Talk to No Sleep.

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The music of time played on, and as we ghosts listened to its haunted harmonies,

the old house became a little older around us.

Some things stayed the same, while other things changed.

The sugar maple tree beside the porch was still there, for instance, but it was showing signs

of decay, much like the widower within the house. The Reverend Hiram von Gothenburg, you see,

continued to reside in the home, even as the

flesh rotted off his daughter's bones in her shallow grave down in the coal cellar, and he

continued to be cold of heart and stern of temperament.

And yet, as the decades passed, the reverend's hair fell out, and his beard grew long

and white and wiry, and his spine and shoulders sacked, until the elderly pastor resembled

a shepherd's crook as he shuffled about the dusty halls.

The world beyond the old house and the lawn and the shutout back must have been

changing too, though any progress was slow to find its way into the old house. Utility workers

from the county did come in once, and they installed wires and glass bulbs and something called

a telephone.

And the coal stoves that had worked so hard to heat the place each winter since its construction

...