Sydney's by the Sea

You know her, you love her, you've heard her songs all over the radio. Now you get an exclusive look inside THE Sydney's beautiful seaside mansion. Treat your ears to this sensational and exclusive house tour of one of music's HOTTEST rising stars. You won't get an inside look like this ANYWHERE else. 

Transcript

You still had the keys to your childhood home after all these years. They didn’t work anymore of course, so you took a sturdy rock to the basement window and that worked just fine. To be honest it was more fun that way. You walked through the house slowly, ready to remember it one last time. But it was different. They’d staged it, brought in fake furniture to make it look better than it ever had when you’d lived here. They’d painted the walls and cleaned the spots that had never been cleaned before. Hell, even the floors were gone, hidden under shiny new laminate. Was it really even the same house, if everything about the inside had been replaced? You decided it was. You went back to the basement and started pouring out the can of gasoline you’d brought with you. Heat rises, so you wanted to start at the bottom. You climbed back up to the wi

ndow and tossed a match into the puddle. You stood outside until the neighbors started coming out, and you heard sirens in the distance. But as you were walking away, and the flames licked their way up to the second story, you saw the attic window burst open. Escaping from the attic at long last is; 

The Podcast Inside Your House. By Annie Marie Morgan and Kevin Schrock, with today’s episode written by Annie Marie Morgan.

 Episode 15: Sydney’s by the Sea

I had many fond memories of Sydney’s by the Sea. And though I could hear the sirens in the distance, and I knew they might be looking for me, I was going to take my time. I was going to see what I could see.

When I arrived I hadn’t expected the door to be intact. It was unlocked, so maybe that’s why. Because anything trying to come inside already had an open invitation. I locked it behind me, for whatever good that would do. 

The years had not been kind to Sydney’s house, but they were kinder than they’d been to most empty places. There were still spots of drywall clinging to the wooden skeleton underneath. The roof was intact, keeping the wet ocean air at bay. Vandals, squatters, and various creatures had all been inside, but they’d left enough behind to give me what I’d come for. I wanted to remember Sydney, just for a little while. 

The hallway leading to the living room greeted me not with pictures on the walls, but with graffiti that heralded doom. Every possible variety of “god save us” “repent now” and “the end is here” was scrawled on the walls. The living room had brown and muted pink wallpaper that, in another time, would have been lovely, but was too antique for our tastes. We’d always meant to tear it down, but we never got around to it. Time had completed the task for us though. There were only a few strips still left clinging to the slowly rotting walls. 

Sydney and I had only lived here for three months before things went bad. But that was enough time to make memories. Probably more good memories than I'd made at any other point in my life. Everything was going right for us, in every possible way. We were finally doing what we wanted with our lives, deeply in love, and on the cusp of fame on top of it all. That excitement and terror made everything in our lives seem so much more vibrant. 

The living room had only been half ransacked. There's hadn't been much of value for anyone to take. Well, nothing that had value anymore. The shelves by our smashed TV still held a handful of movies and CDs, but the books were mostly gone. As I started rifling through them I caught the scent of sea air. I froze and listened intently to see if someone had opened a door or window. But the sirens didn’t sound any closer, and the house was silent of both creaks and footsteps.

On our falling shelves there were still thirteen copies of our CD left. We'd gotten a whole box for family and friends, more than we could use, even with our rapidly growing social circle. I picked up the cleanest copy and wiped it with my filthy shirt, smearing the grime away from Sydney's face. They'd airbrushed out that little mole on her left cheek, and the eyes looking back at me were a lighter blue, but it was still her. It had been so long. God I missed her. 

I slipped the CD into my jacket. It used to be a nice jacket, but a life on the run had necessitated change and I'd cut the inside layer open for storage. Now it held all the essentials; water, bandages, food, my knife, and now Sydney. 

I made my way to the kitchen; more graffiti, more holes in the walls, and the scent of sea air only grew stronger. The cabinets were still mostly the baby blue we’d picked out, underneath the dust, dirt, and of course, the blood. The tile floor was mostly intact, harder to destroy than wood and drywall. 

The kitchen had never been somewhere I’d felt comfortable, but I had been trying. It hadn’t been a room I’d had at most of the places I’d lived. Well if you can even call it living. Sometimes I feel like the only times I’d really been living instead of existing were the brief years I’d gotten with Sydney. We’d gone to school together for the seventh and eighth grades, then my world went dark. It reignited when I met her again a decade later at twenty-three. And when I lost her for good, it was back to the darkness, the emptiness.  

I felt like the kitchen, more than any other place in the house, represented the massive divide between us. For me, eating had always been an act of survival, something to be done in haste when the opportunity presented itself.  For her, it was so much more. She’d grown up with family dinners, holiday feasts, and takeout movie nights. When Sydney cooked she’d always chop up something green to garnish or sprinkle fancy sauces on top of everything. For her, food had always been there, and since she knew it would always be there she could take her time. I tried to learn to do that too. I tried so hard to exist in her world. I feel like if I’d had just a little more time, maybe I could have succeeded. Or I at least could have gotten better at pretending. 

I started digging through the cabinets. The unessentials were still there, gadgets that only served one purpose; a garlic roller, a tortilla press. Her little box with frosting tips and food coloring was completely untouched. I poured out some bright blue on my finger and licked it up, taking that bit of her with me too. I pocketed a few bottles. I could hear the sirens closer now, and I still had time to get away, if I wanted to. But I wasn’t sure I did. I deserved it after all, for what I’d done to Sydney. 

I moved down the hallway. The bedroom was hard to look at. Our bedsheets were still there but torn and stained. The blankets were gone. We had bittersweet memories here, but mostly good near the end. I’d always had nightmares, but she’d made them better. I’d stopped waking up as much, knowing she was next to me. I think we’d finally hit the point where I could sleep through the night when things went to hell. Our sex life had only gotten better in the new house too. Before that, we’d had to sneak around her roommate's schedule, as going back to the place I was staying at was out of the question. I wondered who else had made love on our bed since the house had been abandoned. Carved into the headboard was the sentence “Baby, it was real and we were the best.”

I’d always hoped I’d end up with Sydney and the fact that it had happened, even only briefly, still amazed me. Hers had been the first hand I’d ever held, her lips the first I’d ever kissed. We’d only been kids when she moved away, so we hadn’t been each other’s first loves, but that had never mattered to me. I’d had plenty of girls throw themselves at me over the years, but always for the same reasons. The girls interested in me could always tell that there was something wrong with me. But that was okay because that was what they wanted. They’d seen the bruises on me growing up and pitied me. Or as an adult, they’d seen me struggle through the most basic of human interactions and wanted to help me. They wanted someone mysterious, maybe even dangerous. They wanted to touch my scars and ask me about them in hushed voices in bed. But as the mystery and the danger vanished, they lost interest. 

That had never happened with Sydney. I’d known her only before things had gotten bad, and only again after they started to get slightly better. Sydney had known me happy and wanted that again. As children, we’d planned for the future together. With my poems and her voice, not to mention her beauty, we’d be unstoppable. It was just a silly childhood fantasy, one you’re supposed to forget about when you start to really plan your life. But for me, it was all I had. That dream of our future together got me through those disgusting next few years. 

The door to our office was closed but with a hole big enough to walk through. Was it really still a door at that point? I decided it was, and I reached in to unlock it, opening the door properly. Sydney’s sound booth in the corner had been similarly broken, shards of glass at the edges of the window the only thing separating it from the rest of the room. On the other end of the office, the pictures above my desk had been mostly left up, but washed out by the elements. The scent of the sea was stronger here, and I could hear the waves of the ocean now. 

Sydney didn’t, and would never know that it wasn’t an accident that we met up again as adults. The second I had my life together enough that I felt like I wouldn't scare her off I found her. I practiced over and over again saying in the mirror “Oh my gosh Sydney, is that you? It’s been so long.” Practicing my words was nothing new for me, I did it any time I knew what the world was going to throw at me; ordering coffee, interviewing for a job, and saying hello to people I sort of knew. I always had to practice, and by the time I found Sydney again, I was getting good at it. I almost felt like I could speak to people without practicing first, and not mess up my words, or stutter, or forget what to say. Almost. 

She’d remembered me, and the one thing that I’d been born lucky with had been my looks. I was handsome enough to get the benefit of the doubt. I swept her off her feet. She’d put enough of herself on the internet that I knew all of her favorite things; her favorite foods, her favorite books, her favorite shows. I’d listened to her sing over and over again online, but I still acted surprised the first time she sang for me again after our reunion. Not only had she remembered me and our silly little dreams as children, but she wanted to see if we could still make it happen. She was so beautiful, she might have made it even without me, but I was happy to be along for the ride. And fuck we’d gotten so close before everything went so horribly wrong. We were hitting the point in our lives where our biggest worries had been how to stay humble, and where we wanted to go on our next vacation.

At least one of Sydney’s fans had walked through the house after it was left to rot. Near my desk, they’d spray-painted a heart around the poster of our first EP and wrote underneath it “I loved you, Sydney.” I know this place had technically been both of ours, but I’d never been able to think of it that way. This was her house, I could never own something so beautiful. 

The last room in the house wasn’t really a room anymore. It had been our back porch, but the screen was all gone. Only jagged wooden slats remained, and the tile floor, which had stayed almost perfectly intact. I’d spent much of my childhood and young adult life living in forgotten, rotting places, and that was how it always went. The soft and delicate features of a building died first, torn apart and destroyed by animals, people, and the elements. Anything intricate would mold and rot and collapse. Only stone, cement, and brick stayed for any length of time. Wallpaper, art, and decorations; those were not things that lasted. 

I used to hear Sydney’s singing when I went to sleep, now all I hear is her screams. 

In the old world, buildings like Sydney’s abandoned house were a rarity, a curiosity, at least in our country. Abandoned places were torn down eventually, and replaced with new ones. Now, in this new world, these were the only buildings we had. I sat on the steps of our back porch and watched the new world from where Sydney and I had watched the fall of the old one. 

It had happened so quickly, that we didn’t have time to prepare. Though truthfully I don’t know how we would have. I couldn't tell you how long ago it was, time becomes different on the run. But we’d sat here the first night they came, and listened to the screams from the city across the bay. TV was gone, the internet was gone. It was every man for himself within hours and no one knew what was happening. 

The first attack came from our neighbor who’d always had eyes for Sydney. We let him in, he was human after all, in a world rapidly being filled with things that were not. But he only wanted to take Sydney for himself, as if she were merely a thing to be possessed in this new world. We didn’t have a gun so I’d killed him with a knife. Truth be told it was easier killing my fellow man than killing the creatures that came in next, but only because they were stronger. 

The binoculars we’d used were still on the ground, I was shocked no one had grabbed them. They were one of the few things we’d had in this house that still had value in this new world. I picked them up and looked out across the bay at the city's new inhabitants. 

Half the skyscrapers had burned down, and curled across the top of one was a sleeping dragon. Something purple with a dozen legs was crawling out of another building, looking for survivors with each window it punctured. On the ground below a giant with one eye sparred with a unicorn, or maybe they were playing. I hadn’t yet seen the creatures turn on each other, but perhaps they would when they ran out of us. On the beach closest to the bay a pack of centaurs kicked around a human head, laughing and whinniying as they ran. If I was close enough to hear them, they could probably smell me. But that was fine, I was done running.

When the world ended we’d only made it out because our boat had enough fuel to get us to the forest down the coast. We survived in those woods for nine months. In the time it takes to grow a new life, we clung to this old one. I remembered those months more vividly than any other time, we were always on the brink of death, but I’d had Sydney all to myself. 

The creatures stayed in the cities at first. There were so many different kinds, but what united them all was a taste for human flesh, and a determination to wipe us out. They started finding us exponentially more as time went on, and they ran out of easy prey. I tried to teach Sydney to kill, but she never took to it, even with our lives on the line. I knew she was a lost cause when she wouldn’t even spear a mermaid I’d caught for her in a net. It was such an easy kill. She still ate the meat though, surviving but not wanting to see how.

During those nine months, I started to wonder if I’d ever really loved her, or if I’d just loved the idea of her, the things she could give me, and the life I could have with her. Her smile, her laugh, her spark, all vanished as time went on. I wonder if maybe everyone becomes that way given enough stress. If we’re all just empty husks without our possessions, our houses, our food. Maybe that’s why I’m so good at surviving here, I’d already had that all taken from me before. 

Our neighbor wasn’t the only human threat I’d taken out. With society gone other people, particularly the men, became monsters too. The night Sydney finally died I thought that’s what we were in store for. 

They’d all appeared around us in a circle, a group of men at the edge of the woods. The ones we could see in the firelight were shirtless, possibly naked. But they were still human, and I thought that perhaps we could reason with them, we were becoming a rare species after all. 

But they ignored my questions, my demands, my threats, and as they got closer I saw why. They were only human from the waist up. With whinnies, neighs, and snorts they rushed us. I bashed one in the knee, giving me an out from the circle, and Sydney tried in vain to stab one, but she was too weak, too afraid to commit to the kill. One of the centaurs reared up on its back two legs, and stomped on her with his front hooves. The others were excitable, braying and grunting through human mouths. Sydney begged me to help her as I backed away. Maybe I could have, I’d killed so many people, so many creatures since this all began, and I'd gotten quite good at it. But the odds had never been that bad. And part of me knew, that without Sydney, I could survive much longer. She wasn’t made for this world. 

The other centaurs surrounded her and started stomping too, and as Sydney screamed and her bones crunched, I ran. In the end, I did survive better without her, but I wasn’t living. 

I could hear the sirens nearly at the house now. They'd been tracking me for days. I’d never seen how they killed, but I was sure it would be just as horrible as all the other monsters of this new world. I stayed on the back porch and waited for them. I didn’t want to go back in the house, it hadn’t been mine, not really. I took out one of the bottles of food coloring from my jacket, and on the wall behind me in red, I wrote simply “I was here.” That seemed like the only thing I could say about my life. 

As the sirens’ song grew louder I set down my knife and waited for whatever fate had in store for me. I’d had enough of this life, and it had had enough of me. I was ready to die, and I couldn’t think of a better place to do it than Sydney's by the Sea. 

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the podcast inside your house! To hear every tale of terror as they are released, subscribe to our show on your podcast app or on Youtube. And Until next time, take a moment this week to appreciate the fact that centaurs are not real. At least, not yet.