He tried to lie down inside his body, but the two never melded again. He could not sleep again.
He had to go for a walk.
He felt himself seeping into the cushion and the curtains, like smoke. Particles of himself mixed with the grime in the cracks of the house, a fine tar of anger and dismay.
They had killed him! He needed revenge. He needed life. He needed purpose, and as the black soot of the house infused his being, he joined its collective need for justice.
Someone had been killed! His was only the latest corpse to rot in the walls of this evil mansion. It's wood creaked with rage, and he groaned with its collective sense of violation.
He lost himself, but gained a greater sense, and a stronger power. When he acted as he remembered himself, he could only flutter and howl. As the greater thing they could break glasses, knock things over, throw plates, cutlery, axes.
The place was empty for years as they whirled and howled, disintigrating and reforming into a refined dust of hate.
The family were strangers to him, then they stayed awhile and some of the odor of the place bagan to stick to them, and they became the ones who were here before, and they began to deserve to die. They embraced their fate, and the house and the ghost he sometimes was tested their collective strength.
Sometimes he appeared to them as himself, in the hopes that some selfish, unremembered goal might be achieved. They might find his bones, or his killer. But he was only partly there. His body had crumpled into a pile of broken bones and dirt, and he was scattered throughout the house. Soon he joined the other, and his forever remembered wrongedness joined the other forgotten crimes, and they punished the newcomers with flapping doors, flying tools and falling walls. They were crushed and torn, every one of them, and their ghosts tried to stay lying inside their bodies too, until the insomnia of death pushed them out, and they too joined the wronged in the house of wrongs.
--Dan Kilian
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