They have hollowed out a wooden shell and made it damp, on purpose, to frighten one another.
I know this house. Not the standing part, the shingles and the sagging beams, the parts that will fall and rot and mean nothing to me. I know the wet in its walls. There is a skin of me under that basement floor, seeping up through stone, and a green film of me sweating down the cellar glass, and a low black pool of me gone still in the corners where the light does not reach.
This is old water. This is water that has forgotten it was ever a wave.
The little warm creatures come in single file, gripping each other's arms, and they shriek. Something drips on them from the ceiling and they scream as though the drop were a wound. It is only me. It is me they are dressed against, me in the cold breath of the hallway, me condensing on the back of a boy's neck while he decides whether to run.
They have built a whole ceremony of fear around the sensation of being touched by water in the dark.
They will not stay. They never stay. They pour back out through the door, laughing now, the salt of them running down their faces, wiping me from their eyes with their sleeves. And the drop that fell from the rafter, the one that made the girl cry out, is already sinking through the boards, going down through soil and root and stone, going down the slow way, coming home.