(Author’s Note: This is the first spooky story I ever wrote. It’s also going to be in my new horror story collection coming out in August, A Heartbeat in the Darkness. I did a reading of this back when I had a horror podcast by the same name. You can find the reading here: https://youtu.be/kz58xCnc1VQ?si=LksEZNKEOFrFF5YB )

I haven’t been outside in a few days.  It’s not for lack of trying.  It’s just that, my house isn’t the same as it was when I woke up on Monday morning.  Something has happened.  I don’t know what. 

The rooms don’t connect the way they used to.  Every time I open the door, it leads me somewhere new.  My bedroom suddenly leading into my kitchen.  The kitchen leading towards the basement stairs.  Close the door, open and find something new.  When I did manage to get to either the back or front door, I would open them and try and leave.  My eyes would be blinded by a bright white flash of light and I find myself back in another room of the house.  Perfectly situated in the middle of a room.  Something akin to teleportation.  I’ve pinched myself until my eyes watered from the pain.  This isn’t a dream.       

I’ve tried the windows but they’re locked and no matter how I adjust them, they refuse to open.  I tried breaking them as well, throwing the heaviest objects I could find.  They refused to shatter.  I became so desperate and frustrated that eventually I opened up my gun safe and removed the pistol I had inside.  I readied a round in the chamber, kneeled behind the bed and took aim.  I fired.  I dove to the side when the bullet ricocheted, the report of the pistol still ringing in my ears.  The smoke from the muzzle setting off the  detector.  The bullet has lodged itself in the wall.  

I don’t know what to do.  I’ve been trying to figure out my new reality.  I still have water and electricity somehow.  My laptop shows a black screen, the tv shows static, the phone won’t dial out.  Without these electronic means of contact, I decided to go about the physical.  I looked through the books I had on my shelves.  All of them now a jumbled mess of letters with no meaning that I can find.  

I decided to try an experiment.  When the door opened to my front hall, I opened the door and figured out how close I could get to it before the flash of light sent me to another room.  I stood a little bit past the doorjamb yelling and waving my arms to get anyone’s attention.  Someone to help,to pull me from this place.  But no one heard me.  They kept walking.  Never turning so much as a curious eye towards me.  It was then that I heard the silence.  Despite the open door and the fact that I could see all kinds of noisemakers, birds, lawnmowers and cars.  I heard nothing.  No sound reached me.  I’ve become isolated even from vibration.

I’m sitting on the bed now with the gun stuck in the back of my pants.  Something supernatural is going on but I have no idea what it could be or why.  I’ve entered into a realm that seems to exist with some kind of dream logic.  It has rules that it follows.  Like the doors.  I’ve tried to leave them open but they shut whenever I look away.  I’ve opened them, turned and then spun back around.  Always they are closed but I see no movement, I hear no sound.  No other in the house but me.  Near as I can tell and hope.  

I’ve been trying to think of the reasons that this could happen.  Horror stories generally tell of things like this happening to those that deserve them.  Someone who has violated some universal law of rightness.  I can’t think of anything that I’ve done.  My life has been fairly unspectacular.  No skeletons in my closet.  Maybe it’s just a run of bad luck that led me here.  A higher power hoping to destroy me with no more thought than I have then when my foot falls on an anthill.  

There’s one option that I don’t want to consider.  The idea that I may have gone insane.  Something in my past that I repressed or I’ve seen something recently that made me snap.  I  don’t know much about insanity and I don’t know if a lack of sound counts as it.  That also wouldn’t explain the people who ignored me while I screamed for help.  I was there for minutes.  I saw so many people and yet no one came towards me.  No one offered anything.  Could this be a trap of my mind?  Have I simply become locked in an endless existence.  My body being left in the care of the state or some relative.  Catatonia taking over for my consciousness.  I think about the gun in the back of my pants.  I wonder if I should put it under my chin.  Pull the trigger and be done with it.  I’ve never thought about killing myself before.  No grand notions of the future but no death thoughts either.  I have some food left.  I think I’ll hold out until that is gone.  I’m not ready to roll that dice just yet.  

The long hours drag on towards the setting sun.  I turn on the lights when the sun goes  down while I still have them.  Keeping the TV on while I fall asleep.  The sound of the static offering some comfort.  

When I wake up the next morning I look out the front door.  It’s the only entertainment I have. I sit cross legged in front of the open door.  I play a game with myself in which I count  numbers until I see someone walk by.  I’ve gotten up to the hundreds before someone has.  I live in a suburb, a quiet little vacation spot. I’ve seen only one person that I know, a woman who became a townie like me.  I still have friends that live in town.  Yet, no one has come to check up on me.  To find out if I’m okay.  No phone calls.  No one knocking on my door.  Of course, I have no idea if they even register if I’m gone.  Perhaps the house has erased me from their memories.  Continuing to isolate me.  I play my game until the sun starts to set.  

That night as I lay in bed with the TV still blaring its static, I hear something.  I’ve been lying in bed listening to it with the lights out.  It’s the slightest hitch in the sound.  A slight rising in the constant static.  It doesn’t sound like anything.  No words.  I lie back down.  I barely sleep the rest of the night.  There’s nothing else of note from the TV in that entire time.

The next morning I go to the door and start playing my game again.  I’ve eaten my one meal of the day.  My mind is groggy from the minimal food and sleep.  Thoughts come slowly.  I’m even having trouble remembering the numbers as I count.  I blink and something has changed again.  There’s a man standing across the street from my house.  He’s dressed in a T-shirt, jeans and leather jacket.  He wears a large preacher’s hat as well.  The brim of it casts shadows over his eyes.  He’s looking at me.  He begins to walk forward.  I jump up and slam the door shut.  I lock it, pull the gun out of my pants, chamber a round and point it at the door.  There’s a window in the top half of the door.  The man steps up onto the front porch.  He comes right up to the glass.  His hat falls onto the back of his head.  I can see his face fully now.  

His skin is a pallid, sickly white.  He’s thin in all his parts.  But it’s the face that causes my hand to shake, my aim being thrown off by it.  The purple lips stretch back in a terrifying grin.  His teeth are a ghastly yellow color.  Rotten and full of cavities in black diseased gums.  His eyeballs are black.  Red dots glow in the center of them.  His hair is blonde and greasy hanging on either side of his head in curtains.  

He places his forehead against the glass.  His hands on either side of his head.  His eyes are staring right into me.  Through his garish smile, he’s laughing.  A wheezing, empty thing.  I’d fire if I thought that I would actually kill him.  He leans back and then slams his face against the glass.  It makes me jump backwards.  The laugh rises in pitch and frequency as his forehead bleeds against the cracks he’s made in the glass.  I pray that the door will hold.  I aim again.  He leans back and slams his head against the glass a second time.   The glass holds even as more cracks appear.  He leans backwards and I figure that he’s going to strike a third time. He steps away from the door and walks back across the street, returning to the spot where he once stood. He doesn’t move again for the rest of the day.  I watch him for a while though the glass of the door, which is repairing itself.  The cracks reforming with ease.  The only evidence that he was ever here is a greasy stain with spots of blood.  

I spend the rest of the day upstairs watching him.  He doesn’t look up but continues to stare at the house.  My thoughts twist in even greater confusion than they did before.  There’s nothing about him that makes me think that he’s here to help me.  The man’s presence has another effect in that it changes my opinion as to what’s happening in my house.  That perhaps the fact that I can’t leave is because my house is protecting me from whatever that man is.  Some demon come to torment me.  To block my escape from the house.  I can’t survive within or out.  I’ll starve in here.  I don’t know what that man will do to me when I leave.  I turn on every light in my house.  I barely sleep again.  More noises amongst the static.  No words.   

The man is still outside of my house.  He hasn’t moved from his vigil.  I didn’t notice it before because I was so focused on the man’s approach but the places on my lawn where that man strode, the grass is now black and dead.  People are still walking down the street.  They pass and he goes unnoticed.  What is this tormentor?  Where did he come from?  I know that he wants to harm me.  There could be no other purpose for him.  I know it’s not death that he has in store for me.  But something far worse.  I have the gun in my hand.  For the second time in as many days, I think about killing myself.  I think about it for a long time.  But there’s a voice in the back of my head that tells me that even if I was to die by my own hand that would not allow me to escape from him or even the house.  I’m trapped.  The idea that I’m not myself returns to me.  That maybe I died and am just a spirit haunting this house.  That man outside is a grim reaper come to claim me.  That thought is foolish though.  If I was dead I wouldn’t feel the constant growling hunger.  I move my bed into the corner so that I can keep an eye on the door.  I plan to sleep with the gun under my pillow.  

It’s then that I notice the hole in my wall.  Whatever damage that man did to my door has been repaired by the house.  But that remains.  I’m struck by sudden inspiration.  That perhaps the walls may not be afflicted by the same strange magic as the doors.  That perhaps using the tools in the basement I can break through a wall and find a different way out.  If nothing else having something to do today has made me happy.    

I close the door until I get to the staircase that leads down to my basement.  I fill my toolbox, shoulder my axe and sledgehammer and leave the basement. I cycle through the doors until I get to my front hall.  It’s then that a new idea enters my mind.  What would happen if I was to remove a door from its hinges.  I make it to the second floor hallway and walk down to one of my guest rooms.  I get to work and within a few minutes, I’m picking up the door and moving it to the side.  

When I look back at the doorway I see that my guest room isn’t beyond it. Instead there’s a long hallway leading into the distance.  At the end of it is the outline of a door framed by white light.  I take a moment to wrap my mind around what I’m seeing.  The impossibility of its existence.  Considering the length of the hallway, it would extend out of my house by about a hundred meters or more.    

I leave most of my tools behind, but keep the axe and pistol.  I start walking.  My mind is so broken at this point that I don’t know how far I go.  I try and figure out based on the number of steps I take.  I stop after awhile.  Besides seeming fruitless, it’s also difficult to keep the count.   Eventually, I get to the end of the hallway.  I see that the light is pouring around the shape of a door.  I place my hand on the doorknob and push it open.  

I step out through a door into a kitchen.  Not my kitchen, though it’s far fancier and more modern.  I turn and the door has closed behind me.  I call out.  Hoping that anyone can hear me.  That someone will answer.  There are four closed doors here.  I hear nothing as well.  No sounds from the street.  There’s a glass sliding door leading out to a patio.  I pull it open and walk through it.  There’s the flash of light.  

When my vision clears, I’m staring at a wall that’s a dark blue color.  This isn’t a room in my house.  I smell something terrible.  I turn around.  

There’s a woman on the bed before me.  She’s clearly dead and has been for some time.  Something has gotten at her.  Her body is opened, something ate into her stomach.  The body has been made ragged from bites.  The eyes are gone. There’s so much blood on the floor and walls.  My bare feet are soaked by it.  I’ll have to remember to clean them when I get back home.  If I get back home.  A foot is gone as well.  

This isn’t how she died though.  There’s a peaceful smile on her face.  A bottle of pills on the nightstand.  She must have OD’d before she was ripped her open.  I bend over and vomit onto the floor.  There’s almost nothing left in the my stomach.  Only black bile came out.  When the sickness subsides I open and close the door a few times until I get back to the kitchen.  

I look around.  There’s no dog bowl in the kitchen.  Something else got to her.  I open up the cabinets and fridge and take what I can to restore my own food reserves.  Putting as many cans and boxes into a pair of reusable bags.  When that’s done, I know that I need to get out of here.  I riffle through the drawers and I eventually find a screwdriver.  I take the door off the hinges and see that the hallway remains.  I look around.  There’s no reason for me to return here. 

I start walking down the hallway again.  I’m halfway through when I hear the noise behind me.  I turn around and the light of the kitchen has been replaced by some other shape.  Something huge, scraping the ceiling of the hallway.  I hear a growling and I start running.  I can’t tell if that’s the beast that feasted on that unknown woman.  I hit the door in front of me and push it open.  I slam it behind me and press my body against it.  I hear something hit on the other side of it.  The door just about shakes off of its hinges.  I hear scratching and scraping on the other side.  A roar of something that sounds enormous reverberates through me.  Eventually, it stops.  

I wonder if the monster is lost in the limbo of the closed doors or if it’s simply decided to stop and wait for me.  I wonder if I was to repeat the removal of a door if the monster would be there.  It doesn’t matter.  That was only one of the plans anyway.  I still have the other.  I’ve been thinking about tunneling out through the basement.  I look out my window to check on the other threat.  The man still stands and stares at my house.  Still unseen by those around him.  There are more dead footprints in my grass.  These ones leading around my house in a circle before cutting a new path back to his position.  Did he sense that I had left the house and come looking for me?  Or was he looking for a new means to enter?  Besides the front and back door, there’s the cellar doors.  I had no plan to try and go out through those.  The plan was to tunnel through the basement wall and up into my backyard.  Hopefully, I could make a run to my car or find someone to help me.  Anything to stay away from that dark figure.    

I open and close the doors, still holding onto my axe and pistol, until I get to the kitchen.  I eat a fair amount of food and then put the rest away.  I cycle the rooms again until I get back upstairs to my hallway.  I pick up the tools and cycle the doors again.  Making sure to open a different room than the guest room in case the monster is there.  I see the basement stairs and am about to go down when I hear something.  A thudding, powerful noise.  It draws closer.  It’s then that I see the monster that pursued me.  It’s about one and a half times as tall as I am.  It’s head scrapes against the ceiling of the basement.  Its body shaped like a bull dog.  It stops and sniffs with an invisible nose.  Then it turns and I see its face.  A cyclops, one red eye with a yellow pupil and black iris.  Its mouth is vertical and full of sharp teeth.  It lets out with the same guttural roar it did when I denied it before. 

Without thinking, I pull the pistol from the back of my pants.  I fire through the entire magazine as it comes pounding up the wooden stairs towards me.  They crack and scream under its weight.  The bullets either go wide in my panic or strike the creature and do nothing.  When hammer falls on nothing and the gun clicks, I back up.  The monster makes a desperate leap for me but I slam the door.  I wonder if it’s now cycling through just like the rooms.  If I’ll open a door and it’ll be in my kitchen or bedroom.  I pull the spare magazine out of my pocket and reload.  I keep a round chambered.  

I’m still in my kitchen with all the doors closed.  I take a deep breath and pull a door open.  It opens to my living room.  I lie on the couch and think about what to do.  It connects to my front hallway without a door, so I make my way upstairs.  The last thing I want to do is spend more time on the bottom floor when the man across the street can get to me.  I know I have to cycle the doors.  I have to find out where the monster is.  The despairing part of me, knows that it doesn’t matter.  That whatever forces are at work could easily kill me at any moment.  Changing the rulesn  to suit their needs.  I cycle the doors, finding nothing in my bathroom, bedroom or kitchen.  It’s then that I think that the doors are still operating on their own bizarre logic.  The monster never went through the door.  It’s stuck in the basement.  Which means that my plan is now untenable.  I get to a window.  The smiling man is still in his position.  As far as I know everything is in its right place.  

I turn on the TV for the static.  The white noise begins but after a few minutes I start hearing the strange upticks in pitch.  It happens in frequently at first but then it begins in quick succession.  The sound is hard to place at first.  A high pitched thud like a heartbeat.  It then begins to go higher until it’s true nature is apparent.  Laughter.  Some strange male voice laughing heartily.  It rises until the voice is nearly shrieking.  I cover my ears to keep it out but this does nothing.  The laughter goes on for long minutes.  Near as I can tell it’s only one voice.  Finally, it subsides and I hear the voice ta ke several gulping breaths.  It then says in a voice that sounds like it has a smile on its face.  

We’re just getting started here, sports fan.  

A few more seconds of laughter and the TV returns to the ambient white noise.  My heart is pounding in my chest.  I’ve gripped the axe until my knuckles go white.  I’m thinking of splitting the TV in two.  Is that the voice of the smiling man?  He laughed as well but that sounded like dried leaves and cancerous lungs.  A wheeze as much as anything.  This was the robust laughter of the mad man.  There was still a throat that could be pained and bloodied from the laughter’s intensity.  Who or whatever that voice was.  That was the voice of my enemy.  I know that in my heart.  

I think about that woman.  The way that she went.  Perhaps it was easier than continuing to try and live.  I’ll never know if she was in the same situation as I was.  Maybe she saw that dog or the man.  She couldn’t handle it.  Wanted to get away from it.  On her own terms.  That sounds nice.  Hell, it sounds great to even think about.  Denying them their dark victory.  Let them have my body but I’ll be far away.  The next time I reach for the gun I’ll use it on myself.  Not waste the bullets on them.  They don’t deserve them.  I laugh for the first time in days.  I must truly be going insane.  

I think about the hole in the wall.  Still the only lasting damage that I’ve been able to do to the house.  I wonder if instead of opening doors, I could go through a wall.  I knock about the wall, hoping to make sure that I don’t hit a load bearer.  I slam the axe into the wall.  The reaction is almost instantaneous.  A scream from an unknown source rips my mind apart with its force.  Its a low pitched wailing thing.  Wordless and ancient feeling.  The house begins to shake.  An earthquake born not from a fault line but something else.  I remove the axe from the wall and everything stops.  The house didn’t like that, is as near an explanation as I can find.  The TV snaps on and the laughter starts again.  I go to it and try to turn it off.  The buttons no longer work.  After about two minutes of the noise, my frustration grows to its zenith and I slam the axe into the TV.  It never stops.  As the pieces of the screen shatter and hit the floor, they continue to show static.  The laughter continues to fill my room.  It continues for a long time.  The voice won’t speak to me anymore but the laughter is bad enough.  I can’t close my ears to it.

Hours pass and the laughter reverberates through the house.  Moving to a different room helps but not by much.  The living room TV turns on and the laughter keeps going.  It’s making it impossible to think.  I scream at the TV.  Demanding answers until my voice goes ragged.  There’s no answer from the cacophony of sound.  

Eventually, I make my way to my medicine cabinet and pull out some cotton balls.  I jam them into my ears until it hurts.  Until I can’t hear anything anymore.  I collapse onto my bed.  The night wears on.  The laughter continuing without stop.  Now just a dull sound through the cotton.  At some point, my body refuses to be awake anymore.  I fall asleep.  I awaken when the sun comes into my eyes.  The laughter is continuing.  I look out the window to do my morning check.  

The smiling man is gone.  

 I pull the gun from my back pocket.  I push open the bedroom door and for once it opens directly to my second floor hallway.  I push open the door to my guest room.  It opens to my guest room.  I move down the hall and open up the door to my bathroom.  It opens to my bathroom.  I go downstairs.  I make my way through the house in two circuits.  The doors are staying open now.  What is happening.  Nothing has changed in regards to the laughter.  It’s still screeching throughout the house.  

Where is the smiling man?  

It’s then that I realize.  I know where he’s been the whole time.  

I turn around.  The smiling man looks down at me.  I point the gun at him and he slaps it out of my hands with ease.  I run.  Blind panic.  I turn a corner into another hallway.  I pull open a door.  

I fall through the broken staircase.  My body being ripped apart by the shreds of it.  When I do hit the floor and feel my arm and leg break against the stone, I’m already bloodied and full of splinters.  I’m gasping through the pain.  

I look and see the creature in the corner of the basement.  It turns towards me, sniffing with its unknown nose.  I think that at least this is a small mercy.  My death will be a physical, finite thing.  A few agonizing second of pain and then nothing.  

The creature doesn’t see the man until it’s too late.  He’s standing beside it.  Still smiling.  The laughter still pouring in from upstairs.  Then he dips his hands into the creature.  There’s no other word for it.  The smoothness of the breaking of that creature’s skin.  The way that they come out covered in blood and flesh with ease.  The creature howls in pain.  The man drives his hands now into it fully and it never appears that he has anymore effort than putting his hands in water.  The creature dies ugly.  Spasming on the floor as blood pours from its mouth.  The man then turns to me.  There’s no escape now.  I’ve lost my race.  

The man grabs me by my unbroken leg.  He starts dragging me towards the cellar doors.  My future is one only of pain and torture.  I start thinking about my house.  How it kept me safe and I violated its sanctity with my axe.  

We’ve reached the cellar steps now.  My head throbs with pain every time it bumps one of them.  The door opens to sunlight and an unknown future.  The laughter from the house has reached a crescendo.  Filling every part of my consciousness.