In the backseat of the van, Bernhard Zimmerkrug bounced violently as they hit another pothole. They had to drive back through town to get to the mansion, and their vehicle plodded between the school busses and office vans that clogged the streets. Even through they’d closed the windows, exhaust fumes and dust infiltrated the vehicle and stuck in his throat. When they finally rumbled onto the dirt road that led to the mansion, the shadows had grown longer. A faint redness tinged the sky.

“We have flashlights, right?”

“Yea, Mr. Simmercrack,” said the driver, a stocky youth with close-cropped hair. “I got torches in the trunk. High quality ones, very good.”

“Perfect.” The landscape rushed by—paddy fields,  a dried-up irrigation tank—each turn of the road pressing Julia against Bernhard and Bernhard against the van door. She didn’t seem to care, but he wished they had rented a bigger vehicle.

They passed little roadside shrines with glowing halos and half-drawn curtains. The bats had begun to swarm over the fields, and Bernhard watched their huge wings against the cloudless sky—much bigger than the crows that dominated daytime airspace.

“Does this house have a name?” Bernhard asked, leaning forward between the seats as they approached. The mansion was L-shaped, extending over two stories between the paddies and the forest. Neoclassicist columns, a colonial verandah, white domes protruding at the edges.

“No name, no. House at the forest, house in the paddies. The big house, the Dry House, the old house. It’s an abandoned place where no one goes, see?”

“The Dry House?”

“Very hot area, sir. Very hot.”

The road veered away from the treeline toward the mansion. A log at the side of the road sprawled like a decaying cow carcass, and for a second, Bernhard thought he saw lurid shapes wriggle inside it.

The mansion’s gardens merged with tendrils of jungle, and Bernhard glimpsed a waterless pond and desiccated flowerbeds. In its prime, it must have been an impressive sight for anyone approaching, especially local villagers. Even now, with the grass growing tall and the house so unkempt it appeared to be shrinking, it loomed large over its surroundings.

The driver stopped the van parallel to the main entrance and got out. Blind windows and broken glass blinked at them from upstairs. The ground floor openings had been boarded up with wooden planks. But the double-winged door stood ajar, and Bernhard strode toward it.

“Let’s see, shall we?” he said over his shoulder as Julia and the driver piled bags and cases on the driveway. “I have a good feeling about this, Julia. It might be just what we need.”

“Why do we need an abandoned house again?” Julia hefted her pack onto her shoulder with the driver’s help. “Climate change and human habitats?”

“You know how this works.” Bernhard turned back to the house. “We need to narrow it down, tell a human story. Only farmers care about parched fields and drought resistant crops. Everyone cares about family struggles.”

“Sure.” Julia’s shoulders twitched, but she didn’t challenge him.

Scrolling woodwork covered the frame and lintel of the door, a forest of thick and tangled greenery. Bernhard squinted. Some kind of animal was hiding behind the plants—a lion with pebbles for eyes. “Can you take a picture of this, Julia?” He scanned the lintel one last time, then stepped through.

“Ja. This will do,” Julia muttered, her camera obscuring her face. She pointed her lens at the staircase and the remnants of the chandelier fallen in the center of the hall, its brass fingers clawed into the hardwood floor, crystal shards spread about it in a beautiful blast radius. The walls and ceiling were covered in faded paint and plaster, some parts black with mold and others yellowed from the sun. The clicking of the shutter was a staccato note through the hallways as Julia captured fractured stone and dry leaves. The mummified remains of a cockroach crumbled under her boots, but she had eyes only for the house. “This will do nicely.”

“Indeed,” Bernhard said with a satisfied nod. He passed Julia to examine a broken vase. Ants moved in line around it and into the cracked woodwork of the stairs, carrying white larvae on their backs. “For an abandoned house, this is in good shape. I’ve seen far worse in Germany.”

“Ja, me too.” Julia’s voice was the monotone of distraction; focused on her photography, she advanced with her camera like a soldier carrying a rifle. “Let me try to get as much footage as possible while there’s still light. You want anything specific? I’ll start with the ground floor.”

Bernhard nodded and put his right foot on the stairs, testing the structure with his weight. “If you find a bedroom, that’s good. A children’s bedroom or toys, that’s even better. We need the leftovers of people’s lives, right? Their blankets and cutlery. Anything that shows this place wasn’t always a ruin. That it used to be a home, that people lived here. We can juxtapose that with the fields. It will work wonderfully.”

“Got it. Are you checking the upper floor?” Julia ducked under a splintered doorframe and vanished into the ground floor hallway.

Bernhard nodded to himself. The staircase looked solid enough. He put his full weight on the first step, then the next one. The railing wobbled as he grasped it, but the stairs held firm.

The upper area mirrored the ground floor, with a hallway that spanned the length of the building on the side of the jungle. Pausing on the landing, Bernhard wiped his brow but found no sweat. He retrieved the bottle from his backpack and drank deep. Important to stay hydrated, especially after a day in the torrid sun.

The third door off the hallway led into a sprawling bedroom that must have belonged to the building’s owner. The bed was king-sized, the décor and high ceiling impressive even in the mansion’s twilight years.

Moth-eaten curtains allowed dim shafts of light to fall into the room, and Bernhard’s gaze settled on a strange knot atop the bed’s dusty covers. He activated the flashlight on his phone and inspected it.

Gewölle? Bernhard frowned. The thing looked like something he would find in an attic, leftovers from a bird or feral cat that had found shelter here. He pulled the curtains wide to let in the light, his stomach suddenly hollow.

Something crunched under the sole of his sandal—something that felt different than the usual dry leaves or cockroach carcasses. Bernhard pulled his foot back and struggled to find his balance. The floor was littered with broken glass. But the shards hadn’t pierced his soles. There was no blood. No pain.

Glück im Unglück. He shone his flashlight into the adjacent bathroom and stepped through the remnants of long ago vandals, or maybe a fight. The sink had been shattered, the pipes wrenched from the walls. The bathroom mirror was broken, the toothbrush glasses smashed on the tiled floor. He made a mental note to ask Chaturika, his local research assistant, to do some digging on the mansion’s history. Maybe something could be found in the local newspaper archives or police records?

“Julia! Can you come here?” Bernhard waited until he heard her on the stairs. His throat hurt from forming even these few words, and his tongue filled his mouth like a dusty rag.

Apart from the sink and other broken fixtures, everything was exactly as the mansion’s last occupants had left it, untouched and unspoiled—the comb, scissors, and nail file remained neatly stored on the shelf above the sink, from which the mirrored door had been torn. Bernhard opened the tap in the bath and listened to the pipes rumbling inside the wall. No water came out—of course not.

“Have a look at this, Julia. What do you make of it?”

“Many years of bad luck,” Julia said, her face grim as she lugged the camera through the door, stopping before she stepped on the glass.

“You don’t find this unusual?” The shards reflected the flashlight but little else, too small and broken to reflect the room and the people in it. “Why would someone do this?”

“No idea. I’ll film it, though.”

Bernhard studied the scene: “Let’s do some recreations here.”

“Of what?” Julia raised an eyebrow behind the body of her camera. “Do you know what happened?” She aimed the camera at the empty-framed mirrors and the broken glass scattered over the floor. “Enough to be truthful?”