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To whom it may concern,
I am writing to your office to bring attention to what I can only describe as a gross dereliction of civic responsibility on the part of the Gravity Falls tourism bureau. For the past three years, I have lived on the outskirts of town as an adjunct researcher – an unusualogist, to be exact. While much of what I have catalogued in this region can be dismissed as eccentric local color (minor spatio-temporal anomalies, zoological curiosities, and the occasional haunting), the phenomenon I will describe in this missive is anything but benign.
To be abundantly clear, I am referring to the presence of malignant entities which manifest unpredictably inside the town limits; they disguise themselves as ordinary doors, but they harbor a malevolent intent to lure the unaware and incautious into spaces from which they may never return. It is my assessment that their animacy stems from a curse, or a series of curses, perhaps enacted by a witch or comparable practitioner of magic.
You may feel inclined to dismiss me as a crackpot academic, too long isolated in his work, but I urge you to reconsider that judgment! A review of the county missing persons reports reveals a consistent pattern: those that mention architectural aberrations almost always involve tourists – which means that these entities fall squarely under your agency’s purview. Despite this, you have failed to act, but perhaps my expert testimony will motivate you where the public record has not.
It was February 11th at exactly 3:19 AM when I first encountered the anomaly in question. I was crossing the hall from my laboratory to the kitchen to prepare another pot of coffee when I noticed a door that had not been there an hour earlier. My first impulse was to ignore it – after all, any intelligent person confronted with the sudden mysterious appearance of a new doorway in their home would immediately assume it was attempting to eat them. However, upon further reflection, I reminded myself that I am, in fact, highly qualified in matters of extradimensional topology and unusually well-equipped to approach the bizarre and otherworldly not with fear, but with rational inquiry. In short, I felt I had no choice but to investigate.
I began by examining its exterior. The surface was coated in a mustard-yellow semi-gloss enamel, scratched and weathered, apparently by decades of exposure – an obvious camouflage, though perhaps convincing to an untrained observer. I took careful measurements, collected several paint chips, and scraped a small sample of the wood itself (all of which are available by request, if your department requires extra evidence) but there was nothing I could identify that suggested the door itself was unnatural, other than its unwelcome apparition in my hallway. That is, until I noticed a cold draft seeping in from the bottom edge and the faint earthy smell carried with it. Before I realized what I was doing, my hand was already reaching for the knob.
The shock of the brass – icy to the touch – snapped me back to myself. I stepped away, unsettled, and took a moment to collect my thoughts.
At that point, it would have been sensible to abandon the investigation. Perhaps the anomaly would have vanished by morning, and the inconvenience I suffered would have thereby been avoided. However, I must confess that my uncompromising devotion to the scientific method compelled me to commit what hindsight has revealed to be a serious error…
I opened the door.
Beyond the threshold stretched a dark hallway, the length of which, it goes without saying, was entirely impossible, given the layout of my cabin. Roughly fifteen feet from my position, I could just barely make out the edge of an object against the left wall. After I retrieved my lantern and extended it into the darkness, I could see it was a side table – ordinary enough to be unremarkable, but it had a vague familiarity to it that nagged at me. My lingering hesitation was no match for my curiosity, so I gathered my research journal, a spool of fishing line, a measuring tape, and, regrettably, my brand new calculator and prepared to extend my investigation into the interior of the anomaly.
As a safety precaution, I anchored one end of the fishing line to a stable piece of furniture, but as I stood at the verge of crossing a second time, I doubted its ability to protect me from whatever lay within.
It wasn’t until I had my handgun holstered at my side that I felt confident enough to enter.
(For the record, I strongly advise against carrying weapons into this anomaly for reasons you will soon come to understand.)
The air inside was cold and damp, permeated with the same faint mildew scent that had first drawn my attention. It was darker than I would have anticipated. Even with the light spilling in through the doorway and my lantern in hand, I had to walk several meters before I was able to confirm what I’d already suspected: the side table in the impossible hallway was identical to the one in my cabin. It even had a small dent on one of its legs from when I’d damaged it while moving in, and behind it, the wood paneled wall was scratched, as if I’d spent the last three years bumping into this table as often as my own.
With the spool in hand, I ventured inward and found further copies – my grandfather clock, my mounted entomological specimens, my bookshelves (books included), and my worn down rug – all arranged exactly as they should have been. There were no obvious inaccuracies, which begged the question: how, exactly, was the anomaly reproducing this small section of my home with such startling precision? Was it merely a parasite on the space itself, or could it be siphoning details directly from my memories? I found the former to be a more palatable explanation, and since it was the one that allowed me to continue deeper, I favored it over the latter.
Along the walls there were doors that, up until this point in my investigation, I had wisely been avoiding, but now I couldn’t resist satisfying my curiosity. I stopped in front of what should have been my linen closet and opened it. On the other side, the same hallway extended into darkness. The doors to the parlor and first floor bathroom led to similar spatial loops. All identical. Well, they seemed to be identical, at any rate. Although it was tempting to confirm my hypothesis with empirical evidence, I resolved to limit my exploration to the main path to avoid becoming lost.
Employing the measuring tape and calculator, I was able to determine that the space repeated approximately every twenty feet, six inches. With each iteration, the atmosphere grew colder and more damp, as if I were entering a natural cave system rather than an interior domestic space. There was a low hum emanating from somewhere in the structure, steady and untraceable. I paused to place my hand on the wall to better gauge the frequency and noticed that the mirror, which had at first appeared unexceptional, was becoming slightly more distorted with each pass. Nothing too extreme – a small bend in the glass and some kind of stain on the silver backing – but certainly enough to warp my reflection just a little more each time I stopped to check on it.
All of these small details were, of course, rather transparent attempts at intimidation. I cataloged them, then ignored them. If anything, I felt emboldened. I announced to the anomaly that if it wished to frighten me, it would have to try harder than that.
Evidently, it took my challenge to heart. The next loop was interrupted by a new feature – a steep staircase leading down into darkness. If I hadn’t been paying attention to my footing, it would have been quite the hazard. The fishing line was still taut behind me, and I had ample length remaining in the spool, so I made the decision to continue to the level below.
The railing felt smooth under my palm, as if it had been polished by years of use, and the muffled creaking of the floorboards sounded familiar. A change in air pressure required me to pop my eardrums several times to adjust as I descended. Curiously, the stairs terminated in a simulacrum of my foyer; the kitchen lay ahead, my workspace to the right, but unlike the hallway I had just left, both rooms were nearly bare. Other than a few pieces of furniture left askew and a lamp without a shade sitting next to the front door, wrapped up in its own cord, all of my possessions were missing. My workspace had been completely purged of my presence. The notes I’d accumulated, the experiments I’d left in progress, and the collection of anomalous flora and fauna I’d meticulously curated over the last three years – my life’s work – were gone. Only a cold, dark, hollow shell of a room remained.
As I was appraising this disturbing diorama, I began to notice that the earthy, mildew scent from the hallway was more intense toward the center of the room. The source wasn’t difficult to identify; it was a black stain, which had spread out over a section of the floor, irregular in shape, its color so deep that it seemed to drain the light from my lantern. I deduced that something organic had laid there for a long period of time and whatever fluids it leaked had seeped into the wooden floorboards during the process of decomposition.
My instincts urged me not to linger too long, so I took a small sample for later testing (the results of which will not be released, due to their personal nature) and resolved to return later, better equipped – with stronger lighting, a camera, and the means to take more comprehensive measurements. I turned away from the stain, intending to follow my fishing line back home, but…
The staircase had disappeared.
In its place was a blank wall and ceiling, featureless and smooth, as though it had never existed in the first place. The line itself was still taut, but instead of leading upward, as it should have, it now stretched around the corner, into the same hallway in which I’d originally discovered the door. I’d felt no shift, no tug, no disturbance at all to indicate this change in spatial configuration. One moment I had a lifeline; the next, I was caught in a snare.
Panicking would have accomplished nothing, of course, so – calmly and methodically – I checked each of the doors and windows that should have led outside. Unsurprisingly, they offered only another grim view of that damned hallway. It seemed I had been left with no choice but to take the bait.
Once I’d confirmed that my sidearm was still loaded and at the ready, I forced myself to follow the line. It led me down the hallway and then vanished under the gap of a door – the same mysterious door I had first opened in my cabin, with its mustard-yellow enamel and worn brass knob. The air seeping through its edges was now saturated with a rank moisture, and when I opened it, the shadows inside were significantly more impenetrable. I cursed myself – aloud, I believe – for not bringing a proper flashlight; the antiquated lantern was clumsy, heavy, and its faint glow couldn’t keep the shadows from pressing in on every side as I stepped through the door a second time.
With each loop, the corridor’s form seemed to bend the limits of space and logic, or else my own mind was beginning to betray me. The floor dipped slightly underfoot, although my eyes insisted it was level. The angles sharpened, the walls closed in, the darkness swam with strange, unattributable movement, and the deep humming I’d noticed earlier had returned. My initial conclusion that the sound was external to the hallway, some mechanical resonance originating from within the structure of the anomaly, had been flawed. I realized now that the sound was coming from inside my own body; the anechoic effect of the tunnel had amplified the rush of my blood until it filled my ears with a deafening roar.
The smell of rot was worsening too, a sickly sweetness now clinging to the back of my throat. My stomach clenched, threatening to revolt. I had to press a hand against the wall to keep upright even after I reminded myself that losing composure at a time like this would be beyond foolish.
Foolish. The word stuck in my mind like a splinter under a fingernail. I despised myself in that moment – for trembling, for staggering, for allowing a simple lack of light and sound to frighten me. I’d had enough. If the corridor was real, then it had to obey some set of rules, however twisted they were, and if it wasn’t… then there should be a way for me to test my perceptions. In either case, surrendering to fear was beneath me; there had to be a better course of action.
I forced myself to stop and take in my surroundings more carefully. The lantern’s weak glow just barely reached the walls, where the light (and my attention) caught on the picture frames. Until then, I hadn’t noticed that my entomological displays and cryptid photos had been replaced with a new set of much more personal images: myself, hunched over a desk, transcribing field notes with a furrowed brow; then, asleep at my workbench, cups of cold coffee abandoned to the side; and again, in the early hours of the morning, poring over reams of data – alone, always alone. Each scene showed me thinner, wearier, the cabin falling into squalor as I kept at my work and was slowly consumed by it.
The next wave of nausea struck harder than the last, though whether it was caused by the sickening rot in the air or by what I was seeing, I couldn’t tell. My fingers twisted around the fishing line. Were these images some reflection of the truth of my circumstances or only a trick played by a mind starved of other stimuli? How long had I been wandering this hall? An hour? A day? Had it been longer than that? For that matter, was I even there at all, or had I collapsed in my cabin weeks ago, fevered and delirious, imagining this entire descent in a state of isolation-induced madness?
Disoriented by the implications, I stumbled forward, and my shoulder caught on the ornate frame of the mirror. I blinked at its cloudy surface, struggling to focus. My own reflection stared back, but the expression was wrong; it was smiling – a broad, steady grin, either rictus or manic.
Before I could draw a breath, the reflection’s hand moved, sliding to the holster of its sidearm.
I tore myself away from the mirror, knocking over the side table in my haste to dispel the illusion. It toppled over, and its contents spilled out across the warped floorboards – newspaper articles, typed reports, photocopied images, and other ephemera. I dropped to my knees and hastily pieced together the grotesque story the fragments told: police reports of a body discovered in a cabin on the outskirts of town; a short, impersonal obituary; a coroner’s account of the corpse, bloated and stinking from months of decay, identified as Dr. Stanford Filbrick Pines. Cause of death ruled suicide by gunshot.
That was the moment I realized just how grave my initial mistake had been: this place wasn’t some passive anomaly to be charted and studied. It was a trap. Like a pitcher plant, it had lured me in with the promise of a mystery to be solved, and now it meant to digest me.
When I stood again, my reflection greeted me with a sympathetic expression. It now held the gun in its hands. I watched, frozen, as it lifted the barrel up to its head.
I felt the cold metal press against my own temple and dropped the gun.
Immediate withdrawal seemed prudent. I wrapped the fishing line tightly as I ran, the one tether I had left to reality, but in the very next loop, my foot caught on the toppled side table. I went down hard, and the line snapped. When I searched for the loose end, I found the gun I’d discarded earlier instead.
Adrenaline did not clear my head; my thoughts began to race. What would happen if this hallway succeeded in driving me to suicide? I had come to Gravity Falls to evade familial expectations and escape the ridicule of my colleagues. I rarely ventured into town – it was unlikely that anyone in the area even knew my name. If I died here, my body would not be found for months, if it was ever found at all. No one would come looking for me. The story told by those clippings was not just a threat; if I didn’t find some means of escape, it would be my future.
I ran again, faster and less certain than before, dragging my hands along the walls and shouting into the corridor until my voice was swallowed by the deafening boom of my own heartbeat. The walls bent inward. The ceiling warped into unreasonable angles. The geometry itself mocked my naïve attempts to cling to reason. The floor softened under my boots, marred by fungal growths, and when I pressed a hand against the wall, it crumbled into packed soil, as damp and cold as the grave.
A harrowing thought refused to leave my head: maybe I had already pulled the trigger. Maybe this nightmare was merely the collapse of my final minutes of awareness – or, worse, maybe the inescapable stench was that of my own corpse, already weeks into decomposition, and I was now haunting my own former home.
The structure began to collapse around me, heavy clumps of moldy wood sloughing off the walls to block my path. In desperation, I began wrenching open the other doors and plunging blindly into whatever lay beyond – always the same hallway, but colder, darker, and more rotten than the last. I began to lose hope of ever finding an exit. Was it already too late? Was I doomed to be forgotten, left to putrefy in obscurity and disgrace?
I flung myself through another door, but instead of soil and darkness and decay, I tripped into blinding light and skidded across my own kitchen floor. The refrigerator door banged against the counter as spoiled leftovers spilled out all around me. I lay there in the mess, gasping, the only sound in the room the steady hum of the appliance I had just emerged from, until finally, I regained my senses.
Once I had confirmed beyond all possible doubt that I was back in reality proper, I was able to take stock of the situation. The door in my hallway had already disappeared without a trace. I will note, however, that a full week had passed while I was inside it, though to me, it had seemed to be no longer than an hour. My body had not suffered starvation or dehydration, which only deepens the mystery.
I did, however, suffer one considerable material loss: my specially-modified Hewlett-Packard 41C calculator – a top-of-the-line and, I might add, very expensive machine. You may consider yourselves fortunate that I am not submitting a reimbursement claim.
What I will request, in the interest of public safety, is that your office print and distribute a pamphlet to discourage visitors and new residents from tampering with unexplained doors in the vicinity of Gravity Falls. Although I am very busy with my work, I will make myself available should your office need to contact me for additional testimony. I trust you will treat this problem with the seriousness it deserves.
Respectfully,
