The House of 87 Cabinets Revisited
Part of cleaning the house meant cleaning the electronic house, and I found a lot of emails about the House of 87 Cabinets project, a draft of which was completed on the Night Shade message boards. It included contributions from a host of writers, including Liz Williams, K.J. Bishop, Michael Cisco, Steve Rasnic Tem, Rhys Hughes, Ben Peek, Tamar Yellin, Jay Lake, Minsoo Kang, Laird Barron, and too many more to name. With some editing, it might make a nice little anthology someday…
THE HOUSE OF 87 CABINETS
The sun had burnt the sky, was fading, light refracted through the old glass windows of the house. It touched the floor of the kitchen, the hall, bringing with it a bronze silence, any flicker of a sound snuffed out. The light retreated, meandering, ate itself. It pulled away from the walls, hesitated, briefly touched the foot of something dragging itself down the hall. Something crawling, like the light, toward the cabinets. Eighty-seven square cabinets in polished rosewood—some ripped open, some intact, some gaping, some closed. The scent of oleander and of dust. The light recoiling from the dark. Outside, the tips of pine trees heavy with distant gold, the ground dark green, fading.
Inside, eighty-seven cabinets, and something moving toward them.