Chapter Text
When they answered the door on that wild winter night,
There was no one expected—and no one in sight.—Edward Gorey, 'The Doubtful Guest'
There was something inside the house: a malevolence that might ordinarily have comfortably brooded, but which had somehow been roused into vicious rage. Perhaps the particular distribution of bodies in the drawing room had caused the abrupt shift in temper, or perhaps it was the juxtaposition of that evening's supper leftovers with the dough already set out to rise for the next morning's breakfast bread. Maybe the wind, unusually strong that night, had struck a particularly unpleasant note, and whatever bad luck had been built into the walls and foundations of the house had heard it, and woken up, and decided it would rather be doing instead of merely lurking.
There was something outside the house: a whimsicality that might well have passed by on its fanciful way, but that its keen awareness perceived the thing inside. On an impulse, the whimsicality decided that intervention was called for, and accordingly presented itself at the front door.
Through a series of curious historical phenomena—ranging from architectural fads to the thoughtless violence of a pair of fires—the household's servants resided in a building entirely separate from the main house. Through an inexplicable set of miscommunications, mutual irritation, and mistletoe, they had already retired for the evening—despite supper being barely a half-hour past—without having put the left-overs up for the night. Or the child.
Thus it came to pass that, when a great thumping was heard at the door, the family that comprised entire human population of the house came outside either to look for the elusive visitor or to wonder over the curious circumstance, and not a soul was left indoors when everything in the house went ping.
From its vantage point on top of a decorative, architectural urn, the whimsicality could clearly smell an onrushing, outdoor, retaliatory pop, which to be quite honest it had not anticipated. If the truth were to be told, its subsequent scramble indoors was far more a matter of frantic self-preservation than a display of carefully considered altruism and inter-species communication. Nonetheless, five humans, including one young child, all scrambled back inside after it, exclaiming no longer merely to one another, but to the intruder as well.
For its part, said intruder rather felt that after the whole upset, the solid comfort of a dependable wall was very much called for. Some further consolation also came in hearing the voices of the entire family, gradually rising in tone from entreaty to shouted demand; the general clamour, whatever its substance, at least indicated that they had clearly all survived something far more horrible than their understandings could accommodate. Under the highly stressful conditions of the evening, gratitude could hardly be expected. However, the whimsicality found that simple relief at one's own continued existence—together with a certain self-congratulation for the continued existences of others—very nearly sufficed.