up the windows, ripped in places to allow just enough light through to illuminate the avalanche of dust entering the room. Amy was allergic. To this and to other things. Apparently not to dumb shit, though. She was apparently a-okay with that. Several paintings still hung on the wall, and there was no way in fuck's green fuck that she was going to remove them. She had no doubt that they were covering some portrait of a snaggletoothed inbred family that had an interest in having guests over to see the house, particularly the basement.

Was there a basement? She very much didn't want to know.

The living room was small, with a door in the back that led to the kitchen. There was no way, dare be damned, that she was stepping foot in that. Ghosts she could handle. Monsters she could handle. But after the first cockroach she would be out the fucking door. From where she stood she could see the grout was caked in mud, standing out in stark contrast from the surprisingly still acceptable flooring. What was probably once a white tile mixed with pink gout was now white tile mixed with black nastiness. Not something she would expect to see one of those Learning Channel interior decorating shows. The cabinets were scarred, as if someone had long ago slashed them with a knife. A creepy porcelain pig was facing where she stood in the doorway which gave Amy the impression that it was a guard dog that didn't expect to see an intruder today, and was in between the moment of surprise and tearing bloody chunks of her throat out. A dirty chandelier hung from the ceiling, covered in the previously discovered spider webs.

And that was about as far into her evaluation of the kitchen as she was willing to go.

"Nighty-night, bitch! Don't let the bed-vampires bite." Victoria Jansen's voice chimed behind Amy. One simply had to hear the name to know everything one needed to know about the ringleader of the popular girl crowd. What could the preppy trust-fund baby's name be other than "Victoria Jansen"? Amy was pretty sure that every rich girl to earn her honorary doctorate in snobby douchiness was by default named Victoria Jansen. At the moment of inception, a man in a suit would walk into the room over the awkward protest of two star-crossed, rich lovers and hand over the birth.

"See you in morning! Maaaybe. Mwa-ha-ha-ha-HA!" Victoria gave a bad impression of Bela Lugosi or Vincent Price or whatever his name was.

Amy smirked. Maybe Victoria was alright after all. Amy was about to respond when the door slammed shut with a creaky scream right out of the drooling, slimy maw of some winged Lovecraftian monster making its abode in an ancient, cyclopean tomb. Or maybe Victoria was just a cunt.

Amy mentally walked through the steps of her master plan. First, stay the night. Second, Victoria tells Curt how cool Amy is. Then Curt asks Amy to go to the movies. And finally, Amy would fuck Curt's brains out in the back of his surprisingly not-that-tacky Mustang. The leather seats grinding against her back while Curt was grinding against her everything-else would make this rotten adventure all worth it. Maybe. Hopefully.

And ghosts weren't real. Maybe. Hopefully.

"Okay, no sense putting it off any longer. Let's get these stairs over with." Amy shifted the strap of her backpack as if she was preparing to climb Everest. The carpet was almost assuredly a nice, clean white at some point. That point was long past. Now it was yellow, even green in spots. Cigarette smoke? Or just never washed? Why do people put carpet in their house? It's the most disgusting thing ever.

She slowly tested the weight of each stair before making another step. She definitely didn't want to push her foot through and twist her ankle five minutes into her adventure. Each stair had its own distinct creaking noise. Amy wondered if you ran up the stairs fast enough if it would play "California Gurls." That was probably too recent. Maybe some dirge out of the 1400s.

It was dark at the top of the stairs, but not dark enough that she didn't notice a shadow darting into another room. It moved. It fucking moved. Amy turned on the spot, lost her footing, and immediately tumbled down the stairs. She was glad she hadn't broken her neck, but was less happy that she would apparently have an unexpected roommate for her little sleepover.

"Probably a raccoon. Or a serial killer. Those are the two most likely cases." Neither was very comforting. Amy lay still for what seemed like hours, straining to catch any sound. Nothing. She was starting to believe she had imagined it. Or at least her brain was starting to convince her that she was better off thinking she had imagined it.

She slowly stood, careful not to make any unnecessary noise. She stood still for another few minutes until she was reasonably sure there was nothing waiting to mutilate her upstairs. Not a single sound had been heard since she thought she saw something. If anything large was moving about, it would've made a noise, right?

"Right. Sure. Makes sense. Not really, but whatever. Mustang. Focus on the Mustang."

Amy began her ascent once again, this time pausing every three steps to give her future murderer any attempt to make his presence known.

"Okay, if there's anybody up there, just let me know. If you're a methhead or homeless or something, that's cool. I'll be on my way. This is your place as far as I'm concerned, and you're welcome to it. Just let me know, okay? I'm not gonna tell anybody, I'm just gonna leave. I'm only here to get a date anyway with a fratboy douchebag anyway. Okay?"

Nothing. At this point, Amy was really starting to convince herself that she had imagined the shadow. Hell, there was enough dust floating in the air that it could've just been a mass of it floating by.

The upstairs was remarkably nicer. The carpet was still dirty, but didn't compare to the stairs. She wondered how that could be? Was the owner only dedicated to tracking dirt all over the stairs, but wanted the second level more or less okay? Amy imagined some balding, bearded lanky man walking up and down the stairs for hours on end in an effort to get them just the right level of disgusting. The thought was strangely comical.

"Okay."

She hadn't said that. She had not said that. Amy turned to flee back down the stairs, intent to give her neck a second opportunity to break itself. At this point she didn't care. She had to get away.

Except suddenly a pair of red eyes were glowing out of the darkness at the bottom of the stairs, between her and the safety of the front door. And it was much darker downstairs than it had been fifteen minutes ago. And much, much too cold for this early in Autumn. This wasn't a coke addict, this was something inhuman. And it had probably watched her the entire time she was climbing.

Amy screamed and ran into an adjacent room, slamming the door behind her. She leaned her back against the door, struggling to breathe as silently as she could. There was a step and a creak. Then another and another. The melody of the stairs wasn't playing Katy Perry. It wasn't playing anything. It was just a simple refrain, over and over. It was saying she was about to die. It was saying that she was never going to see her mom again. It was saying that this was the last day of her life. It was saying that there was no God in this house. And if He is here, He's creeping up the stairs right now.

The footsteps stopped as whatever it was reached the landing. She swore she could hear it sniffing. Or perhaps breathing heavily through its mouth. Then ... nothing. The breathing stopped and she felt for some reason that it was no longer even there at all. She was damn sure not going to open the door to find out.

There had to be windows in this room. She was sure of it. Dusk was still an hour away, she was sure. Even through the yellow paper, some sunlight was bound to get through. At this point she wasn't even concerned with escaping through a window, she only wanted some reassurance that the heliocentric theory was still in play here. The sun meant the world still made some sort of sense.

She fumbled in her backpack and pulled out her flashlight. She had changed the batteries before leaving the house and she was sure it worked. She flipped it on and confirmed that it did indeed work, albeit for only a second. It made a loud popping sound and went out again. Amy flicked the switch on and off several times, but it refused to work. The bulb must have shot. Do flashlights still have bulbs? This one does. Did.

She had gained one brief second of being able to see inside the room, and what she saw wasn't good. True, there was the snarling visage of a large animal against the far wall, but that was oddly no big deal. It was a bear's head, one of those disgusting hunting trophies. She felt like it should have scared her more than it did, but it didn't have that effect. But as for the rest of the place?

This was the worst room in the house by far. There was red painted onto the tattered wallpaper. She didn't want to think about what made it. The floor was plywood. No carpet, no tile, no nothing. More reddish-brown stains all over it. And there were logging chains on the floor, and some smaller ones hanging from the ceiling, with one particularly large brown stain underneath them. She felt strangely certain that whatever was standing outside the door lived in this room. She was in its home, and it certainly didn't want her here.

"Or maybe we do."

Amy spun on her heels and fumbled for the doorknob. Jesus Christ. It said "we." "We" meant more than one. She found the knob and twisted, but the door wouldn't open. She banged her fists against it and screamed, but nothing. Was the thing outside pressing against it? She didn't think so. Suddenly the doorknob slipped from her hand. No, that wasn't right. It just ... wasn't there. It had vanished, and there wasn't a hole in the door for it to fit inside. It just wasn't there.

She was stuck in here. There was no way out. There wasn't even a way in. The door was gone and she was frantically beating on wet sheetrock.

"Ohgodohfuckohgodohfuck."

"No. You thought it yourself earlier. He's not here. We're not Him, but He's not here. There's just you. And us."

Amy turned in the direction of the voice. This one had a distinctly different tone than the other one. They both sounded like whispers filtering through a tube of jagged metal, but they were distinct. This one almost sounded maternal. Caring. Which was strangely even more terrifying than the brusqueness of the other voice.

"Don't be afraid. We're with you. You're here. Where you belong."

"Where you've always been. Where you'll always be. You've known this was going to happen sooner or later."

Amy slid to the ground. It was warm and wet. "Oh God, what do you want from me?"

"What you want," answered the darkness.

"W-What do I want?"

"To be here."

"N-No, I don't." Amy thought about trying to find the door again, but was almost certain there was never a door. Was she born in this room? Was this all there was to the world? There was something about Plato's something-or-other. A cave or a house or something. Was it like that? "I want to go home."

"You are home." The kinder voice this time.

"Please, please let me go. You don't have to do this."

"No, we don't." Now the stern one. "But you do. You want to."

"What?" Amy pleaded. "I want to do what?"

"This."

Amy screamed as the terrible pain became everything, her thoughts, her world, her being. It was her father and mother. It was her child. It was everything. She fell to her hands and knees, the grimy floor pressing into her palms and invading the space underneath her fingernails. She glanced at her nails as some of the pain gave way to revulsion, only to watch them begin to flake off her fingers, new yellow-white talons sprouting underneath. She screamed, droplets of drool mixing with her own blood adding to the moist floor. Her saliva was soon followed by her porcelain white teeth collecting underneath her. Drool, dirt, blood, sweat. She was creating quite the puddle.

And they were laughing. The harsh clamoring in her ears mixed with the drumbeat of her own heart, one loud and harsh, one shrill and mirthful. She closed her eyes, praying to a God she wasn't sure she believed in any longer. But she would believe in Him, or any like Him, if only she could escape. Wake up in her bed, or behind a dumpster at school with some narcotic playing with her addled mind. Anything would do, any reason for not being here, for "here" being just a horrible trick of her consciousness.

She forced herself to open her eyes and focus on something, anything, to try to drive off the cacophony and the growing madness she felt sure was on its way. Unfortunately, the sight that greeted her wasn't something she was prepared for. Her nails had continued to lengthen, inch by inch from her fingertips, gathering flaky black wood from the soggy floor as the went. They changed from claws to talons to protruding bone spires that were no longer something that could grasp, could caress, could hold a human hand. They were made for slashing, for goring, for stripping hot flesh from bone.

Her jaw was aching and she instinctively brought a hand up to attempt to soothe it, stopping before she realized that particular comfort was no longer something available to her. She began coughing violently, the stream of drool growing until she almost vomiting it out. Her jaw cracked as new tooth grew from her gums, sharp, wicked things made for snapping the neck of a deer, or a dog, or a person. Yesterday she had given some thought to becoming a vegetarian. She ran her tongue across them all, realizing they were all canine teeth now, and there seemed to be more of them than she remembered. She tried to scream, but only managed a pitiful mewling noise before the coughing resumed.

A sharp pain in her feet drew her attention shortly before she realized that somewhere in between the screaming and the pain and the claws she had somehow lost her clothing. They weren't strewn about the room, they weren't ripped into tatters. They simply weren't there. Her toenails had already flaked away and the talons that replaced them were on their way to mimicking the claws on her fingers.

Looking down she also realized her pubic hair was growing wild and began trailing up across her naval as it continued its pilgrimage between her breasts to join the hair that was sprouting there as well. Looking down at what used to be her arms, she noticed a growth on her forearms as well, the sweat on her flesh contrasting with the rapidly thickening black hair. It gave it a greasy appearance, but it also looked wiry, like tiny guitar strings that could tear at flesh just as easily as the sharp bones jutting from her fingers and toes. The little lake pooling underneath her face had grown wide enough now that it touched the palms of her hands. It was too much to have possibly come from her and it showed no signs of slowing. She realized from the sheer volume of it that it must have been more than just her bile. Perhaps she was coughing up her soul.

The hair continued to thicken until she could barely see her slick skin. It was growing down her cheeks, following her mandible. She tried to wipe her mouth on the fur on her shoulder before realizing she no longer thought of it as hair. She was becoming some sort of animal. The thought caused her to begin weeping, which brought a consoling "Shhh" from the voice at her left ear and a deriding sneer from her right.

"Be brave, yes? The hardest part starts now."

"You aren't ready. But we are."

"If we are, then WE are." The mostly reassuring voice was now addressing the aggressive one, which gave a low grunt of reluctant agreement.

"Please just let me go!" Amy had found her voice at last, although it was deeper than she expected, almost masculine. The act of speaking felt like barbed wire flowing up her throat.

"That's exactly what we're doing." The soft voice this time. "Good! That's good, dear."

"Still a long ways to go." She could feel this one perversely smiling even if she couldn't see it. "This is our favorite part."

"What are you talking about?" Amy tried to stop crying. "I don't understand."

The pain returned in force and Amy collapsed to the floor. She rolled onto her side, the thick drool sticking to her face and sloughing away in strings from where she had landed. She curled into a fetal position, inadvertently digging her talons into the soft flesh at her side. As if in response, her flesh pressed back against the claws, thickening, becoming a leathery hide. It continued to swell along with the rest of her. Her biceps were growing, slightly shifting her arms away from her chest. That particular part of her body seemed to be swelling as well, as her breasts began to press into her forearms, her swelling nipples larger than she remembered. She was so thirsty. Her tongue lolled from her mouth, and she recoiled as for a moment she could taste the dirty wooden floor. It was so wet now she felt sure it would soon collapse. Maybe she would fall into the living room and break her neck, or hit her head on the kitchen counter and dash her brains across the dirty tile. That would be a mercy she dearly wanted.

"No. We don't."

Her sobbing voice quaked out, "But maybe I do."

"She isn't paying attention."

"WE will," the motherly voice corrected its twin. "We're getting so strong now, little one." Being consoled by a phantom was not reassuring in any way.

Then it hit her. The smells. There was an acrid, brimstone stink in the air. Someone was opening the gates of hell to drag her into it.

"No, not yet," one of the voices responded to Amy's thought. "But maybe later. We'll see."

But there was more than just one smell. There was the stench of the mildew. The sweat all around her. The coppery aroma of blood. The odor from her own body. It was ... fascinating. It was like she had only just discovered she had a sense of smell at all. It was so much more profound now. She found herself wanting to investigate them all.

"See?"

"Yes, yes, fine."

The fur was now covering her, so dark it almost made her invisible in the dim room. She could make out sharp quills on her forearms and shins. Every part of her seemed to be made to maim. The fur was becoming so dark that for a moment Amy felt as if she must be fading away. Perhaps that wouldn't be so bad, but she felt almost disappointed that she couldn't see what else was happening to her.

"Let there be light."

"Not funny."

But there was light, a harsh, red glow like the halo from a traffic light. It was enough light to allow her to try to focus on her tormentors, but they were nowhere to be seen. Wherever she looked the light seemed to follow. With a dawning horror, she brought her hands to her eyes and examined to thick pads that had developed there. Bringing them closer, the light seemed to intensify, reflecting off of her palms.

Reflecting. The light was reflecting because it was coming from her eyes. They had become two twin spheres of hellish flame. Tears fell from them, bursting into tiny drops of flame before dying with angry hisses on the damp floor.

"Oh God, what are we ... I ... What am I becoming?"

"She's almost got it. Such a smart girl."

The silence from the condescending voice seemed to hint that Amy was beginning to gain its approval.

The pain centered around the small of her back now as a tiny nub grew. The pulling sensation was almost comfortable, like someone was helping her stand for the first time. The tail continued to grow until it was almost comically long. It lashed back and forth, finally stopping its growth when it was probably twice as long as Amy's own height. It lashes back and forth angrily, slashing back and forth like a whip, tearing chunks of rotten wood from the walls where it struck. It was almost fun to watch.

Amy's attention was drawn away as she felt small pinching sensations from her abdomen. Compared to the overwhelming pain from a moment ago, the small ache these created seemed almost comforting. One by one, new nipples were budding down her torso. Of course they were. Animals have more than one pair, what did she expect? They popped into being, stiffening and causing a feeling in her loins that was altogether different than the constant pain. Three pairs. Four pairs. Five pairs now, the last of them resting on either side of her slit. She carefully slid her hands down her chest, rubbing her new growths with her rough palms. For a moment she felt she should be concerned about the "presence" of her invisible audience, but she was finding fewer and fewer reasons to care about many things that once seemed important. She contemplated touching herself, but realized that was probably a luxury that was no longer available to her. Her puritan mother would be so pleased. Her daughter may have become a monster, but she would be a chaste one.

The change seemed to have other ideas. Her mound started swelling, a pointed hood growing around her clitoris and pushing it at a downward angle until it was facing behind her. She'd have to be fucked like a beast now. The thought actually brought a smile to her lips.

Whatever was happening to her, it was starting to become fun.

"We're got her now. See?"

Amy was actually pleased to hear the stern voice reply, "No. We have US now." It was a compliment, whatever it meant.

She was nearing the end now, she knew. She pushed herself back to her hands and knees, a full foot of her tongue hanging from her maw. Her jaw was sliding forward now, and it didn't hurt a bit. Her entire skull was cracking, crushing, breaking, and it felt ... wonderful. She started to moan, faster and faster, louder and louder, inhaling great heaps of the stale air and exhaling heat and light in equal measure. The pulsing in her loins was keeping pace with the pounding in her chest and her ears. The voices were panting alongside her now.

They were so close now.

So was she.

They howled as they came, and gazed across the room at a mirror they knew wasn't there when they entered the room. The scalding light was so bright now. Three pairs of eyes stared back at them.

The head on their left shoulder started licking their middle one in comfort. The fatherly one spoke from her right, "Now we see, yes?"

The middle one, the one that was still partly what was left of the them-from-before smiled. "Yes. Oh, yes. We see."

The one from the left asked in a soothing voice, "And what do we think?"

The middle one took a deep breath as they stood up on two legs.

"We think ... maybe this isn't such a bad old house after all."