I dreamt about a mansion

Once upon a time in 2018 I had two connected dreams separated by months. Ever since, I tried to represent them in some form.. I tried comics and even abstract animation, but I could never show exactly what I wanted.

So, finally I decided to share these dreams in short story format and what a better idea than to share it here! In this post, you will read my second dream. Enjoy!

read the 1st part here

The tires rippled through the wet tar from the road. My grandpa was driving me somewhere I didn’t know and I couldn’t possibly guess, since the darkness was creating the illusion we weren’t even moving. Eventually he stopped the car and I snapped out of my daydreaming state. Without a word, grandpa got out and made his way into a small house at the right side of the road.

I quickly got out of the car and followed grandpa towards the house. It was a tiny white house, without a front yard. The entrance door was directly in the road, it was made of old and dry wood. In each side of it, there was a dirty fogged window. The house seemed really old and just like every other house I’ve seen before. Right now, it was the only house I could see at all and I guess that was the case for the great amount of people at the entrance.

The crowd at the entrance was my entire family, I realised, gathered at the door for some unknown reason. I guess it was a party that I didn’t know was going to happen. I fought my way through them and somehow, nobody noticed my presence.

Already inside the house, I closed the weak wooden door behind me. The darkness took over me and, as my eyes were getting adjusted to it, the insides of the house started mutating into a different one, a smoothly gross transition. Nevertheless, I could still faintly hear my family speaking on the wall behind me, their voices muffled and incomprehensible. In front of me, the entrance was huge. The big white tiles on the floor glimmered with a faint light and gave the scenery a brighter look, contrasting with a blue carpet. A warm light stretched from the right wall of the corridor in front of me. I followed it and it let me to a room with people speaking in a low respectful voice, accompanied by a soft piano melody.

I felt an invisible force pulling me towards that light and my feet started moving. When I was finally able to see its source, I was met by a huge ball room. The ground was shiny and created a hazy reflection of the people populating the room. The faint piano came from thin air, there was no musician or piano to be found. The people were scattered across the room, drinking champagne and nibbling at some snacks. They spoke in a low voice, with respect and elegance. A table packed with delicious looking food sat on a corner of the room and I decided to try some of it to pass the time, they looked so tempting. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something and, after a time, the mood shifted. A man with a brown smoking jacket, a curled up moustache and a pointy chin cleared his throat to speak and everyone went silent.

“Ladies and Gentleman, the hour has finally arrived. I invite you to proceed, join your groups and prepare yourselves as the game is about to begin. Thank you.”

After that, he raised his glass and smiled. Everyone followed, sipped and gave him a respectful applause. I did the same. Even though I didn’t know what game was about to happen, I felt obliged to participate. The groups were rapidly forming and I randomly joined one near me. In this group there were a middle aged man, a woman old enough to be my mum, two young lads my age and me. Nobody spoke to each other and nobody seemed to notice my presence. Regardless, I followed them until we got to the queue.

As we waited for our turn near the corridor, I could see what the game was all about. The groups weren’t competing against each other, they were individually competing against time. The playing group was positioned in the entrance hall facing the dark corridor with a white ornamented door at its end. As soon as the man in the brown suit gave a signal, the group would start to run towards the corridor and the door would close behind them. After the bang of the closing door, nothing could be heard and we would wait some time while the man looked at his pocket watch until he called the next group. The queue was getting smaller and our turn was getting closer.

We were next in line and the man made a gesture for us to take our positions. We silently went to our place and everyone got in position to start running. Without knowing why, my heart started beating against my temples urgently, something didn’t seem right. I interrupted the silence and asked,

“I’m so sorry to interrupt but,.. can someone explain the rules again? I’ve just arrived and I don’t really know what’s happ-”

The man in the suit didn’t even look at me. He ignored my words and, in the middle of my sentence, he raised his left arm in suspense and dropped it dramatically, announcing the beginning of our turn. My group started running. Confused and frustrated, I opened my mouth to speak again, but someone behind me pushed me forward and I started running to catch my group.

The darkness of the corridor swallowed me and the door closed behind me. My eyes started to get used to the dark and I realised I was in a very large corridor with fancy furniture, high ceiling and blue velvety carpet. It seemed to have no end, even though it had many doors. Everyone seemed very tense. Occasionally, when we would find a door we would try to open it but it would never budge, they almost seemed fake. I looked back and realised it was just impossible to come back. It was pitch black and, on top of that, we had come a long way already. We were stuck at going solely forwards and that gave me a suffocating claustrophobic feeling.

Finally, the lady found a white door that opened and we all looked at each other in relief. We came through the door one at a time, while she held it. While I got through, I noticed this was a bedroom. In the dark I could see the silhouettes of a canopy bed, a large commode, some chairs and a chest at the end of the bed. I looked back at the door and the lady was letting go of it to get to us but something emerged from the ground and grabbed her legs and feet. She screamed, but got quickly silenced because whatever it was, it was consuming her whole body. The door closed quickly and with a loud bang, as if it was closed by a storm. The last thing I saw was her stretched arm, helpless and evolved in a black substance that swallowed her to the ground. The air got thicker and hotter. The dust from the broken marble crippled through the gap between the floor and the door, forming beautiful dancing white clouds. Everyone screamed and ran. Everything after that turned into a blur. My head was dizzy and everything seemed too fast and too slow at the same time. My breathing was heavy and my heart was pounding so hard I almost thought it was going to burst out of my chest.

The room stretched through a passage and we ran to get as far as we could from that infernal white door. A sound was constantly chasing us. It was wet and slimy, like a thousand spiders running in the same web. We got pass through a lot of furniture with intricate designs, photographs in various frames and hard cover books scattered across the twists and turns of this infinite damned room. The older man was getting tired, but fortunately the room ended in a small corridor with another white door at its end. This time, I was the one opening the door and tried to make sure everyone went through at the same time.

The man stumbled on his feet and fell. The thing appeared once again and, in a horrible and disgusting second, swallowed him, pulling him into the marble floor. There were some small crack sounds and I didn’t know if it were bones or stone breaking. With this scenario, I couldn’t handle myself anymore and threw up right at my feet. My head felt light and my lips were numb. I couldn’t move and stop looking at the traumatising scene in front of me. One of the guys grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to the next room. The door closed and there was nothing left to do other than continue. By now I wasn’t running so fast, I didn’t have much strength left in my body and I didn’t even pay attention to where I was or where I was going. I didn’t even know what was to happen when all of this nightmare ended. Would it really end?

My body stayed completely numb and ran very slow. The world was spinning and my ears were buzzing. The two guys were very ahead of me and I almost couldn’t see them in the dark. Cold sweat was dripping in my forehead and tickled my eyes, but I couldn’t care anymore. I was so tired that eventually I was just walking at a normal pace.

Another door emerged. One of my teammates opened it, looked back at me and hesitated, but his friend urged him to continue so he gave me a pitiful look and said a muted sorry with his lips. They disappeared in the dark, I was alone now and my turn had arrived. The white door closed in front of me.

Something wrapped my left leg, it was cold and unpleasant. It felt like it had sharp teeth or thorns that were piercing my skin. I tried to fight, but the more I moved the more it hurt. The substance started to make its way up my leg. It was an amalgam of legs, arms and hair, like a human spider. I stumbled and fell. Even if in vain, I tried to run, dragging myself through the floor. But the thing was stronger and I felt something dislocating in my hip and I let out a desperate scream of pain. The thing wrapped my other leg and my waist and I heard an alarming crack. The pain came almost instantly. My femur had broken and I was almost blind with pain, I wasn’t able to scream. This thing was literally breaking me to pieces. I saw the world slowly disappearing as I was being involved with this horrible thing.

A darkness and an emptiness hugged my body. I couldn’t feel anything, I didn’t feel pain nor was I sweating or breathing heavily. There was purely nothing. I was falling infinitely in the void, alone. And I never stopped falling.