Chapter Text
Helen wasn't a reasonable person. She hadn't been for a while, at least.
Maybe she'd never truly been reasonable. Just putting on a face, an act for everyone to look at and see someone who had her life together, when she in fact, did not.
And even if she was, or she had been in the past .. she wasn't now. And that was a fact that she had to live with.
Doors were a touchy subject. She refused to go near them. Inconvenient for a real estate agent, one would think, but that hadn't been the worst of it - she could avoid her work, she hadn't opened her email or her computer in days, had gone to lengths to avoid any of her co-workers that she could feasibly.
But she couldn't just avoid doors altogether.
She'd panic whenever she saw a closed one, and she would wait for someone else to open them, in public, and if anyone else was there, waiting for a way to verify that the doorway was safe.
Whenever she did get the courage to try and open a door, she would see a flash of dirty yellow wood, her eyes would go sideways and she'd stumble away before her hand even reached the doorknob.
She'd taken out the doors in her house, replaced what she needed to with curtains - except for her front door, which she had relented in replacing for a sliding glass door, as her decidedly traumatic experience was somehow second to the possibility of anyone she didnt want just waltzing in.
Tonight she was walking down the street. She didn't know what drew her to do so - it was dark, the rain was pounding, and the wind was vicious. But it took her mind off of things, even if her umbrella was useless and her coat was too thin for the cold. She was soaked to the skin, and yet she continued her walk. She had no real destination. She was just wandering, near-aimlessly, shivering as she went, her legs shaky.
She passed through alleyways. Quite a few of them, actually. She felt like she was walking in circles, but she swore up and down that she never walked past anything twice not like she could look, anyway, with the wind bearing down on her.
Why was she out here, anyway?
Why did she choose to go out here?
She didn't know where she was.
Oh god.
It was dark, and windy, and rainy, and she didn't know where she was, and she had to get home, and she felt like she was walking in circles.
In spirals.
She stopped, leaning against the wall of an alley she didn't catch any details of.
She had to calm down.
She was overthinking, that was all.
She had to be practical about this.
She had to catch her breath and regain her focus.
The wall of the alleyway she was leaning on had a slight roof overhead, giving her a litte respite from the rain, as she used her umbrella to cover the parts the small roof couldn't, and breathed.
Think, Helen, think.
The only directions she had gone were right and forward. If she just went left, and backward, she could get back home. She was sure of it. Vaguely sure. As sure as she could be in this state.
But what if it wasn't?
What if this was just another form that hallway had taken?
What if she had never left it at all?
What if her life after had all been elaborate hallucination brought on by that place?
Paranoia.
It filled her bones suddenly. A creeping dread that grabbed her and didn't let go. It hadn't let her go since the hallway, giving her brief respites for moments before crashing again into her, raising her hackles, gritting her teeth, making her look around in fear and stare and watch and wait and see patterns in the ground that ebbed and swayed with her, her unfocused eyes locking in on random patterns in the wall opposite, and on the ground, and in the rain, and in the sky, and in the door-
The door.
The door that hadn't been there before.
A small yellow door, with a black handle, that had not been there before.
The brief attempts at dissuading her panic were lost as her eyes locked with the door. Any semblance of sense she had was replaced with pure, blind, animal panic, as if a gun had just been fired in a forest.
She had to go.
She had to go, she had to run, she had to leave.
The wind was blowing towards the door.
She couldn't go back in.
She couldn't go towards it.
She ran.
She ran, against the wind, agaisnt any sense, driven only by her panic.
Her umbrella was discarded, it would only slow her down, and she hadn't even realised it was gone until she her mind caught up with her hands.
She was running.
She followed no clear direction, and she could barely see, but she was running.
Somewhere, somehow, her feet shifting as the world blurred.
And like that she went, tripping over her own feet but not falling, running and going and going, the pavement scraping under her feet.
She couldn't breathe, her limbs burned, but she ran.
She had to keep going.
Running until the ground changed and crunched beneath her.
The familiar sound of asphalt.
When did she run onto a road? She hadn't walked by a road in ages, how had she found one?
She stopped, stupidly, in the middle of the road, catching her breath.
It was dark, almost as if the streets she had wandered down didn't exist.
It wasn't so dark, suddenly, as she looked up and saw a van on the road.
Approaching.
She couldn't move, she couldn't make out the drivers. It was like time had slowed.
The panic was replaced by a slower ebb of dread as the van showed no sign of stopping for her.
And then the world went dark.