House

by ~reido

You open your eyes, blink once, twice.  The room you’re in is dark, and the air feels heavy around you.  You close your eyes again and rub them with the heels of your palms before sitting upright and opening them once more.  The environment is unfamiliar—you’re very sure you’ve never been here before.

You look down at your hands on the hardwood floor.  Where they’ve moved, the thick layer of dust has been pushed aside.  You stand and regard the floor where you had been laying; the same dust has been disturbed in the shape of your body.  Vaguely, you are aware that the dust was there before you were, which is a relief:  you didn’t lie there as long as the dust did.

You’re not sure how you got there.  Beyond the single window in the room you’ve woken up in is nothing but thick, oppressive blackness.  You wipe at the window with your hand, but only manage to smear it with your own sudden, nervous sweat.

You look around, taking in your surroundings more fully.  The room is square, with wood walls and a wood floor, the latter slightly darker than the former.  The floor, all the way to the edges, is coated with dust.  Opposite the single window is a rectangular door with a brass doorknob.  A small bed is pressed against the wall to your right, the sheets and blankets in disarray, the pillows absent.  A large, dark brown stain is clearly visible in the middle of the bed, despite the darkness in the room.

Without knowing why, you slip a hand into the pocket of your jeans.  Inside, you find a box of matches equally as new to you as your surroundings are.  The logo on the front looks like an ad for a bar, but the name is smudged out.  You open the box, and find several matches inside.  Immediately, you light the first match and hold it up, illuminating the room.  You find it no different in the flickering light than in the near-darkness.

You find that your hand is on the brass doorknob, but it will not turn.  You try harder, but to no avail.  That sudden, nervous sweat becomes a cold perspiration inspired by pure fear.  You’re locked in.

The match burns your fingers.  You curse, and quickly shake it to extinguish the flame.  The darkness seems even more oppressive now that you’ve experienced the light.  You know it’s impossible, but the bed seems to loom over you now.

Afraid, you move to the far side of the room, putting as much distance between yourself and the stained furniture as you can.

Your eyes fall on the window.  You immediately feel stupid for not thinking of it, and then set about opening the pane.  It slides up easily, and the utter blackness beyond seems to seep into the room, sucking what little unnatural light was present outside where it dissipates, useless.

You stick your head out and peer down.  You can only see the outer wall for a foot or so below you, but there’s a small ledge just below the window, moving off horizontally in both directions beyond the edge of what little you can see.  You light another match and hold it out, but the blackness pulls away only a little.  Below you, even in the match light, that darkness hides the distance to the ground.

You take a deep breath and drop the match.  It floats down with an odd slowness, reminding you of a moth.  Your ability to see stretches down with it, the little glow falling and falling and falling.  It travels an impossibly long distance, never stopping, and you watch it until it is barely a pinprick of light in the distance.  And then it vanishes completely.  As far as you can tell, there is no ground below you—or, at least, it is so far below that climbing down from the window is impossible.

You examine the ledge.  You could probably walk along it, but where would it go?  For all you can tell from here, the wall is just as endless horizontally as it seems to be vertically.  And the room your in now is safe, though eerie.  You light another match and examine the room again.

The bed, its brown stain somehow larger now, is much closer to you than it had been only moments before.  It is no longer pushed against the wall, and trails have been cut through the dust on the floor by the bed’s narrow legs.  Clearly, it moved.  You stare at it for a moment then, without a second thought or a moment’s hesitation, you climb out onto the ledge.

Your hands are shaking so hard you can’t light another match, so you carefully move along the narrow makeshift walkway in the darkness, one hand groping the wall at your back for a window or door to allow you back inside.

The longer you stay on the ledge, the stronger your sense of vertigo becomes.  You squeeze your eyes shut, knowing they’re useless in this complete darkness.  After a minute or two of agonizing, terrifying, slow movement, your hand brushes against glass.

Your breath catches in your throat as a new problem presents itself to you.  The window is low, and you can’t bend over to open it.  Your heart starts beating faster, and a bead of sweat rolls down your forehead to your cheek, then to your chin.

Panicking, you smash through one pane with a clenched fist, gritting your teeth as you feel the glass cut skin.  Moving quickly as dizziness threatens to overtake you, you use your makeshift handhold to lift the window open, whimpering in pain as a sharp shard cuts deep into your palm.  

In seconds, you’re inside, clutching your wounded hand to your chest.  You can feel the blood seeping out, staining the front of your shirt.  It hurts more than it should, and you feel hot tears, inspired equally by pain as by fear, pour down your face.  The dizziness you felt outside still causes your surroundings to tilt and buckle around you, so you clench your eyes closed once more and wait for your head to settle before opening them again.

Once you’ve finally managed to calm your nerves, you carefully shuck off your tee-shirt and wrap your hand in it, tying the clothing in a knot to apply constant pressure.  It hurts, but not as much as the wounds did at first.

It takes a lot more effort to open your matchbook now and light the next match.  The room lights up much brighter than the previous, and it takes you a moment to realize why:  around the room, on stands and mounted on the walls, are mirrors of different sizes and shapes.  The small flame of your match bounces off each one, the reflections adding light to the room.

For the first time since waking in the room with the bed, you manage to get a look at yourself—and honestly, you look terrible.  Chest smeared with the blood that soaked through your shirt, hand wrapped in blood-soaked cloth, a large smear of blood on your cheek, mixed with your tears and sweat.  You realize only now that you cut your face at some point in coming in the window.  You wipe the blood away, but it slowly oozes out the small cut.  There’s not really anything else that can be done about it.

One of the mirrors, on a swivel stand, moves just a few degrees; you notice and immediately move as far away from that mirror as you can, staring at it.  For the second time, your match burns your fingers, and you curse and drop it to the floor.  Once more, your heartbeat picks up, the pounding sounding in your ears.

For a moment, you can’t figure out what’s out of place.  It takes a few seconds for you to notice that the room is still lit, as if your match hadn’t gone out.  Your blood chills when you realize that in each of the mirrors you are still reflected, and in each you are still holding a lit match.

All of the mirrors are pointed directly at you.

Your hand finds a doorknob as you grope blindly behind you, and, panic mounting again, you yank the door open and move quickly out, slamming it shut behind you.  Without even thinking about it, you move to the far side of the hallway outside the room.  The light continues to shine from under the door.

To your left and right is only darkness, only a few feet of the corridor visible to you.  The floor beneath you creaks loudly, startling you, and immediately you realize that you are not alone in the hall. You move in the opposite direction of the formless presence without thinking twice.

Within four steps, you find yourself tumbling painfully down a flight of wooden stairs, head over heels over head.  You hit the bottom hard, but are instantly thankful that the staircase is not as long as however far the seemingly nonexistent ground outside is.

You can no longer feel the invisible presence and, taking several deep breaths, you rise to your feet again.  You light another match and survey your surroundings:  another hallway, seemingly infinite as far as you can tell from the faint light of the flame in your fingers.  The wall near the bottom of the staircase is rotten and broken, and several large, thick pieces of wood have collapsed inwards.

Your eyes travel up to the top of the stairs.  The formless presence is still gone, but you grab one of pieces of timber in your good hand and swing it once or twice to test it.  You feel slightly strengthened by your makeshift weapon, and immediately start down the hall away from the stairs.  The presence doesn’t return, but you still seem like you are being watched from behind.  You look over your shoulder every few steps, but see only darkness.  You light a new match when the first burns out, and then a third after that.  You realize that you’re out of matches, and curse yourself for not conserving them.

The last one burns out just as you finally reach another door.  The darkness seems even heavier now, but an odd, pale light is shining out from under the doorway.  You tighten your grip on your makeshift weapon, and then open the door.

You find yourself blinded as whatever the source of the light is shines directly in your eyes.  A person holds the source, whatever it is.  You can barely make out several other figures as the afterglow of the light muddles your vision.  You say something to the person, but it doesn’t respond.  None of the figures move.

The source of the light suddenly lurches towards you without warning, the figure holding it taking on a sudden sinister appearance.  You don’t have time to hesitate, and immediately swing wildly with your piece of wood.  The blow connects, the light tumbles away, and the human figure shatters, falling to the ground in pieces.

You blink, letting your eyes adjust.  None of the other figures move.  After a moment you realize that the light is coming from a heavy, black flashlight; you immediately reach down to take it with your wounded hand, clumsily shining it on the remains of the thing you struck down.  It’s a mannequin, legs and arms scattered on the floor.  All of the figures in the room are mannequins.  You are not calmed by the fact that they are not real people and while you know they’re not alive, you can’t shake the feeling that all of them are staring at you with their blank faces.

You back into the hall, closing the door.  The flashlight illuminates the corridor; you swing it from one side to the other, and you get the distinct impression that this is not the same hallway that you stumbled through by match-light.  You tell yourself that it only looks strange because of a different light, but after a moment or two you realize that the hall is indeed quite different.  There’s a turn on either side of you where the corridor had once been straight, and the stairs you came down are no where in sight.

A wave of vertigo hits you, just as when you had been on the ledge, but you can’t figure out why.  The corridor, despite having changed, seems solid and level enough.  For some reason you suddenly get the distinct impression that you’re walking on the ceiling and above you is the floor.

You lean against the wall and close your eyes.  You mutter something about how this is all crazy, about how you must be dreaming, but inside you know it can’t be true.  No matter how strange or impossible your situation might seem, it’s really happening.  You’re really in an environment foreign to you, and you’re really being followed by some nameless, formless entity.

You realize that that presence is back, almost on cue as you think of it.  It’s just around one of the corners.  Gritting your teeth, you quickly round the other corner—and fall again, this time straight down as the floor seems to open up beneath you, dumping you to the level below.  But only for an instant, as you strike the edge of another hole and continue your plummet.  A third hole smashes into your gut and as the air rushes out of your lungs you lose your grip on the plank and it clatters to the floor.  Scrambling to hold on to the edge of the hole, you make a desperate grab for your only means of defense, but it’s beyond your reach.  For an instant, you can’t help but feel like something is pulling you down.  With a helpless wail, you slip, and continue your descent into the depths of this strange building.

The fall does not last much longer as you crash into a cold tile floor; an instant later, dust and debris brought down by your painful plummet rain down around you.  The flashlight slips from your bad hand and rolls along the flat floor, but you ignore it, doubled over in pain.

It takes you a moment to regain your ability to move, and your first action is to retrieve your flashlight.  It’s easier to hold in your wound-free hand.  Panting still, you shine it up at the hole—only to find flat, water-stained ceiling above you.  Whatever gap you fell through is gone.  You can feel your heartbeat in the tips of your ears, the pulsing throb syncing up with the pounding in your chest.

You examine the room around you, the beam of your flashlight shaking erratically as your hands tremble.  It looks like a kitchen, with stoves and sinks and shelves lining the walls, the kind of kitchen that would be staffed by a large group of people.  It’s empty now, though, and everything is covered by the same thick layer of dust as the room you woke up in.  There are no doors.  There are no windows.

A sense of claustrophobia engulfs you, and you reexamine each of the walls as quickly as you can.  The findings are no different—no entrance or exit of any kind.

One of the large ovens is open.  Carefully, you make your way over to it, shoes leaving prints in the thick dust.  Breathing long and slow, you bend over to peer into the oven, and then shine the flashlight in.  Where the back should be is only more blackness, and the oven seems to go on forever.  A faint light can be seen way off in the distance.

You stand back upright.  You don’t want to crawl into the oven, for obvious reasons.  It smells foul, but you can’t place the scent.  You scan the room again, searching for some other way out.  You find nothing, and are not surprised.

You take a deep, trembling breath and crawl hesitantly into the oven.  The metal at your hands is warm, and the stench is only stronger once it engulfs you.  You crawl several feet in before the door behind you slams shut.  In the same instant, the light at the end of the tunnel vanishes.

Your panic intensifies, and you crawl faster.  Your knees hurt and the cuts in your hand sting.  And after a moment, the metal around you begins to grow hotter.  Somehow, you aren’t shocked.  After all, you’re crawling in an oven.  And now you’re crawling faster.

You can distinctly tell that the source of the heat is behind you, and that the metal behind you is much hotter than the metal in front of you.  You slip and slam your shoulder into the wall.  An orange glow surrounds you, and the heat intensifies.  Slippery with sweat, you crawl even more quickly.

In the very moment when you feel you can’t go on, you stumble out of the tunnel into a cool, dry room.  You feel deprived of oxygen and cough, gasping for air.  Once you’ve gathered your wits, you rise and shine the flashlight on the mouth of the tunnel—simply a hole in a green-wallpapered wall on this end.  The heat emanating from it is quickly fading.

You are suddenly aware of the formless presence behind you.  You spin around and shine your light on where it feels the thing should be, but find nothing.  You can feel it’s aura in front of you, though.  It doesn’t feel angry, but it’s certainly malicious.

You ask it what it wants from you.  You get no response.  You ask it where you are, but it’s just as silent after that question.  You ask it who or what it is, but get no answers.  Behind you, a door creaks, opening.  The presence before you ceases to be, and you slowly turn around to check the door.  It’s opened in the same exact place the tunnel you crawled out of had been only moments before.

Something deep in your head tells you not to go through that door.  You listen to the little, surprisingly sane voice in your brain, and turn away.  The presence immediately returns, and now it seems very angry.  It screams at you without sound, pushing you back towards the new door with its will alone.  The little voice in your head tells you not to listen.  You tell it you have no choice, and quickly back into the door.  It slams shut as soon as you’re through it, and in that instant the formless presence is again gone.

The room is empty and square, nearly identical to the room you woke up in, only it’s missing the window, and in place of the stained bed a pile of sheets is tossed haphazardly in the corner.  You turn around to face the door, but you find, instead, a large circle charred into the wallpaper, symbols you’ve never seen before written in the black burn-marks.

The pile of sheets moans softly.  You panic, and move to the opposite wall.  Your eyes scan the room quickly, but find no exit now that the door is gone.  You wish, then, that you still had your two-by-four.  The flashlight will have to do, you decide.  Gritting your teeth in fear as much as in pain, you lurch across the room and bring the heavy flashlight over your head—and stop.

The sheets slide back slightly, revealing the face of a young woman with brown hair and green eyes.  You’re breathing heavy, and she’s looking at you with nothing but terror on her face.

It’s only now that you realize that the room is lit by a strange, unnatural glow, as if a lamp were lit somewhere in the room, though no lamp is present.

The girl stares at you wordlessly for several heartbeats.  You stare right back at her, letting the flashlight fall to your side, clicking it off.  Who are you? she asks you, trembling.  You tell her your name.  She asks you if you know where you are, and when you tell her you don’t, she tells you the same about herself.  She, too, is lost in a building she’s never seen before.

You ask her what her name is, turning away to look at the room again.  She stands up, letting the sheets fall to the ground, and brushes her dress to straighten it; her belly is drastically rounded, curving out from under her breasts.  You can tell without asking that she’s heavy with child.  As she tells you her name is Bernadette, you realize she’s in much better condition than you are.  You can’t see a scratch on her, yet you’re cut in multiple places and covered in bruises.

You tap the butt-end of the flash-light against the center of the circle burned in the wall.  It sounds hollow.  You don’t bother asking Bernadette how she got into the room without doors, assuming she came the same way you did.  The two of you don’t speak as you examine the strange markings.

Without a word, you slam the butt of the flashlight against the center of the circle.  The wall cracks slightly.  You repeat the attack, again and again until you’ve smashed a sizable hole in the wall.  Your arm hurts from the effort.  Bernadette just watches you, wincing with each impact.

You look at her and smile, knowing full-well that it’s a smile you don’t mean, then carefully climb through the hole.  She follows you, searching the next room wide-eyed once she’s through the hole you made.

Somehow, you’re not surprised to find a different room than the one you came in from.  You click the flashlight back on and shine it on the walls, frowning.  Bernadette says something about this room not being familiar, though she, like you, must have come through it.  She describes how it looked before, completely different than you remember it:  burnt, damaged, decrepit.  Again, you’re not surprised.  The shifting geography seems almost normal, now.

You turn around to examine the hole you smashed in the wall.  It’s still there, but beyond is only blackness.  The unnatural glow the room had once been bathed in is gone.  You shine your flashlight into the hole, but there doesn’t seem to be anything on the other side now.

Bernadette gets your attention by tugging at your elbow.  Wordlessly, she points down at the floor.  Burned into the thick carpet is another circle, similar to the one in the previous room, but with different characters written in it.  At the center is a hole, the edges charred heavily, blackened by flames.  She asks you if it was there when the two of you first entered the room.  You tell her you’re very sure that it wasn’t.  She looks in your eyes a moment, worried—and then past you, at the wall.  The hole’s gone, she says.  You don’t have to look back to know she’s right.

You tell her that that only leaves the hole in the floor.  The look she gives you makes you want to protect her, to find another, easier way, but you know you have no choice.  You tell her you’ll go first.  As you watch her, a word appears in your mind:  vessel.  You blink, wondering where it came from.  The voice that seemed to whisper it to you wasn’t the same one that told you earlier to resist the formless presence—that much you’re sure of.  And then you carefully lower yourself into the hole, filing that thought away for inspection later, in a safer place.

You don’t examine the room below until you’ve helped Bernadette down.  You’re back in the large kitchen again, still without doors or windows.  Seconds after you enter, the hole in the ceiling vanishes.  You’re not sure when it happened, exactly, but you’re aware that it’s gone.  The oven door is closed.

You turn around to find Bernadette staring at you, a confused look on her face.  You're my escort, she says.  You ask her what she means, but she’s unable to explain.  Separately, the two of you set about searching the room.  After a minute or two, she calls you over to the far wall.

A third circle is there, burned in the wall, with another hole at the center of it, and a third set of characters.  At the base is a short length of chain.  You bend over and take it, handing Bernadette the flashlight.  You’re not sure why, but you know you’ll need it soon, so you wrap the chain around your good hand.

Carefully, you climb through the hole, and then help the pregnant woman make her way through with some difficulty.  You both brush yourself off—and she gasps, looking past you.  You turn quickly, searching the hallway for the source of her fear, but all you find is the formless, invisible presence that pushed you to the room you found her in.

You ask Bernadette if she can see it.  She nods quickly, eyes wide with fear.  She shines the flashlight towards the formless thing; where the light hits it, you can see a human-like figure, but only the parts that are illuminated.  Outside the flashlight’s small circle it remains invisible.  What little you can see is charred and brown, blistered, damaged.  Broken.  Staring at the burnt form you realize that wherever Bernadette shines the light, the walls and floor also seem horribly burnt, but only for the instant that the light is directly on them.

Kill it, she whimpers, backing towards where the hole you climbed in through used to be—the hole that’s gone now.  You tell her to just show you where to hit.  She shines the light on the thing’s head—hideous, burnt, disfigured, but human.  You don’t hesitate.  You feel flesh and bone collapse beneath the blow, and the burnt figure dies.  You don’t see its life end, but you feel somehow that the presence is gone, though its body remains.  The room immediately seems less threatening as the thing falls out of the flashlight’s beam.  When Bernadette shines it on the fallen creature, nothing can be seen.  She asks you, panicking, where the body went.

Catching your breath, you ask her what this room looks like.  Like the last one she described to you, she describes this one as burnt beyond repair.  She says that all of the rooms have seemed such.  You tell her that everything looks totally different to you.  The two of you exchange a single, confused gaze before you start searching the room for another charred circle.  You’re not sure why, but you feel that these circles will lead you out.

The fourth circle is not hard to discover.  It’s low on the wall, directly behind where the invisible thing’s body should be.  You assure the woman that it will be okay if you just keep moving, but neither of you seems convinced.  You have to crawl on your hands and knees to fit through the hole this time, and Bernadette has trouble behind you.

You both stand up on the other side and find that you’ve entered a huge banquet hall.  At the center is a huge table, covered in stacks and piles and mounds of food.  It’s all rotten—brown, moldy, odorous.  Bernadette covers her mouth and nose, and you wish you could, but one hand is wrapped in bloody cloth and the other in heavy chain.

You don’t need the sane voice in your head to finally return and tell you not to eat the food, but it’s there anyways.  The presence is oddly comforting, though you know it means you’re probably going crazy.  If going crazy gets you out of this place, you don’t mind the insanity.

The two of you start searching for another circle to travel through.  After several fruitless minutes you notice a glow coming from below the huge table.  It is a glow that had not been there when you entered.  Ducking down, you examine the underside of the furniture and find, without being surprised, a circle burnt in the wood, with yet another set of strange characters written in it, and a hole in the table, a hole that does not open up on the top of the table, though it seems to be the only area of the flat surface that is not covered in food.  Impossible geography, much like that of the flexible variety, no longer surprises you.

You call Bernadette over and show her the hole.  She informs you that the life in her belly is moving, kicking.

And she tells you that the first moment after she’d woken in this house was when she realized she was pregnant.  Wherever she had been before, she had been barren, unable to have a child even if she wanted to.  The thing inside of her is not hers, she tells you, and she doesn’t know where it came from.  Each circle you travel through causes it to grow more active.

You get chills as she explains.  It’s only now that you realize that you have no idea where you were before you were in this place.

The two of you spend a long moment staring at each other, more confused than ever.  Eventually you decide you have no choice, and duck under the table.  Bernadette is hesitant to follow you, but you explain that it’s the only option right now.  Her fear has become more and more gripping as you travel through each circle.  Hesitantly, she agrees to follow you.

You climb up through the table into the next room—a bathroom, with tile flooring, the tiles broken and shattered by the portal leading up into it.  You help lift the woman up into the room, crowding on either side of the hole.  The room is not very large at all, and once you’re both sure that the hole is inexplicably gone you move closer together, examining the room together.

You find the sixth circle, after several minutes, burned on the large mirror over the sink.  A hole is shattered in the center.  It is no surprise that the mirror had been unscathed when you entered.

Bernadette tells you she won’t go any farther through the circles.  You ask her why, narrowing your eyes slightly, suspicious.  A slender hand rests on the curve of her belly, and she looks at you, a dark gleam in her eyes.  She informs you that the thing inside of her is whispering in her ear, telling her what to do.  It’s telling her this is the last Circle of Transference before it will break free.  The specifics of the circle’s name sound vaguely familiar, and convince you that she’s not fooling around.

She tells you she doesn’t want the thing to break free.  No matter the cost.

The two of you sit on the edge of the bathtub in silence, staring at the mirror.  Your faces don’t reflect properly; the distortion gets worse the closer to the circle the reflection is.  You stand up and touch the mirror.  It’s warm.

You turn to your right, facing the door.  You try the handle, and are surprised to find that it is not locked.  The door swings out slowly, letting out a creak.  Bernadette rises carefully and moves through it after you, staying close behind you as you enter the hallway.  She tells you she didn’t think to try the door either, assuming it would be locked.

The air suddenly seems heavy.  Bernadette whimpers softly behind you.  You ask her left or right.  She thinks for a moment, and then tells you to go left.  Leading the way, you walk down the hall, your chain-wrapped fist in front of you.

The hall terminates in a single doorway.  You turn the knob and open it, finding a staircase leading down into darkness.  Bernadette stands beside you, looking down.  Her hands on either side of her belly, she starts down before you can protest.  You follow immediately after.

The stairway twists and turns and doubles back on itself repeatedly, but it always takes you down.  The pair of you walk for what must be hours, taking breaks when one is tired, catching your breath when it is needed.  You start to wonder if the stairs ever have a bottom.

Without warning you first, Bernadette stops; you bump into her and both of you nearly fall but manage to regain your balance.  In the process Bernadette gets turned around and looks past you.  Her eyes narrow slightly in frustration.

You turn to look.  The door is there, only six steps behind you.  A circle has been burned around it—with the same strange letters as those on the sixth circle, in the bathroom.  The circle is still smoking, the markings freshly burnt.  Without speaking, both you and Bernadette start down the stairs again.

You turn to check your progress several minutes later, but the door is still there, six steps above you.  The six steps themselves are different—it’s the door that has moved.  You’re definitely making progress down the stairwell, but the door is following you down.

Bernadette tells you that she thinks the staircase is endless.  You tell her that it can’t be, and that she should just keep going.  The farther down you go, the closer the walls seem to be.  The door remains six steps behind you.

The farther down you go, the heavier the air gets.  It seems to not only push down on you, put in from the sides.  It feels like the air-pressure in the stairwell is rising.  After a while it starts to smell foul, like rotting fruit and eggs.  The door with what you both believe is the final circle remains six steps behind you at all times.

The wavering reflections of the flashlight bouncing back up on the walls around you cause you both to pause and look down the staircase as far as you can, curious.  A dozen or so steps below you, the stairwell is flooded with murky water.  Bernadette sighs and closes the distance to the liquid, and you follow just behind her.  When you reach the pool you look behind you:  the door has followed you down, leaving only six steps exposed between it and the water.

You ask Bernadette what she wants to do now.  She just stares at the pool of water for a long moment, shivering.  She tells you that you know what she has to do.  I can’t go back up, she says down is the only direction left.  She looks at you, and you can see the total defeat in her eyes.

You tell her you’ll go with her, then.  You don’t want to go through that door either.  You know it’s not the way out, and you don’t want to wander around this damn house anymore.  You reassure her, telling her that neither of you have memories from before the house to miss.  You’ll have nothing to regret once you’re gone.  She smiles tiredly.

You reach out and take her hand.  You glance back up at the door, and the house around you rumbles.  Angry.  Desperate.  It knows you’ve defeated it.  It knows you won’t allow it to be freed through this woman.  It screams and rages and rattles and the air pushes down on you, heavy.

You turn away and smile back at Bernadette.  Together, you slowly descend into the murky water.  It closes over your head as you put an arm around the woman and pull her against you.  And as the darkness wraps itself around your mind and your body screams for oxygen, you know you’ve found your way out.