Page 2 of All the Things We Buried

ONE

DORIAN

T he walls breathed with me. In. Out. They whispered to me in the places no one else could hear.

I hadn’t spoken in years. The words had rotted somewhere inside me. Died the same night Ian did. The white burned my eyes. The bed, the floor, the ceiling, the straps. Everything white. White like his skin in the barn; drained, empty, silent.

I stayed in my corner. Back pressed against the wall. Knees locked against my chest. That’s where it felt smallest. Safe, almost. Like if I folded myself up tightly enough, I could vanish inside my own ribs and never come back out.

He was there again.

Shadow.

He was always there. Sitting across from me like a vulture that never needed to eat.

“You still wouldn’t talk,” his voice slipped into my ears. “It’s been years, Dorian.”

I didn’t look at him. I stared at my fingers instead. They twitched without me asking them to, as if they had their own thoughts, their own fears.

“You still talk to them, though, don’t you?” Shadow whispered. “Ian. The barn. The screams.”

The air turned out to be colder than it was before; I could feel my breath in the air. The whispers behind the paint grew louder, pressing through the cracks. They were always there. Always watching and always waiting.

The door clicked open, and a sharp light cut through the room. “Phone call for you,” the nurse said as she entered.

I stopped breathing. The phone continues to ring in her hands.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

My chest tightened. My pulse stumbled. My hands shook harder now.

Shadow leaned in closer. “Who’s calling you, Dorian?”

The ringing carved into my skull.

Ring. Ring.

“Do you want me to answer it?” He asked me, but my focus was just on the phone, my fingers twitching.

I didn’t want to move, but my hand moved anyway.

Shadow smiled. His teeth gleamed too white, too wide, and he answered the phone,“Hello?”

Static crackled, the same ringing in my ears that hadn’t stopped ever since I was twelve. Then— “Dorian…”

The voice.

Ian.

My chest ripped open. My breath broke apart. The walls leaned in on me. My ribs folded in. My skin crawled with something alive beneath it.

The scream came before I could stop it. It clawed out of my throat, and it broke free from all these years of radio silence I kept inside me.

And the door burst open. Hands grabbed me.

Cold metal pressed into my arm. I barely felt the needle slide under my skin.

My body softened, limbs too heavy to move, but the scream stayed alive inside me even after my mouth closed.

Through the blur, I saw Shadow lean in, so close his breath brushed my ear. “That’s better.”

And then the dark swallowed me whole. I couldn’t move; my body was numb. I could only lift my finger just enough to point towards the wall. I could see the paint peeling, and the wall started to bleed.

“Hello?” I could hear the voices, just before one last scream.

I woke in the dead of night; it was 3:18 a.m. It was always 3:18 a.m.

Shadow hovered above me. He had slipped through the cracks between my dreams and memories. My eyes rolled back into my skull, hijacked by his possession. He was inside my mind, hungry.

He was always hungry for blood.

He saw into the broken reel of my memory. He tasted my tears as they slid down my face while I held Ian’s shattered body. He watched my trembling hands, slick with blood, fumbling to gather the fragments of his skull, desperate to fit them back together, as if stitching bone could summon life.

I shook as my hands searched for bones like puzzle pieces, my mind splintering with each heartbeat. Somewhere inside, I whispered.

“Maybe I can fix him. Maybe I can still fix him.”

But it was the stench of blood, warm, metallic, that clawed into my senses. The taste of it coated my tongue as I wiped my tears with stained hands. That taste never left me. It’s still there. Even now.

How do you come back from that?

How do you survive losing a piece of your own soul?

I lost my brother that night. And something inside me rotted with him. I was only twelve. Twelve. Do you understand what that does to a child? What it creates?

I am living proof. Proof that darkness is real. It can crawl inside your brain and build its nest, sinking its teeth in so deep you no longer remember where it ends and you begin.

We all carry our own shade of dark. Some live with pale shadows.

Mine... mine was pitch black. Thick, endless, consuming.

But isn’t that what we all think? That our suffering is the worst?

That if we wear the smile well enough, no one will see what’s decaying beneath.

People see it and believe you’re fine. But inside, something is dying. Every single fucking day.

Be careful with people like that. They should have been careful with me.

Because when a mind fractures that deeply, when something festers long enough inside, what’s left is not human. Not really.

And when life becomes hell, we learn to build heaven from flame and ash. We’ll burn the world if that’s what it takes to survive.

My eyes rolled back, and there he was. Floating above me.

Shadow.

His eyes were black, like open graves staring down at me.

A grin twisted across his blurred face, features smeared and shifting, as if the air itself refused to hold his shape.

And yet, I knew him. Somehow, I always knew him.

A ghost wearing the face of someone I used to know, someone I used to see.

The moment I closed my eyes, he disappeared, but then Ian came.

His face appeared first, pale, eyes open too wide, lips tinged with blue. And then his body dragged itself toward me, crawling across the floor like some twisted marionette tangled in its strings.

I screamed. The sound ripped from my throat. The door burst open, and the nurse rushed in, clutching another needle between her fingers.

They said it was medicine. But I knew better.

There was poison in it. Not the kind that kills, but the kind that infects. The kind that burrows into your mind and nests there, forcing you to relive the worst pieces of yourself on an endless loop.

Ian’s ghost returned every time, his voice colder with each word he spoke. “It’s your fault, Dorian.”

You are useless.You are nothing.You are a burden.You cannot be loved.

And I believed him.

The words burned into my skin like brands, sinking deeper with each repetition. I couldn’t escape them. I couldn’t escape him.

Desperation took over. My hand shot forward, seizing the nurse’s needle. I dragged it across my wrist, praying it would end, begging for an end. But the metal bent beneath the pressure, snapping in my grip.

“Hold him, he’s having another episode,” someone spoke from behind.

They stripped away my white shirt, replacing it with the jacket, the one with the belts, the one that swallowed my arms and pinned me inside my own failing body. And under the harsh lights, my scars were exposed.

My skin was covered with burn marks, cuts, and bad memories carved into flesh. Did it all make me stronger? Maybe. But strength means nothing when there’s no one left to see it. You carry it alone, and when you can’t share it, strength only sharpens the loneliness.

I let them bind me. There was nothing left to fight for.

I was a haunted, broken animal. Years inside these walls had emptied me. Whatever soul I once had, the house had taken it. Now, I was only that was left of me, a forgotten man. Just a body, a ghost still breathing.

They positioned me in a lying position, and as my eyes started to close, I could see white dots behind my eyelids, and somehow I found myself at the beach, my feet are in the water, and next to me there was a man, his face was familiar, his eyes like I knew him.

He was wearing a uniform, looking at me with a wrath in his eyes. I knew him.

I had heard stories about him, seen old photographs. He used to own Gloomsbury Manor. One of the many who never left.

They say he drowned in 1997. His daughter swore she saw him walking after a woman just before he stepped off the cliff.

Some say it was love. My father said it was wrath.

Said the man dragged his own rage through the halls of the manor until he lost it completely, said that ghosts made him drink until he couldn’t stand.

He said alcohol chose him. But I always knew better.

Alcohol doesn’t choose people. People choose it when they’ve run out of other places to hide.

And he wanted to hide. He wanted to disappear into anything that wasn’t that house.

Light flooded my eyes, flickering brightly until it transformed into the sun.

I stood on the beach, staring at him. The man looked soaked to the bone.

Pale. Not angry, not sad, just empty. And then he walked toward me.

Slow. His hand closed around my throat, and before I could scream, he was dragging me into the ocean.

The salt stung. The world turned quiet. I could see the ocean floor like it was reaching up to greet me. And I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. He was drowning me.

But how?

He was just a ghost.

Or maybe… I wanted to drown. Maybe part of me needed to.

Then I heard her.

A child’s voice, screaming from the beach, “Papa, no.”

Suddenly, I was back on the beach, gasping for air, wet sand clinging to my skin. And she stood in front of me, barefoot, eyes like broken glass and sea foam, her eyes were so blue I didn’t know color could feel like drowning, too. But she wasn’t afraid. Just watching me.

She saved me.

And then, just like that, he took her. He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the house.

Toward that house. Gloomsbury rising in the distance, and I tried to follow.

Tried to move. But every time I stood, my legs gave out.

I was stuck in the sand, falling again and again, lungs still burning, heart still breaking. Helpless.

Still losing.

Still fighting things I couldn’t name.

And that feeling, the sharp, sour one deep in my chest, it wasn’t fear.

It was the awful, sinking sense that maybe… Maybe the house chooses people like him. Like me.

People who want to leave but don’t know how. People who love things they’re scared to keep. People who mistake haunting for home.

I think ghosts aren’t the dead. They’re the ones left behind, still begging to be seen. Still begging for something they’ll never touch again. Or something they were never meant to touch at all.