More Than This Read Free

through the open door not illuminating anything, just making the shadows heavier and more threatening to his bleary eyes. He fumbles on, seeing less and less, reaching the bottom of the stairs but turning from them, still hearing nothing, no sounds of habitation, no sound of anything at all except himself.
    Alone.
    He pauses before the doorway to the living room, feeling a fresh thrust of fear. Anything could be there in the darkness, anything could be silently waiting for him, but he forces himself to look in, letting his eyes get used to the light.
    When they do, he sees.
    Caught in a few beams of dusty sunlight from the closed blinds at the front, he sees a simple, plain living room, merging into an open dining area on his right, leading to a doorway through to the kitchen at the back of the house.
    There is furniture here, like any normal room, except it’s all covered in dust so thick it’s like an extra cloth draped over everything. The boy, exhausted still, tries to make the shapes match up to words in his head.
    His eyes adjust to the light more, the room becoming more of itself, taking shape, revealing details –
    Revealing the horse screaming from above the mantelpiece.
    A crazed eye, a tongue like a spike, trapped inside a burning world, looking at him from behind a picture frame.
    Looking right at him.
    The boy cries out at the sight of it because all at once he knows,
knows
beyond a shadow of a doubt, the realization coming like a tidal wave.
    He knows where he is.

He runs as fast as his exhausted feet will take him, staggering back down the hall, stirring up clouds of dust, heading toward the sunshine like –
    (like a drowning man reaching for air –)
    He can vaguely hear himself calling out in distress, still wordless, still unformed.
    But he knows.
    He knows, he knows, he knows.
    He stumbles down the front steps, barely able to stay upright, and then not even barely. He falls to his knees and can’t find the strength to rise again, as if the sudden rush of knowledge is a weight on his back.
    He looks to the house in panic, thinking that something, some
one
must be coming after him, must be in pursuit –
    But there’s nothing.
    There’s still no sound. Not of machines or people or animals or insects or anything at all. There’s nothing but a quiet so deep he can hear his heart beating in his chest.
    My heart,
he thinks. And the words come clearly, cutting through the fog in his mind.
    His heart.
    His dead heart. His drowned heart.
    He begins to shake, as the terrible knowledge of what he saw, the terrible knowledge of what it
means,
starts to overtake him.
    This is the house where he used to live.
    The house from all those years ago. The house in
England.
The house his mother swore she never wanted to see again. The house they moved across an ocean and a continent to get away from.
    But that’s impossible. He hasn’t seen this house, this
country,
in years. Not since primary school.
    Not since –
    Not since his brother got out of the hospital.
    Not since the very worst thing that ever happened.
    No,
he thinks.
    Oh, please, no.
    He knows where he is now. He knows why it would be this place, knows why he would wake up here, after –
    After he died.
    This is hell.
    A hell built exactly for him.
    A hell where he would be alone.
    Forever.
    He’s died, and woken up in his own, personal hell.
    He vomits.
    He falls forward onto his hands, spitting up the contents of his stomach into the bushes on the side of the path. His eyes water from the effort of it, but he can still see that all he’s throwing up is a weird, clear gel that tastes vaguely of sugar. It keeps coming until he exhausts himself, and since his eyes are already watering, it seems only a very short step to weeping. He begins to cry, slumping back down to the concrete face-first.
    It feels, for a time, like drowning all over again, the yearning for breath, the struggle against something larger than himself that only wants to take him down