I'm walking the halls again, they're dark and silent. Haunting. I can feel the ghosts around me, perhaps angry at my trespassing presence.
In the dark, the shadows seem to ooze and flow towards me, trying to capture me in their darkness. They can't realize that I'm in a much deeper darkness than they could bring upon me.
The halls are silent, and yet in them, I can hear sobbing. The sobbing of a broken seven year old boy echoes across the walls and through my ears. So I search for him, because the cries rip through my heart, like the sharpened claws of the Kyubi no Kitsune. I have to comfort him, if only for my own peace of mind.
I turn corner after corner, searching. This way leads to a room that heals and wounds in equal measure, a room I've visited often. Perhaps that's wrong. The way also leads to a room I'd never dare to step foot in. I can feel heaviness about it, and lightness the rest of the house does not have. The heaviness is stifling and fills me with fear. Like the bloodthirsty aura of a jonin intent to kill. But it's light in equal measure, free from the rest of the ghosts that linger. Maybe they wait for him, their killer. Or perhaps they wait for him, the one to avenge them. Either way, they wait.
This hall is a dead end, and still the crying lingers, there but not there, broken and fading, howling in anguish, dying slowly. Without a second thought I slide open the door to the room which heals and wounds, searching its dark corners for the sobbing. But there is nobody there. I close the door behind me and look to the door across from it.
The crying can't be coming from there. And yet I must be sure, because with every moment the howling continues I feel my heart being shredded and my soul being burned. With every moment it continues I fear I shall never be able to get it out of my head, that it will always linger in the background.
I reach out my hand and let it hover there. I could just leave, turn around and never look back, never suffer the dirge again. But now that my hand is there, is so close, I wonder. The room that's so heavy, so light, the room that belonged to him, their killer, what would it be like? My hand rests on the door. But if entering his, the avenger's room is wrong then entering his, the murderer's room is something much worse than wrong. But is it wrong? My hand has inched the door open slightly and the heaviness wafts out into the hallway.
I pull my hand back, take a step away, and then all but run down the hallways, corner after corner, perhaps searching for the exit, or searching to get lost in these corridors. But I know them too well. Maybe better than he did... does. Does he still know these hallways? Does he traverse them in his dreams? And are those nightmares?
Within moments I am out of the house and in the open air. Still, I cannot breathe freely. Despite the best attempts to remove traces of the massacre blood still lingers along with the one symbol whose cracks stretch and expand, a spider's web. And even if these things did not linger, death does. Because death has a distinct feel, a distinct smell, a distinct and oppressive silence.
And only when the compound falls out of my vision can I breathe freely. Life is here, I can tell by the feel of it, the presence of others nearby, the smell of food among other things, the small sounds of crickets chirping or birds whispering or cheerful talking. Life is here. Death lies behind me. For now, I've had my fill of the halls he, the avenger used to walk. So even though I realize I left his, the murderer's door open, I'm not going back tonight. But I've no doubt his gravity will reel me back in, ignoring the feel of death to focus on the feel of his presence, however faint.