Paint it Another Colour

Chapter 74

Leon hadn't been back to the house he'd shared with his family for months. Now, he stood outside the garden staring up at the dark windows and wide open front door. They'd left it like that when they'd all left, not bothered about what happened to anything. They'd taken their valuables and walked out.

Since then, it was obvious someone else had been there.

The burnt out remains of a portable barbeque sat in the middle of the garden, grass slightly longer than Yao always liked to keep it. He'd have had a fit if he'd have seen it. Yao had always liked things to be in a fairly straight forwards order. It was almost a good job he wasn't around anymore. The front door, though it had most definitely been open when they'd left, looked as though it had been kicked a couple of times, as though it had been closed. The porch step was littered with various cans in different stages of abandonment – some squashed, some upright, some piled in the gutter, some covered in a substance that Leon didn't want to think about.

It hadn't taken the locals long to move in after them, had it?

Carefully, he took a few steps up the path, picking his way in between the odd week in a gap in the stones, until he got to the door, stepping over the cans and inside. It wasn't exactly dark outside, though the descending sun made the sky not quite as bright as it had been when he'd arrived, but inside the house, it felt dark. Not a nice dark, like the type you can fall asleep to, or the type you find in the cinema just before the screen lights up and the film you've paid to see comes on; but a dark that seeped into every corner and curled around everything, him being one of its newest posts. He shuddered and walked down the hall, past family photos swinging on one corner or smashed on the floor, towards the kitchen, the last room he properly remembered.

The second he got into the kitchen, the smell hit him - a stench of rotting meat and something else unpleasant over the top. They'd been in such a hurry to get out, they hadn't even taken the time to sort out the bodies. They were all still there in similar states of decomposing - a couple of skeletons, one headless, one curled up.

That one was Mei.

The other one was his fault. Both of them pale grey with grinning skeletons, one across the other side of the room, and both with little leech like shapes of flesh still attached to the bones. Through the grimy windows, he could see the third in the garden, a pitchfork lying discarded next to him. Xiao.

That one was because of Kiku.

The table was still half cluttered with harmful objects, like pans and scissors that they'd scooped together as soon as they'd figured they weren't safe. A couple of arrows had joined them, which definitely hadn't been there before. That was probably Batukhan. Many of the objects had fallen off the table, creating a scene of disarray around the base of it. 

Leon stood in the doorway peering through the dark at it, hands buried deep in his pockets. One of the corners of the room was now dominated by a spider's web, the spider itself, a huge hairy thing with thick, bony legs, sat moodily in the centre of it, a cotton wool like egg sack hanging a few centimetres away from it. He shuddered at it and stepped away towards the staircase. He wasn't quite sure why he'd come back now, at all times, he just sort of, had. That, and he'd become sick of wearing the same two shirts and pairs of jeans for a month. Not that any of his other clothes would be in any sort of condition that would redeem them acceptable, but Arthur might be able to do something about them? Heck, he'd been able to get a wine stain off one of Francis' outfits once!

The upstairs of the house wasn't in as big a state of disrepair as the rest of it, more just dusty, dark and cold. Of course, it wasn't very nice, but at least there wasn't any blood, still decomposing skeletons or grumpy spiders. Although, when he opened his wardrobe door, a moth had very kindly chewed holes through most of his stuff. Now, it was chewed up itself, hanging from a thin thread.