Just as without shipwreck, without danger, without loss there is no voyage. Carlos del Puente Stories

The house on the cliff was not a house but the corpse of a beached ship inside the open belly of a whale, its ribs exposed like cement beams, its portholes blinking like drowsy birds. Inside, Captain Ahab Blackwood —who was neither a real captain nor truly a Blackwood, but had won the title in a poker game in a shabby dive bar against Death himself— stood at the helm of his grand piano, navigating through storms of family arguments. His wife, Medea Jones, stirred a cauldron of soup that smelled suspiciously of thyme and betrayal. Their children, the twins Romulus and Remus (though they only answered to Damien and Damien), whirled around the dining table in a perpetual waltz, whispering in a language composed entirely of whale songs and the grinding of dolphins furious about their falsely positive public image.

The household's central axiom, painted in phosphorescent letters above the mantelpiece, read: Just as without shipwreck, without danger, without loss there is no voyage. This was not philosophy but a statement: the house demanded sacrifice. Last Tuesday, they had eaten the nanny.

Detective Rust Cohle, called to investigate the disappearance, ended up investigating why the wallpaper screamed when touched. The pattern —an endless knot of vipers swallowing their own tails— twitched under his fingers. You don't understand anything, said the eldest daughter, Carrie, setting the curtains ablaze with a look of sweet passion. The house isn't haunted. It's hungry.

The twins stopped mid-rotation along the axis of their slightly separated bodies' gravity, tilting their heads in unison. Damien the First licked his lips and said, in a voice like a rusted castle door hinge, Shipwreck is the womb of discovery. Damien the Second countered by biting his own wrist until the blood spelled NO in Morse code on the floorboards. Their private language had no word for compromise, though it did have seventeen words for mutually drowning in empathy.

Meanwhile, in the attic, Uncle Pinhead was solving the puzzle box again. Not the one with chains —that was child's play— but the one made from the nanny's ribcage. Each solved vertebra produced a note, and the song was beginning to sound like Nearer My God to Thee. Aunt Annie, who had brought dessert (a pie crust filled with live wasps and heartfelt apologies), remarked that this was what happened when you ignored the house's cravings. The grandfather clock, which had once been a naval chronometer, struck thirteen times at midnight to mark the arrival of new time. A warning or a countdown? The clock refused to clarify, though it did vomit up a soggy tide table from 1887 from beyond the seas.

Outside, the neighbor's dogs of science fiction writer Philip Kindred Dick formed a choir, howling a funeral dirge from the future in 7/4 time. Mrs. H.P. Lovecraft, American writer of weird fiction, science fiction, fantasy and horror, from the house next door filed her seventeenth noise complaint, this time written with the blood of her own cat and feces from the famous sheep. The police chief, a man who had seen occult cults worship darker things than extorted real estate, took one look at the house's new gable (shaped unmistakably like the wing of Edgar Allan Poe's raven) and resigned on the spot.

Inside, the walls now breathed faster and better with the stale air of Poe's cat. The twins resumed their spinning, their bodies moving in perfect opposition —one clockwise, the other counterclockwise— generating just the necessary torque to prevent the house from collapsing into the sea beneath a galactic storm. Their sister Regan began reciting the names of drowned sailors in chronological alphabetical order. Hannibal the dog thoughtfully chewed on a femur that may or may not have belonged to the mailman who was gradually losing bones from his body as he walked from house to house.

And the manuscript—ah, the manuscript!—lay open like a corpse upon the black wood of the piano, its pages blank until someone changed them by bleeding onto them one by one without pause. The family took turns, of course, in this honorable donation. That was the rule. Tonight's contributor was Cousin Patrick, who approached the task with his usual clinical detachment, cutting his palm with a blood-spreading knife. The blood formed puddles that became letters, then dirty words, then a complete confession: We are not the shipwrecked. We are the ship saboteurs.

The house growled its approval. Somewhere, a bell buoy rang itself.

And the wheel turned. And the bodies spun. And the voyage continued, as all voyages must, toward shipwreck, toward danger, toward loss.

By Carlos del Puente relatos