As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

42. The Yellow Room

The tunnel was damp, dark, and hot; it went on longer than most of the hallways so far, and Marks began to fear they’d made a terrible mistake. The noise got steadily louder, the vibration under their hands got more and more powerful, and it occurred to him they might be moving towards the approaching destruction of the place. When the door finally swam up from the darkness, he smiled in relief and pushed it forward eagerly, and they emerged into blinding light that made them both reflexively squint and shield their eyes.

It was a small room decorated entirely in yellow.

Monstrous sunflowers towered above them in yellow ceramic vases everywhere throughout the room, all of them vibrating and walking this way and that as the whole space shook; the sound of destruction was almost too loud to be shouted over. The flowers seemed freshly-cut. The air was thick with fragrance, making him cough, but he’d never actually smelled a sunflower before. He didn’t know if they were really this overpoweringly sweet, or if the scent was being pumped in somehow, which wouldn’t surprise him.

Aside from the vases, the room was filled with yellow cardboard boxes, all marked with a black stencil reading PHONE BOOKS. As they stood there, a handful of bugs that had attached themselves to them wriggled free, dropping to the floor and making their way to the vases, seeking new homes. Marks wondered briefly if they’d just introduced a destructive species to the room, if the next set of victims wouldn’t find it decimated, all the plants eaten, the yellow turned brown and green from rot. Assuming anything of the current maze survived.

A phone started ringing. It was distant, almost lost in the noise, but they could both just pick it out.

They both froze, looking at each other. Marks held up a hand for silence, unnecessarily, and began spinning around, trying to locate the source of the ringing. It was an old-fashioned ring, like an ancient landline. The only exit from the room seemed to be a winding staircase, disappearing into the floor and the ceiling. He stepped over to it and stood very still for a few moments, listening, but he couldn’t tell where the ringing was coming from.

Just as suddenly, the ringing stopped. The noise of collapse seemed to get louder, and Marks could feel the floor shifting under his feet from the vibration. Dust sifted down from the ceiling onto them.

Dee walked over to a stack of the boxes. She noticed more stenciling on some of the boxes, reading THIS END UP. A quick survey showed that not every box had the extra instructions. She looked at Marks, and they shrugged at each other again, not needing to talk. She looked down and tore at one of the double-stenciled boxes, ripping the flaps up and digging down into it. She reached in and pulled out a stack of checkbooks. She recognized the blue safety paper. She squinted at them; there was no address or bank information.

She tossed one to Marks and bent to one of the boxes with just one stencil. She tore it open, but inside was only foam packing peanuts—yellow. She dumped out the box to show Marks, and thought they looked like fat, the fat that got sucked out of people on medical documentaries.

The distant phone began to ring again.

“This shit,” Dee shouted tiredly. “Is gettin’ weird!”

Marks nodded, eyes roaming the painfully yellow room. “Up or down, though, at least it’s not complicated.”

She pursed her lips. “Which makes me think it is complicated. And that we’re never getting out of here.”

Marks shook his head. “This goddamn place. It’s perfect, Dee, don’t you see? One way out. The other way, shit, I don’t know—but it won’t be good. And it all comes down to chance. We made it this far. Let’s say—for shits and giggles!—we’ve made the right choices, we’re on the path like I said. It doesn’t matter, because the path brings us to a fucking roll of the dice.” He laughed. “There are no clues. There’s no puzzle. We just flip the coin, up or down.” He kicked a box, hard, sending it flying, check books scattering everywhere. “This goddamn place.” He dragged a hand down his face. “I need a fucking drink.”

Dee studied him. “Dude, don’t fall apart on me now.”

He barked a laugh. “Why not? This seems like the perfect time to fall apart.”

She stared at him. “You promised you’d get me out. You promised.”

“Yeah, well—”

She stamped her foot, and for some reason the tiny gesture stopped him. “Okay,” she said, “the whole place is screwing with us. Falling apart behind us, driving us forward. Herding us. Sending people who look like … who look like … to fool us, to mess us up. And now here we are and you know one way will trap us again and we can’t know which one. But you promised.”

Marks stared at her and was ashamed of himself. He’d seen things like this. His own life was ruined. Dee had a chance, still. She was an orphan and if her father’s death couldn’t be pinned on him, hers could, if he left her in the Black House. If he let it claim her the way it had claimed Agnes.

He looked down at his shoes. “All right, kid. You’re right. Might as well see it all the way through.”

She smiled falteringly. “Besides, Marks, maybe it isn’t random. Maybe there’s a clue, like the chess pieces, or something. Maybe we just haven’t seen it.”

He nodded without looking up. “Maybe.”

She toed one of the boxes. “Like, why do some of these boxes say this end up? The ones that do say phone books, but they got checkbooks in ?em instead.”

As she spoke, the phone stopped ringing again.

“I still can’t tell if that’s above us or below us,” Marks said, slowly seeming to inflate, to animate.

“Probably just Agnes calling to call us names.”

A ghostly smile flitted across his face. “Probably,” he agreed.

“Checkbooks. Check books,” Dee said, wandering around. “Check the books.” She looked up at Marks. “Where else we see books in this dump?”

“The Library,” Marks said. “Dictionaries!”

“Huh,” she said. “That bedroom, the spare room—Lost Horizon!”

With a ear-splitting crack, one of the walls began to split, a chasm in the stone blinking into existence and immediately spidering into a complex pattern of slowly spreading lines. The floor seemed to tilt under them, the whole room shaking violently.

Above them, the spiral staircase suddenly jerked, as if twisting free from its moorings.

“Marks!” Dee screamed over the noise, shielding her eyes from the bright reflected light that seemed to have suddenly jumped from intense to blinding. She couldn’t see him—she couldn’t see anything, everything had become a bright yellow blur, the world shaking as if someone had taken hold of the room like a child holding a toy block, shaking it violently in their pudgy fist.

She felt his hand on her arm and she allowed him to pull her in. Vaguely, as if he were a mile away instead of right next to her, she heard him shout time to go! Up or down!

They were just barely ahead of the collapse, he thought. A few seconds, it felt like, and the whole place was coming down around them, crushing them, leaving them in a formless void, or being crunched up as it was all broken down to atoms and rebuilt—whatever it was, it meant they wouldn’t be around any more. And the thought of somehow becoming permanently part of this place, of his atoms being ground up and mixed in with the mortar and the fabric of the rooms created for the next unlucky person to wander into the Black House—it was intolerable.

Up or down! he shouted again, pulling at her. They had seconds. Chunks of the walls and ceiling were falling, and the floor was undulating in waves as if it was made of liquid.

Up! she screamed, and he barely caught the word under the weight of the din. We. Go. Up!

He nodded and turned. Holding her close, he made his way to the stairs, staggering and rolling, trying to match his weight distribution to the new gravity he encountered with each step. A section of ceiling crashed into the floor directly in front of him, and he barely had time to consider how dead they would both be if he’d been moving just a little bit faster.

Kicking phone books out of the way, he pulled them up onto the stairs and began climbing.

It shook violently, trying to buck them off. After four steps upward, twisting around, the bottom of the stairs tore free from the floor, treads flying, and Marks doubled his efforts, trying to run up with just one hand to brace himself as the stairs swung this way and that. Dee threw her arms around his waist and squeezed, giving him back his second arm, and he began half-running, half-pulling himself up as the stairs dissolved behind and beneath him.

As the ceiling, ragged and pocked with missing chunks, drew near, the light began to fail.

This is it, Marks thought, sweating and breathing hard but, oddly, at peace. They’d given it their best shot, he thought. he could see the bolts holding the stairs in place jiggling and popping, and then he was up past the line of the ceiling. The stairs melted away beneath him, and with one final leap he threw himself up and to the side, praying there was a floor to land on.

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As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

41. The Restroom

The linking hallway, unfinished and twisting, went on far longer than the others. Marks slowly realized it was shrinking as they advanced, getting smaller and smaller. After about a hundred feet, he was on all fours, crawling along what had become an air duct, the drywall giving way to thin galvanized steel that burped and warped under them, giving every impression that they were suspended in the air over a large space.

Just when he wondered if he would be able to continue forward or if the duct was going to narrow too much for his shoulders, he came across a ventilation grate. He stopped so suddenly Dee bumped into him from behind.

“Ack,” she whispered. “Old man butt.”

He peered down through the slats of the vent. There was a space below, lit by a flickering white light that buzzed and clicked. He could see what looked like tile work.

He twisted around painfully and looked at her. “We can go down, or we can go on.”

She took a deep breath and wiped sweat form her face, leaving behind a dark blur of dirt. “No clues, huh? No more music, no more chess?”

He shook his head. “If there are, I’m missing them. It’s down, or forward.”

She nodded, then froze. “Wait—do you hear that?”

Marks shook his head. She held up a hand and they both sat frozen for a moment in the humid darkness. The roar of the maze tearing itself apart was back—muffled, although the duct shivered and shook with it, a bass line running under their hands and knees, driving them forward. Slowly, he became aware of a familiar tinkling noise, and he smiled.

“Water,” he said.

She scrambled back a foot or two as he stretched out and began kicking at the vent with the heel of one foot. He found himself struggling for breath, the duct seeming intolerable hot, and he worked as hard as he could. The fourth impact sent the vent tumbling down to the floor below, and he grinned, holding out his arms. Dee crawled forward and lowered her legs through the hole, and Marks steadied her and slowly lowered her down through it. When he had extended himself as far as possible, he took a deep, ragged breath.

“Gonna drop you!”

“Okay!”

He let go, and heard her land effortlessly on the floor below. He scrambled to follow as quickly as possible, dropping down in a rush and landing awkwardly, turning his ankle slightly, making him wince and dance for balance. His ankle and back both joined in a symphony of pain for a moment.

It was a bathroom all right, a public restroom, done in gleaming white tile. It smelled strongly of cleaning products. The lights were bright white fluorescents that buzzed and hummed ominously. They could hear water dripping, somewhere. He could feel the collapse in the floor. The lights flickered in time with the enormous noise, making it that much harder to think.

There were three white urinals against the wall to their left, a row of four sinks with bright chrome fixtures set under a large, smudged mirror to their left, and two wastepaper baskets. One of the faucets was running, filling the room with a distinctly damp sound.

There were four stalls across from the sinks, doors closed. Each stall door had a Roman Numeral written on it in what appeared to be black marker: X, V, III, C.

The whole room was painfully white, even the grout between the tiles. It hurt his eyes. The whole place looked like it had been recently scrubbed clean by a team of desperate professionals. He imagined he could eat out of the urinals, but decided not to say so.

“Marks,” Dee said.

He turned and followed her arm to a section of the mirror where someone had written several sentences in the same black marker:

I wonder at a holy mystery

I ponder the terror of ghosts

I am fonder by far of agony

the room floods and you are lost

The phrases were each in wildly different handwriting, as if written by different people.

Marks nodded. “Well, that’s goddamn disturbing. Water first,” he said, and Dee nodded back. They crossed to the sinks and opened up a second faucet. Clear water came rushing out, and they each thrust their heads into the basins to drink. For a few moments it was just the sound of water, and then Marks straightened up, shrugged off his backpack, extracted a plastic bottle and held it under the stream while Dee straightened up and wiped her mouth.

“It was getting a little dry, huh?” he asked.

“A little dry,” she said, smiling a little.

He capped the bottle, took another long drink at the faucet, and then turned to look around, water dripping from the whiskers on his chin. He reached up and scratched at them, surprised; he didn’t think they’d been inside for so long.

Dee twisted the faucet handle, but the stream of water wouldn’t stop. The sink wasn’t draining, either, and was rapidly filling up. She glanced at Marks and saw him having the same struggle. As she did so, the other two sinks suddenly switched on, water pouring and filling their basins.

The noise of the collapse seemed suddenly louder, and the whole room shook as if an earthquake was going on.

Marks looked at her. Then he pointed at the poem written on the mirror. “The room floods and you are lost!” he shouted. “I guess that’s to be taken literally. No exit doors,” he said, looking around. “And the vent’s too high to get back up to!”

Dee nodded. Marks thought she was sadly calm, inured to the constant betrayals and struggle of this place, and he felt an enormous weight of blame. “How much you wanna bet that vent is closed somehow, we float up there? But we got four doors.”

Marks nodded, dropping the bottle back into the backpack. He considered the niceness of the trap: They’d been thirsty, in fact dying of thirst, and now they had water—too much of it.

He strolled towards the stalls. He walked up to each and put his hand on them, palm flat, and then dropped down to look under the doors. He paused; each stall was horrifying in a different way. X was blood-splattered, gore dripping down the interior walls; the floor in V was covered in a thick pelt of ash, ghostly bones peeking through; III’s floor undulated, a million insectoid bodies crawling over each other; C looked clean, but a foul smell drifted under the door, rot and char and something else that burned his nose.

He sat back. “Huh,” he said out loud.

“Marks.”

Dee was standing over one of the wastepaper baskets. He stood up and joined her. Sitting at the bottom of the basket was a single sheet of paper, with text written on it in the same marker.

ALERT

YOU ONLY

GET TO

OPEN

ONE

“Well,” Dee said, sounding tired. “That’s fucking ominous.”

Marks nodded. He knew how she felt, he thought; it was numbing, the endlessness of the Black House. Every room seemed so promising, every revelation, every new door. And then you found yourself once again pondering a riddle and wondering if you weren’t really just spinning wheels. It was entirely possible, he reminded himself, that all of these tantalizing clues that seemed to indicate a route, a purpose, might have been part of the trap, part of the torture.

As he thought the word torture, water began overspilling the sinks and running onto the floor. The room shook again, a distant explosion spiking the noise level.

He looked at the stalls and considered what he’d seen through the gaps. He nodded. “I believe it,” he said, imagining Agnes sweeping through here and tearing the sign down in anger, another prank by her “minions,” and tossing it into the garbage. “I actually think if we open the wrong one, we’re in for a world of pain.”

Dee stepped over to stand next to him, crossing her arms and wearily studying the stall doors.

“Ten, five, three, and … what’s ?C’ stand for?”

“Hundred,” Marks said.

“Ten, five, three, hundred. Mean shit to you?”

Marks shook his head. “Not right off. Can’t spell anything with them. Why Roman numerals? Why numbers at all?” He turned and leaned down for a drink, the water pooling in a shallow layer on the floor.

Dee bent down and retrieved the paper from the wastepaper basket, smoothing it out and studying it. “I keep thinking there’s a hint here, right? Look how it’s written, like a poem.” She stared down at the page. “Maybe there’s something about the letters. Letters on the doors, letters in the note … there are no Cs, Is, Vs or Xs.”

Marks straightened up, wiping his chin and staring at the mirror. “You know what? No Xs or Vs in the poem, either.” He leaned forward and squinted. “No Cs, either.”

Dee turned and looked. “Three Is, though.”

They both turned to look at the stalls.

“Seems too easy,” Dee said.

“Who says it has to be hard? Takes brains to make a good puzzle. Not everyone has brains.”

“We got brains?”

“Definitely fucking not,” Marks said, “considering we got trapped in here.” He walked over to the stall with the numeral III on it. He put his hand on it and closed his eyes. “Had to be bugs. Had to be, huh?”

“You don’t like bugs?”

Marks nodded. “I was in a shithole apartment. This was a few years ago, still sliding, still a part of the world. Not yet at bottom. At night I could hear some critter in the walls—a rat, a squirrel, who knows. Scratch scratch scratch, all night. Drove me crazy. Then one day, no more scratching, I won the lottery. I got really lit that night, celebrating. And then the flies came. The fucking flies. A few at first, barely noticed them. Then more, and more. One morning I woke up, the room was thick with flies, a black wave of them. The damn animal had died in my wall.” He swallowed. “I had nowhere else to go. So I stayed. I stayed until the flies finally died off.”

“Jesus, Marks,” Dee said. “That’s awful.”

He nodded. “Just one of the many merry stops I made on my way to the bottom.” He turned. “Look at those lines,” he said. “I think that’s our clue. Three Is. Roman numeral three. Bugs.”

She nodded again, and he felt it again: That weariness, that defeat. The girl had been abandoned, left to fend for herself, then lost inside this insanity engine. And she’d chased after her father only to be tortured with his death, finding him carved up and used as a prop—for what?

“All right,” she said, and they walked forward together, sloshing through a surprisingly deep pool of water; Marks suspected more was being pumped in from hidden places. Marks took a deep breath and angled his body to shield Dee as he pulled the stall door open.

The whole tiny space was crawling with insects, but they were all harmless. Revolting, perhaps, but nothing that stung or bit or infested the body—just thousands of legs and squirming, shiny bodies, gleaming dumb eyes. Instead of a toilet, there was a tunnel. It looked like it had been torn out of the wall, the edges rough and wriggling with bugs. He could see a rough-hewn tunnel heading into the wall for a few feet, then making what he now regarded as the usual right-hand turn that prevented him from seeing anything else.

“Gross,” Dee said emphatically, and Marks smiled.

“Come on,” he said. “Before we drown.”

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As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

40. The Myna Bird Room

Marks and Dee each threw themselves out of the way. The suddenly giant bird’s beak crashed down on the floor, sending spidery cracks in every direction.

“Dee!” Marks shouted, grabbing hold of her arm and pulling her close.

“Watch out!” she shouted.

“Mawk! Show you the way!” the bird bellowed, fluffing its suddenly immense wings and puffing out its chest. Marks thought it didn’t look like a bird any more. It looked like something else entirely, a demon, a devil. The feathers on the back of its head had stiffened and bristled, giving it a dark crown. It loomed over them, its face more expressive than Marks thought possible, collapsing into a mask of anger and disapproval.

“Here it comes!” Dee screamed.

The bird lunged at them. Marks picked Dee up bodily and twisted away. he was knocked off his feet as the beak slammed into the floor where she’d been. They both fell into a heap on the floor. He turned his head. The bird was struggling, making a choking noise as it tried to extract its beak from the floor, where it had become securely wedged.

He looked at Dee.

“We gotta make a run for it!” she shouted, pointing at the doors.

He nodded. “Tiger!”

They ran. Marks twisted around every few steps to ensure Dee was right behind him, which offered him an unfortunate view of the giant bird, wings spread, beak open, and eyes blazing as it chased after them, enormous beak open.

Must go faster, he thought stupidly. Just as they reached the door with the tiger carving, he turned to check on Dee and saw the bird lunging forward. He grabbed her by the shoulders and spun them away, stumbling to his knees and pushing her roughly as he fell. The bird smacked into the door and shattered it with a noise like an explosion.

He grabbed at Dee and pulled her up. She felt light, like she didn’t weigh anything. Her face was wide and frightened—a direct reflection, he was certain, of his own. After seeing her father in the Incision Room, he thought, things had changed: Now he knew they could—both—die in this place. The idea of being impaled by a giant bird suddenly didn’t seem impossible. The idea of Dee dying in this place didn’t seem impossible, and a cold vein of fear had set up permanently in his belly. He’d done this. He’d brought her into this.

The bird was stuck again, though, flapping its giant wings as it tried to extricate itself from the ruined door. Marks grabbed Dee’s hand again.

“Viper!” he hissed. “Hurry!”

They ran for it as the bird tore the Tiger door off its hinges, the door still embedded over its beak. It thrashed this way and that, trying to shake it off, strangled, choked-on squawking noises bubbling from its chest. As they reached the Viper door, it brought its beak down hard on the floor, making the boards jump and knocking them off balance as the Tiger door shattered and fell away. Marks stumbled backwards and landed on his ass, dragging Dee down with him.

“Fuck!” he shouted in frustration, a sharp lance of pain driving up through his back. Dee sprang back off him, staring and backing towards the Viper door.

“Come on!” she shouted. “Come on!”

He lumbered up, back snarling in protest, and staggered after her. Dee scurried nimbly forward and pulled the door open. Marks could feel the floor shaking as the bird chased him, could see the terror in Dee’s eyes. He waved at her.

“Go!” he shouted. “I’m right behind you!”

She darted inside. He was just a step behind, breathing hard and sweating freely. He ducked in through the doorway, into the familiar rough hallway, and was just beyond reach when the bird slammed its head into the doorway, making the framing groan and crack. It screeched, beak open far wider than should have been possible, and he backed away from it as rapidly as he could, eyes locked on it, certain it would tear itself loose, shrink down, pass through the wall—something. That it would just keep coming and coming.

It didn’t. It screeched again, but the sound grew muffled as he turned the usual corner in the hallway. He spun and chased after Dee, who was just opening the next door. She turned and watched him urgently as he limped after her. She slammed the door shut as he passed through, and the door vanished, as if absorbed by the wall.

For a moment they both stood there, panting, staring at the unbroken plaster.

Marks turned and blinked in the sudden silence, shivered in the sudden cold of crank air. They were in a small, modern room with a movie screen at one end and a few folding chairs behind a simple table in the middle. The blasting air conditioning was loud, and he could feel the breeze of it. He thought it must be about thirty degrees. He wrapped his arms around himself and walked over to the table.

There was a box of half-eaten donuts on it, which he picked up and sniffed at, then handed over to Dee. She stared dully at the donuts, knowing they needed some kind of food but sick with adrenaline and terror. There were also several congealed cups of coffee on the table, mold growing on them. There was also a film canister, labeled Psycho, Hitchcock, 100 mins.

He looked up. There was just one door in the room. It had a small blue and white sign on it, showing a simple icon of a woman on one side of a dividing line, and an icon of a man on the other.

“Restrooms,” he murmured softly.

“Sure,” he heard Dee say. “Why not.”

In the crisp silence—the sort of silence that hinted at insulation in the walls, muffled and damped—he strained to hear the bird’s tortured squawking, but couldn’t. Slowly, he let the tension drain out of him. The door had disappeared behind them, so while the bird might still be out there, searching, for the moment he thought they were safe.

He shrugged off his backpack and sat down in one of the folding chairs, half expecting it to dissolve beneath him and dump him onto the floor. He pulled out the notebook, which looked like it was decades old, torn and stained. He opened it to his most recent map and made further notes, adding the new room, and sketching a tiny danger sign next to the Myna Bird’s room. Then he stood up, put the notebook back, and held the bag open for Dee to stuff the box of stale pastries into it. He looked around one more time, hopefully, looking for water, but there was none.

“All right,” he said, tiredly. “Only one door, so we might as well.”

“Are we still on track?” Dee said. “I feel like doubling back on the bird room was a mistake, and now we soirt of panic-chose this one.”

Marks sighed. He thought of the bird. Mawk, way out, I know, set me free! He thought of how it had destroyed the Tiger door. He pictured the crown of feathers over its head. “We can’t know,” he said. “Until we make a few more moves. We need to see where this leads. Nothing for it.”

She nodded. “I’m fucking tired, Mr. Marks.”

He put his hand on her shoulder, feeling awkward. “I know. Me too. Come—”

The lights went down and a hidden projector revved up, filling the screen with a test pattern, grays and whites and nonsensical images followed by an old-fashioned countdown, starting from five. They turned and stared at the screen, each of them thinking the exact same thing in the exact same words: what fresh piece of bullshit is this?

The countdown made it to two before the film jammed and melted. A moment later the lights came back up. They stood for a moment, waiting, but the room had returned to its static, still state. Wordlessly, they both walked to the restroom door. It had no lock or handle, but swung inward. Marks held it open and Dee slipped past.

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As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

39. The Xeric Room

“Come on!” he heard Dee shout, distant. “There’s a way back!”

Marks stepped into the hallway, gathering up rope as he walked. As he turned the sharp corner that all the connecting hallways between the places in the Black House had, he could feel heat building, like he was walking towards a huge furnace. When he turned the corner and stepped through the doorway, blistering heat almost knocked him down as he stepped into an impossible, wide-open space.

Sand, unbelievably, crunched under his feet. It was too large to be a room. It was a … place? An environment? A world? None of the terms seemed to fit. Squinting and holding his hand over his eyes to shield them from the bright light that was almost exactly like sunlight, he could actually see a horizon in the distance. In each direction all he could see was blue sky and sand. Despite the glare of the light, there was no sun in the sky.

There was some sort of landmark: A cactus stood proudly not too far away. He was already sweating freely, and thinking about water again. He turned and found a door frame freestanding in the middle of the air, the door opened outward, a goat carved onto it. He leaned around and peered behind it, finding only sand, no evidence of the hallway that led to a garden just a few subjective feet away.

Dee was standing by the cactus, the rope still knotted tightly around her waist. She grinned at Marks and looked around. He walked over to her; the sand was loose and fine and difficult to find purchase in, and he was breathing hard by the time he reached her.

“Look,” she said, pointing at the ground.

Drawn in the sand around the plant at the four corners of the compass were four symbols; the stick used to scratch them was discarded nearby. The symbols were a fish, a crown, a cross, and a key, each with an arrow pointing away into the distance—the fish pointed back at the freestanding, impossible door that led to the garden.

“Hmmph,” Marks said. The thin, dry air seemed to snatch his voice away with the constant, steady hot breeze.

A sound from above made him look up; small dark shapes were circling around them, high in the air.

“Vultures,” he said softly. “Come to see how long we can stand the baking.”

“Shit,” Dee said in a low voice, following his gaze.

“No footprints,” he added.

She looked down and around. “Shit,” she repeated.

“My guess,” he said after a moment, “is that we start walking, we die in here. Or are lost forever. Same thing, really.”

She nodded. “Moth, then.”

“Moth.”

Back in the garden, Marks looped the rope around his elbow and hand and then shoved it into the backpack. He pulled out the notebook and made some notes in it, bringing his messy map up to date with the new information, including some cryptic notes about the drawings in the sand he hoped would make sense someday. He wondered if everything there connected somehow to him or Dee, if only they thought about it. The stuff everywhere, the dictionaries, the carvings and drawings. He looked around, wondering if every single detail had been plucked from their brains, their memories.

He was thirsty. As he stuffed the notebook back into the backpack, he knew that if he was wrong about the song being the key, if he was wrong about the insane logic of the place, they would both die in here, absorbed by it. He could hear and feel the collapse of the place, the grinding up of rooms behind them as if by enormous teeth, and corrected himself: It sounded very much as if they would die some sort of horrible, painful death if they stayed there. There was little choice but to keep moving. He had the idea that as long as they were on the right path, as long as they were heading towards the exit, the path couldn’t collapse. Couldn’t be ground up to be remade into the next version.

He didn’t have any proof, or reason why this had to be. It was all faith. He believed he understood the Black House, its rules, its purpose. If he didn’t, it didn’t matter.

“What’s the next chord again?” Dee asked. “After the minor one, I mean.”

“F,” he said, slinging the backpack onto his shoulder and standing up.

She nodded. “Shit, Marks, there was a fish in that desert!”

Marks nodded. “True. But it pointed back here. I think it was making sure we went in the right direction. And there was a Fly in the concert hall.”

“Yeah, if this place plays by rules, which we’ve seen, like, zero evidence for,” she said. When she looked back at him, he thought she looked tired and dirty. She pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. “We gotta be close,” she said, nodding firmly. “We’re almost through.”

He nodded back without enthusiasm, his mouth dry and thick, his stomach rumbling. “Ready?”

“Ready eddy.”

He smiled faintly, and they walked over to the door with the moth carved on it. The old door was soft and rotten, the iron hinges rusted, and it was difficult to open. He managed to get it open far enough for them to slip through—her, easily, him with a panic moment when he appeared to be wedged. Then the usual twisting hallway, the usual second door. He pushed it open and found darkness; the noise of collapse, the tearing, grinding noise, was much louder, as if it was right there in the room.

He hesitated a moment. He wondered if that was what the grinding noise left behind: Darkness, nothingness, void. Thinking there was no other choice, he stepped through, and fell a short distance, landing awkwardly. A moment later he heard Dee land next to him with more grace, and suddenly there was light, soft and yellow.

There was still the slightest scent of peppermint perfume in the air.

He looked around. “Fuck me.”

It was a simple room with plaster walls that had been painted a garish shade of red. The floor was worn and scratched hardwood. There was no furniture.

Except for the birdcage in one corner, the large black bird staring at them, eyes shining.

“Mawk, good to see you awk!”

Dee sat down on the floor. “Oh my god,” she said dully. “We got fucked.”

“Mawk, set me free, set me free, awk!”

Marks felt tears in the back of his throat. He was exhausted. So tired, and here they were in a room they’d already been to, meaning he was either totally wrong about the path out, or they’d simply made a wrong turn, chosen the wrong door. He remembered the door that had led them here before; it had a bird carving on it—a Myna Bird, he now realized. It had been literal. He didn’t know what it meant. He didn’t care any more. Maybe they should have stayed in the desert. Maybe that had been the trick, making them afraid to wander the searing sands, scaring them off the correct trail.

“What do we do now?”

Marks closed his eyes. The doors were tiger, hippo, and ibex. The way back to the garden had vanished. They’d gone through the hippo door and into the Hall of Mirrors. They’d been through the Ibex door from another route and been in the surgery. That left the tiger door, but he stared at it glumly. He had no faith that it meant anything. It was just another door. And they were never getting out.

The noise was getting louder, slowly approaching. He wondered if there was even a maze left to backtrack through. He thought, with the notebook, that he could retrace their steps, but he wondered if the rooms they’d been in were still there, or if most of the maze had been destroyed behind them. He wondered if it even mattered, if he’d even been correct in thinking there were patterns to perceive.

“Mawk! Set me free! Set me free! Way out!”

“Shut up, bird,” Dee whispered.

Marks stood up and walked over to the cage. It looked like someone had recently changed out the newspapers lining the bottom and the water; it seemed clearer and less spoiled than before. He remembered Agnes saying something about minions; perhaps that hadn’t been a lie. Perhaps there were hidden beings, re-shaping the place, cleaning it, maintaining it—tearing it apart.

He looked up, listening to the noise, picturing giants destroying everything, re-building, re-arranging.

“Awk!” the bird screeched. “Way out! Set me free!”

Marks bent down again and looked at the bird. It stared back at him steadily, shifting its weight subtly on the wooden dowl it perched on.

“Set you free,” he said quietly.

The bird ducked its head, as if nodding assent.

“I guess we go Tiger?” Dee said, standing up. She sounded defeated, too. Tired. She sounded like she was making the suggestion for no particular reason. As if she had no expectation, but had decided she couldn’t just sit there and do nothing. “Nothing else to do, right? At least it’s a new room. Maybe we’ll get a hint as to where we went wrong.”

Marks continued to stare at the bird. “Did we?”

Dee snorted. “We doubled back on ourselves. You said M for minor but we got M for myna and we’re back in this stupid, useless room.”

Mark nodded. “Maybe we set the bird free.”

Dee stepped over to him and leaned in to peer at the bird as well. It looked at her, than back at Marks. “You serious?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Why not? It keeps saying it knows the way out. It wants to be set free. The next chord would be an F. Maybe it’s F for free.”

Dee shook her head. “That means we could of gotten out way back when we were here with … with her. That doesn’t make sense.”

“Sure it does. It’s a trick. It’s a game. The place messing with us.” He looked at her. “Or it needs to happen in a specific order, like opening a safe—a combination. What’s to lose? We set it free. See what happens.” He looked at the bird again. “Doesn’t it look smart? Like it understands?”

The bird ducked its head.

Dee frowned. “That did almost look like a nod.”

The bird ducked again. She cocked her head. “We set you free, you show us the way, huh, Little Man?”

The bird ducked. “Awk! Way out!”

Marks nodded. He reached out and took hold of the tiny door to the cage, a door that seemed far too small for the bird—too small for it to have even gotten into the cage in the first place. He took a breath and looked at the Bird; it was staring at him intently, its wings moving in subtle rolling motions, as if it was preparing itself for exertion.

He pulled the door open.

For a moment, the bird just stared at the opening. Marks and Dee held their breath. The shattering noise went on, crunching and groaning.

And then the bird moved. It fluttered its wings. And started to grow. It swelled up, quickly filling the cage and then bursting out of it, sending Marks and Dee scampering to escape an explosion of shrapnel. The bird took flight, making one circuit of the room as it grew and grew. When it returned to hover over them, flapping its wings, it was as large as Dee. At its new size, it was much more frightening. Even worse was the intelligent way it peered down at them.

“Well, fuck me,” Marks whispered in the sudden, ominous silence.

“Fuck us both,” Dee added.

The bird ducked its head. Then it reared up and pecked at Marks.

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As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

38. The Garden

He stood in the midst of the garden, staring at the noose tied to the large oak tree, and remembered.

It came to him as a series of images, at first, disconnected, random. He saw her: Agnes. He saw her sitting in a coffee shop, a diner, sipping coffee, worried and unhappy. He saw her staring at him, studying, her hands wrapped in a paper napkin which she twisted and tore. She was both prettier and more haggard than the Agnes he’d met in the Black House.

He remembered her now: A client, long ago. Unhappy and frightened, plagued with a series of mysterious messages from her deceased husband. She’d found Marks the usual way, he realized: Asking around, desperate, until someone took her story seriously and suggested a name, a man who was known to look into the strange, the mysterious.

She’d gone missing herself, he recalled, but she’d left word for him: An address, a note saying she’d been told this was where her David was to be found. And he’d traveled there, dutiful, and he’d entered, and he’d found himself here, in the Black House. Except everything had been different. The foyer had been filled with hunting trophies. There had been no library that he recalled. And the doors had been marked with patterns of dots. But it was the same place. He listened to the approaching noise of collapse and realized it was also the approaching noise of reconstruction, the Black House unmaking itself and reconfiguring everything, choosing new puzzles, new decorations, new traps.

“I’ve been here before,” he said out loud, hearing Dee behind him.

He remembered her, Agnes, the real Agnes, asking him for a dollar, sitting at the diner. He remembered having just three dollars to his name, but he’d given her one. She was so sad, so pretty, he couldn’t resist. And she’d gone to the jukebox and played the same song, over and over again. And he’d sat there and he’d thought she was beautiful.

“Marks?”

He stared at the noose. They were in a formal garden, surrounded by an incredibly high stone wall. It was a peaceful place filled with plants, but hadn’t been tended for a long while. The stone benches were overgrown with mold, as if the ground were slowly reclaiming them. The walls were engulfed in ivy, making them seem part of the landscape instead of merely a container. The fountains were dry, and the little frescoes of fish diving in and out of the water were faded and dulled, their crimson paint washed away by time. Here and there a path traced a faint way through the overgrown grass and the exotic plants that thrived with less attention.

The tree was massive and ancient. The rope was old and didn’t look like it would hold anyone’s weight.

There were four vine-covered wooden gates in the walls; the vegetation was so thick on them the carvings were hard to make out, and on one the carving had been deliberately destroyed, blackened and chopped away. The remaining three displayed the familiar Newt and Octopus, and a Moth.

“Marks?” Dee repeated, stepping carefully forward. “You okay?”

“I was here,” he repeated. “I forgot. I forget a lot of things. Something happened to me, and I forget a lot of things, now. I was here, though. So was she.”

Dee frowned. “Agnes?”

Marks nodded. “Just like your Dad. And I came here to find her, to rescue her. And I failed.”

He remembered her by the jukebox. Bright daylight, the diner half-full, the smell of coffee, the feeling of energy buzzing in the air. She played that same terrible, awful song four times in a row and just stood there, swaying slightly, beautiful. Sad. Terrified. And he knew he would try to help.

He remembered the phone message from her, the next day: An address, a lead, something she’d stumbled on in her husband’s effects.

Dee swallowed. “Did you find her like … like we found Dad?”

Marks nodded again. He half-turned, and she was shocked at the look on his face: Bleak, desolate. “Yes,” he said. “Just like that. And the place has been trying to torture me with her, but my fucking broken brain screwed that up, and I didn’t see.” He hit himself in the temple, hard, and Dee took a step back in shock. He hit himself again, and she stepped forward.

“Mr. Marks!” she shouted. “Stop it!”

“I’m useless, kid,” he said slowly, breathing hard. “I’ve been kidding myself. I went up against something and it beat me down, it beat me down hard, and I’ve been scraping along and I thought I could survive and maybe even help someone. Help you. But I can’t even tell when I’m being tortured any more.”

He dropped the backpack into the overgrown vegetation and began pulling off his jacket. he was staring up at the noose again.

“Take this,” he said, holding the jacket back towards her without turning around. “There’s money sewn into the lining. A lot of it. Well, not so much these days, but enough for you for a while, get your bearings, figure something out. Take it.”

Dee stepped back again, wrapping her arms around herself. “No.”

He shook the jacket. “If I’m right, the next chord is minor, so you take the Moth door. Then the next chord is an F, so look for the Fly again—I think it’s important you do the rooms in the right order. No shortcuts. After that I’m not sure, to be honest. The next chord would be a D minor, but we’ve been to the Dining Room already. So it has to be something different. I think it’s the end, the exit, but I can’t be certain in this fucking place.”

She shook her head again. “If you’re not sure, come with me. Or I’ll get lost. You know the song, I don’t. You’ve been here before, right? I need you.”

He shook his head. “I’m no good to anyone. I can’t even remember when I get you killed.”

He saw Agnes laid out on the slab, naked, with the same incisions as they’d found on Dennis. There’d been a different clue inside her; not a chess piece but a shot glass, an old school one with a stylized silhouette of a woman on it, heavy and substantial. He remembered the sense of shame, the anger. he remembered shaking with it, his hands in fists as he stood there.

Dee stepped forward slowly. ignoring the jacket held out behind him, she reached up and took one of his hands in hers. It was rough, calloused, and cold. Hers was smooth and warm.

“Marks,” she said, voice shaking. “Come on. You see, right? You were here. That means you got out, once. That means you can get me out.”

He continued to stare at the noose. He knew it had been put there for him. One more twisted joke, one more blade in the ribs from a place that had been playing a series of black jokes against both him and Dee, toying with them like a spider spinning its meal into a cocoon.

Dee tightened her hand on his. “If you make me go on without you, I’ll die in here.”

He startled. “No—”

“I will,” she said earnestly, not raising her voice. “You left me once and I was almost lost for good. If you bail on me now, I’ll be in that room with … with my Dad.”

He closed his eyes. “All right. I’ll get you out.”

She hesitated, willing him to say something else, to promise something more. He didn’t move or open his eyes or speak, so she dragged her arm across her nose and nodded. “Okay. Show me. Why the Moth?”

He sighed heavily. As she released his hand he twisted around and put his jacket back on. He knelt down and opened the backpack, extracting his battered notebook from it. As he flipped through the pages Dee circled around him, placing herself between him and the tree, and crouched down.

“Newt heads to the maze,” Marks said. “Octopus goes to that old, dusty room with all the crap in it. The other door’s mark has been erased, so we don’t know where it goes. The next chord in the song is a G minor, but we’ve already been through the Goat door—that’s here. So I figure M for minor, which means Moth.”

Dee frowned. “But we don’t know where the unmarked door goes to. Maybe it’s the right way, and the Moth is a trick.”

Marks sighed and pushed his hand through his hair. He nodded. “Okay, that’s possible. But do we take that chance? We go through an unmarked door we don’t know where it sends us. Maybe back to the Waiting Room. Or someplace worse, someplace we can’t get out of no matter what we do. Or the maze of unfinished rooms. Honestly, Dee, if we get lost in that maze again we might die in there. We don’t have any food or water left. We need to get out of here quick or you’re going to die of dehydration.”

“We might die of dehydration.”

He nodded absently.

She turned and studied the doors. “We got to know, Marks. We’re so close. I can feel that shit, how close we are. Like this place is pissed off that we’re on the verge, you know? We can’t do something stupid now, pass up an opportunity. The way the mood of this place feels right now, it’s dying for us to screw up, and it’s gonna punish us if we do.” She looked back at him. “So I’m going to go and scout ahead.”

“No,” he said sharply. “That’s—”

“Look,” she said, putting her hands up. “Tie a rope around my waist. I go in, I see what’s up, and if I can’t get back, you pull me back.”

He shook his head again. “Sometimes there’s no physical connection between the rooms—you know that. For all we know you go through and the rope cuts in half. Besides,” he said heavily. “We don’t have any rope. Lost it a long time ago, in the elevator shaft.”

“I’ll go slow. And we got rope, don’t we?”

They both turned and looked up at the noose.

Marks’ smile was faint and awful. “Right. We got rope, all right.” He nodded. “Fine. But I go in with the rope, and you promise me if I can’t make it back, you keep on, go through the Moth.”

“Don’t work. I can’t pull you back, you’re too fucking heavy, old man. You can pull me, though, so if I’m in the middle of the air or something, you can drag me back.”

Marks studied her, then slowly smiled, shaking his head. “Goddamn smart-assed kid,” he said with a laugh. “All right, you’re so skinny and light, you climb on up and get the rope down.”

She snapped off a salute. “Yessir!”

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As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

37. An Eerie Room

They both stumbled with a shout as they entered; the door was a few feet above the floor. Dee managed a semi-graceful roll but Marks landed hard and twisted an ankle. He cried out in pain and then lay on the floor, breathing and rubbing his foot. He was in no rush to move, because they’d entered an eerie room that was almost blinding, made from a clean white stone with no visible source of light. Marks felt immediately uncomfortable for reasons he couldn’t quite articulate.

There was a slight hum in the air, an almost-imperceptible noise separate and distinct from the distant sound of collapse that still hunted them. It got under his skin and made him want to leave as quickly as possible. The walls and floor were of the same stone, a rough limestone-type rock that was dusty and crumbling, white and dry. The floor was partially covered by a white rug which was embroidered with various scenes of battle, all in shades of off-white, white on white—difficult to make out. The walls were hung with similar tapestries, although it was hard to notice at first.

There were three doors leading out of the room, but all three were several feet above the floor. Marks got to his feet with a wince and limped over to the north side and stood in front of the door there, sporting a difficult-to-see relief of a fly, and the threshold of the door was level with his neck. He turned to look at the door to the East they’d just come through; it was set even higher, and sported the camel that indicated it led back to the concert hall. He twisted around; in the corner between them was the third door, even further off the floor, with a carving of a goat. There were dark smudges along the threshold, as if something had been dragged over it. Getting up and through any of the doors would take effort.

His eyes hurt from all the white, and the small hairs along his body were raised as the humming got louder and deeper. As he turned to look at Dee, the hum suddenly increased in pitch, turning into an alarming whine, and with a rumble of hidden machinery, the floor lurched, slowly beginning to rise in jerky increments.

“Marks!” Dee shouted.

He spun, judging the nearest door while reaching blindly behind him for her hand. A trap, then—he’d been wrong, and the Black House had used his sunken memories against him. When he felt her hand slip into his he started for the door that would lead them back to the hall. Thinking of the crunching, collapsing noise underneath the mechanical whine of the room, he hoped there was still a hall to return to.

Suddenly, the noise stopped.

They froze, looking around. The floor, he realized, had risen several feet, bringing the fly door to the proper level, while the other two remained too high off the floor for them to reach.

“Well,” he said, but before he could speak another word, the noise began again, the floor lurched and began rising again, quickly snapping up so that the first door was cut in half by the floor and the second door was at the proper level.

“Don’t move,” Dee whispered. A few seconds later, the floor adjusted upwards again, bringing the final door to the proper height, and then almost immediately churned downward again, returning to the initial position when all three doors were too high off the floor.

A moment later, the cycle began again.

“I really, really, fucking hate this place,” Dee said in a dull, defeated tone.

“Wait,” Marks said, looking around, counting. When he hit a count of eight, the process began again and went through the same pattern while he and Dee stood in the middle of the room fighting for balance. The floor lurched to bring the first door into sync, pause for a few seconds, and then rose up again, and again, and then reset.

“We’ll have to be fast,” he said in the brief pause before it started over. “If we’re slow we could be caught when the floor rises and … ”

“Snapped in half?” Dee asked with a tired smile.

Marks smiled back just as faintly. “Yes,” he said. Then he thought of Dennis and sobered: Dying here was no longer a remote possibility. “Yes,” he repeated. He studied the doors as the floor started upwards again. “We’ll have to be fast.”

“First we have to pick a door.”

He nodded. “Only one choice: Goat.”

“Why goat?”

“The song,” he said. “It’s from my memories. I used to play it on guitar, as a joke—it’s a fucking terrible song. But I remember the chords. The first chord of the song is an E chord. We followed the exit sign to get here. The next chord is a G. So, goat.” He shook his head. “This place plays by rules, in its way. It used your chess stuff to mark the route here, and it’s using my song to mark the route out. It’s literally been whispering the route to me since I got here.”

The floor settled into its brief moment at the top. “All right, goat it is.”

Marks nodded as they headed back down again. “But fast.”

Dee nodded. “So, we time it. When we hit bottom, start counting. Then when it stops at the goat door, I’ll start counting. Then we’ll know how fast we gotta move.”

“Unless the house cheats.”

That shut them up while the floor settled, paused, and then began shuddering upwards again. Marks started counting.

“One Mississippi, two Mississippi …”

At five, the floor was level with the door and stopped moving. Dee started counting, and got to two before the floor started moving up.

“Two seconds,” Marks said glumly. “That’s plenty of time, right?”

“We going together or one by one?”

“Together,” he said. “I’d be worried about being separated. I’d be worried one of us goes through and the floor stops moving. Or, you know, that you go through and the whole goddamn place ceases to exist behind you. Or you go through and the next room is filled with bees, or fire.”

“Fire,” Dee said solemnly. “Burn me before bees.”

“Now you let the place know you hate bees, so it’s gonna be bees.”

“Shit.”

They looked at each other and started laughing as they were headed back down; Marks wasn’t certain if this was cathartic or simple insanity, if they were done being horrified and intimidated or if they’d simply lost all sense, if he really thought there was a way out or not. All he knew was that he didn’t want to stay in this eerie, white room any longer, and whatever they found behind the Goat Door, he would welcome it as a step towards something, even if that something was whatever was causing the crunching noise that had been following them.

As the floor settled into its lowest position, they stepped over to stand just below the door with the carving of a placid goat and faced the wall. As the floor began to rise, they braced themselves, ready to move.

“What’s the song?” Dee suddenly shouted.

“What?”

“The song! What song are we following?”

Marks didn’t answer. He didn’t know the name of it, couldn’t really remember the lyrics. he only had the chords, and even those were rudimentary, simplified.

He saw Agnes again. She was staring at him, and as he imagined her he could hear the song and he could smell her perfume, but nothing else came to him, aside from a shivering feeling of dread.

The floor settled to a stop, and the Goat Door was right in front of them. Dee surged forward, turning the knob and pushing the door in, and as she dived forward a memory bloomed inside him. Froze him in place. Agnes’ face, but bloated, somehow, and pale, drained. Lying, he realized, on the same slab that they’d found Dennis on, dead, bled dry.

And he’d been there. In the Surgery, looking down at her.

“Marks!”

He snapped back to reality just as the floor began to shudder back into motion. Covered in a sudden cold sweat, he dived forward, throwing himself through the door. His feet cleared the opening just as the floor shot upwards, closing off the doorway and leaving him rolling on the floor, covered in the gritty dust of the white stones.

“Marks!” Dee knelt down next to him. She put her hands on his shoulders and he stopped moving, staring up at her without any sign that he saw her. “Are you crying? What is it?”

For a moment he just stared at her. Then he sat up, dragged the sleeve of his jacket across his eyes, and shook himself. “Come on,” he said gruffly, climbing unsteadily to his feet. Dee watched him walk down the usual unfinished hallway and thought he looked suddenly frail, somehow less than he’d been just a few moments before.

“Marks?” she said, following. But he said nothing. Just kept walking.

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As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

36. The Concert Hall

For a moment he was frozen and his mind seemed on the verge of some sort of epiphany, some connection. He saw Agnes—not as she’d appeared since his arrival, but somehow different, more real. He saw her in disarray, in a panic, her face stretched in a mask of horror as she stared at him, her hair tangled, her face streaked with dirt, her blouse torn.

And then she was gone and he was in motion, racing forward. “Dee!”

He forced himself to stop and think, and he realized there were only two possible choices. She’d either tried to go back, to retreat, or she’d gone through the one door that led somewhere they hadn’t yet been: Camel. They’d seen the Spare Room, the Underground, and the Hall of Mirrors—he didn’t think for one moment that she’d purposefully step off the path, purposefully get caught up in the gears of that Black House again. And he didn’t think anyone would have the intestinal fortitude to go back into that vast, empty darkness they’d just escaped from. Unless—

Unless they were going to end themselves. Unless they were going to throw themselves over the side of the path and sail into that darkness, become one with it.

He rejected the idea. Dee was in mourning, she was in shock. She wasn’t suicidal, she wasn’t a quitter. He’d never known someone so young who just kept going like she did. He opened the door with the camel carving and stepped through, finding the familiar brief hallway and the second door. He pushed it open, heart pounding, and stepped through, shouting. “Dee!”

His voice echoed hollowly and he was aware he was in another huge, open space. It was a theater, the ceiling soaring above in a gilded dome, each square panel a faded painting, the colors muted. He turned and found a door still behind him, marked with the Ibex carving, and thought acidly that the place was working hard to sow doubt; a closed retreat choked off choice, making the way forward seem certain.

He was standing on a deep pile green carpet, the aisle stretching forward in the dim light towards the stage, where a string quartet’s instruments had been set up: Two violins and a viola sitting on simple wooden folding chairs, and a cello propped up by a stand. Music stands stood in front of each spot. A spotlight lit up the instruments, while the rest of the concert hall was bathed in gloom.

He could hear her sobbing. Behind that, muffled as if through very thick walls, the crunching noise of the place collapsing. As he stood very still he could feel the vibrations through his feet. The possibility that the noise and vibration was another trick, another illusion designed to herd them like in the New Rooms was real, but he doubted it. The place collapsing seemed perfectly in line with the rest of his experience.

He crept down the aisle, and realized he was kicking up dust as he walked. The whole place was covered in a thick layer of dry grime, and within a few steps he was choking on it. He walked down to the stage and then turned, shielding his eyes from the spotlight and scanning the seats, searching for her. She was sitting three rows from the very top, under the balcony, bent over with her head in her lap.

He didn’t go near her. He stayed down near the stage and gave her some time, looking around. There were four doors he could see: The ibex leading back to the surgery, a fly, a jellyfish, and one at the very back marked with a traditional glowing EXIT sign. He stared at the exit for a moment; it was unusual, but they’d seen the occasional change in the door patterns before and it hadn’t meant anything, really. And ultimately, all it meant here was that they had three choices—three obvious choices—of rooms they hadn’t been to before.

Marks stared at the sign and wondered if it was really that easy, or if they were supposed to think it was that easy, or if they were supposed to ignore it because it was too easy. His head swam, and he decided to look for the chess pieces instead. A Queen, if they were on the right path.

He eyed the rows and rows of seats and felt tired. A small wooden carving could be anywhere in a room like this—and it seemed like the Black House, as he’d come to think of it, was cheating more as they got further along the path, hiding the clues more thoroughly, in less obvious ways. With a sigh, he started searching, choosing the seat on the aisle in the first row and checking under it, putting his fingers into the hinges, pressing down on the cushion.

Then he moved on to the next seat in the row.

He was on the fifth row when Dee stood up, scrubbed her face, and began searching her own seat. They worked in silence, then, quietly moving from spot to spot. Every noise they made was captured and augmented by the acoustics of the space, and yet the air had an insulated quality to it, as if they were sealed inside something. As they worked more and more dust filled the air, hanging in it and scratching their throats and making them cough. They could hear each other’s breaths and grunts as they worked over the low rumble of the Collapse.

They moved on to the next bank of seats. Marks took off his jacket, sweat pouring, the dust getting caked onto him. His mouth was dry and he felt giddy and lightheaded. When his hand brushed something on the floor under a seat in the fifteenth row, he almost moved on to the next seat mechanically before his sluggish brain kicked in and stopped him.

He knelt on the dusty floor and leaned down, pushing his hand under the seat. Just as his hand closed around the small carving, he heard Dee gasp.

“Found it!” she shouted.

He stared at the tiny wooden carving, vaguely feminine, the tiny crown just a few pointed ridges on the head. He stood up and turned to look over at Dee, who stood holding something aloft in her hand. He raised his own in response, and for a moment they just stared at each other. Slowly, they walked down the aisles and met in front of the stage again, holding up the carvings they’d found.

“King,” Marks said.

“Queen.”

They traded the pieces, fondling them in their hands, and then handed them back again.

“What’s that mean?” Dee asked. She sounded exhausted.

Marks shook his head. “Hell if I know.” He pushed his damp hair out of his face. “This place is messing with us again, right? Trying to stick with its own rules, but in a way that makes us doubt what we’re doing. So, following that, we’re on the right track and this is just the last room on it. This is where we’re supposed to be.”

Dee looked around. “Shit, of course it would be some creepy empty theater. I feel like there’s ghosts in all those seats, watchin’ us.”

Marks turned and set the Queen on the edge of the stage. “So I guess we still have to figure out what our next move is.”

Dee nodded, setting the King next to the Queen with careful attention, an almost gentle movement of her hand. She stared at the pair. “So, where do we go?”

Marks looked back at the doors. “Jellyfish. Exit. Fly. One of these things is not like the others.”

“Maybe on purpose,” Dee said. “What about backstage?”

Marks blinked, then turned to look at the stage again. A tattered red curtain hung along the back, and there were, of course, left and right exits that led behind it. “Well, shit,” he said. “Let’s take a look.”

They walked to the side of the stage and found a set of sagging old plywood steps that creaked and groaned under them as they climbed them. The grinding, snapping noise of the Collapse was louder, Marks, thought, and the constant vibration under his feet was palpable even when he wasn’t concentrating on it. Whether it was an illusion or not, whether it was designed to instill panic in them and keep them moving or if it was the real end of everything that was and had been their world, it was becoming too loud to ignore.

On stage they kicked up huge new clouds of dust, walking directly to the right side of the stage and ducking behind the curtain. To their disappointment, however, all they found was a blank wall, with just a narrow channel between the curtain and the wall to walk down to the other side. When they emerged back onto the stage, Marks mused on the essentially dramatic nature of the Black House: It was all sets, all props, all bullshit. It had taken pieces of their subconscious and fashioned them into a place that seemed real but was all just fakery.

They wandered over to the instruments, covered in a thick line of dust. Dee reached out and touched one of the violins, and a string snapped with a loud snap. She snatched her hand away and thrust it into her mouth, stepping back with a grunt.

Marks didn’t try to touch anything, but he walked over to the music stands and leaned in to examine the sheet music. He paused, then leaned closer and blew the layer of dust off, squinting. He stared at the music for a long time; it was actually not musical notation. It was something called tablature, and he was suddenly aware that he understood this because he once played guitar, as a hobby. Tablature was a simplified system of notation, and he could read it perfectly well.

After a moment he straightened up, and studied the hall around them.

“Come on,” he said. “I know which way to go.”

He leaned forward and slid the first sheet from the nearest stand and held it in his hand, studying it.

Dee frowned. “What door? How do you know?”

He continued to stare at the music for a few moments, and when he turned to look at her, she was startled to see his eyes shining with sudden tears.

“The Exit,” he said with a horrible, warped smile. “Of course. So obvious you doubt yourself.”

“How do you know?” she repeated.

He shrugged, gesturing at the sheet music and turning towards the steps. “Because I know this song.”

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As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

35. The Incision Room

The hallway ended, as always, at a door, which appeared to be similar in every way to all the other doors: Dark wood, the ibex carved into it, a brass handle polished from frequent use. He pulled it open.

The coppery-fish smell of blood stopped him in his tracks.

It was a surgery. At one time the tiles might have been a shining white and a clinical blue, but they had faded into a uniform sort of yellow, the color of pus and infection. The carts of instruments had been overturned and bent. The operating table in the center of the room was an explosion of blood, soaked through with little rivers of it dripping onto the floor. Several instruments were scattered directly around it, as if dropped in surprise.

“Stay behind me a moment,” he whispered, putting out his hand protectively.

Bloodied instruments were scattered everywhere, and pools of blood jellied on the floor. The single bulb lighting the room was flickering, obviously on its last reserves of filament. Its weak light made the blood appear darker than it really was, almost ruby.

A shining trail of blood lead from the table to one of four exits, swinging, glass-paned hospital doors, each bearing a typical carving: Stag, hippo, unicorn, and camel. Marks examined the swath of red liquid leading to the Hippo door that he knew led to the Hall of Mirrors, noting the sheer amount of it and thinking that something that could bleed so much and still walk must be huge, monstrous.

The doors marked giraffe and stag had once featured small signs that had been torn off, leaving ragged corners as evidence. The camel door’s remnant showed a clear letter “S.” Marks wondered if it had once read “surgery.”

“Bishop,” Dee said in a quiet, unhappy voice. “If this is the path, we should find a bishop in here.”

Marks contemplated searching through the gore unhappily. He had a strong sense that the blood, were he to touch it, would be warm. Fresh. And it would bring up the obvious question—obvious to him, at least—of whose blood it was, and whether either Dee or himself might be scheduled for a visit with whatever horrific doctor had created this mess.

The noise of the place’s slow collapse buzzed all around them, vibrating in the floor, in their bones. He’d forgotten about it during their long, silent trek through the wall. For a moment Marks expected Agnes and Dennis to come dancing in, to continue their program of torment and hilarity. But nothing happened. The growing buzzsaw of destruction remained a steady distraction, the blood dripped, and their time got shorter and shorter.

They searched. Gingerly, at first, trying not to touch the gore, trying to keep their clothes clear of it. Then more desperately, smearing the blood, sliding in it, splashing it around. Marks wondered if this was an elaborate trap: They were shrunken down, now, and even if they turned back the dark place they’d just barely made it through would be an impossibility without a new source of light. And a source of water. Even if they could still make their way back to the pantry and the kitchen, would they remain microscopic in size?

There was no avoiding it: Before long they were both filthy. The smell of blood and the sensation of it made them both wretch, and Marks became convinced this was part of the plan, to make them both as miserable as possible. Which meant they might be getting close to the way out, which meant things were going to be heading downhill fast from this new low point.

He was sweating again, and aside from being very aware of what he must smell like, he could feel the itchy presence of the cash still sewn into his jacket. It suddenly felt heavy and useless, and he wondered why he hadn’t thought to just toss it away.

“Fuck,” Dee said, for a moment sounding just like the distrustful, moody kid he’d met in a motel bar … was it just a few days ago? It felt like they’d been in the Black House for months. “If we both starting puking, Marks, shit’s going to get real.”

Marks swallowed back bile as he investigated the horrifying contents of a small trash bin in a shadowed corner of the surgery. It was filled with soiled sponges, rags, and viscera, and his own stomach kept threatening to rise up through his throat and strangle him as he sifted the contents. The urge to just assume they were still on the right trail and move on was growing, but he fought against it. Cutting corners would just risk being trapped in the place even longer.

“Marks!”

He leaped up and turned. Dee was standing in front of the wall opposite the four exits. He quickly crossed over to her, trying to wipe his bloody hands off on anything he could find. She pointed at the wall and Marks realized for the first time that there was a small door there, about three feet wide and three feet tall. It was made of metal that had been painted the same color as the wall, making it hard to see, and had a punch-out for a tag or small sign towards the top. There had once been a handle, evidenced by two screw holes, but someone had removed it.

“Is that a damn morgue whatever you call it?”

Marks nodded. “Cold chamber. Looks like it.”

They both stared at it in silence for a moment.

“Okay, so it’s obvious, right, that there’s a dead body in there in some sort of horrifying state of rot,”
Dee said slowly, “and that the Bishop piece is inside said body, right?”

Marks sighed. “Yep.”

She looked sideways up at him. “I will choose you for it.”

Marks smiled. “Odds and evens?”

She nodded, grim.

“Forget it,” he said. “I got us into this, I’ll carve it out of whatever we find in there.”

He looked around and located a bone chisel. Wiping it off on his trousers, he took it to the chamber and ran his chapped, painful fingers around the seam until he found a spot he thought he might get some purchase. Working patiently he set the edge of the chisel into place and worked it under the lip, coaxing the drawer out millimeter by millimeter until he could worm fingers between the drawer and the slot. Grabbing hold, he pulled the heavy drawer out, backing up as he did so.

The figure on the slab was human, covered with a white sheet that had soaked up blood from the various incisions inflicted on it. One hand had slipped from under the sheet, and Marks stared at the dark skin for a moment before turning suddenly.

“Listen,” he said, licking his lips and wishing fervently for booze, any sort. He could taste it, the sharp, chemical wash of cheap whiskey, the antiseptic, nauseous flavor of vodka, the fizzy stale bread of beer. It flooded his mouth as if the recipe was locked inside his saliva, ready to produce alcohol when he was under stress. “Listen—”

He paused, uncertain what to say. His mind raced through the possibilities, but he knew Dee was too smart. He watched her expression go from expectant to irritated to worried, and then watched it collapse, her face hollowing out, her eyes suddenly wet.

“Oh fuck,” she said, softly.

He leaned forward and put his hands on her shoulders. Was it the first time he’d touched her? He wasn’t certain, but it felt like it. He pushed down on her gently, as if to hold her in place, stop her from moving.

“Listen,” he said. “I want you to go to the other side of the room—”

Her eyes widened and she raised her arms, looking at the blood on her hands. Then she spun around, looking at the mess everywhere. “Oh my god,” she said in a strangled voice. “Oh my fucking god!”

“Hey!”

He spun her back around forcefully and shook her. “Listen to me! I want you to go to the other side of the room. I want you to turn around. I want you to stay that way until I say otherwise. Do you hear me? Dee! Do you hear me?”

She was shaking her head, tears running down her face. “No, no, no, no, no,” she wailed softly. Her eyes flicked over his shoulder to the slab. “Daddy!”

He shook her again, then took her by the chin and moved her head, forcing her to look back at him. His fingers left smears of blood on her face. “Dee,” he said softly, breathing hard. “Dee, listen. Go. Turn around. Don’t look until I tell you.”

She shook her head. “You don’t know—”

“Dee,” he said, and she stopped speaking. “Of course we know. This place … it’s obvious.”

She was breathing in painful little gasps. “You don’t have—”

“Yes,” he said. “I do. You know I do. We have to know, or else we’ll get lost. We have to be sure we’re on the path.”

For a moment they stared at each other, him leaning down, hands on her shoulders, her looking up, chin quivering, tears dropping from her eyes. The noise of destruction seemed louder than ever, like a million termites consuming a house, amplified a thousand times.

Slowly, she nodded.

He almost fell as the tension drained from him. “Good,” he said, trying to catch his breath, trying to slow his heart. “Good girl. Go on. Don’t turn until I say.”

Slowly, still nodding, she turned and walked away. He waited until she was on the other side of the operating table, facing the wall. Shaking, he turned back to the body on the slab. He reached out and picked up the crisp white corner of the sheet, holding it gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. He glanced over to be sure she wasn’t looking, and lifted the sheet.

He recognized Dennis instantly. His face was splattered in his own blood, but was otherwise untouched, and he looked exactly like the entity that had fooled Dee earlier. The eyes were open, and stared blankly at the ceiling.

“This fucking place,” Marks whispered.

A wave of dizziness swept through him, and he imagined he could hear the song Agnes kept humming.

And she said, “Aw, it’s you.”

He shook the words and notes out of his head and peeled the sheet back, revealing Dennis’ naked body. Marks quickly glanced at Dee; she was still turned away.

Dennis had been cut open with a standard autopsy Y-incision. The flesh had been put back in place, but not stitched up.

“Goddamn you,” Marks whispered, heart pounding. “I am going to spend the rest of my life learning how to burn this place. Whatever it is. Wherever it is.”

He hadn’t taken it seriously. At first he’d assumed it was a place of chaos, a prank, a place designed to keep him running. Even when he’d lost Dee and spent—weeks?—in the maze searching for her, he hadn’t quite realized where they were. It wasn’t a puzzle box. Or a Soul Engine. Or an Insanity Box. It was a meat grinder that enjoyed playing with its food.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the dead man he’d never met, not really. “I’m so sorry. But I’m going to get her out of here.”

He reached out and took hold of a flap of flesh and began to peel.

The bishop carving was where the heart had once been. It sat, pristine, in the chest cavity, a small piece of wood that had only the most surreal and basic resemblance to a bishop. He didn’t reach for it, or touch it. He stared at it for several pounding heartbeats and then gently replaced the flap, then the sheet. Slowly, so as not to jostle the body, he pushed the slab back into the chamber.

For a few moments he stood leaning with his forehead pressed against the wall, just breathing.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, you can turn around now. We’re still on the path.”

When she made no reply, he turned his head, then froze. Dee was gone.

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As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

34. The Mousehole

“So,” Dee said after a long period of silence, “why does she—Agnes—keep asking you if you remember her?”

Marks didn’t answer right away. They were … he wasn’t sure where they were. It felt different from everything else they’d encountered, less defined somehow. They’d stepped into the dark maw of the mousehole, he’d fished his flashlight from the backpack, and they’d started walking. At first they’d been in a tunnel, rough-hewn, like something had chewed it into existence. He’d been aware of the ceiling and walls of the tunnel.

Slowly, though, the space had widened out, and now he had a sense of being in an immense cavern, pitch black. The path was illuminated for a few feet in front of them and few feet behind, but the light of the flashlight, which turned into a small lantern when slid into the open position, didn’t reach very far. The path might be just a narrow lane elevated over a bottomless chasm.

The moment he thought it, he was convinced that was exactly what was happening.

“Stay in the center,” he said quietly. “Don’t wander to the edge.”

“Gee, that’s encouraging,” Dee said.

Their voices echoed distantly, and the air, which had been almost unbearably hot in the pantry, had turned cold.

“So,” Dee said. “Agnes?”

Marks nodded. “She’s like your Dad—this place made her in the image of someone I used to know.”

“Who?”

He shook his head. “I can’t remember. I can tell it’s someone … important. Someone that should be messing with me, making me really sad and upset. But I can’t quite see her.”

“And you ain’t trying too hard, huh?”

He smiled thinly in the darkness. “No. I’m not sure I see the upside of remembering her. Not while I’m in here.”

They walked on in silence. Somewhere, very far away, there was a screeching cry, like a bird of prey’s call. But incredibly distant. They both stopped and looked up and around. But the light of the flashlight was too feeble; all they could see was darkness.

“Water’s gone,” Marks said.

They’d rested, sitting in the dim glow of the small lantern, feasting on the crumbs and dregs left in his bag. Around them the sound of wind was hollow and constant, a soft reminder of the huge space all around them. He looked around at the darkness and considered tossing the empty plastic bottle into it to see if there were any audible clues as to what might be found out there, but reconsidered, thinking that they might come across another water supply and want the bottle.

They’d been walking for a long time, though he wasn’t sure how long. Dee’s phone battery had died, and he didn’t have a watch. They were stuck in a formless, timeless void, shrunk down to—what? Atomic scale? Quantum? Were they getting smaller and smaller with each step? All of those possibilities seemed perfectly valid.

“It’s cold,” Dee complained, hugging herself.

Marks shrugged off his jacket and held it out to her. The girl hesitated, then nodded, taking it and pulling it on. He thought briefly of the money sewn into the lining, and then dismissed it. He wasn’t sure money would ever matter again.

“Come on,” he said. “We should get moving before the batteries in the flashlight start to go.”

“Jesus hell,” Dee said, getting to her feet. “Don’t say that.”

They walked.

They made a shelter of sorts; Mark unfolded the shovel and jammed the blade into the soft dirt of the path, and they hung his jacket on the handle, stretched it out and anchored it on the other end with the backpack. It wasn’t much, but it felt better than sleeping out in the open, surrounded by darkness. When they were settled, Marks turned off the flashlight.

The darkness was immediate and complete. The world, small as it had become, vanished completely. Marks clutched the flashlight tightly and pushed it deep into his pocket. There would be no morning, no sunrise, no other light source. If they lost the flashlight, they were doomed.

He closed his eyes and opened them and there was no difference.

“Marks?” Dee said softly. “You there? You still there?”

“I’m here.”

There was at least the sound of the wind, some kind of proof that the world still existed, that there was something out there. Marks lay quietly, trying to feign sleep for Dee’s sake, trying to project a calm acceptance, a confidence maybe that there would be light again, that this was just temporary. Dee had grown quiet, plodding along without any of the chatter or energy he’d grown used to. He was worried they wouldn’t get through this fast enough to save her.

He lay there and listened to the black wind.

“Mr. Marks.”

He nodded. “Might as well call me Phil,” he said. “Seems kind of silly to call me mister like I’m your teacher.”

“Never gonna happen.”

“All right. What?”

They walked a few more steps before she responded. “What if we never get out of here? What if this is a Trap Room?”

He nodded again. The thought had occurred to him. They’d camped out twice now, the rest of their lives just walking in the tiny pool of light afforded by the flashlight. He didn’t know how long they’d slept, or how long they’d walked. He decided to call it two days.

“Then we die here, kid.”

They walked.

“There’s no bishop,” Dee said after a while. “If we’re on the right path, there should be a bishop.”

Marks nodded. He thought the flashlight was dimmer. It definitely was. When they’d started their trek in the total pitch blackness it had been bright enough to see a few feet ahead of them. Now it was barely more than a foot, just enough to take a step. He thought it wouldn’t be long before it faded completely, leaving them alone in the most intense blackness he’d ever experienced. He realized it had never even occurred to him to buy extra batteries.

“I don’t think we’re in a room, technically,” he said. “I think we’re … in-between rooms. In-between all the actual spaces. I think when we shrunk down, we kept shrinking, and we’re in the wall. Like, literally, in the wall.”

“Well, it ain’t crazier than anything else that’s happened,” Dee said. There were a few moments of silence. “But we’ve been here a long time.”

And it’s getting dark, he thought.

“Tell me about your Dad,” he said, wanting to distract them both. “What he’s really like.”

She didn’t respond right away. When she did, she spoke in a low, dense voice. “He’s really like he was here, actually. Kind of serious all the time. Restless. Always moving. He’s got this sadness in him, like he knows he’s wasted time, made mistakes, and can’t ever forget it. But he’s silly sometimes. Has this really, really lame sense of humor.” She sighed, and Marks thought it was the most relaxed sound she’d made since arriving at the Black House. “A lot of fart jokes.”

“I think I’d like him.”

“You will,” she said pointedly. “Hey, Marks—how’d you get into all this shit, anyway? All this weird stuff?”

He squinted in the dimming light, which was going much faster than he’d expected. Was there some faint outline ahead? Something resolving out of the darkness? It might be an artifact, a trick of the light. “You know what? I remember this. I never forgot it. Or I did, but only for a really short time. Maybe it’s because it was so far in the past, it was burned in better. Or maybe it’s because it’s so fundamental to who I became.”

As he spoke, the light grew steadily weaker, the path in front of them harder to make out.

“It was an email. Or a bunch of emails. There was a kid in school, high school, who died. Some bizarre disease, something super rare. He was sixteen and he just died, and it was a shock. All of us in school went to his funeral. We didn’t know how to dress, how to act. And the worst part was, the kid? Who died? Total asshole. Everyone fucking hated him.”

“Why?”

Marks grimaced. There was something up ahead, but he couldn’t make it out. He decided not to call attention to it until he knew what it was.

“He was one of those guys who was just mean. Nothing nice to say to or about anyone. Everyone was dumb. Everyone was lame. He’d heard your music before, long ago when it was still fresh and exciting. He’d read all the books and heard all the jokes and anything you did was just tired and boring. And he had money.”

Dee snorted. “Money. Marks, you coulda just said that.”

“So he dies, and everyone pretends to be broken up about it, but we’re all just kind of okay with this guy being dead. And then my friend calls me one day and says he saw him. At the mall. Eating a cheeseburger in the food court by himself. He says he looked right at him, and the dead kid winked and got up and walked away.”

A few more steps, a little darker. “So?” Dee finally asked. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. I never found out. That’s what drove me to this. I never did the legwork, I never investigated, and to this day I don’t know if my friend was crazy, or if that kid didn’t die, or if it was a ghost. And it bothered me. Still does. And I slowly became incapable of letting anything like that slide.”

“Marks, that’s a real crap origin story. You ever get famous, I advise you to dirty that up a little.” He could see her, dimly, turn to look back at him. “We’re going dark, ain’t we?”

“Afraid so.”

“Shit.”

“There’s something up ahead, though,” he said, slowly, hesitant. “I can’t exactly make it out. Might be a door.”

“Might be?”

He shrugged. He could barely make out the faint outlines of the path, much less something looming up a few dozen feet ahead of them. “All right, it’s absolutely a door. Feel better?”

“No.”

The flashlight went out.

It was a slow, majestic fade, a sudden decline from bare illumination into total blackness. Marks froze where he was. He widened his eyes.

“Dee?”

“Here.”

“Don’t move for a moment.”

“You think you gotta tell me that?”

“Let’s see if our eyes adjust at all. Maybe there’s a tiny amount of light that might help.”

“Okay.”

He stood. He could hear the faint whine and wheeze of the wind, he could hear Dee breathing and swallowing. He could hear himself doing the same. But there was nothing visual. After a few minutes, he held his hand up near his face. Touched his nose. And couldn’t see it at all.

“Not working,” Dee said, her voice shaky.

He shut his eyes. “Then we walk.”

“But we can’t see. We might wander off course. Fall of an edge. Be lost—”

“Listen,” he said, kneeling down and sweeping his hand around. He found a small pebble and picked it up. He stood, took a deep breath, and threw the pebble as hard as he could in the direction he was still fairly certain was in front of them. There was a distinct plink of impact.

“That’s the door,” he said. He saw no reason to be careful in his language. If it wasn’t a door there would be plenty of time for them to come to terms with the fact later. “We take a few steps, we throw a rock, we orient. It’s like Sonar.”

“Okay,” Dee said. She sounded doubtful. He knelt and found another pebble. “Listen for it, then walk towards the sound. Just take a few steps. The fewer steps you take, the more likely you won’t get off track. I’m right behind you.”

He threw the stone. He took three steps and heard Dee doing the same. He wasn’t going to let something like twenty feet be the end of them. Not now.

They repeated the process nine or ten times, and then Dee grunted. “Just walked into a wall.”

Marks stepped forward until he bumped into it as well. “All right,” he said. “If it’s a door it’s not very wide. Don’t move to your left or right. Lean, but don’t step, yes? Try to find the door handle. Or anything. But don’t move your feet.”

They searched. The sound of their hands against the stone in the perfect pitch blackness was horrifying, a dry, itchy sound accented by their desperate, unhappy breathing.

“Found it!” Dee shouted. Before he could react, he heard the click of a latch, and then light, white and blinding, flooded into the space. He stumbled back to let her open the door all the way, shielding his tender eyes. The doorway framed the usual drywalled hallway, with the usual bend after a few dozen feet. The familiarity of it was so welcome he almost laughed.

She stepped into it without hesitation, turning to smile back at him. “Come on!” she said, looking dirty and thin. “Things are gonna start going our way now. I can feel it.”

He nodded, following her. He stepped into the hallway, eyes stinging from the light, and then turned to look behind them. The path, as he’d suspected, was just wide enough for two people, and dropped off to a deadly edge, nothing but blackness on either side. He paused for a moment, contemplating, and then turned to follow, pulling the door shut behind him.

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