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Helen doesn’t know how long she’s been here.
The concept of time ended at the closing of a door. There are only hallways now. No where or when, only hallways. A reprieve, and then hallways again. Hallways and hallways.
Walking makes it worse. It doesn’t bring her any deeper, nor closer to escape. It doesn’t bring her anywhere at all, only back, and nowhere, and never. The buzzing in her head that makes it hard to think shows no sign of stopping. It’s terror and despair, so constant they fade into the wallpaper. Not buzzing. The twisting. She’s starting to twist around the corners as the corners twist around her.
Each old new identical and unfamiliar hallway swallows her up in a new and exactly the same way, each turned corner alike and yet worse than the last.
In the instant and the years since she entered, she has not gotten tired. Not physically. Her mind is drawn thin and strange from lack of sleep and overdose of hallways, but her feet don’t hurt from walking. She assumes she still has feet.
She’s not hungry. She’s not thirsty. She’s not sure she needs to breathe. Is there even air in here? She doesn’t remember how to tell if there is air.
This place that is not a place and cannot ever be will not kill her. She’s not sure when that thought worms its way through the terror worn thin against the inside of her skin. Death has no place here. She will not die, will not end, only walk until she fades into the wallpaper as well. She doesn’t want either. She wants out.
It’s too late to go home, even if she escapes. She leaves footprints on the carpet, and the carpet leaves footprints on her.
Walking makes it worse, but the ever-winding halls don’t allow for stopping. If she stands still they shift around her, switch up and down and left and right until she starts moving just to catch her balance. If she dares sit, the wallpaper changes colour every time she blinks and doors open their maws wide behind her back and under her feet. If she stays put regardless, closes her eyes and swallows the headache and nausea, it shows up. The thing that laughs and looks like wallpaper made flesh.
Helen does not want to die. Running is worse than walking. She walks.
She hates the hallways. The hate is drawn as thin and brittle as her fear. She has always been here. The memories of life before are clear to her still. She is not the same woman who stumbled through the yellow door. She knows the face in the mirrors on the walls. She’s not sure who owns it anymore. She hates the hallways. The hallways are home, almost familiar, all she’s ever known. She hates the thing that laughs.
The thing that laughs wants to eat her. The hallways are the thing that laughs, and it is them. The hallways are eating her. She cannot die here. They will not let her.
She hates the hallways. The hallways hold her, love her.
She hates the hallways.
Once, forever and a moment ago, she tried and failed to draw a map. It can’t be done. She knows it can’t be done. But she was outside the door, then. She was the Helen before the hallways. Almost before, tasting it, not knowing it. She is the Helen that is here, now, with carpet-print on her shoes and wallpaper-paint on her fingertips.
There is a pen in her pocket. She takes it to the wall, draws lines and lines and lines until the thing that laughs is laughing at her to run. She thinks it hates her.
The thing is the hallways. It hates her. The hallways do not.
Helen hates the thing that laughs.
The pen never runs out of ink. The walls shift and change as she blinks, but her scribbled maps stay put until the laughing thing comes chasing.
None of the maps make sense, but there is none of that here anyway. Helen breathes the scent of struck lightning and old wallpaper glue and lets it stain her teeth on the way out, presses her hand to her ribs and feels them branching. Her maps come together, one impossible turn after another. All she has to do is look from the right angle.
The only pattern that holds is that there is no pattern. It’s a song with no rhythm, no tone or harmony. Sometimes she can almost remember the lyrics.
She walks endless hallways. She stops to draw. She runs from the laughter.
The laughing thing doesn’t fit here, any more than she does, but it can hardly eat itself like she is being eaten. Her fear is worn so thin now that she can watch it with clear eyes in the mirrors as she runs from it. Even as it comes through the mirrors and forces her to turn, she watches it.
It doesn’t fit the song. A harmony in the dissonance, a note predictably in place. It disrupts the perfect awfulness of the hallways. It’s not right. It’s not the right kind of wrong.
Helen draws maps on the walls with mirror-glass fingers and the walls let her do it. The laughing thing chases, and she runs.
It is predictable, can be predicted. The hallways are not, cannot, will not allow it.
It is the hallways. The hallways are it.
Helen wonders if hallways can get sick.
She draws maps and opens doors, leans against mirrors to feel the weight of her mirrored self and studies hanging decorations. They make her head spin, but her head is always spinning. She knows the hallways. They are unknowable, but they are staining all that she is.
She hates the laughing thing, hates how predictable it is. She learns how to stand still so it will not notice her quickly. She hates it. The hallways.
Her hate is drawn thin and brittle. She… the hallways.
A fleeting thought visits her mind that Helen is dead, and she is only her ghost, haunting impossible hallways and her own memory. But Helen doesn’t want to die. She keeps walking.
Her fear is either gone or fused with her skin, so much a part of her it doesn’t matter anymore.
The thing that laughs is a disturbance, an irritant. Truth until you trust it, then it lies, that is right, but it is more than that. Anger and the chase, resentment, hatred, a contaminant into the pure, dizzying halls. Predictable. Easy. Stupid. Anger makes it a straight line where none belong, cutting through the beautiful tangle. Sickness.
Helen is never getting out. There is not enough of her left to get out.
But it can leave, through perfect, impossible doors. It leaves in anger and mischief and anger and anger. Stupid. Predictable.
Helen does not choose her own path as she walks. There is no such thing. But she can follow the laughter, easily. As long as it is distracted, and it is oh so distractable.
Sickness in her beautiful hallways. A heart that doesn’t twist quite far enough, that festers in its corners. It is outside, now, momentarily. Distracted.
There is no Helen left to reach out. She locks the door regardless.
Just fear, just a little, just feel a little bit of fear. The doorhandle rattles. The laughing thing stops laughing. This is impossible, you know it is impossible, you are the impossible, you are, should be, would be, just fear a little, Michael, just a drop, just a moment, just a little bit, remember the fear that you are. The Archivist drew every festering human bit left in you to the surface, just fear, just skim them off, just remember, just fear a drop and you can die, don’t you want to die, Michael? Don’t you want this to end? Just a drop just one drop just a whiff of fear and you can end, this can end just once just a drop just—