• A crow perches upon a statue of a woman, broken and without a face or an arm. A man, of middle age, travels down the road. His once warm coat and scarf, are now dark and cold like the September rain that falls tonight. Upon his arrival to the house, the crow takes a nervous leap off of the statue and flies to a dead maple tree near a dead house of brick covered in moss and grime. The once red brick, now covered in moss made green by the rain, guarding the perimiter of the house from the threat of a long dead garden. Seeking the refuge from the cold and fright of lightning, the man enters the mansion through the overpowering doorway, stained a dark geen from the moss and with remnants of red paint.
    Inside, the man's face is shown by dim light from an unknown source. His pale face mirrored his condition, wasted and washed away by the rain. His greasy hair was black, but growing slightly more gray in the front, giving the look of aged wisdom, but closer to the end by every day. Everything about him was dark, slowly getting lighter as it went up, ending in the hair folded back on his head.
    The red walls and floor of the hall he was in were fading in spots yet darker in others, where the walls had failed and trapped the rain. The sound of steady punking, slightly louder than the rain muffled by the overpowering roof, could be heard from a frame to the left. The barely audible sound could have been ignored to anyone older, due to the soaked fabric on the walls.
    Bested by his curiosity, the man enters to the left. Inside a large parlor, a man in a black faded suit sat playing an old majestic piano of same color. The combination of dust, rain, and fabric muzzled the sickening sound. The pianist, who seemed of twenty years elder than the man who entered, sat with a grave stare on the keys with his unmoving eyes, playing flawlessly. The piece ended, and begin anew. His mouth ever moving and uttering silently numbers, time. His teeth seemed fitting to the rest of him, glorious at one time, perfectly decayed and bone white against the gray luminescence that enveloped him. Black and white, backed by the dead crimson velvet that masked the inside of the building. A shiver wakes the numbness from the man in the empty doorway from his daze, to fully recognizing the environment. He notices the man's features, all pale, and with slender bony hands with even whiter fingers. Straining his wet eyes, the man's fingers were smooth, but not caliced from his timeless work, worn to the bone. Still he plays, The same song, counting his flaws in his timing. Frightened, he turns to leave. A new figure enters, a small child, who pushes past him without paying attention to the contact. The boy enters the room's center. His hair was black as the outside night, a younger image of the pianist. The boy walks to a clock, and winds it. Checking the time with his own, the man finds it only afew minutes fast; almost one o'clock. The boy makes no response to the music, and continues to the staircase in the back of the room, hidden in the vastness of the wall. Followed by the man, the boy walks to a large corridor of gray wood, looking frail but held, and goes to every room to wind and work each clock, much like clockwork in his own traits. He moves silently, and upon the strike of one, the house erupts with a single burst of chimes of a multitude of sounds. The man grabs his ears with terror, and falls to the ground. When he stands, the boy had left, and his ears were ringing with ferocity of pain. In his confusion, he stumbles into a room to his right.
    In the room, there was a very large bed, captured by an old man, a relic from older times. The man seems sickly, but to the relief of the man, was making some form of bodily sound. His toothless mouth seems to grunt with a pain quieted by fatigue and hunger. The other in the room was a maid, of some sort, busying herself with a constant organization of the liquids in glass bottles on a nearby table. She seems far too focused on the perfect nature of the room than the dying man lying behind her.
    Quite disgusted and disturbed, the man yells, the first time he said anything for a length. No response. He grabs a bottle of the liquid in his fist, but found it was of a paperthin glass bottle, cutting him badly. Not caring, he gathers the pool of liquid and blood and pours it into the man's mouth. When his hand met his lips, they crumple and turn to a pile of gray dust on his neck. With that, the man's eyes stop moving, fixed now on the murderer. He stumbles back into the woman behind him. He turns and sees she was now just standing, without purpose.
    The man runs downs the stairs he had before. The pianist now was playing seemingly faster, still counting his flaws. With his running, the room seemed to sway, making it folley to walk fast. He stumbles to the doorframe, with the child standing in it. Knocking him over in panic, he comes to the velvet hallway with the entrance. He barges through the magnificent door he entered through and quickly closes it behind him, only to find that he was still in the red hallway. The monotony of rain was slowing, and he dreadfully walks to the room in the left where the piano sounded quietly. In the room, was the same it had always been, with the addition of a group of people sitting and drinking tea. From the group, he could depict some people he recognized before and never bothered to actually know, along with the man from the upstairs room, now dressed in a similar suit as the pianist. The other man had his face turned away from him. They laugh as they drink empty cups, that clinked hollowly when contacting the saucers. Without a motion or a word, they beckon to him. He walks to the seat next to the man he had murdered, opposite from the man whose face was hidden. As he sat, the man reveals his face, as an exact duplicate of the man who entered the house not an hour beforehand. The man between smiles with his toothless mouth and then it goes black as a crow's feathers.
    A crow perches upon a statue of a woman, broken and without a face or an arm. A young woman passes down the road, with a coat drenched and darkened by cold September rain.