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Riley was tired, and not lack-of-energy kind of tired. He was tired of the screams behind the door of the dark room. He couldn't get them out of his head. And for the next few days, that was all he would hear. If it hadn't been for the food Hart left him every morning, he'd think he was alone in the world and the screams were just memories echoing, trapped in the house with no way out just like him.
His eyes hurt and there were no more tears left to cry. After seeing one of his best friends die, he sort of became numb. He was a vessel waiting to be strapped to a cold metal table, drained of blood and be tortured merciless.
He was losing hope, and he wasn't sure if it was a good thing anymore. Should he even be hopeful? If he got out, nothing would be the same again. He'd still have the dead bodies crawling out of the darkness in his mind, making him see them over and over until he went crazy.
I'm better off dead, he thought truthfully. He couldn't sugar coat the situation even if it was possible. But the last bit of hope in his heart still told him, begged him, to try. He had better energy now that his stomach wasn't empty anymore, and finally he could sleep without the lifeless eyes of forgotten people staring right at him like they knew he was there.
Riley sat in the middle of the underground room and stared briefly at the four rectangle walls. He still didn't understand what the room was for and why anyone would build it. The deaths and murders of innocent people must have been planned before the house was even built. Who ever Hart and his family was, they were no good.
And to top it all, he thought he was going crazy. Where did the bodies go? There were so many that it must have taken days to get rid off. Hart couldn't have done it alone, and if he did how did he get rid of them? There was only one door and Riley had sat across from it, watching it as Hart disappeared and left him all alone.
He wasn't sure why it bothered him so much, but it did. Maybe he just didn't want to believe that he was actually going crazy. It wasn't his imagination playing games, he hadn't invented them. That was impossible. Especially when he saw Hart killing people in front of him. They were real.
Something suddenly broke his train of thought. He heard a grinding sound followed by a loud clunk. A cold, chilly breeze struck him. Shivering, he turned around to find the door wide open. There was no one there. It had just opened by itself. No Hart.
“Hello?” Riley called out, double checking.
Once nobody answered, he got up and quietly walked towards the door. The room in front of the dark room, the one where Hart did his . . . torture, was empty. He wasn't going to question how the door just happened to open, maybe it was a malfunction since it was electronic.
Before heading to the door at the top of the stairs, Riley searched the room for a weapon. There was none out on the open, and the closet was locked. Frustrated, he dashed up the stairs anyway and continued his escape.
He didn't make any noise when he left the basement. He kept quiet, slowly walking down the hall to the front door. He had gone through this already, he couldn't fail this time. He had to get out of here. Just when he was losing hope, light found a way. He was going to get out and he was going to live. No one was going to choose if he lived or died, not today.
The front door was locked. Completely expected, an unavoidable scene. He looked through the very blurry windows and saw no car outside. All he saw was just trees and the sun behind them.
He turned around to look for another exit and felt gravity flip when he didn't see the dark wooden stairs facing the front door, or the hall without any family pictures. Instead he turned around to nothingness. He wasn't in the house anymore, like somehow his body had transferred somewhere else. He didn't understand what was happening, or why he couldn't see anything anymore, except for a strange light seeping through what seemed to be a dark, ominous sky full of emptiness.
In awe, he watched the tiny sparkly particles floating down from the sky. They were brighter and bigger than normal, like diamonds falling from a crack in the night sky. Only it wasn't the night sky, it wasn't anything.
Doubtfully, he stepped forward to stand under the ray of light. He felt warmth on his bare skin, something he'd been yearning for ever since he woke up in Hart's home; coldness always embraced him to the point where he didn't believe in a sun anymore.
But this, this felt like heaven. And then it hit him, was he in heaven? While he was staring out the window with his guard down, did Hart kill him? It actually made perfect sense. After the realization, he just felt a rush of relief, it was over.
As the heavenly ray of light showered him with warmth, he heard a distant laughter of a child. Then a second laughter joined, also deep in the darkness. He looked around, unsure of what he was searching for. The light slowly faded and left him scrambling in the dark. But something began to bloom . . . grass. From the unseen floor, colorless grass began to grow, followed by tiny flowers that looked like sunflowers, only they were gray.
Two small children emerged from the darkness, holding hands and running over the field of grass. They looked like any other normal children, except they had no smiles written on their faces, just a cold stare with lips pressed tightly into a thin line.
Riley had never seen them before, yet they looked familiar to him. They looked sick, with pale skin and worn out eyes. Maybe they were dead like he was.
He tried calling out to them but nothing left his mouth, no voice, no sound, nothing. He tried again, but his attempt was a failure. He . . . couldn't speak. He could hear wind, but no other sound seemed to exist in this place.
Instead of trying to speak to them, he tried walking to them, but every step he took just made the invisible path in front of him stretch longer. The closer he got to them, the farther he felt. It was all confusing and difficult to comprehend.
The two kids sat on the ground as two other figures behind them appeared, walking casually towards them. One was a very tall, slender woman. She had a motherly image, maybe she was their mother. And next to her was a man, shorter than the woman, but also sharing a relative aspect. They all had very dark hair, so dark it almost blended with the background. Their eyes were an eerie blend of blue and gray, similar to the moon.
They were most definitely related. But who were they?
He was about to open his mouth, but then remembered his voice didn't work in this place. Walking wasn't an option, he'd just get dizzy. Was he just supposed to creep on this family?
Just then as his thoughts rambled on, they disappeared, but appeared again in a different position. There was no more grass, they were inside a house now. It was the house, Hart's house. He knew it right away, only this version was different. He couldn't quite put a finger on it. Maybe it was the color that was messing with his brain.
The two kids ran down the stairs and down the hall to the back of the house. They were inseparable. And of course, they were twins. One was a girl with long black hair, and the other was a boy with his hair almost touching his eyes.
When they ran through the backdoor, Riley saw something that made his skin shiver with fright. There was a man standing there watching him. But what frightened him was the empty sockets where his eyes should have been. The man opened his mouth and Riley saw nothing. No teeth, no tongue, just a black hole.
This place was soundless, so he heard no terrifying screech that his mind had somehow already made up. The man just stood there watching him with his mouth open.
Flash.
Another person appeared with a blinding light that momentarily shut his eyes. Then another, and another, and more, until the hall was filled with death. They were all different, some disfigured, with missing body parts or limbs hanging by a piece of flesh.
Riley was scared. He had no idea what was going on, but he hoped he was hallucinating, because questioning his insanity, or state of dreaming, was no option. He was awake and he knew it.
It was so unexpected, and he was unprepared, nevertheless it made him jump out of his skin. They all moaned, and it was the most horrible thing he'd ever heard. It sounded exactly how you would think death sounded like.
Riley turned around and ran for the front door, opening it and shooting outside, only to find himself back inside the house again, facing the dead people. His heart raced and crawled up his throat as they began to move towards him.
This is not happening, he thought. It can't be real. Dead people don't just walk around and moan at you. They stay dead.
He took a step back and felt a wet, cold body press against him. He managed to swallow the knot in his throat and brought up his quivering hand to see blood smeared across his arm from what he had touched.
He forced his eyes shut and began to chant in his mind, “It's not real. It's not real. It's not real.” He released a long, shaky breath and slowly opened his eyes. He was surprised to see that the dead people were gone and color had been restored. Everything was back to normal, or as close as it could get with his situation. He let his hand wonder around to make sure nothing was behind him before turning around to face the locked front door.
Maybe Hart had keys laying around somewhere.
Quickly, he went to the kitchen to look through cabinets and tables. When he opened the first cabinet, he noticed the blood on his arm, it hadn't disappeared, it was still there, it was real. He shook his head and tried to forget about the blood. Finding a way out was more important than anything right now. If he could make it out, he could try to find a safe place to hide for a while so that he wouldn't be caught walking down the empty roads and get kidnapped again.
Riley felt a cold hand touch his arm and he immediately spun around to face nothing. He swore he felt someone touch him. He wasn't going crazy. There was something going on in this house and he needed to leave quickly.
He opened a random drawer and found kitchen utensils. He pulled out a kitchen knife and held it so tightly that his palm turned white. When he turned around again, he saw what had touched him. It was the man with no eyes. He was so close that Riley could feel his unusual cold breath against his face. So he wasn't dead?
Riley almost screamed when he saw him, but he didn't, for the fear that Hart was in the house. The man with no eyes hadn't made a move to attack him, so Riley quickly slipped around him and backed away slowly.
When he touched the farthest wall, the one closest to the hall, he turned and almost screamed again when he found himself in the same gray scenery. What was happening to him? This couldn't be real, even though nothing had made him feel more alive than this moment. He gripped his chest as his breathing became uneven. He was trying to avoid the panic attack he could feel coming, it wouldn't do good for him right now.
He bit hard on his tongue when he tried to go for one door and saw soul less bodies staring at him from a corner of the house. He bit so hard that he felt the metal taste of his blood pool over his tongue.
He swallowed, took a breath, continued walking past the bodies, and kept searching for a way out but everything was either locked or impossible to break through.
The man without eyes followed him. He seemed to be the only one that moved freely, for now. He was slow and painfully terrifying. Riley kept the knife close to his chest, ready to be used if needed. He wasn't sure if he could even harm this man. This might as well just be a dream.
A really vivid dream.
The one thing he didn't want to happen, happened. They attacked him. A girl with half of her head missing tried strangling him, but he pushed her away and she disappeared into the walls. Then another behind him tried to pull him back but Riley was fast and easily broke free.
He was cornered. As he tried to go back to the main hall, the one with the front door, he was cornered. They were all around him, walking closer to him as blood filled the floor. He closed his eyes again and tried to chant them away, but this time it didn't work. It actually got worse, because when he opened his eyes again it was raining and the blood had reached his knees.
Lightning flashed, and each time it flashed one body disappeared but another found its way back. He didn't know who was where, they all kept changing. Riley almost dropped the knife when one man appeared in front of him ready to kill, but the lightning flash took him away before anything dreadful happened.
“Please, stop!” Riley shouted, unsure of what he was yelling at.
But it all stopped. It all went back to normal. He was in the normal house again. The beautiful colors he was beginning to miss were back. He was shaking so much at this point that he wouldn't be able to tell the difference if an earthquake happened to say hello.
Just a few minutes, that was all he took to gather his thoughts and let his body calm down for a bit. He figured out that Hart must keep something locked away in the closet in his basement. Keys? Something to smash the windows with? Anything!
Riley left the hall he was in to go to the basement, but he saw the man with no eyes in front of the door. He dropped the knife when he saw him and quickly picked it up again, only to face the man when he got back up again. Riley tried jabbing the knife into the man but he disappeared. He looked behind him, nothing. Then he heard a groan, it was deep and so close to him. Riley turned around again, slicing empty air in front of him.
He told himself every five seconds that he wasn't going crazy, because the chances of that were very low. He wasn't crazy, he knew that.
“Leave me alone!” he yelled.
When Riley thought the man wasn't going to appear again, he rushed to the basement door and opened it, running down the stairs as fast as he could. When he reached the last step he saw the man with no eyes coming at him. Riley took the knife in his hand and pierced it through the man's neck. For a second, Riley gave a victorious smile, but the smile was gone after that one second, because when he pulled the knife out of his neck, it wasn't the man with no eyes. It was a normal guy, Riley's age definitely, and he was running from Hart who was behind the metal table watching them. And there were dice on the floor.
The young man choked out blood as more poured from his neck where Riley had punctured him with the knife. There was so much fear in his eyes, so much familiar fear. Riley's eyes watered as the man fell on the floor and died quickly. He . . . he just killed someone.
“No, no, no!” Riley said, kneeling beside the body and trying to wake him up. “Please, don't die!”
Movement snapped him back to reality. Riley grabbed the knife from the floor and stood up, holding it out in front of him as Hart walked towards him.
“Don't come any closer or you'll be joining him,” Riley warned.
Hart didn't listen, and when Riley tried to use the knife against Hart, he just easily took it from Riley's hand like it was the simplest thing in the world. Like taking candy from a baby. He really was a baby, he was so weak compared to Hart. He'd always lose. But right now he didn't care, because he killed someone. He took someone's life.
“Just kill me! What are you waiting for!?” Riley sobbed hysterically.
Hart didn't kill him. He just got closer to Riley and tried to calm him down by hugging him. Riley was so confused, he really was. He didn't hug Hart back, that would be strange and not to mention insensitive to the dead person on the floor that he had just killed.
“It's okay,” Hart whispered closely. “You'll be okay.”
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[Author's Message]: I really wanted to make this chapter super scary but I'll save super scary chapters for later lmao. This chapter is more of a wtf chapter and it's supposed to make you think. So I hope you guys liked it and I hope you're enjoying the story so far. Please vote and leave a comment for a chance to get a chapter dedicated to you. Thank you guys so much for everything!