Blood and Guilt.

The wind howled like a banshee around the old, dilapidated Victorian house, its mournful wail sending shivers down my spine as I ascended the creaking wooden stairs. Each step groaned under the weight, a tortured sound that seemed to echo through the house's hollow chambers. It was as if the very bones of the building were crying out in protest for what was about to happen. The storm outside hurled rain against the windows with such fury that the glass rattled in its frames, threatening to shatter at any moment.

The once vibrant green and gold leaf wallpaper, now hung in tattered strips, revealing the skeletal framework of water-stained plaster beneath. Shadows danced and writhed in the corners where my flashlight beam couldn’t quite reach, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that something just beyond my sight was watching. Waiting.

Pausing midway up the staircase, I gripped the banister. Its sticky surface gripped my old hand, decades worth of grime seeping into my fingers, casting a hesitant glance over my shoulder. The entrance was calling me back, like a mother calling her child. The front door I’d entered through was now barely visible in the gloom. For a fleeting moment, the decrepit state of the house dissolved, replaced by the warm glow of light dancing off the walls, mingling with the soft voice of Elvis crooning from a record player. The phantom scent of perfume and cigarette smoke filled my nostrils. Laughter and chatter echoed in my ears. Amy’s bright, loud laugh rising above the rest, transporting me back to a time when this house was alive with joy and festivity. But the illusion shattered like glass with the sound of thunder outside the walls, leaving only the stark reality of decay and neglect. The silence rushed back in, oppressive and suffocating. I hadn’t intended to return here, not after the that ill-fated night, seventy years ago, where smiles turned to screams and laughter soured into the silence of the grave. My hand trembled as I resumed my climb. The stairs seemed to stretch endlessly upward, each step requiring more effort than the last, as if my body itself was trying to hold me back. Dust swirled in the beam of my flashlight, and somewhere in the walls, something scuttled. Rats, perhaps, or something else entirely.

My gaze fixed on a single door at the end of the hallway, amidst the peeling paint and splintered wood. Despite its dilapidation, it stood out to me like a beacon in the darkness, or perhaps a warning. The door to Amy’s reading room. The door I shouldn’t have opened that night. The floorboards creaked beneath my feet as I approached, each sound like a gunshot in the stillness. My heart hammered against my ribs, a wild, desperate rhythm that made my breath come in short, sharp gasps. With trembling fingers, I reached for the dusty handle. My hand was hovering only just inches away. The brass was cold even from this distance, radiating a chill that seemed to seep into my bones. Hesitating, I felt a wave of emotions wash over me. Grief and a guilt so profound it threatened to root me to the spot. What would I find beyond this door? What had I been running from all these years?

Taking a deep breath that tasted of mould and forgotten things, I pushed open the door. The hinges shrieked in protest, the sound like nails on a chalkboard, and the faint click of the latch echoed in the room beyond. Inside, the scene was frozen in time, a perfectly preserved snapshot of that terrible night, untouched by the ravages of years, but preservation had not meant kindness. The room was a tomb, airless and still. A glass still sat on the small side table, the liquid inside the cup long since evaporated, leaving only a dark residue. A book lay open on the ottoman. Its pages were yellowed and brittle, and there on the wall above the mantle was the black-and-white photo of a couple. Amy and myself, that was taken the summer before everything ended in what would be the story of the decade. Tears welled in my eyes at the sight of the once-beloved sanctuary now reduced to this heavy stillness. A sob caught in my throat, and I pressed my hand to my mouth to stifle it.

My gaze fell upon the battered and torn brown chair beside the fireplace, whose weathered appearance held countless memories. The leather was cracked and spilt, the stuffing peeking through the exposed wounds. Tracing a hand over the worn surface. I recalled the comfort it had offered me that fateful night, when I sat alone in contemplation, nursing my wounds and my whiskey, oblivious to the screams that must have echoed through the rest of the house. Oblivious to Amys desperate search for me. Oblivious to everything until the silence fell and it was too late.

Thunder rumbled ominously outside, a deep-throated growl that seemed to emanate from the very earth itself. Drawing me back to the present as the rain hammered against the windows with renewed violence. Lightening flashed, throwing stark white light across the room for a split second, illuminating corners that had been mercifully hidden in shadow. I flinched, and the ghost of the old scar twinged beneath my shirt, a jagged line across my ribs where the knife had found its mark. A stark reminder of the night that was set a flame, those flames changed my life.

As memories threatened to engulf me once more, threatening to pull me under like a riptide, a sharp knock shattered the silence.

‘Knock. Knock. Knock.’

Three precise, deliberate raps on the door behind me, the very door I had just entered through. My heart lurched into my throat, and I spun around so fast I nearly lost my balance. The knock came again, more insistent this time. But that was impossible. I was alone in this house. I had to be. No one else would come here. No one even knew I was here.

“Who’s there?” I called out, my voice cracking with fear, sounding shaken and alone in the stillness.

Silence. Only the eerie quiet of the empty house greeted me, broken only by the drumming of rain and hammering of my own pulse in my ears. Then, without a warning, I was fixed to the spot as I watched the door open, slowly, agonizing slowly until in one big swoop it swung open. Not with the violence of the wind, but with deliberate purpose inch by excruciating inch. A shadowy figure stood in the doorway, backlit by the faint grey light from the hallways window. I couldn’t make out features, only a silhouette, utterly still and watching. Waiting.

My breathing become rapped, my palms sweeting as the fear coiled in my chest like a serpent, squeezing until I couldn’t breathe. My legs felt weak, my knees threatening to buckle. Every instinct screamed at me to run, to flee, but I was paralyzed unable to move as I watched the figure materialize before my eyes. It stepped forward into the room, and another flash of lightening illuminated everything with cruel clarity.

The figure was morphing, featured becoming clearer. Sharper, impossibly familiar. Morphing into someone I had loved and lost long ago. Dark curls. Porcelain skin. Those eyes, green as summer leaves, that had once looked at me with such love.

Amy.

But Amy had been dead for seventy years. I had seen her body myself, pale and still. The life stolen form her by a madman’s rage. I had wept at her memory very day for years. I had carried the guilt of my ignorance and hatred for her that night for seven decades. Recognition dawned, flooding through me like ice water, but with it came a chilling realization that froze be to my bones.

This wasn’t a reunion. It was a reckoning.

For in that moment, I understood with terrible, and clear clarity. I wasn’t truly here. Not in the way I had thought. This dilapidated house, this preserved room; it was all wrong. The house had been demolished forty years ago, torn down to make way for more up to date housing. I had read about it in the paper, I had mourned its passing from afar.

This was a vision, a haunting reminder of the night I should have died but didn’t. The night the killers knife had found me first, but I had survived, hidden away bleeding in this very room while he moved through the house, methodical and merciless. While Amy died calling my name, and I was too weak, too much of a coward to answer.

And now, after seventy years of borrowed time, carrying the weight of survivor’s guilt like stones in my pockets. Death had come to claim what was rightfully his. With trembling hands, I reached out to touch the figure, half expecting my fingers to pass through its form like smoke. But to my surprise, to my horror, they met solid flesh, cold and clammy beneath my touch, like something pulled from a river. The skin had the wrong texture, too smooth, too perfect like porcelain or wax.

A gasp escaped my lips as I recoiled, stumbling backward, and a flood of memories rushed back with the force of a tidal wave, threatening to drown me in their depths.

“Amy.” I whispered, the name tasting bitter on my tongue, like ashes and regret. How many years had it been since I last spoke that name aloud? Since I last saw her face, alive and full of laughter, before I stormed off to sulk over some petty argument I couldn’t even remember now?

But there was no laughter now, only a solemn gaze that pierced through me like a dagger seeing everything. Every sin. Every failure. Every moment of anger.

“Do you remember what you did?” she said, her voice a mere whisper on the wind, layered with something else beneath it, something that didn’t quite sound human. “Time to face the truth.”

Memories came flashing back the pain became louder and louder as Flashes of fire and blood came flooding back. Looking down at my hands covered in blood, a knife in my hand. I shook my head violently, denial taking over with the undeniable truth staring me in the face. My heart raced so fast I thought it might burst.

“I can’t.” I choked out. The words catching in my throat. “I’m not ready. I’m sorry. God, Amy, I’m sorry.”

Amy’s expression softened, a hint of sadness flickering in her eyes. Those eyes that I had once known as well as my own.

“You’ve never been ready, James” she said, her voice tinged with regret, with something that might have been forgiveness or might have been condemnation. “But time waits for no one, not even you. Not anymore.”

With those words, she reached out a pale hand, beckoning me forward with a silent plea. Her fingers were long and pale, like bone wrapped in wax, and they seemed to glow faintly in the darkness. And though every instinct screamed for me to run, to flee form the specter of my past, from this impossible thing that wore Amys face, I found myself unable to resist. It was as if invisible strings were pulling me forward, as if I had no choice in the matter. Perhaps I never had.

Step by agonising step, I crossed the threshold. My feet moving of their own accord, leaving behind the safety of the world I knew for the unknown depths of what lay beyond. The air crackled with electricity, sending sparks dancing along my skin, raising every hair on my body. The temperature dropped so suddenly that my breath misted in the air. I drew closer to Amy’s outstretched hand, and I could see that she wasn’t quite smiling anymore, there was a uneasiness to it, a smile that seemed to me hinting at something else, something evil.

And then, with a single touch, everything changed. Her fingers closed around mine. Ice cold, burning cold and the world around me dissolved into darkness, swallowing me whole as I tumbled into the abyss. I felt myself falling, falling the sensation of dropping through space even though I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. Couldn’t breathe.

When I awoke, the home that I had once loved and had gone back to in my dream was gone, my wife was gone. I sat up slowly, my old bones protesting and looked around. The old study room had now been replaced by a stone cell and metal bars. The old leather chair was now a hard prison bed, but the memories remained, etched into the very fabric of my being.

Amy’s laugh, her smile, the way she used to read to me by the fire but also the arguments, the jealous thoughts that ran through my head when she would say hello to even just the post man. Its was all there. The guilt remind too, the guilt of ending her life.

The sound of the wardens shoes echoed across the stone and silent corridor, his keys rattled in the lock of my cell as he pulled the iron bars aside. ‘Well James, you ready for your last meal.’ Glancing up from the photo I held of the two of use, I took in a deep breath like it was the first time I was breathing and for the first time in seventy years, I was ready to face my guilt because I was the madman, it was be who took her life, me who stabbed myself and hidden. It was me who had seen nothing but anger and jealousy at finding a simple letter from her brother in law. It had been me who had killed my wife.