A house sits on a ledge. The fading gray boards and overall stench of abandonment would indicate to any passerby how very old the house is. However, this is not a location convenient or safe enough for people to consider passing by.
They are missing quite a sight, though. The house was built on a ledge, overlooking the infinite sea below. It is easy to see why the owner built the old manor there, and added a large deck off the house, to take advantage of the view. This precarious platform juts out into thin air like a shipwreck somehow flung up above the beach. While the lookout was built to be the defining tribute of the old abode, fate has since bestowed another.
While one side of the house stretches over the ledge, sharply silhouetted against the empty sky, the other half of the house has collapsed. Boards, debris, and glass fragments tangle with weeds and grass on the bluff. This carcass has been left to rot in the sun, yet no scavengers come to pick its wooden bones so the exact moment of tragedy remains preserved relatively well except for maybe a slight bleaching and hints of erosion. The whole piece resembles some abstract representation of bipolar disorder.
One more thing is in the atmosphere that one cannot describe the broken house without mentioning. This aura overrides the still powerful stench of age coming from the timbers. Even if an unlikely passerby is on the strip of beach below the house, they notice an aura from above, interrupting the infinity of the horizon and shoreline. Ask any hypothetical person unfortunate enough to pass this house, and they would say in all earnestness, that it seemed the house was breathing, breathing the stories of the dead.
It should be clear this house does have a story, (one containing many others.) The stories make the house breathe. At night, its boards do not creak simply because of the precarious foundation, but because it is alive. The stories and ghosts of long dead characters have seeped into the house and inhale and exhale with the walls, the whole thing creaking with the pain of being badly broken. These stories permeate the air and crack through it like lightening when they hear the approach of an unfortunate soul who shall soon learn what a horrible thing it can be to listen.