They had moved into the house only a little while ago, but were already realizing that something was wrong. They found a basement where the floor plans said there would be none, found that the attic was slightly larger than it should have been.
They ignored it, and kept living there, and the family grew.
The House grew with it.
They had a larger house now, visible even from the outside. Two generations in, and they had learned not to talk about it, accepting the extra space, the impossible rooms, the winding corridors long and strange. They saw rooms stretch and expand and bud off new rooms, wood paneling warping and then straightening like the growth of some living thing.
They ignored it, and kept living there, and the family grew.
The House grew with it.
Before long, the house was large enough to support multiple families. Sons brought wives into the house, and they were welcomed in, and more families lived in the house, first two, then three, then five, then daughters started to bring their husbands in, families upon families, in a single house, of a single house, of a single family. The families grew, and prospered, over the long decades, merging together. The family reveled in the gift of the house, and the family grew.
The House grew with it.
Before long, new families began to be invited into the vastly expanding house, sprawling over their acres of land, towering and teetering, with even the outside, massive as it was, not comparing to the vastness of the inside. The families, long friends of the Family of the House, accepted, and were moved in, putting beds into the empty newborn halls, stocking the tumorous closets with food and supplies, wandering the long, branched corridors and hallways through which oxygen reached the Family of the House. They installed stoves and newfangled electric lights, scientific marvels of their decade. The Family grew.
And the House grew with it.
One day, the House twisted.
The Family twisted with it.
The roof of the house, with its myriad of towers and turrets and windows and attics and balconies, fell through, and the Family woke to find themselves reduced, and trapped deep within the darker parts of the House. They thought they were dead, at first; it was pitch-black, darker than night, and they could not see anything around them. But they were familiar enough with the shapes of their rooms to realize that they were still within their House, and they soon found other survivors. They tried to dig their way out, at first, but soon realized it was a hopeless endeavor; there were likely many yards of broken floors and shattered architecture above them, and the House grew faster than they would be able to excavate. Instead, they focused on going on, keeping themselves and their children alive, finding the small stores of food, which were soon exhausted by the Family. They cursed their House, cursed it for burying them deep inside of it, cursed it for cutting them off from food and light and the outside world.
The House listened to its Family, and they found themselves cared for.
Water ran down certain walls, tasting of mildew and mold but potable, better than nothing. The family found swarms of rats, trapped like them by the fall of the House, and set traps for them, ate them, survived on the fruits of the House. But still they cursed it, even as they scraped walls for mold to eat, sat still and silent before springing forwards to wring the neck of a rat.
The House groaned, from time to time, forcing them deeper as the floors filled with bits of masonry and wood raining down from above. They moved deeper, and found themselves in smaller and smaller corridors, smaller and smaller rooms, forcing themselves through cracks in their search for food, water, and safety. They learned to hunt for swarms of subterranean bugs when they went too deep for rats, learned to smell out the mildew that suggested water, learned to eat from what the house had given them.
The House shrank, and the Family shrank with them.
Not in size, no; they grew, for after many years, many of those who had been small children when the House fell were adults, and many of the original adults had died; they raised their own children, and there were many in the House who had never seen sunlight. But the legends were still told, and many still waited for the House to open up, for them to walk in the sun again, to feel grass under their feet and to breathe fresh air. The Family lived, though, and the Family grew, the House often providing for them as if they were its own children. And the children grew used to the darkness, used to the cramped spaces, used to the water which tasted of mold and eating bugs and crawling things.
Before long, however, they knew that something was wrong. Squeezing through cracks and holes, crawling through small spaces, they knew that they would change, change over time into forms more suited for the House. But they hadn’t expected it to happen so soon.
Children were born smaller, and did not grow so large. Children were born spindly, born thin and frail, born lightweight and growing up weaker. Warping over slow generations, but faster than they knew it should have, having been taught of the theories and of the science of the outside world by parents and grandparents, desperate to retain their hold on something.
They all knew, in some form or other, that something was wrong. They could almost feel how the house molded them, stunted them, twisted them, though this was rarely noticeable in their bodies; it had the greatest effect on their minds, which slowly changed the plains-dwelling instincts of primeval humans to that of something altogether more troglodytic. The eldest among them had ruts worn deep in their minds from decades of memorizing slowly shifting routes and the constant semi-rituals of feeling along the rough planks and badly-papered walls.
The water still tasted foul to them, and they still wished for better food than the monotony of large bugs and scuttling creatures; their tongues refused to totally acclimate to their diet. Still they hunted, crept, camped out near likely food sources. One of them had managed to find an area which had more prey than others for the time being, and had made a habit of staying there till he had a substantial catch.
He cracked open the carapace of some crawling thing which he had coaxed out of a crack in the wall. After slurping out the insides, and gnawing a bit at the legs, he carefully put it outside of the crack, baiting others of its kind into crawling towards it. He licked a bit at his arm, which was still sore from scraping against a nail which had been sticking out of the wall. He would have to be more careful when crawling about, back to the den with his catch.
When he returned, the Family were in a quiet bustle around the campfire, roasting some of their catch, warming them and giving them a chance to see each other, to see anything. One reached out a long arm to stir at the coals with a stick, sending out a spray of sparks, which stirred one of the children. A mother coddled the child, shushing it, while the infant mewled plaintively.
One girl crawled over to the returned hunter, holding up a bundle of small paper things.
“Look,” she said. “Aren’t the flowers beautiful in the light? This is much better than feeling over them.”
He nodded assent, picking one up, looking at the way the colors and patterns changed in angle and lighting.
“I’d like to see a real flower, at least once,” she said. “Real ones, not ones made of wallpaper.”
“Do you ever feel like there’s something wrong?”, he asked.
She hung her head.
“No, but I can tell that there is something amiss. We are much smaller than mother and father, even though we have come of age.”
He pocketed the flower in one of the pockets of the flimsy paper garments the Family called clothes. He would look at it later, reflect on it, think about how the Family would harvest the wallpaper that grew on the walls of the house, peeling it off like skin, drying out the damp stuff by fires to make more fuel. He thought of how they would find colorful patches, patterned off of human designs copied over and over again by the House, til they degraded into splotches of blended hues and weird, eerie patterns no human being would have ever decorated with, the inscrutable patterned skin of the House, grown for a purpose unknown to them, if there was a purpose at all.
Perhaps it thought the Family wanted decoration.
In any case, they took it and bent it and twisted it into beautiful flowers, a remembrance of part of the beauty they had left behind.
One day, the House shuddered, and the Family shuddered with it.
The floors shook throughout, and debris rained down through cracks old and new. Three times the House gave out a mighty crack, and three times the Family cowered, til the final rumbles of the third shake had quieted, and they saw a thin ray of dim, reflected sunlight. The Family gathered together, buried what few dead they had, and set off, squeezing through cracks, climbing up slanted, fallen corridors, and scrambling up walls, till at last they found a passage to the outside.
The children of the House emerged from that great split, looked about them, felt blind in the harsh sunlight, felt their skin burn and blister in the sun and heat, felt small and pathetic in the vast open field. Eventually they saw other people walk towards them.
They stood tall, thick and ruddy, towering feet over the Family, wrists as thick as the Family’s legs, men and women both. They looked at the pale intruders into their sunlit world, and gasped in revulsion.
The Family tried to speak to them, in garbled, archaic dialects. There was little success, but even if there had been more, it would have changed little.
They felt their skin burn, their eyes still watering after hours, saw the weakness of their frames and the frailty of their build in the vast openness and size of the overworld.
The Family turned back, and returned to their House.
The Family stayed, as the House knew its children would.