I wiped the drying blood from my face with the hem of my t-shirt but let it fall back to my waist in defeat as I realized I was only rubbing the moist fabric futilely into my skin, spreading the coagulating liquid around and doing little to remove it. I was sticky all over. The pack I’d brought with me was somewhat waterproof and I thanked heaven for that.

The smallish room was made up entirely of dirt and thin wooden beams; it was warmer and more comfortable to be wrapped up in this little place after wading through those immensely cavernous corridors. I could have seen myself falling in the corner and sleeping until there was no more of me. It was not quite exhaustion that had overtaken me but a new feeling entirely. I would have been happy to simply pop out of existence.

The screams and howls went on and I felt I should lose my mind if I were forced to listen to their ringing melodic quality. I could feel them growing louder so that they became everything around me. They were the air, the walls, eventually me. Each squeal threatened to demolish my senses and send me into a catatonic fit. If before it felt like they were rattling in my skull, it then felt as though my brain may, at any moment, split open like swollen burlap.

I gripped my baseball bat in both hands, being careful not to rub the spot where my pinky finger had been. I reached out for the handle of the new door.

"You scared?" hushed the whisper?

I careened back, again holding the bat with both hands and pivoting all around, looking for the source of the voice. Nowhere. I recoiled, but in the relative safety of the small dirt room I was bolstered, "Fuck you!" I shouted at the open air all around me.

"She's dead, you know. She held on so long for you to come and rescue her." The voice hissed. "Eventually," it laughed, "She had no fight left in her. I made sure of that."

"Liar." The word came out small. It was raining. It wasn't. It was tears.

"Humans are so fragile. Her insides were soft and runny"

I shouldered through the bodiless words and shoved the door open and was met with- daylight. It was immediately stunning. I stepped from the small room I'd been hiding in and into my home. The main hallway opened on either side of me and I saw sunbeams shooting through the windows adjacent me. I peered through one of the windows upon the wall and saw my neighbor on his wooden deck, sitting in one of those rickety plastic chairs while sipping on a frothy silver can.

I was astounded and allowed the baseball bat to slide limply in my right hand, keeping barely any grip, while I slinked down the hall. I turned and looked back at the small room I'd come from. It was still there, as real as anything else. The bowing wooden pillars and dirt walls stood evidently, but it was in the spot the bathroom should have been.

I heard whistling birds and that is when it occurred to me that the screams in my head had ceased. The strange nature of the shrill hitches was replaced by the entrancing avian music. The day outside seemed idyllic and gentle and soft and normal. Then I smelled something stronger than the blood on me. It was bacon. The sound of popping, sizzling meat came from the kitchen.

I crept further down the hallway to the threshold that led into the kitchen and the smell grew stronger and I heard someone shifting along the linoleum floor. I bit my lip and mentally prepared myself. I was shaking.

There she was. Alice at last. In our home. With her earbuds pressed in, dancing goofily while cooking breakfast. She was wearing her pajama bottoms and her no-show socks and her hair back in a ponytail and this was the realest thing I’d seen in a long long time and besides this is what I’d come there for and always wanted and there she was and there I was and here was our house and and and and

She jumped at the sound of the metal bat clanging out of my hand and popped her earbuds out. Her expression was one of horror as she looked on me and in that sweet honeysuckle voice, she said "Oh my god. Are you okay? Did you hurt yourself?" She saw the space where my pinky finger had been and recoiled a few times while examining my hand in her own.

I couldn't speak; breathing was a conscious effort.

It was a dream. A terrible nightmare of some kind. I slid against the stud of the threshold I'd been putting my weight against and crumpled to the floor. She hunkered down with me. I openly wept while she held me.

"Shhh, shh. It's alright. We can just sit here for a while. That's okay, okay?" She rubbed my spine. "We'll do that and then we can get you cleaned up. It'll be alright."

I believed it would be.

I showered and wrapped my hand in light gauze, dazed. She offered me breakfast, but I couldn't eat. My body was there in the present, but my mind still lingered in that other place, the nature of it crashing down over me in waves, realizing that I had gone mad. How long had I been down in that deep dark rabbit hole? Realities shattered as they were created in my mind.

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I wrapped myself up in Alice’s velvet presence and found a place for my sanity to hinge.

We laid together in bed.

"We can lay here together forever." She said.

"Yeah'. Forever." I smiled the biggest, dumbest grin.

I turned to her in bed, as I cradled her face. I could have gotten lost in those water-green eyes for days.

"Alice?" I was frozen in fear as I said then heard her name. It came out before I could even comprehend what I was seeing. "Your eye."

Her eyelashes on her right eye grew longer as she blankly stared at me. "Forever." The word fell from her pursed lips on repeat like a skipping needle track. The eyelashes formed legs and pressed against her cheek to pry the eye from the socket. I jumped out of bed, throwing the comforter against the wall. The comforter smacked against the wall wetly and it wasn't a blanket anymore. It was patchwork skin and hair. I watched as the eye's legs continued to grow. Its appendages made a bone snapping crack as the eyeball entirely freed itself from her face. Her form lay flat upon the bed, staring one eyed into the ceiling. "For-ever."

"Can't expect us to get every detail right, can you?" hushed that bodiless whisper.

The eyeball skittered across the bed like a newly born calf and threw its body into the dresser. It stood two feet tall on its innumerable legs. It stopped, stood up straight, and shifted to look at me.

It mostly sounds stupid in retrospect, but the only words I could find to sum up what was happening were, "Oh, what the hell!" and then, "Why?"

I looked at the eye, then at the door to the bedroom, then back at the eye. The creature mimicked my glances. I shouted and threw my arms out, attempting to look larger. It crouched and looked up at me. Was it scared of me? I thought this for about one second before one of its limbs shot out and stabbed me in the right shoulder.

It was hot and metallic. It pulled its spindly leg free and stood tall again.

I could feel the wet warmth running out of my shoulder and I gritted through the pain. I ran out of the bedroom and slammed the door shut, pressing my back against it. I grimaced as my own blood began to pool beneath me. The thing slammed into the door and shook the frame. I held steady. Again and again it bounced off the wood until I was sure the creature would splinter the thing into a million pieces, and me along with it. It went silent on the other side of the door.

Had it given up? I looked at the droplet of my own blood in the floor and that's when I saw the thing. Thousands of legs sliding underneath the space at the bottom of the door. I felt one of the limbs scratch against my ankle and I withdrew from the door, watching the thing slide legs first underneath it.

I waited for it. I knew what to do. I saw the eye begin to edge its way underneath the door. I lifted my foot as high as I could and brought it down so hard, I was afraid I might dislocate my knee. Its innards ran out of its iris and its limbs shot out in all directions, scrambled, then it was limp.

I didn't dare go back into the bedroom for the only thing I heard coming from there was the word "Forever." I wondered if that doppelganger would say that- well forever.

The bat was still lying at the other end of the hallway. A lot of good it had done me so far. I went to retrieve it while nursing my shoulder. It was hard to get a good grip on the thing; the bat hung limply from my hands for a moment before it fell back to the ground. I bent back over to pick it up and slipped in my own blood. It was getting harder and harder to move. My vision was going. I took a knee and tried to prop myself back to my feet with the bat but slumped into a sitting position. Everything was going blurry. I caught the brief glimpse of dust particles settling on a nearby windowsill. The world around me was shrinking into a pinpoint.

I spasmed a few times, attempting to jump-start my body. I just had to move. I had to get back up. This wasn't over. Goddammit, this wasn't how I was going to die! I was falling apart inside. I groaned and moved my head back and forth. I heard the metal clatter of the baseball bat once again as it clanged the ground near me. That was it. I was dying. I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing. In. Out. In. Out.

...

My eyes opened. I was standing in the small room in that hellish place. I had never left. I had never gone through the door. My hand was still stretched out in front of me. I heard that bodiless voice cackle again. This time it was shrill, boisterous almost.

I was losing my grasp on reality. That place messed with my head. It infected me somehow. I could feel it coursing through my veins; I and that place were no longer opposing entities, but one and the same. Maybe that makes no sense, but it is the absolute best way I can explain it. I wanted to twist into a spiral of oblivion, fall into some dark abyss, and forget all of who I was and what I knew. The vulgarity in which that place touched me cannot be put into words and so I am sorry for that.

I spun around the small room, touching the dirt walls and the ground to make sure that they were tangible, real. How can I trust that? I couldn’t, but it was better than nothing.

I reached for the door I'd never opened and twisted its rusty knob. It creaked and dust shook from its frame as it pushed into a dimly lit room. I adjusted the bat, arching it over my shoulder, preparing to swing it at the very next thing I saw.

Stepping into the new room, I flinched at every imaginary sound and drifting specter. It was much larger; the walls seemed to go up into infinity and meet one another at some unseen point for I saw no ceiling. My footfalls echoed and the ancient door behind me shut gently without me even noticing.

There were candles everywhere. Millions of them of varying heights. They rested upon a limestone floor. Their flames flickered restlessly at my presence, licking at the open air above them.

"Hello?" I said timidly into the room. My own voice echoed back at me and I was struck by how meek it sounded.

The candles lying on the floor were arranged in a way so that their negative space creates a three-foot wide walkway down the center of the grand hall.

I walked in between those candles forever, trying to keep track of time and losing it around every shadow. The room seemed to never end. Every hour- well to be honest with you, I'm not sure. Time had no meaning. Every so often I would sit in the middle of the path of candles and tend to my aching feet.

The candles did well enough to light the immediate area around me but sometimes my eyes strayed up and I wondered, how far did that ceiling go? How far under the earth’s surface was I? I resolved into thinking that it must really, truly go on forever. I felt as though someone was watching me, standing among the candles. But every time that I turned to face the voyeur, they were gone, and I was faced with nothing more than the clawing shadows upon the wall that those small flames casted.

At least it was warm.