I hate pces like this.
The first thing I feel is not the floor beneath my feet or the smell, but some deafening, detached realisation that there is no way out. I've been trapped in minds before. Minds that wanted to kill me. Minds that wanted to erase themselves from the inside out. In minds that were mere remnants of the human mind, clinging to existence itself. But this pce... It doesn't want to kill or distort or break. It doesn't want anything. It just is. A trap for no one.
I'm stood in a corridor stretching into infinity. The floor is tiled, the walls are covered in pale wallpaper with a geometric pattern, but the pattern seems to shake and distort, as if something is moving beneath the thin yer of paper. The light is unnatural, no shadows, no source. It's just there. Dead, cold, eternal. And the voices. They won't shut up. Puzzled little whispers, varying in timbre, tone, or speed, echo from behind the walls, or is it the walls themselves communicating.
"You know what you have to do, don't you?""You don't have to be here, but you will be here. We'll all be here."
Psychosis.
Doors. Endless doors on either side of the corridor, like soldiers on parade, ready to reveal another piece of someone else's madness before me. I open the first one. There is no furniture in the room. Only the maid herself. She stands, a watering can in her hands, water running from it onto the wet floor. I don't immediately realise what she's watering - nothing. Or maybe it's something I can't see.
“What are you doing?” I ask, even though I already know I won't like the answer.
She doesn't turn round.
“I'm watering the flowers," she answers, and there's no doubt in her voice, only exhaustion.
“There are no flowers here.”
She shakes her head.
“They're just invisible. If you don't look at them, they'll rot. I hope they're still here.”
She hopes they are. Doesn't know. She doesn't believe. She just hopes.
I stare at the empty room, at the droplets dripping down her clothes. The water goes into the cracks in the floor as if they were the capilries of a huge creature. I close the door.
"Where are you? You're already here. You're lost, you'll never be lost."
Another room. It has only a narrow, high window. There's no furniture under it, nothing to climb on. Just the maid. She stands beneath the window with her head tilted back, looking up.
"What are you doing?"
"Counting clouds."
"How?"
She's silent. Only her fingers curl. I can't see the sky. Only a narrow strip of light that seems as artificial as this world.
"You promised to be humble, aren't you humble? Why aren't you humble?"
A queue. Of her alone. Shes are standing in a looped line, occasionally moving a step.
"Do you want to be humble? Tell me what you want. You can't say it. You must be silent."
All of the rooms have the same wallpaper of sharp geometric lines, but in each room the wallpaper differs in texture or changes shades from normal to dirty.
Dust. There is dust everywhere. Mountains of dust. It's impossible to clean, but she keeps on cleaning. Her hands are in the dirt, a yer of ages, and she swipes at the dust and it takes off like a swarm of flies, but immediately settles a little farther away, mocking her hands. The air is whipped, dry. It presses on me like all the worlds I've visited today.
“You know what you need to do, don't you?”
"Don't do it... You can't do it. Tell me, do you want it? Do you want this?"
A room full of clocks. The hands move jerkily. Some go forward, some go backward. Others just wobble in pce.
"I have to keep track of time," she whispers. "I should."
"But it's going wrong."
"I know it is.
" I look at the nearest clock face. The time is 25:81. The hands begin to spin faster, as if they can sense my gaze.
A sharp shout interrupts the voices, but then they continue as if nothing had happened.
Occasionally there is furniture. Chairs too high, tables too low. Mirrors reflect things, people, and actions with slight differences. Some appliance makes a pulsing, ominous sound and exhales smoke as if its purpose is to torment.
I keep walking. The corridor stretches again, like an unwinding reel of film. A draft flows along the walls, carrying the smell of damp paper and rusty iron. And then there's the door. Heavy, wooden, with a dark iron ring instead of a handle. I push it open.
Inside is the other maid. She kneels in a mountain of garbage - shreds of yellowed papers, broken pocket watches, pieces of cloth, old keys, the remnants of someone's life piled there. Her hands are digging through the junk, but her eyes are bnk, not seeing, just looking.
"What are you looking for?" I ask.
She doesn't answer right away. Only after a few moments, without stopping digging, she mumbles:
"Truth."
"Any luck?"
"It must be here somewhere..." her fingers fumble for something. She pulls out a thin metal key and hands it to me. It's cold, like it's just been pulled from the grave. "This way.
All but one of the corridor doors open at once. They come out of every room. All at once. All the same. All her. Hers footsteps are quiet, synchronized, but hers don't look at me. Just move like blind actors following an unknown script. If I follow them, I'll never come out again.
The key comes to a closed door. Behind it is me. Younger, about twenty-something. The square face has not yet cut through the gray, the posture is straighter, the gaze clearer, without the heaviness I carry now. He - me - walks into Longford Manor.
I take a step forward. The young me lifts his head. We say:
"Where is that room?"
I am snapped back to reality.
I hate pces like this.