Puff

 The fog clinging to the moors of Blackwood did not behave like mist; it moved with a hungry, deliberate intent, tasting the walls of the manor house like a tongue. Inside, Elias sat in the velvet armchair that smelled of stale lavender and preserved decay.

He was waiting for the nursery door to open.

His daughter, Clara, had been dead for three days, her small, pale frame tucked neatly beneath the heavy oak floorboards of the cellar, where the damp would keep the scent of rot at bay for a little while longer. But the house didn't care for his efforts at preservation. The house wanted the debt paid.

Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.

It was the sound of fingernails—not on wood, but on bone.

The nursery door creaked open. There was no child standing there. Instead, a tangle of wet, grey hair and bloated, translucent skin spilled over the threshold. It moved like an arachnid, limbs snapping at impossible angles, joints clicking with the sound of breaking glass. It was Clara, but the version of her that the rot had claimed. Her jaw hung loose, unhinged, revealing a throat packed tight with the black, oily mold that grew in the cellar floorboards.

Elias tried to scream, but the air in the room had turned to thick, stagnant water. He couldn't draw a breath.

The thing that was Clara skittered across the ceiling, her dead eyes—milky orbs devoid of pupils—tracking his every tremor. She dropped onto his chest with the wet thud of a sack of butchered meat. The smell hit him then: a cloying, sweet stench of gangrene and swamp water.

She didn't bite him. She began to sew.

With fingers that lacked skin, she dragged thin, jagged ribbons of his own shadow into his flesh, stitching his eyelids open, then puckering his lips shut with rusted wire pulled from the wallpaper. He watched, unable to blink, as the nursery walls began to bleed a viscous, tar-like substance that smelled of his own sins.

"Puff," the thing whispered, its voice a wet rasping of wind through a hollowed-out chest.

As she pressed a thumb into his eye socket, feeling for the soft jelly beneath, Elias realized the house wasn't punishing him for the murder. It was inviting him to join the collection.

The candle on the mantel flickered once, twice, and then sputtered out, smothered by the rising tide of shadow. In the absolute dark, there was only the sound of wet tearing—the sound of a father being unraveled, thread by agonizing thread—until the room was silent once more.

By morning, the nursery was empty. The manor stood cold and grand against the grey sky, its windows like sightless eyes. Inside the cellar, beneath the floorboards, there were now two bodies, both woven into the foundation, their faces frozen in a silent, eternal gasp, waiting for the house to grow hungry again.