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The Empty House

by Cristel Hastings

published in WEIRD TALES, November 1931

Its windows stare like gaunt eyes at a road

Now weed-grown, voiced with rasping croak of toad

And crow and with the wind’s shrill moan at dawn,

For all the things that once lived here are gone.

An empty shell, forsaken by its host,

Its gloomy rooms are now abode for ghost

And pixy and the spiders in its halls,

And something that at midnight crawls—and crawls,

Gray dust upon its stairways lies in heaps

Unmarred save where a shadow slides and creeps,

And where the tiny feet of mice have played

In scampered rhythm where the drafts have prayed,

Once there was laughter here beneath its roof,

Now there is silence, strangely weird, aloof—

Once there were voices and at noon a song,

Now there is stillness and the nights are long.

Only the aching silences remain

Behind the gloomy door and dusty pane,

And the black shadows that forever creep

Through empty houses and their vigil keep.