The Mansion

Part Three

It was dark and drafty in the upper-left hallway as he silently passed through it, hoping against hope that he would find something to explain his situation. He was confused. So confused was he that he thought his brain was no longer functioning properly anymore. Real and not real were being muddled in his head. He no longer knew the difference between them.

The hallway seemed to stretch on and on forever. At very far intervals, there were little dim lights with old-fashioned shades around them on the wall. However, there was nothing else, as it seemed, in the hallway. The man could hardly see, anyway, so there was no way of knowing for sure. He started to feel extremely tired. The walk seemed like it would never end. His legs began to ache, and even the shirt on his back seemed to weigh down heavily upon him.

And yet, for some odd reason, he knew not to sit on the floor to rest. He didn't know for sure why, but he knew that it would be a bad idea. He continued on through the relative darkness and the confusion, and just at the opportune moment, just before he was about to give up, he spotted a bench against the wall. The man quickly paced over to the bench and excitedly lowered himself onto it, finally able to get a rest—but he fell straight through it and landed on the floor. He got up, but when he looked to see if the bench was still there, he found to his great displeasure and confusion that it was indeed no longer there. He didn't know if it was his imagination creating a sort of mirage or if the place was playing tricks on him. Either seemed extremely likely.

The man closed his eyes for a minute, standing there in the middle of the hallway and taking deep breaths. He just wanted to be at home, living his life. But what life? He had no idea what his home or his normal life were like. If he could not get back to the way things were (however they were before he got to this wretched place), then the least he could ask for was a place to sit. And not even that was granted to him by whatever mysterious power ruled over the place, if there even was something ruling over it.

But then he thought to himself. What if there was some form of life in the terrifying mansion he found himself in? What if there were other people in the same predicament as he? His determination kicked in, and with the bench no longer there anyway, the man decided to continue along the hallway, no matter how tired or frightened he became. Sitting down and doing nothing would serve no purpose; looking around would get him somewhere.

He didn't remember much after that point aside from the occasional passing of those dim, old-fashioned lights in that hallway and the odd sensation of his tired legs even though he was slowly walking through a hallway, something that certainly should not have made him as exhausted as he was. He didn't know how long he walked. He just simply walked and walked and walked, determined to find something, anything that would give him answers or lead him to another person. He wanted—no, needed—someone to talk to if he were to keep his sanity. That is, if he still even had his sanity. For all he knew, this could all be his imagination. But a part of him knew that he could not come up with something so cruel and terrifying in his imagination. Something else was at work here. There had to be. He was sure of that.

Deep in his thoughts, the man let the time pass by as he walked. He almost missed something dreadfully important—a wooden door in the hallway. He nearly passed by it, but the sight of something different from the drab walls and carpet and the lights instantly brought his attention back to reality, if it even was reality.

He stopped in his tracks and turned to the door. His hopes instantly reappeared for a moment. Although he doubted the door would take him out of the place, he was almost certain that he would discover something within the door. Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes. Opening them, he slowly turned the rusty knob and pushed the door open.

Darkness appeared before his eyes. Not a single thing could be made out in the infinite darkness before the man. Evidently, the dimly lit lights of the hallway were not bright enough to pierce the darkness behind the old door. And yet, he knew that he had to try to figure out the purpose of the door rather than giving up and walking away. He knew that he had to try it out, just as he did before with the odd cold material of the blank wall in the entry hall, the room where all of this had started.

But this material felt different. It felt like nothing. Rather than feeling the chill of the empty wall from before, the man felt nothing unusual when inserting his hand into this door. He figured it might be alright to just walk in, since it seemed to be quite the normal room—just eerily dark.

Just as he had stepped past the threshold of the door, his foot passed through the floor and he fell into the oblivion beneath the room. As it turned out, there was no floor.

The man fell and fell and fell for what seemed to be an eternity. Or it may possibly have been no more than two minutes. In fact, it seemed possible that the fall was only one second long, or maybe even ten years long. Time seemed to hold no place in the oblivion beneath the room. And so the man simply fell. And once again, he felt the nothingness that he felt before when the whole thing began.