She'd suffered from bipolar disorder ever since I could remember. When I first met her, she wasn't on the proper medication and some days it would feel like she was constantly spiraling out of control and other days I would have a difficult time keeping up with her energy. It was difficult in the beginning; I won't lie about that. There were times when we were dating that I was sure I wouldn't be able to give her the support that she needed. I can't tell you how often I would wipe away her tears during one of her depressive episodes and wonder how many more times I would have to do it before it was over, but as time went on I realized that it would never be over and it wasn't about me. This was who she was. That was it. She wasn't broken. She didn't need fixing. Once her medication was sorted, it did get easier, but it was always hard.

I wanted to get all of that out of the way so that you can understand that she would sometimes feel as foreign to me as any stranger I would pass on the street, even with meds. She would act funny and be totally withdrawn for days at a time. My wife is- was? My wife is an artist. She would write constantly so that her desk was covered in post-it notes and she would lock herself on the balcony and paint for hours at a time, refusing to eat or drink anything.

When she would finish something, whatever project she was working on, I would be the first one she would unveil it to. Fantastic. They always evoked something in me that was deeply personal and when I would read what she wrote or look on one of her paintings, I would feel closer to her than I would any time we held each other or made love.

After her manic inspired frenzy, I would have her back for a few weeks and she wouldn't feel quite so much like an illusion to me. I would muse that she was like the sea and she would roll her water-green eyes at me, but I meant it. Calm and still. Uproarious and drowning.

Last year she locked herself in her home office. I let her be the first day, but the second morning I knocked on the door and she cracked the door open to peer out at me from the dark room. She told me she was busy and that I just needed to give her some space. I kissed her on the forehead and left for work. She was still in that room when I came back home and so I went to bed alone again. I knew she was working hard. I could hear music coming from the room and I could hear her singing along. I only heard her leave the room once that night. She ran to the bathroom; I heard a flushing toilet and then the familiar click of the door of her office.

The next morning, I went to check on her. The music was still playing a Pixies track. I knocked and waited to hear her footsteps cross the floor on the other side of the door but didn't hear anything. I thought maybe she'd not heard me, so I knocked again. Nothing. Just the music. She'd never done this, and it worried me. Regardless of how locked into a project she was, she always had time to speak to me when I would check on her. I panicked and banged on the door. Still nothing. This forced me to go to the kitchen, grab the key to her office and unlock the door. I swung the door open with images of me finding her dead on the floor flashing before my eyes. My heart was racing as I scanned the dark room. The windowed doors were wide open, leaving the curtains there whipping in the breeze. I moved to the balcony there and searched the ground, hoping to not find her down there. I didn't. She wasn't. She was gone.

Immediately, I called her phone and saw it vibrating on the floor near the closet. Maybe she went to the store? I didn't know for sure that she was gone. I hoped that she'd gone to the store but when I looked in the driveway, I saw her bright red VW bug sitting there. I sat in her office chair for a bit, shell shocked. I waited a few hours before calling the police.

She never came back, and the police found nothing indicating that she was kidnapped. Her family didn't know where she'd gone. It took a long time to accept that she had left us all. And even longer for me to accept that she'd left me. I say that, but honestly, I don't know that I ever really did. The diary I found assured me that I never would have gotten over it. As soon as I’d come across it, I was immediately flooded with an assortment of emotions ranging from anger to sorrow.

I'd become a husk. I took a month off work after her disappearance and even after I’d returned, I only ever did the very minimum of work asked from me. I moved the bed we used to share from the bedroom into her office and hung my clothes in the closet. I hung her paintings on the ceiling so that they were the last things I saw before drifting off into a fitful sleep on those empty nights. Each of them was abstract interpretations of everyday normal things made from red and blue sweeping brush strokes. One was a coffee cup and yet so much more. Another was an airliner as seen from the ground and yet I could nearly feel the warm air coming off the engines on either side of its body. When I would squint, I would feel as though the red streaks in the foreground made up one cohesive message against those many shades of blue.

I eventually set about cleaning up the office and organizing things, but mostly just crying over every scrap of paper I found. I removed everything from her desk and as I went to close a drawer I'd just cleared, I heard something slide from within. I pulled the drawer back out, thinking I must've missed something. It seemed empty but as I looked at the corners of the drawer, I could see there was a false bottom. I pried up a thin piece of wood with my fingertips and there was the worn journal.

I knew my wife had problems with her mental illness. That was what originally came to my mind when confronted with her disappearance. I wondered constantly if that was the reason for her sudden overnight departure and the book seemed to solidify that in a big way. I devoured that journal by phone light and sighed. No, I won't be transcribing her words here. Those are for me.

I will say it was full of warnings about monsters hiding in the closet. At first glance, I thought it was probably just another bit of fiction my wife had previously worked on, one I'd never read. It felt like gibberish and so removed from the kinds of storytelling she was known for. But within the pages, I was mentioned. Those were her real thoughts. Her real dysfunctional, fucked up thoughts. I wanted to scream and be mad at her. Some part of me wished to magically have her in front of me so that I could shake her and get a straight answer from her. I wanted to rip the pages from the leather spine of the book and burn the paper. Maybe then they would cease to be real and I could be left to my own comforting thoughts of a thoughtless, deceiving wife.

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Something within the journal did stick out to me. She kept reiterating how important her paintings were. She kept saying that everyone thought they were just abstract blobs on canvas, but really, they were a map of some sort. This bit did little to jump out at me straight away. It was difficult to push myself to read through the tears. So, this faded away from my mind while I concerned myself with the more painful moments in her journal.

I sat the book aside and tried to sleep, staring up at those paintings and wondering exactly what she’d meant. Just as it grew harder and harder for me to keep my eyes open, I saw it. I bolted out of the bed, flipping the overhead light on. I tore the paintings from the ceiling and began rearranging them on the floor. When I lined up the edges of the red streaks from one canvas edge to the next, I saw the word "ME". Frantically I began matching up other pieces of art until the message was clear:

COME FIND ME IN CLOSET

I don't know what I was thinking. It was like a dream and I was like a mad man, ripping the closet door open and tearing my clothes off the rack, moving my shoes out from the closet floor. There wasn't anything there. I don't know why I thought there would have been. It was an empty closet and I was beginning to feel foolish. I picked a work shirt and began straightening it on a hanger, preparing to put everything back when something caught my eye.

I don't know any other way to explain it other than to say that there was a hole in the closet floor. I blinked and it was gone. I moved back and forth. It was there, but you had to be looking at it from just the right angle. I approached the closet carefully and peered into the open hole in the floor. There was an ancient iron ladder leading down into pitch black. No matter how far I pushed my head down into the hole, I could not see the bottom. I stood from my hands and knees and looked back over to the paintings scattered on the floor and felt a stone in the pit of my stomach, knowing what I was going to do next.

I went down into the hole, taking one ladder rung after the other. I felt a sense of purpose like I'd never felt before as I descended. I was a ship, and this was wind in my sails. She was my ocean and by god I was going to find her. Only now and looking back can I see exactly how easy it was for me to take the surreal nature of this experience with little consideration. There was a magic hole in the floor, and I went.

It took an indeterminable amount of time before I reached the bottom of the ladder. I'd probably climbed down three football fields before I felt my foot hit what felt like concrete. I looked around and then back up. The bit of light coming from the office above me was now little more than a pinhole. Blackness reached out from all directions, tugging at me, it seemed. I couldn't see an inch past my own nose. I clicked on the light to my phone and it helped a little more than not at all. I could see the ground. It was, in fact, concrete.

Even without seeing it, I knew I was in a massive solid chamber. I screamed, "Alice!". My own voice echoed at and through me. The peculiar nature of this was not lost on me, but I knew I had to find her. She was there. Wherever there was. I knew this to be an objective fact of the universe.

I placed my hand on the wall the ladder was attached to and began walking to the left of it, hoping to find- well I don't know what I was hoping to find. I felt the direction I was walking bend and curve to the right. Was I in some tunnel? The ground beneath me went at a very subtle decline. I wondered how much further underground I should go before I saw the very bottom of it. Would there ever be an end?

I walked like that for ten minutes? Twenty? Before I saw a light that wasn't my own in the distance. It was flickering. It was fire. It was coming from a lantern. I squinted to get a better look at it and stopped in my tracks. It was coming towards me. The lantern light rocked from the atop a staff secured in a wagon that someone was pushing. With each step, the light wavered as the stranger approached me.

"Alice!" I approached them in a quickened pace.

I was running through the dark and I didn't even care.

I slammed into the wagon and grabbed the side of it with my free hand. The hunched, hooded stranger pushing the wagon made a noise I was totally unfamiliar with. They stopped and grabbed the lantern from the end of the staff, illuminating the contents of the open wagon. Fish? It was a stupid first thought, I know.

The smell hit me. It was sweet and rot all at the same time. Within the wagon was a mound of flesh, viscera, gore. I staggered away. The man, if that's what he was, pulled his hood back to rest on his back and what exploded out of him was a shriek that ran my blood cold and took the air straight out of me. I looked upon the face of the humanoid creature not of this world and gasped. Metal hooks protruded from the skin around the corners of his mouth, pulled back with string so that his smile was perpetual, eternal. He had no eyes.

"Hungry?" He asked, motioning to his selection. His voice whistled from him, nearly piercing my eardrums.

Backing away, I tripped over something I couldn't see. I turned my phone light on it and revealed it was a severed arm. I scrambled to my feet, kicking the thing away. Looking down at the ground with what little light I had, I saw the ground wasn't made of solid concrete anymore, but something else entirely. The ground was cobbled together out of blood, stripped muscle, limbs tied together with repurposed skin.

I ran. I fucking ran. I felt the ground beneath me breathing.

The man- thing- whatever the hell it was whistled after me melodically. It sounded like whistling, but I may have been mistaken. It felt like he was communicating in a way I didn't understand.

I found a wall and they were made of millions of eyes blinking out of sync, watching me canter over each incongruity of the ground. I ignored them and moved through the massive gore structure, hoping against hope that I was sprinting in the right direction. I wanted nothing more than to close my eyes but kept them open out of fear that I would fall over again.

I don't know how I did it, but I found the ladder and moved up it like mad.

I scrambled into my wife's home office and slammed the closet door behind me.

I was unsure of what I had stumbled upon and I didn't know how long she'd had to live with it. I moved the bed back into the bedroom because I could still hear that whistling noise and every so often, the wet snapping sound of a closing eye. I locked the closet with chains, positive that those thin links would do little if any of that awful stuff decided to press against the hollow wooden door there.