Marcus gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles blanched, watching the Victorian house materialize through the rain at Sycamore Lane’s dead end. Twenty years since he’d fled this place, and still it squatted there like something that had crawled up from the earth and learned to mimic architecture. The wipers shrieked across the windshield, each pass revealing the house anew, its gables sharp as accusations, paint peeling in patterns that looked deliberate, malevolent. He killed the engine. In the sudden silence, he could hear his pulse in his ears, quick and shallow as a trapped animal’s.

The inheritance letter lay crumpled in his jacket pocket. Heart failure, it said. His father dead in the same bed where he’d drunk himself to sleep for two decades. Marcus had thought distance would be enough, two thousand miles, a different name on his apartment lease, years of careful construction around the hole in his history. But the house had patience. It had waited.

The porch boards groaned under his weight, a familiar song of rot and surrender. Inside, dust motes swirled in the bruised light that filtered through curtains gone to cobwebs. The smell hit him immediately, not just mildew and neglect, but something sweeter underneath, like fruit left too long in a closed room. His childhood home had aged badly, furniture draped in sheets that resembled shrouds, wallpaper bubbling with moisture that seemed to pulse in his peripheral vision.

In the living room, family photos lined the mantel like a jury. His parents, faces etched with the particular exhaustion of grief. And there, Marcus at eighteen, arm slung around a smaller boy. David, frozen at sixteen, grinning with the casual confidence of someone who believed in tomorrow. Marcus’s hand trembled as he turned the photo face-down. The sound it made against the wood was like a nail being driven home.

That night, sleep came in fragments. The old mattress knew the shape of the boy he’d been, tried to force him back into it. Dreams seeped in through cracks in his consciousness: the beam of a flashlight cutting through basement dark, illuminating something that shouldn’t exist. A staircase made of pale, veined flesh, rising from the dirt floor. Vertebrae for balusters. Tendons stretched taut as handrails. It breathed with a rhythm that matched his own labored gasps.

He climbed because the dream demanded it. Each step warm and yielding, like pressing into a fresh bruise. Images flashed with each footfall, hands shoving in anger, a body falling with terrible grace, the specific sound a skull makes when it meets concrete. He woke clawing at his sheets, dirt packed beneath his fingernails though he hadn’t left the bed.

Morning brought no relief. In the attic, hunting through his father’s accumulated grief, Marcus found the baseball glove. Leather cracked with age, the initials D.R. carved by a careful hand. David Reeves. The name hit like a physical blow, twenty years of careful forgetting undone by dead cow skin and faded ink. More boxes yielded more evidence: report cards proclaiming David’s intelligence, photos of two boys becoming different people, Marcus tall and careful, David compact and reckless. A birthday card in Marcus’s rigid script: “To the pest who steals my comics, happy 15th.”

The last photo in the box showed David alone, staring directly at the camera with eyes that seemed to know what was coming.

The house began its work in earnest then. Doors Marcus had left open would be closed when he turned back. His reflection in mirrors lagged a half-second behind his movements. The cellar door’s brass knob grew cold to the touch, frost forming in July heat. And always, always, that sweet-rot smell growing stronger, as if something buried was working its way back to the surface.

That afternoon, desperate for air that didn’t taste of secrets, Marcus drove to the cemetery. His parents lay side by side under modest stones, Evelyn Reeves, Beloved Mother; Robert Reeves, Devoted Father. The space beside them was empty, waiting. No stone for David. No body to bury. Just grass that grew too green, too thick, as if fed by absence itself.

Back at the house, he found his grandfather’s journal in a nightstand drawer that hadn’t been there that morning. Elias Reeves’s cramped handwriting deteriorated across the pages:

The house remembers. Started after Henry. We fought brothers always fight about Father’s watch. His neck… wrong angle… I can still hear the snap. Ma sleeping upstairs. Had to be quick. Had to be quiet.

The dreams now. Stairs that aren’t stairs. They breathe, Marcus. God help me, they breathe. Made of… can’t write it. Won’t write it. Henry climbs them every night in my head. Shows me. Makes me see.

The house wants… blood in the foundation, blood in the walls. Brothers’ blood tastes sweetest. It makes you climb through what you’ve done. Makes you taste it. Henry waits at the top. His eyes…

Don’t let it take you. But it will. It always does. We always do.

Marcus’s hands shook as he turned the pages. Sketches filled the margins anatomical drawings of impossible architecture. Staircases that were digestive systems. Doorways lined with teeth.

That night, the dreams abandoned all pretense. Marcus found himself at the cellar door without memory of walking there. His hand turned the knob of its own accord. The stairs down were ordinary wood, but he could hear something else beneath them a wet, organic sound like a massive heart beating in the earth.

At the bottom, lit by no source he could name, the flesh staircase waited. No longer content to remain in dreams, it rose from the packed dirt floor in a spiral of calcified guilt. The vertebrae steps gleamed wetly. Veins pulsed beneath translucent skin. And from somewhere above, echoing down through meat and bone, came a voice he’d spent twenty years trying to forget:

“Come on up, Marcus. We need to talk about what you did.”

He climbed because there was nothing else left. Each step was a memory made manifest:

First step: The cellar, summer of ‘04. Heat so thick it had weight. They’d gone down to escape another of their parents’ whiskey-fueled arguments. David had found their mother’s jewelry box hidden behind the water heater grandmother’s pearls, great-aunt’s wedding ring, things that could be sold. “We could get out,” David said, eyes fever-bright with possibility. “Both of us. Tonight. Chicago, maybe. Anywhere but here.”

Marcus snatched the box away. “That’s stealing.”

“From who? Mom drinks her meals now. Dad hasn’t been sober since May. They won’t even notice.”

“I said no.”

“Because you’re leaving anyway. Full scholarship, remember? You get to escape the right way while I rot here.”

The step beneath Marcus’s foot pulsed, feeding on the memory.

Second step: Flashes of before. David taking a beating from Jimmy Morrison in seventh grade because Jimmy had called Marcus a faggot. Building a fort in the backyard, David insisting on doing the dangerous parts, climbing too high, hammering while balanced on branches that bent under his weight. “I’m the brave one,” he’d said, grinning through a split lip. “You’re the smart one. That’s how it works.”

But brave became reckless. Smart became superior. The love between them curdled like milk left in the sun.

Third step: The shove itself, experienced now from every angle. Marcus’s hands connecting with David’s chest. The surprise in his brother’s eyes not fear, but disappointment. Time dilating as David fell backward, arms wheeling for balance that wouldn’t come. The crack wasn’t like movies made it sound. Duller. Wetter. Final. David’s eyes stayed open, staring at something past Marcus’s shoulder, already seeing whatever comes after.

Fourth step: The cover-up, each detail preserved in perfect clarity. The weight of David’s body, heavier dead than alive. How the shovel handle raised blisters that took weeks to heal. The specific texture of the dirt, clay-heavy and dark. He’d wrapped David in a tarp from the garage, lowered him carefully into the hole. Arranged his limbs so he looked comfortable, as if that mattered. As if dead boys cared about comfort.

At breakfast the next morning, performance of a lifetime: “David took off. We had a fight and he packed his stuff. Said he was done with this family.”

His mother’s face crumpling. His father’s jaw tightening. But they believed it because the alternative was impossible. Good boys didn’t kill their brothers. Good boys didn’t lie with corpse-dirt under their fingernails.

Fifth step: The aftermath unfolding like a plague. Police searches that Marcus watched from his bedroom window, knowing they were looking in all the wrong places. His mother’s deterioration first the sleeping pills, then the drinking, then the long silences. She’d stand in David’s doorway at night, whispering apologies to empty air. His father’s rages giving way to stupor. That day at the gas station when Mrs. Henderson touched his arm, said “Any word?” and he’d seen it in her eyes not sympathy but suspicion, quickly hidden. The guidance counselor pulling him aside: “If you need to talk about your brother…” letting the sentence die when Marcus’s face went blank as paper.

And Marcus playing his part perfectly. Concerned brother. Distraught son. Heading off to college as planned because what else could he do? Leaving his parents to drink themselves to death in a house that knew exactly what he’d done.

The stairs continued beyond memory now, showing him things that hadn’t happened yet. Or had happened. Or were happening always, in every moment, in the space between seconds:

David in the dark, conscious as the earth pressed down. Feeling his flesh corrupt, beetles making highways through his chest cavity. Roots threading between his ribs like new bones. The house keeping him aware through it all, feeding on his fury. Twenty years of decomposition experienced in real-time. Twenty years of waiting.

“Almost there,” David’s voice drifted down. “Just a little further.”

The final steps were made of Marcus himself his own bones forming the structure, his skin the surface. He climbed through versions of himself: the boy who pushed, the man who ran, the liar who aged while his brother rotted. Each step extracted its price in pain that transcended the physical.

At the top, a door of scar tissue pulsed in sympathy with his hammering heart. Marcus pushed through.

The space beyond defied geometry. Vast and airless, lit by the phosphorescent glow of decay. David waited at its heart, suspended in darkness that moved like water. Twenty years had not been kind. His flesh had taken on the texture of the house itself patches of exposed bone, skin like old wallpaper, eyes that were caverns opening onto deeper dark.

“Hey, Marcus.” David’s voice came from everywhere at once. “Nice of you to finally visit.”

“David, I—”

“Don’t.” Somehow David was closer now, though he hadn’t seemed to move. “You know what the worst part was? Not the dying. That was quick. It was feeling you up there, living. Getting your degree while worms ate my eyes. Finding love while I fossilized. Building your careful little life on the foundation of my bones.”

The darkness writhed, taking shapes that hurt to perceive. Sarah’s face, twisted in disgust. Lisa, backing away from something she couldn’t name. Every failed connection, every nightmare that sent him fleeing beds and buildings and entire cities. Marcus saw it now the threads connecting every loss to this place, to this moment.

“I reached up,” David continued, and Marcus could see the tendrils extending from his brother’s corpse, threading through soil and time, wrapping around Marcus’s life like puppet strings made of nerve endings. “Made sure you’d always carry me. Made sure the rot would show in everything you touched.”

“I’m sorry.” The words fell from Marcus like teeth. “God, David, I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry.” David laughed, and it sounded like soil settling. “Do you know what Mom said before she died? She said my name. Not yours. Mine. Like she knew. Like she’d always known but couldn’t face it. Dad drank himself to death trying to forget the sound of my voice calling from under the floor.”

The void contracted, pressing in from all sides. Marcus felt his lungs compress, his bones creak. This was how it would end, crushed by the weight of what he’d done, becoming part of the house’s collection. Another Reeves boy feeding the foundation.

But David wasn’t finished. “The house is hungry, Marcus. It’s been eating our family for generations. Elias and Henry. Dad and Mom, slower but just as sure. Now us. It likes the taste of brother’s blood best. Makes us tender.” His form shifted, became more human for a moment, sixteen forever, still wearing the Nirvana t-shirt he’d died in. “But I’m tired. Twenty years is a long time to be angry. Even the house can’t keep me forever.”

“Then let it end,” Marcus gasped. “Please. Let it end.”

David studied him with eyes that held depths Marcus couldn’t fathom. “You know what you have to do.”

The void collapsed like a lung exhaling its last breath. Marcus tumbled back onto the cellar floor, gasping, the taste of grave dirt in his mouth. The flesh staircase was gone, leaving only an ordinary basement. Ordinary dirt. And underneath, waiting all these years—

He dug with his hands first, then found the shovel. The earth gave way eagerly, as if it too was tired of keeping secrets. David’s bones were smaller than memory suggested. A boy’s bones, wrapped in the remnants of a Nirvana shirt. Marcus cradled the skull, ran his thumbs over the fracture lines where concrete had kissed bone.

The house shuddered around him. Plaster cracked in patterns like neural pathways. Pipes burst in the walls, water running red with rust. Twenty years of swallowed screams working their way free.

Marcus climbed the stairs, ordinary stairs now, though they groaned like a throat learning to speak. Dawn light filtered through windows gone cloudy with age. He sat on the porch with David’s remains wrapped in his jacket, feeling the weight of them, the terrible lightness.

His phone felt alien in his hand. Three numbers. Such a simple thing.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“I need to report a death.” His voice came from very far away. “My brother, David Reeves. He’s been missing twenty years. I know where he is.”

While waiting for the sirens, Marcus held what was left of David and watched the sun rise over Sycamore Lane. The house settled behind him, foundations shifting with sounds that might have been sighs. In the walls, in the spaces between what was known and what was hidden, something stirred. The house was patient. It had fed on the Reeves family for generations, grown fat on their buried sins.

In the corner of his eye, Marcus caught movement in an upstairs window. A figure that might have been shadow. Might have been memory. Might have been David, sixteen forever, pressing his palm against the glass in what could have been farewell. Or warning.

The sirens grew louder. Soon there would be questions, consequences, the weight of law added to the weight of years. But for now, Marcus sat with his brother’s bones and wondered if confession was enough. If anything could be enough.

Behind him, the cellar door swung gently in a breeze that touched nothing else. And somewhere in the spaces between the walls, in the gaps where insulation had rotted away, something that might have been laughter. Or weeping. Or just the sound a house makes when it’s digesting another generation of guilt.

The Victorian had eaten well. And Marcus knew, with the certainty of someone who’d climbed stairs made of his own sins, that it would eat again. The house was patient.

It could wait.