The house was silent and stood still on its lot, as it had been for the last ten years. Tarps and plywood covered the windows, long broken from squatters and pranksters finding ways into the old home. The lawn was overgrown, the path having long vanished under years of snowfall and summer growth. A tree that had gotten regular pruning was now wild and raggled. The winter wind whistled through the yard that magnified the isolation of the house. From the outside, the house had two floors. The upper floor had at least three rooms, and had its windows shuttered tight. The main floor had many holes and scrapes from thrown rocks and the elements.
Standing at the edge of the property were two young men.
“Are you sure about this?” A taller one with shaggy blonde hair, asked. He shifted on his feet, the cold wind not the only thing that was making him shiver.
“It's been closed for like, ten years,” His friend, who short, a little heavier set, like a linebacker had been shrunk to the size of a jockey, spoke. “I got hazed in freshman year of high school to go in there, and it was abandoned then, too.”
“Who lived here?” The tall one asked.
“Who cares?” His short friend scoffed. “There were so many stories. The dude who lived here was, like, a shut in, kinda. Some say he's a vampire, some say that he died and he haunts the house. All that I know for sure is that, one day, this guy just... turned the lights off, and vanished.”
“And no one came and sold this place?”
“Well, who'd take it? No one could 'cause it was a missing persons case, I guess.” There was a moment of silence before the short friend nudged his buddy forward. “Come on. The house is dead. And dead quiet.”
The inside was even more dilapidated than the outside. Furniture had been pulled apart, torn open, and left to the cold. Where there had once been a television was now an empty stand, the drawers having long been looted by people much more curious and daring than the two teens currently standing in the alcove of the living room. The hallway was dark, and they had to pull out their phones to light the way with the flashlights. The stairs led up, and the ceiling and floor creaked underneath them.
The tall teen walked down towards the landing next to the stairs, noticing a doorway that led to either a basement or a cellar. His flashlight lit up a dusty, old photo in its frame, showing a pair – a man and a woman. It was hard to tell since the photo was so faded and dusty, their faces were obscured. He didn't want to disturb the place more than he had to. Which was more than his shorter friend could say.
“I went upstairs last time and grabbed something from one of the rooms,” He said, looking up. “So I already saw that part of the house.”
“No one's seen the basement?”
“Nope. The door's sealed shut, some kind of lock.”
“Really? Ten years, and no one's looked down there?”
“I mean...”
“Doug?”
“What? I don't know, okay? I came in here once, right?”
“Okay.”
“So I don't know shit about the basement. Everyone's said it's locked shut.”
“Then why is the door open?”
“Huh?”
Doug turned around and looked over. His friend's frame took up most of the top of the stairs going down, but Doug was short. He ducked underneath and looked down, seeing that the flashlight now shone on the basement door, open, darkness beyond it, inviting them in. Tempting them with whatever secrets lay beyond it.
“Dale, the door's open.”
“How? What did you do?”
“Nothing! It was closed a second ago!”
The two of them jumped as a red light flashed from beyond the doorway. There wasn't any sign of life or of movement beyond, but a few moments later there came another red flash, revealing that there was a rhythmic pattern to it. Almost hypnotically, Dale took a step forward.
“What are you doing?” Doug had to grab him.
“What? You told me you never went down there.”
“Yeah! It was locked! Keyword here: was!”
“Well. Now it's not, and you're too scared to go down?”
Now that Dale had mentioned it, there was a part of him that wanted to go down. He needed to. Something was down there that needed his attention. His protests didn't leave his mouth at all, slowly fading away as they stared into that darkness, the red flashing gently every few moments.
“Fine.” Doug relented. And the two descended.
The room beyond the doorway was anything but abandoned. It was almost pristine. It was too clean, compared to the rest of the house. Flashlights illuminated several desks and tables, littered with papers and vials filled with colorful liquid.
“What is this place?” Doug asked as the red flash filled the room.
“I don't know,” Dale replied. “I don't like it.”
The two continued walking through the quiet, tomb-like room. The red flash was coming from a computer monitor, reading:
POWER FAILURE
SIGNAL LOST
SYSTEM RESTART REQUIRED
PLEASE CONFIRM
Y/N
Thick, heavy cables connected the computer, and its monitor, to something deeper within the room. The two stopped at the desk, staring, the red message filling their faces with light. This was what they were called down here for. This is what they needed to see. Dale's hand reached out to the keyboard.
“Dude-” Was all Doug could get out, before a single key was pressed, and the monitor stopped blinking, going dark. There was silence for several unbearable moments. Then, a whirring noise as power began to course through the entire basement. Lights started to flicker on with the sound of breakers flipping after being long-forgotten. Banks of bright lights illuminated sections of the basement in a florescent glow. The first bank revealed more details of the dusty shelves of old ingredients, many of them expired and evaporated, dusty condensation left behind. The next revealed equipment – centrifuges and microscopes, empty test tubes that were once clean, caked in grime. The rear of the lab revealed rows of machinery and cables. But in the centre of the lab, it remained dark, quiet. Until...
There was a tremendous crash as alarms began blaring. The final bank of lights revealed a monolithic machine, covered in years of debris. A strip of hazard paint peeled off of the middle where two metal doors were fused shut. A red light flashed on top of the strange capsule, this... pod. A rumbling from deep within it shook the two boys to their core as machines a decade old whirred to life and provided power.
SYSTEM REBOOT COMPLETE.
TARGET GENETIC MATCH FOUND.
CALCULATING ROUTE TO PRIMARY TIMELINE.
CALCULATING...
CALCULATIONS COMPLETE.
WELCOME HOME.
The alarms suddenly cut out, and there was a horrible screeching noise as the middle of the pod started to split open. Thick fog started to drift out of the bottom, pooling around the two boys' feet.
“Is it empty?” Doug choked out.
The doors finally stopped with a loud “thunk”. There was several moments of tense silence as the boys held their breath, the darkness of the metal capsule beckoning them. And then, something fell out of the pod, landing at their feet. It disturbed the mist, but only for a few moments, long enough for them to see a hand sprawled out on the floor, leading to an arm. Leading to a body, hidden in the fog, the cold air from the outside mixing with the hot air coming from within the capsule.
“Is it alive?” Dale asked.
The hand raised above the mist, clawing for them, clawing for anything. The two boys screamed and ran, turning and fleeing up the stairs, and out the door. The front door slammed on the wall and then closed shut, barring the two boys. As the years went on and they told and retold the story, the creature that came out of the pod was bigger, or more vicious, becoming first a cougar, then a wolverine, then a wolf. With each retelling, the two boys later became heroes who had valiantly escaped the death house with their lives.
But what actually came out of the Pod was something wholly different. The arm that the hand belonged to collapsed back into the mist, which continued to fade as it dissipated into the rest of the room. With a coughing noise, the humanoid figure started to crawl away from the Pod, laying back on the floor, panting heavily. Now outside the doors, the Pod slowly, with the same trepidation as before, closed its doors. The woman breathed heavily on the floor, staring at the ceiling. After a few moments, she got her strength back, and slowly stood up. She rested her hands on the table, bracing herself there, as she looked up. Long red hair drifted around her shoulders, and she brushed her bangs out of her eyes, blinking blearily as she got used to the light. Shakily, hesitantly, as if not quite believing it, she whispered:
“...am I back?”
This caused another coughing fit and she let herself sink to the desk. The dust and the cold air were hard for her to deal with, and she shivered as she slowly recovered. It took another few minutes before she shakily stood up, and walked to a cupboard, hurriedly opening it and pulling out blankets that she wrapped around herself. She looked around, coughing a little from the must and dust that came off of the blankets. Even if they had been untouched by looters, they were still a decade in disuse. “What happened?” She asked no one in particular, looking around. She approached the computer carefully. Her jeans were torn at the knees and at the hem, and didn't protect her from the cold very well. Her shirt was dirty and baggy, as if it once fit a person larger than her. A feline tail moved under the blanket, moving back and forth as tabby catlike ears perked up out of her hair. The winter air leaking from outside was not stopped by the blanket, either, and she shakily typed commands, only pausing for a brief moment to register that her nails were longer and sharper than a human's, before continuing and hitting enter. A history of events read on the monitor, and her eyes widened.
“Signal lost, going dormant... last entry was 2014, until someone entered and turned everything back on,” She murmured to herself. “So I've been lost for... ten years?” She shook her head, trying to comprehend it. “Why didn't anyone reboot the system, why didn't Kelly, or... or anyone...” She stopped, staring into space for a moment, before turning and hurrying up the stairs. “Kelly?” She called out, loudly. She stopped at the top of the stairs, looking around, breath caught in her throat.
Her home was gone. The walls and rooms were here, but the furniture, the pictures, the parts that made a house a home, were destroyed. She stepped cautiously, her ears perked up and listening for any sounds. The two boys who inadvertently brought her back were long gone by now, their footprints fading as the snow and wind blew over them. The fur on her tail bristled in the cold as she walked on the creaky floors, and she paused as she picked up the picture that the boys had been looking at. She rubbed the glass, watching the dust and grime smearing away, and waited until she could see the somewhat faded photo underneath – the man and the woman, smiling, standing next to each other.
“Where did you go, sis?” Allison asked quietly as she looked at it, and sighed as she put it down. For a moment, she was about to leave it, before she adjusted it, smearing some dirt and grime back over the man's face. After all, that's not who she was anymore – she hadn't been that man in a long, long time, ever since her travels and fight to return home had began. Allison didn't know when she had changed for the final time, but she had a sense, deep down in her bones, that she wouldn't be able to go back to being fully human, let alone a man, even if she wanted to. The changes she went through, much like the accident that had swept her away, were a one-way trip. She had very quickly gotten used to and okay with staying as a cat-person; it was returning back to her world that she had been struggling with. She had hoped, when she came out the other side of the Pod, that Kelly would be there, surprised, and no time at all had passed. Instead, she arrived out of this nightmare. And she had seen the records – she knew this was her timeline, this was where she was supposed to be. Did the accident take Kelly, too? Was she out there, in the multiverse, lost, like Allison was? Or was she somewhere in this world?
“First things first,” Allison said to herself, descending back down to the lab. “It's time to turn the heat back on.” She hurried to the boiler room and opened it, taking her time to check the hoses and pipeworks flowing from the heater into the other room, just one of many series of cables and tubes connected to the Pod. After all, if you have access to an infinite amount of energy, why not convert it to power and heat your house? You'd never have to pay for the power bill again. Satisfied that everything was still sealed and working right, she went to the breaker box, and began flipping each fuse one at a time. The heater began to whir to life, the water began to flow into the hot water heater. Leaving the machines to work, she went back upstairs and looked around.
“Now,” she murmured, eyeing the tarps over the windows and the boards blocking the views. “Time to make this house a home.” She frowned, going to the front door, and closing it. The lock, Allison discovered, didn't work anymore. But the front light, it turned out, did. The electricity had simply been turned off, nothing was wrong with the wiring itself. So Allison went to each room, checking and replacing lightbulbs, and began bringing light back to her home.
And so, for the first time in ten years, the dead house on the block lit up with life once more.
Welcome home.