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[ARCHIVIST] Statement of Oliver Beebo, regarding an abandoned art gallery.
Statement begins.
[ARCHIVIST(STATEMENT)] It looked like a normal case, at first. I should probably explain my job- I’m a detective. A private one, not with the police. I just have to pick up their slack- but that’s irrelevant.
Being a detective usually doesn’t give you murder cases or anything like that, so the missing cat wasn’t a surprise.
I’d taken cases like that before, so no reason to think anything… odd would happen. Animals go missing all the time, especially cats.
Apparently there were a lot of them around the area, so I thought he might’ve run off with another kitty and gotten stuck, or lost. The art gallery seemed like a good place to start.
It was obviously abandoned, what with the overgrown walls and broken windows. I was kind of worried about how safe it was, but curiosity, as well as the desire to find the cat, got the better of me. I went inside.
It was… normal, at first. Mostly. Besides the weird art and the general decrepitness, anyways. That first room didn’t have much, just a few old art pieces and one of those ‘you are here’ maps. I took a moment to look at it- I didn’t want to get lost in that old building after all. Ha.
Anyways, there wasn’t much of interest at first. Just more old art- I’ve never been much of an art person, so I couldn't say much about it- and some graffiti. The usual, in an old building like that.
I reached what i assumed to be the studio after some walking. No signs of any cats, or any other life at all. I probably should have thought about that more at the time- not a single insect, or rat, or bird nest. I figured that there wouldn’t be much else to look at, and went to head back out of the gallery and keep searching.
When I reached the exit, i opened the door. There was no outside, no overgrown lawn and broken fence. Only a corridor. I thought I had just gotten lost, then. I tried to find the way out some more, but the-the corridors kept changing. I found the map again and it was completely different to the one I had seen on my way in.
It started to get hard to rationalise the situation, then.
I tried to tell myself that it must be an annexed building that I hadn’t noticed at first, that I must have gone through the wrong door at some point. Buildings don’t just change, that’s not how it works.
I kept walking. I thought that surely, I would find some sort of exit, or at least a window, if I kept going.
I hadn’t seen any windows for a while.
I kept trying doors, kept finding new rooms I hadn’t seen in my initial exploration of the building, kept trying to rationalise the situation and tell myself that it was fine and I must have just gotten turned around.
I had to take a break, at one point. A room with one single chair, nothing else. It was then that I attempted to call someone, only to realise that there was a complete lack of signal inside the building.
The dread had started to build up more, then. If I couldn’t call for help, it was likely nobody would know I was even missing for… days? Weeks?
I pushed that away. I had just gotten turned around, I wasn’t trapped, I would be out of this place in no time and then i could just find the cat somewhere else and never come back. Ever. With that, I went to return to the rest of the gallery.
Until I opened the door to a completely different room than the one I had entered from, that is.
Instead of the room full of the strange ceramic statues, I entered a smaller room with a staircase and another map. Different again. I just went up the stairs, ignoring the fact that this building definitely didn’t have that many floors when I saw it from the outside.
The corridors had too many doors. There were more stairs, another floor, another impossible room that hadn’t been here when I arrived.
There were bones in the gallery. Human bones.
People had died here. I was probably going to die there if I didn’t find a way out. I couldn’t hold the panic back anymore.
I found a room with a couch, and just… cried, for a bit. I did worry about conserving water but it was impossible to hold back the tears at that point. I just slept, after that.
I woke up thirsty. At that point it had been… I’m not sure how many hours since I had any water, or food, or saw the sun.
I tried to leave the room, but it was just… the same room. Again and again and again, the same room with the same couch and the same walls and the same everything it just kept repeating over and over and-
Sorry. I’ll carry on.
I wanted to scream then, to cry and shout for help, but my throat was too dry. I kept trying to get out.
I’m not sure how long it took before it let me out of that room. Too long.
It did let me out eventually, though. Into another with even more doors and another map that was different to every other one I had seen, just like the rest. I think… I think I passed out, then. Everything was too much. The dehydration wasn’t helping.
I don’t know how long it took me to get up. When I did, though, I had had enough of that stupid gallery and its stupid repeating hallways and the fucking map.
If that damn building was going to keep me there forever, until I died of thirst and joined the other piles of bones on the floor, I was going to make sure it regretted it. As much as a house can regret anything.
I found a weapon, then. A femur. Strongest bone in the body, perfect for breaking some art. I smashed up everything I could find, in every room I entered. Eventually, I found another map. So I smashed it to pieces.
It felt right, to use a part of another who had been trapped there to destroy as much of it as I could. At least I wouldn’t die completely alone.
I went to leave that room, carry on my vengeance until I dropped dead, but… the door opened to the outside. I was free.
The room behind me was… normal. It seemed to have collected all the things I had seen around the gallery, the bones, the trashed furniture, the art. And the cat was there too. I left the femur behind.
There’s not much else to say, really. I ended up in the hospital for severe dehydration, left the cat to be returned to his owners, and I told anyone who asked that I had gotten trapped under some debris and petitioned, very strongly, for the gallery to be demolished. It was. The bones they found inside helped.
I think I’ve been getting better. I’m still scared that hallways will start changing around me. I don’t think that will ever go away.
Sometimes I still feel like some part of me is back there, with those ghosts and bones and infinite hallways.
[ARCHIVIST] Statement ends.
We have done some research into Mr… Beebo’s account, and Sasha has tracked down a newspaper report about the gallery. The gallery was certainly real, as well as Mr Beebo’s successful petition to have it demolished. However, we are unable to confirm his account of… repeating, infinite rooms within the house.
Given that at least some of the events of his account are true, it seems likely that his experience was the result of hallucinations from dehydration, or perhaps stress.
During Sasha’s research, she uncovered a more recent legal case involving Mr Beebo, related to the death of one Eugene Coli. Apparently Mr Coli was killed in self defense, during a party at an old makeshift hospital that was to be repurposed into a museum, that is rumoured to have… supernatural events surrounding it.
Despite the lack of connections between these two cases, besides the presence of Mr Beebo, I cannot help but feel there is something linking them. An abandoned art gallery, and a makeshift hospital, both connected to one man. Interesting.
End recording.
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