...
"And if we were to dissect a house, we would find ourselves a stomach throat spine and eyes and eyes teeth and sinew and dreams and memories and a mouth that will bite down."
She stands, frozen, looking around at the strings of flesh and saliva extending from floor to ceiling, and the protruding lumps that she suddenly realizes are teeth.
SNAP.
She's standing in the kitchen again.
Rattled, she turns to leave the room. Only to find that she can't leave. The doorway... isn't. A mass of pulsating flesh fills where it'd been.
A creaking sound startles her, and she turns to see the basement door swing open.
She looks from the basement door, to the blocked doorway, to the basement door again. It's obvious there's only one way left to go.
For a moment, she considers banging her fists on the kitchen window and screaming as hard as she can into the night. But the absence of the wall around it gives her pause. She isn't sure she wants to risk touching that black emptiness. And - she realizes - that isn't what the house wants. It opened the basement door. For her.
What the house wants?
The tapes echo in her head. "We can feel his bones snapping." "The basement is dark." "A mouth that will bite down." And, strangely enough, repeating in the back of her mind along with all the warnings that she's starting to realize she should have heeded, "Sympathy--sympathy--sympathy--sympathy--"
She steps through the doorway, hesitating at the top of the stairs.
Just like the house promised, the door slams.
And she falls.
Her foot goes through a rotting plywood step as she tries to catch herself. It holds for only a moment, and then the entire staircase gives beneath her weight, crashing down to the unfinished concrete below. They can feel her bones snapping.
...