Work Text:
Sorry, running late, accident on the freeway. Key is under flowerpot, please start without me!
Alone, the realtor’s text wouldn’t sting. It is polite, apologetic, relatable. However, when compared with your other text, it becomes unbearable:
Working. You decide.
No apology, cold and impersonal, like your texts of “where are you? we have a showing in 10 minutes” are an unreasonable burden. Like the two of you aren’t buying a house together (or even just living life together).
Ash Tree Lane looked hospitable enough before, but when you retrieve the key to open the front door, the house looks… ominous.
Boxes from the previous owners are stacked in one corner of the living room. The realtor said that this house had come fast onto the market, but still that seems peculiar. It gives the living room a maudlin aura, like something abandoned and forgotten.
You can relate.
Although sunny outside, inside the light seems diminished, more than you would have expected. As if the house is consuming light, the same way that it seems to be consuming sound.
It is deathly quiet.
Two doors stand at each end of the living room: one closed and one ajar.
You step through...
...Into a kitchen painted bright white, yet somehow still shadowed and distant. You should turn back; clearly, you’re in no mood to assess stainless-steel appliances or marble countertops. Coming alone was a mistake.
However, before you leave, you glance out the window, and the sight gives you pause. An old oak tree stands outside—clearly the backyard—but from the house’s orientation, that window should look out onto the opposite side of the house.
Suddenly, you’ve lost all sense of direction. A second door to your right offers a chance to reorient yourself, to prove that you haven’t become unmoored.
The dining room.
The ceiling light fixture does almost nothing to brighten the room, oppressively dark and close, stretching out longer than you thought could fit in this house.
The table has one seat at each end, three chairs per side. More guests than you’ve ever had.
You walk one side of the table, your hand resting on each chairback as you pass: one, two, three, four.
Pause.
Three chairs per side.
You look back.
Only two chairs behind you. Somehow, you’ve miscounted.
Panic ripples through your mind, and you fling open the door opposite the one you came through.
The den is filled with windows and light, thank heaven. Someone left the TV on, which doesn’t seem like your realtor. The grainy video playing shows the view from a hand-held camera moving down a long, dark corridor. The sight unsettles you, so you turn the TV off.
Doing so brings you near the window, and outside... Is the same oak tree! The one that was just on the opposite end of the house. Just then, a sound breaks the weighted silence of the house: one long, slow breath.
You bolt for the door closest to you, which opens into…
The living room again. That much, at least, makes sense.
However, you slowly realize that the living room is subtly different this time.
The two doors are still there: the one to the kitchen that you first entered, and the one to the den that you just came from. However, the front door to the house?
Has changed.
Before, it was a solid blue-painted wooden door with a small central glass window. Now, it is a plain door, another room, identical to kitchen and den doors.
You must be imagining things.
You steel yourself and open the door to see…
A long, dark corridor. Exactly like the one in the video.
This is impossible.
You close the door, reopen it.
Still that corridor to nowhere.
There is no front door. There is no way out.
With shaking hands, you fumble for your phone. Call the first number on your list. Nothing. You look at your phone to find zero bars. No wifi.
The dark corridor beckons. You try to rationalize it. Maybe you didn’t notice an entrance hallway on the way in? (There wasn’t one.)
At least your phone has one purpose: to cast a light as you step inside.
|
You count your steps: one, two, three, four, five… It reminds you of the chairs in the dining room, stretching out longer than was physically possible. You stop, pause, turn back. The corridor behind you stretches out seemingly endlessly, farther than the light from your phone can reach. It’s impossible, you insist for the umpteenth time. You only took five steps! Forward or backward? Your cling to rationality. Backward leads back to the living room; therefore, continue forward. Still counting steps: nineteen, twenty… At ninety-two, you finally see a door at the end of the corridor ahead and race through. |
You are faced with a stairwell, light and airy, as if the top of the stairwell is exposed to the sky and sun above. It is such a relief after the dark, closed-in corridor that you let out a slow, shaky breath. Two flights lead to an upstairs landing. Two more spiral down into the darkness. From that darkness, in ominous, opposite echo to your relieved breath, the house breathes another of those deep, reverberating breaths that trembles the very walls.
You are not going down into that endless basement.
Therefore, the only way you can possibly go is up.
Three doors are upstairs.
The first opens onto another door, opens onto another door, opens onto another. Probably, that should’ve been a child’s room, but a child who will never exist, and therefore neither does its room.
In the second room, the shadow from the oak tree shades the window. The same shadow comes in from the window on the other side. You hastily slam the door.
As your hand touches the doorknob of the third door, a snort like a large animal sounds from the other side, and the door rattles as if rammed hard.
You turn and run.
Down the stairs until you reach the landing and turn…
Down the stairs until you reach the landing and turn…
Down the stairs until you reach the landing and turn…
Down the stairs until you reach the landing and turn…
Down the stairs until you reach the landing and turn…
Down the stairs until you reach the landing and turn…
Down the stairs until you reach the landing and turn…
Down the stairs until you reach the landing and turn…
Down the stairs until you reach the landing and turn…
Down the stairs until you reach…
Nothing
But
Pitch
|
Your phone seems to have shrunken in on itself, so that its light can only reach a foot in each direction. When you look back at the stairs, they are gone, although this hardly surprises you at this point. When you turn and stretch your arm out in front of you, you can see that there are inky-black corridors stretching out in all four directions. Does it matter which one you take? Does direction mean anything anymore? All you know is that you are alone and abandoned and no one is coming for you. You pick a direction, at random. | ||
|
Since it doesn’t matter, you choose the path ahead. You follow it deeper and deeper into the labyrinth until you find that you are… | ||
|
Since it doesn’t matter, you choose the left path. You follow it deeper and deeper into the labyrinth until you find that you are… |
|
Since it doesn’t matter, you choose the right path. You follow it deeper and deeper into the labyrinth until you find that you are… |
|
Since it doesn’t matter, you choose the path behind. You follow it deeper and deeper into the labyrinth until you find that you are… |
You reach out, but feel only solid walls all around you. To your horror, you realize that you are:
house house house house house house house house house house house house house house house | ||
house house house house house house house house house house house house house house house |
| house house house house house house house house house house house house house house house |
house house house house house house house house house house house house house house house |
squeeze down a hole that is barely narrow enough for you to fit. It leads further and further down into the blackness until you think you must be crawling into the bowels of the earth. After what seems like hours, your fingers slip their grip on your phone, and it falls from your hand inexorably downward. You listen and listen but never hear the end of its descent as if the blackness continues downward forever. You now have no light to guide your way, but there is only one way to go. Down, down, down, into the dark depths. |
1 The minotaur exemplifies liminality in Greek mythology. Such characters occupy the space between Earth and Dis, human and other, and are feared for their ability to transcend boundaries and definitions. Such figures stand as lonely representations of those trapped between: the Minotaur’s eternally isolated existence, ever-enclosed by its own Labyrinth, the indirect victim of divine punishment. Its mother Pasiphaë was likewise cursed, inflicted with love for a bull, her own wishes irrelevant.
Even the Labyrinth’s creator, Daedalus, suffered a bleak fate: his son Icarus destined to fall to his death for daring to fly too close to the light.
When your eyes open, the light has returned. You are lying back on the living-room floor, and what once seemed so dim now nearly blinds you with its brilliance. You sit up, and your phone clatters to the floor: somehow it had landed on your chest.
The front door has returned.
You burst outside into the world and daylight, your chest heaving with breaths of fresh air, sobs shaking your body.
Your buzzing phone is so startling that you nearly drop it.
What do you think of the house? asks your realtor.
You shakily type:
Let’s call it a ‘maybe’.