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It takes a moment of adjustment before it sets in that Helen Richardson is once again in the corridors. There’s something about the air behind that yellow door, a simultaneous grittiness and airiness that fizzes through her lungs and puts static between her ears, something that messes with her mind, so as soon as she realizes she’s back she promptly forgets it again, before it settles down in her mind like a blanket smothering her.
When she was in the corridors the first time, she mainly felt confusion and an ever-growing sense of debilitating fear. She went through all the stages: denial, telling herself that she was caught in some hellish dream; anger as she smashed the mirrors that didn’t quite show the right reflection and the photographs in their garish frames; pleading out loud as if that strange man with the fractals for hair would take pity on her and let her out. She gave up and gave in and found her anger again, letting it carry her back into the streets of Dulwich and she had made it out and recovered only to fall back into the horror. The first time, she had a constant stream of emotions to keep herself together, but this time, she barely has the energy to stand upright. So this time, she finds it harder to hold on to herself.
She walks around and around and around, drifting in between a state of terror and a state of blissful dissociation. In her moments of lucidity, Helen tries to find it within herself to scream, pound at the tacky yellow walls, claw up the polyester fuzz of the mustard carpeting. More than once, she comes back to herself in the process of standing up, having forgotten what she was doing in the first place. And then it gets harder and more painful to even stay focused on remembering herself, and its so much easier to just let herself be carried through the fractal maze of the creature’s halls.
She blinks and blinks and then looks up at the popcorn ceiling, really looks in a way that involves unfocusing her eyes a bit, and is strangely delighted to see the shifting texture swirling into itself. There’s a strange, tickling sensation in her fingertips and she feels the grooves of her fingerprints expanding outward to an infinitesimally dense point of singularity. She still feels the fear and horror, of course, but its somewhere in a part of her brain that her consciousness is slightly to the left of, so she can’t worry too much about it.
She doesn’t want to, anyways. It’s so relaxing to be swept along, and if she doesn’t actually think about what she’s doing she forgets that she’s a singular thing at all, forgets that things with concrete existences exist, lets herself dissolve into entropy. She jumps in and out of the fabric of the walls like she’s a skipping rock, gives up trying to understand and surrenders to the indescribable euphoria of change and undefined. She can’t feel her body, can’t coalesce herself into a soul-
The image of an eye, painfully precise in a way that cuts into the Distortion’s nonexistence, pins down the patterns of Its fractals. An eye, the memory of the click of a recorder, making a statement, and suddenly Helen Richardson exists again. That’s right. The Magnus Institute, and she double-checked the door to that man’s office before she entered the room and started scribbling her map. Helen Richardson remembers how the archivist, Jon, looked at her as she spoke. How he believed her, gave her sympathy, how even though telling the story brought all the pain flooding back it still felt like a weight off her back. She keeps the weight of his eyes close to her chest, tethering her How to her sternum along with her Who and Where and What and Why, and finds herself standing on the polyester fuzz of mustard carpeting. Around her are mirrors that reflect herself. They show her in all her splendor: her torn pantsuit, frizzy hair, scuffed heels. Her hands, with joints that don’t quite bend in the right places or the right way. Her hair, spiraling away and into itself. She sees herself in all the mirrors, and suddenly knows what she, Helen Richardson, needs to do.
She puts one twisted, twisting, fractalizing hand up to a mirror. She thinks of doors.
She thinks of Helen Richardson.
As she steps through.