House by the Cemetery

Somewhere in a quaint New England village in Massachusetts a timeless horror plays out over the centuries, defying the physics of space and logic itself.  Dr. Freudstein has discovered the secret to life through the perpetual regeneration of dead cells by consuming the flesh of the living.  This discovery has given him an unending lease on life, however it has also left him an inhuman butcher; a shuffling flesh fiend on a blood thirsty rampage.  His mind is but a distant memory, an echo of a past life lost in the murky waters of time.  His only desire is to strip the living of their warm flesh so that his unholy presence may dwell here longer.  So that he festers in this realm never having to face the next Hell that awaits him. 

His house and old laboratory are is his tomb, and his victims haunt him throughout time.  Somehow his abominable presence keeps his victim’s spirits tethered to this domain in an endless dream.  In a rare moment of clarity Dr. Freudstein wonders if the process of transmogrifying others flesh into his own timeless husk somehow traps them in this world, where their essence cannot escape into the great beyond past death’s door until the flesh ceases to be.  They ceaselessly gnaw at his mind, whispering to the fragmented parcels of his memory, nudging his spirit further into the chaotic madness of the damned.  Through a century of careful practice and deep, sleepless meditation the doctor has been able to partially tune out the cries of the damned.  The worse was the children; how their cries and whelps of torment carried on throughout the night, affording no rest for the weary, and the doctor was very weary.  If his own voice box still functioned he’d be tempted to join the cacophony of murmuring spirits in their nocturnal song, but yellow pallid flesh has grown over his own maw, an unfortunate mutation and side effect of his unique condition.  At best he can produce a deep gurgling noise in his throat like a malfunctioning scuba respirator.  His breathing is like rustling dead leaves, and he wonders if he still has to breathe at all, or if it is merely a useless habit picked up from when he was alive.   

  

His eyes have desiccated into red raisins long ago, his ears have shriveled and rotted off his head like spoiled fruit, but in the eternal pitch black he has developed other senses.  Despite the lack of his ears he can hear the blood beat through the veins of the living like torrents of water rushing down white rapids.  The capillaries are like gentle streams of delicious sweet hemoglobin and the heart sounds like an out of tune bass drum.  He is jealous and wants to pry these things free from their fleshly confines.  The living do not deserve the life they so seldom appreciate.  His own heart crawls with insects and a multitude of nesting maggots as it remains silent and still.  His internal organs have sequestered into a jelly like slime, yet he persists.  His walk is a slow gait, a pathetic shuffle.  His muscles are riddled with atrophy, but through sheer will he is able to find locomotion.  In the cob webbed sea of his basement and laboratory, where the air sits thick and still for decades on end, the slow drift of his walk seems like a fury of activity.  He finds another moss covered corner to the dungeon and falls back to rest.     

Since walking comes at a great expense of energy Dr. Freudstein saves his strength up to when he absolutely needs it; when new intruders, fresh meat, enter the house by the cemetery.  Sometimes he feeds on the rats and other vermin.  Otherwise the doctor remains rested in a dreamless suspended animation, where the mind churns but the thoughts retain no form, and the years are lost to the dead stillness of the tomb.  Sometimes while at rest he picks up ghostly images in his mind’s eye, like old photographs, of the house before it was choked with cobwebs and caked in dust.  He can see it with fresh paint and smell the rich mahogany, as if the lumber was just cut.  Sometimes he sees a little girl as if in a hazy dream, a red head with soft snow white skin playing with her doll, and he feels a deep pity, but cannot remember why or for what reason.   He knows his flesh was once tied to the girl, but that flesh is a forgotten memory, and the tie, like his tie to humanity, has long been severed.  Now he exists in a gray twilight world between life and death; a purgatory seldom few have experienced in this realm.  He is a living mummy reaping corpses for his blasphemous desire to continue to be long after his body expires, and the horror he has wrought has trapped his victims, like flies in the web, to this time and place with him. 

He has defied the laws of the natural world by prying back the doors to immortality; and much more.  Achieving immortality, even the pale form of immortality Dr. Freudstein has achieved, has loosened the very laws of physics, strained them to the point that the very ebb and flow of time itself has warped.  The house by the cemetery has become a kind of nexus of time and space, where Dr. Freudstein can view past and future events in fragments as if they were all occurring in the present. Although he no longer has the mental capacity to interpret said images, as his sanity has long left him in the endless fathoms of swelling darkness below the old decrepit mansion, the living can view these images in dreams and under deep meditation.  Some children are also able to tap into these visions, as children are more connected to the spiritual world, a connection that loses it’s potency as they grow into adulthood.

Dr. Freudstein has been restless as of late.  His need for blood and new fresh cells has grown to a ravenous hunger that nags at the fiber of his being with a constant cadence.  The ghosts around him stir with anticipation.  Soon the house by the cemetery will have new residents, maybe even a young virile child to sponge some extra years of life from.  Their flesh always tasted the sweetest, as if he cashed in on the unspent years of their life and added them to his account.  They always provided the most nourishment.  Soon his hunger would be sated…soon more would be caught in the unending wheel of horror that is THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY!