The House at the End of the World

Content warnings: post-climate collapse, body horror, death/corpses

The old Zhu family house sat on stilts along a cliffside. It knew the ocean waters with increased regularity as the tides rushed in and up before falling back out, and the water level slowly crept higher along the stilts to greet it as the years passed. No one quite knew how long it had been standing—its architecture a hobbled mix of 19th century European and traditional Chinese, with roof tiles of oak and bamboo and terracotta. It was covered in a healthy dosage of grime and dust, and within were timelines of increasingly obsolete technology. Yi had lived in this house her entire life, gone everywhere except the attic and the narrow staircase that led up to its door, which held stuffy secrets and clusters of mysteries in the memories of her childhood. Her parents told her that behind the door was just the empty space between the ceiling and the roof, but once, when she tried to hole up there to escape the heat, her parents picked her up off the stairs and forbade her from going any further.

That was all they ever said about the attic. And it filled her with a suffocating sense of dread.

Yi once spent a day organizing the glass jars and ceramic pots that carried ancestral recipes and old specimens (for someone in her family some time ago had been fond of dead things). But by the end of it, everything found their former resting places: each newspaper clipping, each beady-eyed preserved snake, each pot of fermented soybeans. She had asked about it once, and her mother only shook her head and told Yi not to question it.

“This house is hard to clean,” she said. “Nothing ever quite stays put.”

Yi didn’t know much about her family’s home. She knew it saw a time before the summers lasted nine months of the year, that it once sat far above the surface of the ocean, that it witnessed the rise of cities and watched them vacate and implode. She knew the house was how her family survived, that even the two months of blistering cold—when it did come—seemed unable to penetrate the oak and the bamboo and the terracotta. And, finally, she knew that even when the weather swung hard, when the village’s livestock died from the heat, her family always managed to find food in the smallest corners of their house.

•••

On the days that weren’t too hot or too cold, Yi’s mother sent her into the village for school. She would take her bag with her books and food, along with the paper umbrella her mother gave her to shield her from the sun.

Most days though, she wasn’t sure if the umbrella helped at all. The humidity stuck to her bones and coated her skin, and she wondered sometimes if the air in her lungs was as grey as the air that hung below the clouds. It made classes distracting, and while she tried to sit still in the classroom with the other kids, she was hyper-aware of the dirt that sat on her skin. She could feel the particulates settling in her pores. Even her lunch tasted different. She swore it did.

Yi was one of the few kids with full meals instead of rationed rice imported from afar, scraps of meat, and preserved vegetables, and she always felt terrible for it. Because Yi had all these too, in abundance, for the house seemed to know whenever they needed food and she wanted to share it. One day, she asked her mother if she could bring some bao or share their stores of fresh fruit and veggies, and she didn’t understand why her mother refused. So Yi tried to sneak out a bag full of longan, slipping it in with her schoolwork. It was her grandmother who caught her and gently told her to return it to the kitchen.

“Imagine what they would think,” she told Yi, “if they knew what they could take from us.” But Yi didn’t think of it as taking. She wanted to share their relative prosperity with the others. Keeping it to themselves seemed unfair.

•••

Winter came fast. The old mercury thermometer they hung by the front door dropped twenty degrees in four hours as a polar vortex crashed downwards from the arctic circle. Yi watched it patiently and waited for the mercury to settle at the bottom, telling her she wouldn’t have to travel into the village for school. Instead, it rose again slowly, millimetre by millimetre, degree by degree.

“Do I have to go?” she asked. The cold scared her; she wasn’t used to the cold.

“Dress warmly,” her mom replied from the mahjong table. “You should go see your friends.”

“And come home early,” said her father over the clangs and clinks of the mahjong tiles. “It’s going to drop quickly.”

Yi glanced at her parents’ and grandparents’ game of mahjong before reluctantly wrapping her scarf around her nose and mouth. “What’s for dinner?” she asked, hovering at the door.

“Ask the house!” exclaimed her mother.

Yi stifled a groan and headed outside.

The air was humid and mild even though the wind pierced like ice and cut her to the bone. The leftover chill of the night hung in crystals of ice in the air around her, melding to her skin as she walked her usual route to the village. There was still frost on the ground, dusting the wispy grass like lace, while the sheets of ice crunched underfoot.

In the distance, she spotted a figure the size of a grown adult, hunched into a small ball. She could make out the form of a man with his arms hugging his legs, bent at the knee into his body, his back curled forward. Yi approached despite her better judgement, despite the shrieking alarms in the back of her mind.

The man was covered in ice, gradually melting away as the world warmed up. There were small droplets that coated his skin and his hair and his clothes, giving him a sheen despite the pallor beneath. His skin had blued, his flesh now translucent layers of blue and purple muddied by the pale pigments of skin. Yi held her breath and searched for any signs of his. And, when she was sure the man in front of her was dead, she stepped in closer and reached a hand out.

The man did not move. The tips of her fingers broke the frost to find wet fabric, feeling nothing but cold beneath his skin. He was solid, frozen, and stiff from death.

Yi stepped back and held down the dread in her gut. She wiped the moisture from her hands onto her pants and retreated back onto her route, keeping an eye on the corpse as she left for school. It didn’t help her hate the cold any less.

Yi got to class late, not that anyone seemed to mind. Even the teacher simply nodded at her to take her seat—which she did, carefully crossing her legs on a thankfully-dry rug on the dirt of the village square. She tried to focus on her lessons—although the vocabulary for today had the character for “person” in it far too many times—and decided she would take a wide turn away from the body when she headed home.

•••

The next few days were cold and wouldn’t let up. The frost was thick on the glass of the Zhu house as the humidity from outside coalesced onto the walls and windows. Yi stayed inside for all of it, knowing that even while confined to her home, she still had homework to do.

She watched her parents and grandparents play mahjong while she sat at her cluttered desk, brush in hand and wanting instead to join them.

Something rolled into her foot, rattling along the wood floorboard before hitting her in the heel. She looked down to find a jar, unlabeled and sealed shut. Sometimes the house dropped things rather than appearing them in the predictable nooks of shelves and drawers. She picked it up, opened the lid, and sighed when she smelled it. “Mom,” she said. “Were we out of doubanjiang?”

“Is that another jar?” her mother asked, not bothering to look up from the game.

“Yeah.”

“Perfect. Just leave it at your desk, I’ll take it when I start making dinner.”

Yi put the jar at the corner of her desk and glanced between her schoolwork and the window. The glass had fogged up, making it difficult to look outside; the frost crystals crawled up the window pane and covered it like clouds. She gave the jar one last look before packing up her schoolwork and taking it to her room, the clinking of mahjong tiles melding with the rattling of the icy wind against the house.

Her room overlooked the front of the house, toward the barren land beyond. She laid out her papers and her brush and ink, sat down in a brief moment of contemplation, then walked past her bed to the windows. She squinted through the frosted glass and then cleared it with her hand, feeling the ice melt away beneath her fingers. She breathed in deeply and searched.

The landscape surrounding her home was not particularly interesting. She could see the path she took toward the village; it was dusted with snow, more crystals than flakes, balled up in the dead grasses and the sparsely bricked road. The memory of the body made her skin crawl, but part of her expected to see it anyway, that there would be a figure in the distance, hunched over and frozen solid like a statue. It had been too cold for any decomposition, too dry for the elements to do anything but preserve the body in its huddled, last attempts to stay warm. She listened for the mahjong tiles, the rhythmic mixing and stacking, and a thought occurred to her: what would happen if someone in her family froze to death outside too? And then another thought: how many people out there died from the weather to begin with?

A strong gust assaulted the house. She felt it creak against its frame, felt it tilt along its stilts. She took hold of the windowsill for support and heard the wind whistle past, heard the clinking of the mahjong tiles below, heard the violent crashing of the waves.

ASHLEY DENG is a Canadian-born Chinese-Jamaican writer with a love of fantasy and all things Gothic. She studied biochemistry with a particular interest in making accessible the often-cryptic world of science and medicine. When not writing, she spends her spare time overthinking society and culture and genre fiction. Her work can be found at Fireside Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, and Queen of Swords Press.