It was a clear, late summer day when I moved into the house. The property was a large two story Queen Anne, sitting slightly north of the university campus, tucked away among a similar row of turn-of-the-last-century homes. I didn’t know the exact age of the place, but it had been in my family for several generations. The previous owner was great uncle Stuckwell, who had spent the last forty years of his life in that house. He had passed recently, and since then, no one else from the family had taken an interest in it until I decided to go back to school.

    
I was in my late twenties, and had spent the last ten years partying through the country on my parents’ dime. My family was pretty well off, and that had allowed me to bypass the traditional route of a career and instead opt for a life of carefree traveling. I had wandered from coast to coast, stopping and lounging at the houses of friends and relatives and generally living the high life. Partying like there was no tomorrow became a habit I repeated almost everyday. I would have been content to exist in that endless cycle for as long as my body was able. 

But my parents were not amused. It was around December of last year that their demands began to arrive. Over the phone, they had made embarrassing comparisons between me and my more successful siblings, ranted about the damage I was doing to the family name, and threatened to cut me off entirely. And so, after plenty of shouting, pleading, and compromising, we finally agreed that I had to get a respectable degree in liberal arts and then find myself a position at one of my siblings’ companies. The school I picked was Ashwood University, a small college located a fair bit North-West of Madison Wisconsin. I chose it mainly for the family house that was located just off campus, and the ease of their classes. If all went according to plan, I would coast my way through an easy undergrad program at a passable university, then fast track my way to a executive post at my sister’s fintech firm all without too many interruptions to my party schedule. 

    
With a heave, I lifted my third and final suitcase out of the trunk and set it on the concrete driveway. Due to my lifestyle, I didn’t have many belongings with me and my bags were mostly filled with clothes. A few months ahead of my move in, my parents had sent a crew to the house to make sure it was furnished and ready for habitation. Given the state of the exterior, they were probably expecting an ancient tomb with desiccated furniture that would disintegrate at the slightest touch. Instead they found a modern home underneath the weathered facade. Uncle Stuckwell was apparently a man of creature comforts, and had spent a sizable part of the family fortune to keep up with the latest trends in internal decor. Even the pipes and wiring were only a few years years old. Besides a heap of broken stone in the garage, the crew had quickly realized that there wasn’t anything to clean up. The structure of the house was sound, all the furniture was contemporary, and even the technology, like the television and Internet modem, were comparatively recent purchases. The cleaners had simply done a surface level dusting before leaving the house as it was before. And that was exactly the state I found it in that afternoon. 

    
Pulling my luggage up the worn but solid front steps, I unlocked the front door and pushed my way into a spacious foyer. Well lit beige walls greeted me. True to what the cleaning crew had said, great uncle Stuckwell had kept up to date with interior decor trends. The entire house was rendered in a minimalist modern style. Light, neutral tones covered both the walls and ceilings. The floor was comprised of gray paneling with subtle wood grain printed on, and I could just about see the high pile carpet on the second floor. The furniture was likewise composed of blocky shapes colored in shades of olive, tan, and white. All in all, the scene wouldn’t have looked out place in a new build luxury apartment. I nodded to myself with satisfaction. Moving in was as simple as that. All I had left was to unpack the few clothes I had. That would take fifteen minutes at most. My plan to get through school while spending as little effort as possible was already bearing fruit.
    

As it turned out, fifteen minutes was a gross underestimate. While my wardrobe was easily shoved into the upstairs walk-in closet, I had forgotten the implications of the house being recently vacant. The fridge was empty, there were no toiletries, and the premises were completely devoid of anything perishable. This had elicited a groan from me when I found out, and cost me another two hours driving into town for a shopping trip. But I eventually did get settled with still plenty of daylight to spare. With school (and the subsequent parties) still a week or so away, I decided to take it easy and relax on the couch with some TV. That little distraction took me all the way to dinner, at which point I heated up something frozen and returned to flat screen. After several more hours of staring at cable nonsense, I felt drowsiness start to overtake me. With an exaggerated yawn, I stood from the couch and slumped myself to bed.

 

…………………………………………………

 
It must have started out as a dream, because that’s what it felt like. There wasn’t exactly a beginning, just awareness of me existing somewhere, as if I had been there for a while, exactly how dreams begin. I was outside, in a lush alpine forest. Something in the back of my mind stirred with faint memories of the Pacific Northwest, but the forest I stood in was grander than any I had ever seen in real life. Tree trunks wider than an apartment block jutted into the sky like pillars. A canopy, a thousand feet high, filtered the light into small puddles that shifted at my feet. In the dream, I closed my eyes, and let myself be subsumed into the smells and sounds of a primeval forest. Then, I was no longer touching the ground. My eyes snapped open at the sudden shift in balance, and my legs spasmmed like a hypnic jerk. Except I did not wake. The forest was now spread out below me. The canopy, that had seemed so high up a moment ago, was now a blanket of indistinct greenery covering the slopes of a truly gargantuan mountain. Once again, memories of the majestic volcanoes of Cascadia stirred, but not even ten Mount Rainiers stacked atop one another could have matched the height of this beast. In the distance, vanishing into the clouds and sea mist, I could see even taller peaks. An entire range that formed a wall to the world. Rivers wider than the Amazon ran down the colossal slopes of the volcano, carving out canyons larger than any on Earth. And above me, even the sun itself felt further away. It was as if the entire infinite expanse of space had sudden increased in size by a hundred fold. 

It was then that I noticed I was standing on something again. My feet were no longer treading air, instead a floor of stone tiles stretched out under my soles. I tore my gaze from the impossibly vast landscape and surveyed my immediate surroundings. The floating floor was around twenty feet by twenty feet, essentially a perfect square. From the four corners, four narrow pillars of marble extended upwards, each one ending at a joint that connected to another mosaic of stone overhead. I blinked, How did I not notice that I was inside of a structure earlier? My position in the frame was off center, something I realized when I saw the chair. The tiles of the floor were laid in unique diamond configuration, and at the very center of that pattern stood a simple wooden chair. It had no arm rests, and its back was supported by three struts. Its varnished surface gleamed in the midday sun. I immediately felt a draw to it, and in the manner where you do something without necessarily intending to, I sat down in the chair. 

    
Nothing happened at first, although it’s impossible to say for how long I sat there staring at the magnified landscape before me. But as I looked outwards, I noticed something happening much closer to my face. A small, dark sphere, no bigger than a marble, had appeared, hovering in the air. Slowly, almost beneath my active notice, more and more of my attention became drawn to it until I realized that my entire focus had been redirected to this peculiar distraction. Transfixed, I slowly picked myself up from the chair and shifted my feet towards it. I was so focused, I failed to notice the walls and ceiling sliding into place around me to complete the box. I was now within a meter of the ball. I tensed my arm, judging the distance of the marble. Then I lunged out to grasp it. 

 

Reacting faster than thought, the marble shot backwards, just out of reach of my flailing fingers. Silently, it floated to one of the newly erected walls and the stone buckled before it. It was not an impact, the marble did not even make contact with the surface of the wall. Instead, the individual stones were moved aside by an invisible force, sliding out of their spots, rotating, turning, and folding into cervices. The wall became a doorway, and the marble slid right through without slowing down or pausing. Still immersed in dream logic, I thought nothing strange of it and followed close behind. 

The opening led into a hallway, one that terminated in a short flight of stairs. I caught a quick glimpse of the midday sky through a crack between the rocks, before the all the joints in the tiles were sealed. I was left standing in total darkness, yet I knew the marble was just up ahead. Impatience- an emotion that had been completely absent earlier- welled up inside me, and I dashed up the stairs, two at a time.

It should have been a short climb. From my vantage point at the bottom, there were only about a dozen steps total. Yet, like it often is in dreams, my surroundings began to morph and change the moment I passed through them. The narrow, tunnel like hall expanded into a wide passage. The total darkness of a sealed room was replaced with the soft, ambient haze of a full moon. The walls around me grew more finished, stone was covered up, first with wood, then with paint. By the time I finally reached the top, I was walking through a wide, cleanly decorated passage way towards a bedroom. The room was large, easily twenty five feet across and almost as deep. It’s decor matched the transformed stairway, with a minimalist style and neutral tones. And there, at the other end of the room, hovering before a huge curtained window, was the marble. I was across the room before I even knew it, nearly stumbling on the last step. My prize didn’t move to escape me this time, and with an animalistic cry of triumph, I shot out my hand and wrapped it around the orb. 

Then I woke up. 

I did not awake suddenly, but rather, it was a slow, creeping realization that gradually shook me from my stupor. Bit by bit, waking memory returned, and the solid logic of reality reasserted itself. I blinked, and opened my hand. There was no marble. A chill ran down my spine and I looked around. The room I had seen earlier remained unchanged, a large empty bedroom, decorated in a modern, minimalistic style; the same style as my new house. A shaky breath left my throat as the pieces fell into place. I had merely been sleepwalking, probably stress induced. As I thought about it, even the symbolism made sense. The marble represented my degree, something ephemeral I was now chasing after, the source of mental pressure. But despite the rationalization, my panic stopped shy of completely vanishing. Because, as I surveyed the room in more detail, it became very apparent I did not recognize the part of the house I was in. 

It took me a solid ten minutes to find my way back to the master bedroom where I had taken up residence. Pushing open empty closet doors and sticking my head into darkened rooms eventually led me back to a portion of the house I did recognize: The second floor landing overlooking the foyer. I breathed a sigh of relief and turned back to look at the way I had just come. The portion of the house I had gotten lost in felt rather large, and looking back seemed to confirm those feelings. There was a sizable fraction of the house hidden behind those walls, entirely out of sight from the high ceiling foyer. Slouching back to my room, I wondered just how much of the floor space was tucked away like that. This place was indeed, quite large. I vaguely remembered hearing about a total area of over ten thousand square feet. However, given how much of an avid renovator uncle Stuckwell had been, I decided that number was probably an underestimate. Making it back to my bed, I laid down and closed my eyes. Sleep came quickly, and with it, any thoughts of a dark marble or sprawling hidden rooms were quickly forgotten.

 

…………………………………………………

 
“So we’re going to my place at around seven, do some pre-gaming, then head over to the house at around eight, how does that sound?” Jeremy Walton leaned across the table awaiting my response. A fresh faced and enthusiastic sophomore in political science, he and I had met on the second day of classes in some big lecture. I had come in a few minutes late, the consequence of some hassle at home I couldn’t recall, and almost every seat had been filled. It was then that I saw Jeremy. He was one of the few people who had a seat open next to him, and his body language suggested a kind of approachable openness. Before the end of the lecture, we had already become acquaintances. 

Over the next few days I spent most of my time outside of lectures getting to know Jeremy, and occasionally, some of his friends. The few I met seemed friendly enough, but I strangely found myself unable to remember their names. I was only able to recall someone named Sarah and someone else called Philip, but the two-dozen-or-so other names I heard in passing simply went in one ear and out the other. I had never had any trouble with names before, and this development, combined with the utter boredom I felt during class, led me to conclude that I had developed some kind of brain fog from the shear tedium of school. 

Jeremy still stared across the table, eye brow subtly raised, awaiting my answer. We were in the lounge on the second floor of the student center. Huge south facing windows let in the brilliant early-afternoon light which spilled over the plush carpet, sofas, and high walls. Outside, the view of the late summer campus was serene with abundant greenery. 

“Yeah, whatever you guys want to do, I’m in.” I replied. Jeremy’s let a slight grin creep over his face as he sat back. 

“Alright.” He said, bemused. “Let’s see if you still have it in you old man.” 

I couldn’t hold back a giggle of my own. At twenty nine, I was noticeably older than the average undergrad, but I had no trouble letting loose and having a good time. The past ten years of my life were proof of that. Still, I was mainly relying on Jeremy’s connections to get into any parties. I was a stranger at this school, no relations to any of the frats that hosted, so to get in, I needed to go with a group that did have contacts on the inside.
    

“Anyways, I have some canned lemonade for chasers, but that’s about it. The dorm staff are pretty strict with checking, so Caleb’s going to be bringing all the alcohol for the pregame with him. Feel free to bring whatever stuff you want, but you need to take it with you. No leaving behind anything at my place.” Jeremy outlined the details carefully and I nodded along to his explanation. But, despite my efforts to focus on something I was actually looking forwards to, the brain-fog continued nagging at the back of my mind. A chronic discomfort, a constant reminder that something was wrong. Something I couldn’t quite put a finger on.

“-just be at Wilson Hall by seven. Text me, and I’ll let you in.” Jeremy concluded. I nodded in a stilted approximation of enthusiasm. Jeremy’s face darkened with concern. “-is everything ok?” He placed a hand on my shoulder. 

“Y-yeah.” I stammered out. I leaned back in my chair and took a deep, exaggerated sigh. “Just…Lot’s of things on my mind. It’s been like, ten years since I’ve been in school. Just not used to it all…” Jeremy gave me a knowing look. 
    

“Good thing we have that party tonight to unwind huh? Then you have the whole weekend ahead of you.” Jeremy patted me on the back. The weekend? Was it Friday? How could I have forgotten that?

“For sure, for sure.” I replied, scratching my head. There was nothing else to be said. A cloud bank slid in front of the sun and threw the lounge into muted shadow. 

The rest of the day passed in a haze. Jeremy still had afternoon classes and soon disappeared from the lounge for his last lecture of the day. Some instinct buried at the base of my spine urged me to go home, but I had just gotten to campus and wasn’t keen on secluding myself from my peers. In the end, I dawdled away the rest of the afternoon ensconced in that spacious lounge. Eventually, day light drew to a close and I headed to Jeremy’s dorm. The pregame passed in a blur, and before long, the two dozen of us were filing through the front door of a two story frat house on University Street.

Sweat, alcohol, and fruit flavoring filled my nostrils accompanied by a pounding bass that rattled my brain. A familiarity flowed over me. This was where I was meant to be. The incoming crowd filed down a cramped hallway and descended a flight of stairs into the basement. As we exited the stairway, the music came into sharp focus, and the full extent of the party opened up before me. A crowd surged, bodies pressed tightly against each other, cheap strobe lights illuminated the scene in alternating greens, blues and pinks. Instantly, the energy of the party rushed into me and animated my limbs. 

Before I knew it, I had a drink in hand, and was squeezing myself into the mob to get closer to the speakers. Drum lines, flowing lyrics, and synthesized melodies wrapped around me and cradled me. Like pulling the drain on a stagnant pool, I felt the brain fog flush from my mind, leaving clear sensations and bliss ringing in my soul. Jeremy and his friends- the companions I had come with- meandered around the room, sometimes dancing with me, other times sharing a drink. The steady stream of alcohol began to muddle my sensations, blending everything into a heady cocktail of good vibes. For a few hours, I was finally living in the moment again, finally my true self once more. 

Then it happened, the reconstructed happiness I had built over the past few hours was shattered in an instant. It happened during a particular pop song, something sanguine and fast, popular during my teenage years. It might have been my level of intoxication, it might have been the particular note in the air, but whatever the case, there was a moment that I looked up and my eyes landed on the beams embedded in the unfinished basement ceiling. Terror crashed down on me. The space above my head seemed to expand and mushroom, falling upwards into an enormous emptiness. As I stood dumbstruck, the beams became enormous concrete monoliths, barely visible in the darkness. And beyond them, I could see hints of even more massive structures. Huge cyclopean walls, vaulted ceilings miles high, columnar pillars the width of mountains, all residing in an opaque darkness whose vastness dwarfed the empty night sky. From that tiny shadowed crevice in the ceiling, I glimpsed a cosmically titanic structure, and it was bearing down on me.  
    

I screamed, a hoarse sound that terminated with a hacking cough as I fell backwards into the crowd. Shouts and cries of annoyance erupted around me and I felt my rear land hard on the concrete floor. I blinked in pain, my drink spilled on some unfortunate undergrad. My eyes instantly darted to the patch of ceiling, my brain trying to see the oncoming danger in a blind panic. There was nothing there. The wooden beams had returned to being wooden beams, and the crevice that held them was only a few inches deep. I stared in dazed disbelief for a minute, then I pushed myself up with trembling legs and bolted to a clearing near the back of the basement. 

A game of beer pong was in full swing besides the window I found. In desperation, I pressed my face to the screen and inhaled gulps of cool night air. The familiar scents of the party turned into a foul miasma around me. Everything felt wrong, the strobes too bright, the shadows too dark, the music too loud, the voices too quiet. I choked in my panting and let out a staccato of hacking. Staggering back, I collapsed into an errant stool leaning against the wall, my throat still spasming. My diaphragm pulsed and my hand shot to my chest, trying to rip my lungs open for a breath. After a terrifying minute, I manged to inhale a real lungful of air and my visioned cleared. The entire game of beer pong was now awkwardly staring at me, debating whether to tell me off, or call an ambulance. I nodded weakly at them, coughed once more, then sloughed off back to the mosh pit. I had to find my group, I had to find Jeremy and tell him. 

It took five minutes of stumbling before I saw him. Alcohol still pumped through my veins, sabotaging my balance and numbing my muscles. To make things worse, whatever positive buzz had vanished completely, leaving me dizzy and immensely disturbed. I spied Jeremy on the edge of the crowd, conversing with some girl I didn’t recognize. Before I knew it, I was in front of him, arm reaching out for his shoulder. 
    

“Woah, hey!” He exclaimed in surprise. Then his eyebrows knitted together, realizing my condition. “Hey,” He said again more gently. “Are- are you ok man? How much have you had…?” 

“Not a lot.” I slurred out unconvincingly. In truth I was probably more “drunk” than “tipsy”. But in that moment intoxication was the least of my concerns. “Look.” I continued, swallowing. “I- I need to go, I can’t stay here.” Jeremy’s face grew even more concerned. 
    

“Sure but- what’s wrong? Did something happen?” He asked. I opened my mouth, but no words came out. How could I explain what just happened?! Hallucination? A bad trip?

“I- I just have to go, go home!” I spat out the last word.

“Ok, ok, let me just tell Andrew, I’ll walk you home.” Jeremy said. I thanked him weakly and tried to give the girl he had been talking to a sympathetic look. But she averted her gaze from my disheveled frame, no doubt having seen enough belligerent drunks that night. 

Home. That thought floated up to the forefront of my brain, causing a cold sweat to break out across my skin. The same urge from earlier once again told me to return home. But now it revealed itself to be an instinct of trembling anxiety. It needed me home because there was something terrible I needed to be aware of. I tried wracking my brain for the reason behind the terror, but found nothing. Jeremy soon returned and as we headed up the stairs, I silently repeated to myself that I had nothing to fear. 

Not long after, I was waving goodbye to my friend from the weathered porch of my towering Queen Anne mansion. Thankfully, my keys had safely remained in my pocket the whole night, and with a click the lock opened. I took a deep breath. Unexplainable fear still twisted its way through my guts, but now that I was so close to the object of terror, curiosity was suddenly rising through my my brain stem. What was the horrible thing I had to know about? I would find the source of it. Then I would dispel myself of this fear. I turned the knob, pushed open the door, and stepped into hell. 

 

…………………………………………………

 
A thunderous blast of memory slammed into my conscious mind. The front door fell shut behind me with a clack and my heart skipped a beat. My home, my abode, my dungeon and infernal prison reintroduced itself to me. 

I had been exploring. I remembered now. I had gotten curious about the size of the house, the extent of the hidden rooms I had found while sleepwalking. The day after I moved in, I decided that I would find every room in the house. 

I quickly realized something was very wrong when I found the third master bathroom. No matter how many new rooms I walked into, there was always more house. No two rooms were identical, and as I got further and further from the front door, the decor began to subtly change. Paint grew sparser, angles harder, and stone began to appear between stretches of drywall. I counted a total of thirty two different rooms before dread overtook me. That was when I began buying locks. 

I looked down at my hand. My keychain, which had never held more than one or two keys, had expanded into a monster with several dozen jagged blades jangling from an over-sized carabiner. Every door in sight had a lock on it, various shapes and sizes, all of them to prevent the doors being opened from the inside. The subliminal terror in the back of my brain could not say what I expected to see emerging from the impossible geometry, but I took every precaution as to not find out. 

Regardless, whatever had created those impossible rooms inside the house was still working, and it had no care for any of my flimsy protections. One day after I began locking down the extremities, the familiar areas of the house also began to change. Every dimension of the foyer, kitchen, and upstairs landing all began to expand. It was a foot larger by the end of the first day and a yard by the end of the second. Not all of the walls grew uniformly though, the transformation was not as simple as a proportional expansion of every dimension. Rather, the rooms were being molded into wholly new shapes, shapes that did not belong in any human house.

In the present, I tore my eyes away from the ground and looked up. The foyer was now over a hundred feet high. A circular turret had grown at the pinnacle of what was now a miniature cathedral vault. Shafts of moonlight shone down through the windows embeded in the turret, casting dim pools across the floor. I didn’t even need to look at the staircase to know what I would see. The single landing had not been enough to accommodate the vertical growth, and over the course of several days, the stairs had bent, doubled back, and kinked in the middle, again and again and again. By my last count, there were now seven landings in total, aligned vertically, forming an ever more precarious foot path up the side of a dry wall cliff. 

The kitchen, by contrast, had expanded both horizontally and vertically, and was now the size of a small gymnasium. Most of the vast, new space sat beyond the range of any light source, creating pitch black voids and shadow zones that I avoided whenever possible. Somehow, despite the rapidly ballooning volume within, the exterior of the house had not expanded by even a single inch. I shuddered as the revelation passed over my mind anew. The reason behind uncle Stuckwell’s constant renovations and piles of construction waste were no longer a mystery to me. 

And then there were the basements. The door that sat at the junction between the living room and kitchen was the last one I checked. The carpeted stairs led to fully furnished basement with a home entertainment system and mini bar. But set into the back wall of this floor, was another door. This one opened on a set of un-finished wooden steps that led down into a bare concrete cellar where every wall was lined with at least half a dozen doors. Stepping down those stairs for the first time, I was instantly overcome by the feeling of an enormous, encroaching force and I stood paralyzed in that underspace for over a minute. 

The first door I tried, I opened with exceeding caution, and saw nothing but total blackness. At first, my bran interpreted the void as a closet or pantry, but then my eyes lowered and I saw the third set of stairs. They were concrete, rough and jagged, and they pointed in a straight line, deep into the blackness, until they vanished into the gloom. My stomach dropped and I scrambled back at the realization of the sheer volume of emptiness before me. The distance at which the stairs grew too dim to see was at least four hundred feet away, and I was absolutely certain that was nowhere near the bottom of this chasm. 

As I stood there panting, something vastly further away in the darkness became visible. A stone column appeared. Its size was instantly obvious to me. From the way the sparse light touched its surface, I knew immediately I was looking at something larger than any mountain. The indistinct surface textures were huge gullies and ravines, interspersed between mile-wide craters. And it was not alone. Architecture that could only be compared to geologic formations loomed from the inky blackness. Pillars, buttresses, beams, spires, and stone filigrees filled my view, each one a giant that dwarfed the combined size of every man made structure in existence. All of it crushed down on me, gnashing my infinitesimal body into dust with their sheer presence. Without a single sound, or even a hint of movement, I somehow knew that this assemblage of titans was only moments away from obliterating me on the spot. 

I broke. There was no screaming, no thoughts, just a blind need to escape. A mad scramble up the rough wood, then plush carpet, before bursting out the door into the light of day. 

It was then that the most insidious aspect of this nightmare revealed itself to me: I could not remember anything about the inside of the house while I was outside its walls. The instant I charged through the front door in complete terror, I forgot what I was doing there. I simply panted for my breath and squinted into the noon sun. My heart was still thumping from utter panic, and my mind circled around some terrible unknown anxiety. But no matter how long I stood there gawking, my faculties refused to identify what that thing was. Only upon reentering my house did the memories of what was inside return with full force. I cried for an hour before finally finding the courage to so something.

I used the heaviest locks left to me on those doors in the lower basement. Then I boarded them up with planks and nails driven into solid concrete. It was the most I could do with what I had. I spent the rest of that day curled in bed. 

Sobriety slowly crept over me as my mind fully returned to the present. The initial inexplainable terror of being trapped had metamorphosed into a low throbbing angst, which now sat solidly in my lower gut, churning up a cascade of misery. I hurried over to the basement door and sighed as its lock remained intact. Methodically, I inspected each of the doors on the first floor, before proceeding to the second, making sure every lock was secured, that none of the chains or boards had been disrupted in any way. They had not. In the whole week since I started sealing off the impossible depths of the house, nothing had ever disturbed my locks or boards. But that didn’t stop the mutations to my living space, and it didn’t stop the crushing feeling of a giant inching closer every day. 

With my anxious inspection complete, drowsiness began to overtake me. I was barely able to summit the extended stairs and lock my bedroom door. I fell unconscious before my head even hit the pillow. 

 

…………………………………………………

 
“What was that all about last Friday?” Jeremy looked up from his laptop. I rubbed my eyes. The rest of the night was a blur, I only remembered arriving at my doorstep, then blacking out soon after. Thankfully I hadn’t vomited and choked in my sleep, but the party had done nothing to clear my brain fog, in fact it had gotten worse. I had no recollection of the weekend passing, or even why I had my missed classes on Monday or Tuesday. The first thing I could concretely recall was walking out of my house this morning, homework still undone.

“I uh, got spooked.” I replied vaguely. “Thought I saw something, got a bit too drunk, wasn’t thinking straight.” 

“Time comes for us all…” Jeremy sighed sarcastically. But I could hear the worry hidden under a veneer of humor. 

“Are the other’s coming?” I asked, looking around the lounge for any signs of Jeremy’s friend group. Jeremy looked up from his laptop with a raised eyebrow. 

“No…Most of them have classes at this hour, why do you ask?” He replied. I shrugged my shoulders, trying not to let my deep discomfort show. 

“I don’t know, been feeling a bit…isolated lately.” I explained. “I just wanted to get together for something informal, a hangout.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose again, and my head throbbed. I groaned a little bit and leaned back. 

“God, I didn’t think school would be this miserable…” I murmured to myself. 

“Yeah, I feel that.” Jeremy replied. He chewed on his lip for a moment before continuing. “Ok, tell you what. I was thinking of throwing a little mixer, just for…our group. Akshay and Dan have an apartment off campus, I’ll talk to them about maybe having a get-together this Friday, how does that sound?” 

“Thanks, you’re truly a good friend.” I looked at Jeremy with a terrible attempt at sincerity. It wasn’t ungratefulness that pulled on the muscles in my face, but a dreadful worry. It screamed that I needed to go home that instant to deal with something, something that was now critically urgent and on the verge of disaster. I bounced my leg in an attempt to calm down.

I tried to reason that I couldn’t go home yet. I still had classes this day. I had already racked up a few absentee days already, and we were only a month into the semester. In response to my denials, the white hot spike of anxiety intensified. There was an emergency that needed taking care! Something was going wrong this very second! 

“You sure you’re alright? You’ve been spacing out quite a bit this week.” Jeremy inquired again. 

“Yeah, just, thinking.” I replied. My mind flailed for any anchorage in the tempest of dread, and it latched onto Jeremy’s promise. Just have to make it to Friday. I shook my head and tried to keep that one thing in focus, a single life line of relief. I took deep breaths and let the anxiety attack pass through me. I had a target now. Just two and half days left. That was all there was until I could truly unwind and clear my worries. I would be well rested and ready to start the school year for real. I waited until my heart rate came down, before standing up. 

“I need to finish up my classes for today.” I declared, feeling the new found sense of purpose swell in my chest. The remnants of the anxiety attack slinked back to the rear of my mind, successfully cowed. 

“Take care.” Jeremy said. His face was buried in his laptop again, but his voice sounded genuine. 

“I will.” I replied giddily as I picked up my bag. “I’ll see you Friday evening, and we are going to have the best night of our lives.”

 

…………………………………………………

 
I stood inside my childhood home, a large spacious property in the country side. It was nearing midday, and I heard the sounds of my siblings running down various flights of stairs for lunch. I went to join them, my feet moving on instinct and memory. The verdant greenery of late summer rustled outside, shifting the shadows within my room. It was the stillness of a single shadow that stopped me dead in my tracks. A small sphere of darkness   stood apart from the mottled patches of shade dancing across my walls. My gaze snapped to it instantly. Memory of the real world and previous dreams rushed into my mind. I had not seen the dark marble- the terrible instigator of my torment- since the trouble started half a month ago. And now, it had returned. 

The marble, whatever it was, had grown in its absence. It was no longer a marble, but the size of a baseball, large enough that I could begin to make out details. The surface was translucent and wispy, blending into the surrounding air. The majority of its mass was a kind of dark, metallic substance that shined iridescently and swirled with considerable viscosity. Littered throughout this churning fluid were clumps of white specks, instantaneously changing from one arrangement to another in some endless, incomprehensible ballet. Indignation ignited in my heart. This thing was responsible for all of this! It had grown swollen and fat from gorging on my misery, and now it had brought me into a dream of my fondest memories to taunt me! I reached out my hand again, my arm shooting towards the dark orb to slap it to the ground and crush it with my heel. 

Yet, just like before, it effortlessly moved just outside my reach. I stumbled forwards, overbalanced by my swing. The sphere paid my clumsiness no heed and drifted to the back wall of my bedroom. Just like before, wood, drywall, and electrical wiring folded out of the way to reveal a passage. This time the decor was distinctly Brutalist. Concrete stairs led into a wide open air atrium that would never have fit in my parent’s house. The baseball sized chunk of darkness hovered at the entrance, then it moved past the threshold, and into the open space. My vengeance still unfulfilled, I scrambled to follow. 
    

Stepping across the threshold, I walked into what felt like a gargantuan piece of civic infrastructure. Concrete was wrought into a forest of walls, walkways, and supports, with the only light coming through a square hole in the roof above. The stair case spiraled up through the light-well, a landing on every corner. As I ascended, the exact contours on the cement continued to flow ever so slightly. The ceiling above bulged and receded, with new floors sprouting from the edges of my vision. When I finally reached the apex and clambered over the lip of the light-well, I found myself in the titanic old growth forest where this had all begun. But the  landscape was no longer as I remembered. 

From my vantage point halfway up the central mountain, I could see the destruction that had occurred. Enormous portions of the topsoil had been stripped away, leaving vast tracts of pale bedrock exposed. My eyes drifted upwards and my stomach fell even further. Through mist and dust, I could see the distant, bounding mountain range had been ravaged as well. Huge gaps were gouged from the implacable peaks, massive new canyons where unthinkable quantities of stone had been quarried. The final aim of this violent terraforming was immediately apparent. Past the row of mountains, rose a silhouette. I recognized it as the beginnings of an immeasurably vast structure. It had a width that stretched from horizon to horizon, and its height far exceeded the clouds. Despite its unfinished state, this thing was already the size of a small continent.

    
I desperately scanned the rest of the landscape, trying to find any sign that the pristine wilderness had not been totally destroyed. But as I looked, I began to shiver. Every geological structure had been affected. Mountain sides were all carved into the shape of massive buttress, or shaved into the bases of mighty pillars. Meanwhile, the huge wounds of exposed bedrock almost seemed to be alive with gravity defying protrusions growing straight up from the weathered stone. The entire world was being re-molded like clay in the hands of a mad god.

Something behind me shifted that was not the wind, and I spun on my heels. The orb met my gaze, six inches from my face. I screamed and jumped back, nearly losing my footing on a stretch of loose stones.

“What do you want from me?!” I yelled at the orb. I shakily planted me feet on solid ground and pulled myself up to full height. “What is all of this? Are you- are you just mocking me?!” The orb, as expected, did not respond. Anger surged in my chest again.

“Whatever, you’re probably just some stress induced nightmare. You’re not even real, none of this is! I’m just… having hallucinations around the house!” I sneered with as much bravado as I could manage. I knew in truth, deep in my bones, that something was very wrong in actual reality. But in the moment I did not want to give my tormentor even an inch of ground. 

If the swirling darkness understood my words, it did not show. 

“I won’t have to deal with you for much longer.” I continued, the wind whipping through my hair. “I have my friends now, I won’t be living in this house alone anymore. I’ll just move to their place, then I’ll be with people who care about me, and you’ll be gone for good.” 

All at once, the air stilled. In the orb, the white specks shifted in unison and froze. Then the ground exploded. Like sloughing off a layer of dead skin, an ocean of tectonic-plate-sized megaliths tore through the thin facade of forests and mountains. The world beneath my feet crumbled as the entire mountainside was simply batted aside by an ascending section of masonry half the size of the moon. The veil and guise of an open wilderness landscape was instantly atomized. The true titanic rulers of this world were retaking their rightful place. High above, the sun continued to blaze for one last moment, then a truly incalculable silhouette plowed through the star and annihilated it too. Darkness swallowed the world, and I fell. 

 

…………………………………………………

 
My eyes cracked open slowly. Pre-dawn rays of blue-grey came in through the East window, illuminating my warped bedroom. The dream echoed clearly in my mind, replaying that last image of me falling into infinite darkness. I laid there for a indistinct period of time, trying bridge the gap to full wakefulness. My brain struggled to force the nightmare scenes from my head and dredge up the context of the waking world. Eventually, enough pieces had slotted back together that I could remember the details of my situation. That was when I realized that it was Friday, the day of the party. The day I would finally escape this silent torment. I closed my eyes to calm the sudden fluttering in my chest, then rolled off the mattress and stood up. I had to do this right. 

Walking to my ad-hoc desk setup, I fumbled for a pencil and tore a page out of a notebook lying on the chair. I would not be able to remember any information about the horror inside the house after I had left, but maybe I would be able to bring some written warning outside the walls with me. I absentmindedly chewed on my eraser for a minute, trying to come up with a message that was urgent yet reasonable enough so that I would still believe it. I finally decided on something short. 

“Note to self: The house is unsafe! Cleaning crews messed up! DO NOT go back tonight!!! Crash somewhere else until someone has looked at gas, water, electricity, stability, all of it. Make sure they do a whole check, top to bottom before moving back in!!!”

I read it over in my head three times, then copied it three more times, and stashed the folded copies into different pockets of my backpack. Next, I opened my laptop and typed the message onto a note and emailed it to myself, finally I repeated the same procedure with a text message. I even set an alarm on my phone every thirty minutes to check my email. 

Satisfied that I had done everything I could to warn my future self, I grabbed my backpack and turned to the bedroom door. I could always grab breakfast at a cafe, and shower at the campus gym, I just wanted to be out of this place as quickly as possible. Grabbing the knob, I wrenched the door wide with rising impatience. Then my heart skipped a beat, and all my confidence vanished. 

Staring out into what the foyer had become, I cursed myself for assuming escape would be as easy as just strolling out the front door. A stone and concrete labyrinth had crawled out of my dreams and fully taken root in my house. Or rather, it had been growing for weeks under the facade of wood and drywall, and had finally ruptured the faltering disguise of reality. 

I looked out on a chaotic mess of architecture whose size should have made its existence impossible. The ceiling was out of sight, but faint dawn light still shone down through dispersed skylights, too far up to see. The passages had not yet reached the cosmic scale of the monstrosities seen in my nightmares, but they were already closer in size to canyons and six lane interstates than any hallway. Limestone pillars intermixed with slanted marble slabs, attached to concrete walls which were shot through with a myriad of cracks and fissures. Multiple cross walks, staircases, and new floors were placed along the wall at illogical angles. There was no sign of the front door anywhere.

I closed the bedroom door in front of me and counted to ten in my head, praying that I been mistaken, praying that what I had seen was just a remnant hallucination from my fitful sleep. But I was not so fortunate, and when I opened the door again, I was greeted by the same labyrinth. 

No, not the same labyrinth. All the same chaotic elements remained, but the specific pieces were different. I sallowed hard. There had been no sound of moving stone, no indication anything had been shifted by any physical process. It was as if the underlying space itself had been excised with a scalpel and replaced with atomic precision. A fearful thought crossed my mind; any exit of the house was now likely far, far away from my bedroom, if any were still reachable at all. I needed to leave now. My legs ached at the notion of traversing so such a long distance on foot, but I pushed down the fear. Now was not the time. I took one last look at my bare-bones bedroom, adjusted my backpack, and began descending the long flight of stairs to enter the labyrinth. 

I had no idea where I was heading, but the confusing architecture I found myself in was not exactly as maze-like as initial impressions had suggested. Cutting through all the clutter and nonsense was a single, central passage. Countless dark alleys split off from the main hallway, which twisted and wound, ascended and descended, but clearly remained as the largest and most well lit of every path. 

An hour in, I began to notice a subtle pattern. Through small gaps between the titanic walls, I occasionally caught glimpses of the exterior wall in the distance. As I clambered over stone outcroppings and ducked beneath concrete overhangs, I began to realize that there was still one constant of the house that remained despite all the spatial violations: The outer walls. 

The outside of the house had not been altered. Therefore, no matter what changes happened to the inside, the newly created architecture eventually had to press up against the limits of the exterior walls. My excitement and hope spiked. The front door and windows were embedded in the exterior walls, so they would had to have remained constant. 

That meant if I could orient myself in the right direction and walk in a straight line, I would eventually bump into a window. But that feat was easier said than done. The main path- which I began to recognize as a hugely distorted version of the foyer- did not go in a straight line to any of the outside walls. Any time I saw a window or door, it was always through a crack in the chaotic mess of metastasized masonry that lead off into a dark branch. After another hour, I decided there was no alternative or detour. I would have to wander off the main road. 

My first chance came as the warped foyer made a left turn back into the heart of the chaos. Just before the bend, a small alleyway instead turned sharply right. I spied a distant window through a tiny hole between two towering walls and dove for the narrow passage. 

As I had learned very quickly, the layout of the entire house was still changing. Every time I looked away from a section of the maze, there was a chance it would instantly be exchanged for a completely different section. I never saw the shift happen, and I never heard anything either. It was like a movie scene being spliced right between two frames, totally instantaneous, and entirely unpredictable. Sometimes I didn’t even notice after the fact, given how cluttered and similar the entire labyrinth was. But on the occasions I did notice, a shiver shot down my spine, and I had to fight the screaming urge to flee. 

I made it through the transition between the main path and alley without any incident, and my slippers hit the stone hard on the other side. I winced and stumbled. My surroundings were immediately darkened. Turning back, I stole a look at the central corridor. Full daylight now shone on the main path, but the illumination stopped right at the threshold of the branching route. I had the impression that I was in a narrow canyon, about to enter the mouth of a bottomless cave. With a great deal of effort, I turned my back from the relative safety of the light, and continued walking in the direction that I had seen the exit.

Things began to go wrong almost as soon as I stepped off the main path. Within a minute, I realized the walls had shifted again, cutting off any possibility of retreat. I was alone and isolated in the darkness of a corridor barely a meter wide. The hairs on my neck stood on end, my heart pounded in my ears, and cold sweat began to run down my body. But things only got worse when the floor began to slope. It probably started imperceptibly, a nanometer of height difference for every foot traveled horizontally, but as I continued deeper, the decline under my feet rapidly became frightening.

I halted, not wanting to slip off a precipice hidden in the darkness ahead. Crouching low, I placed my face just above the rough stone and tried to see the angle. Nothing. My eyes perceived an entirely flat and level surface. Confused and cautious, I took out my only pen from my bag and placed it on the ground before giving it a push. It stopped a few inches from where it started. Gravity did not lie. Physically the surface was smooth and level, there was no incline for a cylinder to roll down on. Yet when I slid my foot over ground, it felt even steeper than before. 

There was no other alternative. After some pacing and muttering, I worked up the courage to continue down the illusory slope. From there, the situation would continue to deteriorate. I caught fewer and fewer glimpses of the outer wall, even though I should have been getting closer to it by the minute. The enveloping darkness crushed in from all directions, and even though it wasn’t total, it’s pressure seemed to increase the further I wandered from the main foyer-turned-maze. 

But probably most alarming of all, the architecture around me started to grow. As my sense of balance reported that I was journeying ever downwards, the walls of the hallway began to widen above my head. Soon it felt like I was walking at the bottom of an enormous V shaped trench, with only the lowest ten feet or so being a narrow crevice. Multiple floors began to appear above me. Pillars and columns grew to the size of redwoods, stairs became jagged lines emblemed into cliff faces, and vast rotundas took the place of ceiling coves. I shivered and tried not to look up.

Then, hours into my near hopeless trek, as I was climbing down the side of a diagonal slab, I took a glance at the path ahead and froze. The V shaped alley ended abruptly, terminating in a sheer wall that reached up towards the unseen roof. Panic rose in my throat and I let out a cry of anguish. The labyrinth knew what I was doing, and it was keeping me in. 

Carefully I sat down behind the slab and closed my eyes. I needed to recover my breath, I needed to keep my sanity. I focused my mind on thoughts of the outside world. My old friends I had to leave behind for school, my new friends that would help me out of this pit, my family, who I so often fought and argued with. I had to see all of them again. I just needed to overcome this final hurdle. I opened my eyes, heart rate lowered, and tried to analyze things logically. The force mutilating my house was not omnipotent, or else I would have never been allowed to even see the windows and doors. It could stretch space to keep me from leaving, true. But the speed that it could do so was still limited. 

An idea popped into my head. I had to get ahead of it. Wherever the “front” of these alterations were, I need to outpace that, and then I would be able to reach the outer wall before it was thrown ever further into the distance. Lining the canyon walls were numerous staircases some of which disappeared into small tunnels. Many of these were still headed towards the outside wall. If the paths had not yet been completely cut off, there was still a chance I could escape. Another jolt of adrenaline shot through my body as the plan came together. I drained what was left of my water bottle, stepped onto the diagonal slab, and began to climb.

Getting out of the narrow trench at the bottom of the canyon was easy enough. The slanted surface of the great megalith was fairly shallow, and in no time, I was next to set of simple stone steps protruding from the implacable canyon wall. Carefully, I positioned my stance and tested the first step. It held without any give. I wasted no time. I jumped with all my might, landing on the first step, and began scrambling up like a man possessed. I had to keep ahead of the warping, had to keep in front of it so I could reach the window. I began sprinting two steps at a time. The nearest tunnel which still went in the direction of the window was just ahead. 

I plowed through the last few steps, grabbed the wall, and spun myself into the small alcove. For a split second as I rounded the corner, I saw the exterior living room window, the one just left of the television. The narrow and squat tunnel lined up perfectly with the frame. A straight shot to my destination. Then I blinked. The short route that I had just glimpsed was instantly replaced with a vast, complex, cathedral-like hall. The window still shined at the far end, like a priceless painting, but the path to it was considerably more convoluted than before.

    
I gritted my teeth in frustration, but anticipation was already rising in my heart. I was was close to the front! The labyrinth was running our of tricks! I broke into a dead sprint, using the last ounce of strength to dash under the silent vaulted hall. The entire world appeared to blur around me, and the only sound in my ears was the rush of blood. The window inched closer with each passing moment. My escape, my salvation. I banked hard as the path ahead turned, and as I did so, I felt a terrible sensation in my mind: my soul being snagged from behind. It felt like I was dog who had just run full speed to the limit of its leash. A jolt, whiplash, choking. I felt all of those in quick succession. I stumbled, nearly falling, only catching myself on a piece of masonry nearby. Instinct forced me to looked back and try to see the angler that had snared me. 

Mistake. The floor, all the way up to one foot behind me, was entirely gone. Pitch black void swallowed the entire space behind me, and it extended forever. Leering from the nothingness, like a nightmare come to life, the planet sized colossi of masonry met my gaze once again. The presence of a celestial body washed over me, as if the moon had just passed by and missed my head by mere inches. I tried to scramble away, but to my complete horror, the snagging sensation replied. The void was a sinkhole in reality, and it was dragging me into its infinite volume. I threw my arms out, fingers scratching at the gaps between stone. My mind went blank, my kicking feet skidding across the smooth floor, desperately trying to find a firm purchase. 

Suddenly, a crevice! My slipper wedged into a dent and stuck. There was no thinking, only action. I clawed myself up, resisting the pull with everything I had left. The window! I threw my gaze across the room like mad. There! It was still there, set into the wall, albeit a few hundred feet further away again. I sprinted, covering the final stretch in the blink of an eye. My hands slammed into the plastic frame, fingers closed around the latches, threw the window opened, and jumped. 

 

…………………………………………………

 
Orange light shone on my face as a I blinked up at the magentas and blues of sunset. My mind spun but without a single coherent thought. I heaved deep breaths, sweat drying all over my body, yet I couldn’t say why. Grass surrounded me, and my ears rang, but there was no recollection of how I got here. It was as if I had been sleeping and had only now woken up. Dazed, and utterly deprived of context, I simply lay on the dirt for a minute or five, just letting my body recuperate from whatever it had experienced. Eventually, I turned my aching neck and saw a crumpled window screen laying in the grass. Slowly, I lifted my exhausted body from the grass. Had I jumped through the window? I turned to look at the house. The window was shut, locked tightly from the inside, the interior too dark to make out anything. I checked my phone and did a double take. Friday, nearly six in the evening. 

I stared, mouth agape at that screen at for a whole minute, willing for the number to change. My mind spun in futility, trying to catching a hold of any memory that could explain why I was laying- half conscious- on the lawn outside my house. A minute later I still had found nothing. 

I shuddered, and genuine existential fear crept up my spine. The lost time had been bad before, but had not lead to any injuries. As much as I had tried to deny it, this was getting beyond what I could explain away by stress. I had to get help, and fast. I opened my phone, and blinked in shock at a self-sent-text. I read it over twice, and the chill inside my spine doubled in intensity. I had written a message to myself that I could not remember. It was a warning to get out of the house and stay out. Something unsafe was happening inside, and it had to be looked at by professionals as soon as possible. I could not come back here and stay tonight. My hands quivered, and struggled to keep the note steady enough to read. All the implications it entailed ran through my head, but my mind focused in on the most urgent prescription. I had to get somewhere else to rest my head that night. I checked the time again. Six pm. I had a party in one hour. I decided that it would be there, among friends, that I would find my solution.

 

The late summer warmth had turned into a stiff night chill by the time I made it to Akshay and Dan’s apartment. The sky was a palette of dark pinks and purples behind the three story building. I stood there and took it all in for a moment. My limbs still felt jittery, anticipating my deliverance from this mire of dread. I took a deep breath and walked up the stairs. Their front door was beige, and I knocked twice. Feet shuffled inside, and a moment later, an unfamiliar face opened the door. For a minute, she just scowled at me, and I suddenly realized how disheveled I looked. Slippers for shoes, wild, anxious eyes, and clothes smudged with grass, dirt, and sweat stains.
    

“I’m here for the party?” I croaked out. From behind her, Jeremy’s face appeared out of a crowd. His eyes met mine, and his face twitched in recognition. 

“Oh yeah, let him in Emily!” He called from a large table. The girl, Emily, shrugged her shoulders and stood aside. I nodded awkwardly and shuffled indoors.

I was safe. I had made it to the party, and was now surrounded by friends. By all sane metrics, I was as secure as I could ever be. Yet, as I sat down on the couch and looked around the room, an unexpected shiver came over my body. Other unfamiliar faces greeted me from every corner of the room. In total, I counted more than twenty different people. Yet I couldn’t put a single name to a face except Jeremy. With increasing unease, I realized I didn’t even recognize the hosts, Akshay and Dan.  

Sweat beaded up on my face and I took another swig of my beer that I didn’t remember picking up. Emily, the girl who had opened the door for me, was now sitting at the table with Jeremy and a few other people. None of their faces rang a bell in my brain. Suddenly, a laugh went up from the table and they all threw their heads back while tossing out a barrage of follow up quips. One of the people at the at the table, a man between Emily and Jeremy, glanced in my direction, before a look of disdain rapidly clouded his features. He turned to Jeremy, whispered something, and subtly leveled a finger in my direction. Jeremy tried to wave away whatever had been said, but the man’s face did not soften. He snuck another worried glance in my direction before returning to the conversation. 

My gut flipped as if I had swallowed something rotten. The couch seemed to fall away underneath me, and I felt like I was being swallowed by a sink hole that had opened up right below my body. I raised the bottle in my trembling hands and finished off the drink. I was seeing it everywhere now, errant looks, suspicious glances, all aimed at me, the disheveled, paranoid drunk sitting alone on the couch in the middle of a gathering of friends. 

I wracked my overworked and collapsing brain for evidence. I had known these people for well over a month, there had to be something. I plunged deep into the back of my brain, fishing for memories of the time I had spent with these people, recollections of closeness and warmth between us. My net came up empty. With a terrible shiver, my mind crystallized the only logical conclusion: I did not know these people. They were not, and had never been my friends. 

A loud hiccup escaped my lips. I bit down to suppress a burp. How much had I been drinking? At the table, the man who had whispered to Jeremy stood up and gestured for another man conversing in the kitchen. The two gathered by the front door, and were joined by another pair of party-goers before leaving as a group of four. I swallowed my discomfort as the lock clicked shut. 

I had bigger issues that were perhaps life or death. Regardless of my relationship to these people, I needed a place to lay my head that night. Getting up, I steadied myself on the arm rest and moved over to the table. The people around the room gave me a wide berth, my steps confused by the alcohol coursing through my brain. I finally made it to Jeremy’s side and placed an arm on his shoulder. He glanced up from the conversation with surprise.

“Hey.” I said, trying to keep my words from slurring. “Who were those people who just left?” 

A look of discomfort flashed over his face before he was back to his usual, cordial self. “Oh, that was Akshay and Dan, with…” He quickly surveyed the room looking for faces. “Cindy, and….Terrance I think.”

“Ah.” I tried to keep my voice steady. The two hosts were gone. “When are they coming back?” I tried to sound as uninterested as possible, but the meaning of my question betrayed my burning need to know.

Jeremy’s face flushed with embarrassment, and he looked down awkwardly. “Uh, not sure….” He said slowly. “I think they said the vibes were a bit off, they’re probably just getting some fresh air.” He gave me a reassuring smile. A dense pit punched through the bottom of my stomach. I understood the meaning of his words perfectly. There was no question as to why “the vibes were off”. I nodded stiltedly and sat back down in the couch. 

Darkness narrowed my field of view and my breathing grew ragged. That was it, my original plan had fallen apart right before my eyes. This apartment would not be my safe harbor, not even for one night. Bitterness, desperation and anger swirled together and began to coalesce into an idea in the back of my mind. So what if these people loathed me, I was hardly helpless on my own! I brought out my phone. Squinting at the bright screen, I fumbled to the map and searched for nearby hotels. A few popped up immediately. A Holiday Inn, not far from the center of campus. 

I was already too drunk to drive, but this one was within walking distance and guaranteed to have vacant rooms. Perfect. The plan solidified. What was so dangerous about that boring old house anyways? If it was something serious like a gas leak, reason told me that I would have called the emergency services long ago, or else the house itself would have already gone up in flames. I pulled the note from my jacket pocket, read it over, and crumpled the paper with mounting anger. 

I was not a coward. I had faced adversity before, even without any friends. I would go back and really see what was going on, I would figure it out, no doubt. I didn’t even need to stay the night. If there was a structural issue, I would see it. If it was a problem with electricity, I would notice when I checked the lights or the breaker box. In and out, figure out what was going on, and then spend the night at the hotel. I finished another bottle and steeled myself. It was ridiculous that I had been scared senseless for nearly a month because of some simple house issue. This was ending tonight. My determination was set in stone, I would not be swayed. I rose from the couch, waved the hostile party a halfhearted good-bye, and stomped out into the chilly night air.

 

…………………………………………………

 
I rolled on the balls of my feet before the house. The house, my uncle’s house, my house, ownership didn’t matter to me anymore. The shape and silhouette that I had originally found rather charming was now the thing I hated most in the world. Whatever was inside those walls had driven me to the edge of madness. But now I was paying full attention to it. Any misconceptions about friends had been dispelled. I was in this alone, but that was fine. I checked my phone. A little past eight. The sun had fully set a while ago, but tonight was Friday. From the distant bars and restaurants, I could hear cheering and yelling that would go on for several more hours. I had time. The hotel would be open all the way into the night, the truth of what was happening would not escape me again.

Marching up the creaking steps, I dug down deep into my stomach and balled together all the misery, humiliation and paranoia that had dominated the previous month of my life. I held that roiling bundle and compressed them into a burning indignant anger. I had nothing to fear from this rotten pile of wood. I grabbed the door handle and swung it wide open. 

My anger sputtered into nothing just as my hand let go of the door. The sound of a bolt clicking shut behind me reached my ears a split second too late. Memory, terror, and an abject sense of despair crashed over my mind like a tidal wave, instantly extinguishing any courage or righteous rage I had mustered. 

The twisted concrete labyrinth that had once been a modern, minimalist foyer greeted my return. I didn’t even try to turn around. I knew that the door had already been replaced, sent down a newly created hallway, miles in length. Pulled by emotions I couldn’t even remember, I had been lead in a great circle, all the way back to where it began. The jaws of the trap snapped shut in deafening silence. 

I fell to my knees. There was nothing left to do. All my efforts, my plans, my escape, had turned to ashes in an instant. I clutched my head and screamed with mindless abandon into the hell-scape before me. 

Something moved in the shadows, in the very center of the deepest patch of darkness. My sobbing sputtered, survival instincts overriding existential despondency in an instant. I fell backwards, scrambling to get away from whatever it was. The shadow rose upwards, first like a miniature mushroom cloud, then filling out into a large sphere, before it finally moved forwards and into the dim half light of unseen windows.  

I froze as recognition pierced my brain. A dark metallic oil, iridescence shining on its surface. Small white flecks, numberless beyond counting. All of it, instantly shifting from one arrangement to another in some inscrutable pattern. The thing from my dreams had fully entered the waking world, except now, it had grown even larger. A towering nine feet across, the sphere floated until it was inches from my fear-paralyzed body, then stopped. I swallowed and felt something entered my brain. 

It was not an intrusive thought, nor a new level of terror, it was not even a final punch of gallows humor. It was pure understanding. Inconceivably alien, colossally massive, unyieldingly true, and denser than a black hole. It collided with the remnants of my trembling reality, and utterly annihilated it. 
    

A void, endless and deep. A congregation of giants hewn from stone that wasn’t stone. A sphere of oily night. A shifting mass of pale dust. It was a space outside of space where nothing ever moved. It was an infinite array of cosmic architecture rearranging itself over and over in the complete absence of time. It was a mass of dark oil that haunted my nightmares. It was a numberless swarm of microscopic specks floating in that midnight ichor. It was both the sculptor and the statue, continually carving itself into existence, chiseling its pillars- its organs and tissues- from the bedrock of reality itself. And the whole of it danced together like clockwork in a single, eternal moment.

I let out another sobbing wail and stared back at the thing, completely slack jawed. “What do you want from me?!” I whimpered, my mind totally shattered and shredded by the incomprehensibility of what it had just forced into my thoughts. The sphere did not reply. “I’m….I’m here! I can’t leave, I have nowhere else to go! You have me now, YOU WIN!” With those words, my resolve finally and utterly collapsed into a pile of impotent ruin. 

The grit in the oil froze, locking into place. A split second later, the sphere trembled, then collapsed in on itself until disappearing completely. The walls of the house rumbled. I shuffled backwards in a panic, still sprawled on my backside. Then a low creaking moan came from the walls. Wooden beams, the structural support for the as-of-yet-untouched exterior, trembled at the mercy of an irresistible force. A moment later, they snapped with a chorus of thunder. My hands went to my ears and I ducked. Wood and dry wall were blasted into dust as I sucked in a ragged gasp. There was no more outside. The world was gone, only the terrible yawing nothing remained.

Monstrous architecture exploded outwards, the labyrinth finally free of any bounds. Like countless, titanic, recursive chrysalises, the individual pieces split open and unfolded. Impossible quantities of stone spilled from within them, swelling the embryonic giants as they shot away to their appointed positions in the darkness. For an eternity, the air was dominated by the endless choir of metastasizing stone. Then, in unison, it all stopped. Struggling to exhale a breath, I looked up, and my stomach dropped out of my abdomen. The titans stood where I had always seen them, and with their featureless faces, they welcomed me home. The last vestiges of a floor crumbled beneath me, and I fell without a sound. Stillness settled and began its reign over everything. 

 

…………………………………………………

I am walking up a set of roughly carved stone stairs. They extend before me into the darkness as far as the eye can see. My footsteps are deafening in the empty silence. All is silent darkness now. I believe that there must be something at the top of these steps. I will see the light again, hear the laughter of friends again, find refuge, safety, and belonging again. But I am the center of a universe of stone and infinite void. Time does not exist here, and there is no progress outside of time. My feet do not move. I am not walking. I have never taken a single step at all.