... and so the structure sat there for years, gradually settling in the soil, its colors changing under the sun and wind and rain until its outward appearance began to resemble other structures. The ants themselves, obsessed with legality and rigid hierarchy, long abandoned the building over a managerial dispute. Without their careful hands, it ceased to look like the kind of house which ants would maintain. Only a stray few would even, after years had passed, admit their involvement in building it.
Casual speculation took place among other animals, and briefly a procession of mushrooms considered claiming it... though they later backed out. No one ever figured out why. People in the neighborhood sometimes guessed that the house had been a school or a church - and a great boiler room had congealed at the center of the basement, upon whose presence they claimed to base their theories. Their guesses were of no consequence to the things which crawled.
When time came one dreadful Sunday that The Wizard House, as it had come to be called, would, after several more years untouched, be entered by a small troupe of curious rhabscallions, most of the neighborhood's minds had long since ceased inquiring. The dispute over The Wizard House and its creation could not have been further from the public consciousness as the youths slipped into its darkness through an unlocked side door.
As with its exterior, in the absence of its insect groundskeepers, the interior of the building had decayed to a state in which it began to resemble something of human creation. It was sparsely furnished - in the middle of a wide hall, a fallen piece of flower stem had come to resemble an old couch, pristine on one side and badly torn on the other. The teeth of a piano lay strewn by a doorway, and in the adjoining room the floor was decorated with the splintered pieces of the ebony case. Against the wall, fibres scraped from within the plant by the ants had come to resemble the strings pulled from within the instrument, propped harplike upright. In this room a mattress had grown out of the floor, stained in places and strewn with an equally stained woolen blanket. The youths were enthralled by the strange natural wonders of The Wizard House, made from an Iris, and continued through its halls, passageways, and corridors. They circled twice the outer ring of rooms on the first floor before they found their way to the central ampitheater. Here they were wowed by rows and rows of many kinds of chairs in the encircling theater - folding chairs of various age, material, and size. Benches, ottomans, stray stools, and a few armchairs... all stretched off as far as the eye could see in the dark from the central circle. There were only a few built-in seats - it seems the ants had little use for these... but by incident all the ants had abandoned had degraded towards human utility.
The flesh of the plant on the floor resembled peeling carpet, and what lay beneath was hard, cold stone. The party of foolish youths now circled upwards playfully through the rows of the audience, exiting the ampitheater finally in three separate groups through three separate doors on the third floor. It was while passing through its halls among the strange debris of quasi-human origin that the group's troubles began. In short, they were beset upon BY GHOULS!!!
While they moved through these strange third-floor rooms in darkness, more and more the passageways began to moan and writhe. The corrupted floor slowly came to grow naturalistic protrusions which reached, hungering, for the legs of the baffled trespassers. One by one, all the years of spiritual corrosion drew from the structure furious natural specters of human-like form, and one-by-one the youths were hunted and taken by the horrible dark shapes of the wakened ghouls whose thirst for death had up until then been cannibalistic.
Screaming out to eachother, to anyone, in ever-dwindling number the trespassers were grabbed, hit, pulled into blackness from a last thrall of absolute terror until none were left. The ants had never consecrated the ground.
Beyond this, however, I know of no other terrible incidents. Some time later, true to its name, the house became occupied by a true wizard. He, and a host of ghouls (editor's note: actually, these were ghosts, not ghouls. Carlton misspoke. No slander intended.) and magicians in his employ, took to studying, lofting, and entertaining in the place, where they used the dark ampitheater to perform numberous shows of fantastic magick and spectacle.
If you're reading this - Gods of the Dead is the good one. Listen to that first if you're going to listen to anything on here. It's actually pretty solid.
The second EP from Northern Irish singer-songwriter Bea Stewart runs from gentle folk to pillowy pop ballads, all perfectly executed. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 15, 2024
