Ansel had never been one to shy away from the unknown.
Curiosity had been his compass for as long as he could remember, pushing him toward places others feared to tread. Forgotten ruins. Derelict houses. Whispered legends.
He had chased them all.
But the hallway?
The hallway was something else entirely.
It didn't scare him in the way crumbling walls or creaking floors scared ordinary people.
No—this was a deeper fear.
A fear of being unmade.
Even now, as he ventured deeper into its labyrinthine bowels, he couldn't quite place what it was that gnawed at the edges of his mind. His every instinct screamed at him to turn back, but stubbornness, pride, and that ever-burning hunger for answers propelled him forward.
The walls here were different.
They didn't just contain memories.
They fed on them.
Ansel could feel it in the air—thick, viscous, suffocating—like the entire building was breathing.
Inhaling his presence.
Tasting him.
He tried to steady his breathing, to keep his mind clear, but the deeper he went, the more distorted his sense of time and space became.
It was as if the hallway was folding in on itself, pulling him deeper not through distance, but through something stranger.
Memory?
Emotion?
It was impossible to tell.
There was something ancient about this place.
Not just in the crumbling architecture or the way the walls seemed to lean inward, but in the feeling it birthed in his gut:
Timelessness.
Or worse—time as a living thing, spiraling, devouring, remaking itself endlessly.
The darkness thickened with every step.
His flashlight sputtered and died, leaving him bathed in the hallway's natural gloom—a grayness that wasn't quite shadow and wasn't quite mist, but something between the two.
He wasn't alone.
He knew it in his bones.
It wasn't noise that gave it away.
The silence was too perfect, too complete, a vacuum that crushed every breath and heartbeat.
It was the pressure he felt building in the space around him.
The sensation of being watched by something so old and so vast that it didn't need eyes.
Ansel kept walking, each step a little more hesitant, a little more reluctant.
Somewhere ahead, he could feel it: a convergence point.
The place where everything would change.
And then—
He saw it.
A door.
Old, decrepit, sagging slightly on its hinges.
Its surface was cracked like dry riverbeds, the wood gnarled and twisted as though it had grown that way, like a living thing forced into unnatural shapes.
The door seemed to breathe, just slightly, in rhythm with the building's heavy inhalations.
Ansel was drawn to it.
Helpless.
He reached out.
The wood was strangely warm under his fingers, pulsing faintly like the skin of some sleeping beast.
The door opened with a groan so deep it vibrated in his chest.
And he stepped inside.
The room was familiar.
But wrong.
It was a living room—a fractured mirror of his own childhood home.
The battered leather sofa.
The scratched glass coffee table.
The crooked bookshelf leaning against the wall.
All the same.
But drained of color.
The world here was tinted gray, muted, as if someone had pulled all the vibrancy out of it and left only husks behind.
No windows.
No natural light.
Just the cold, flickering bulb overhead, buzzing like an angry insect.
Ansel's heart hammered against his ribs.
This was his memory.
Bent.
Distorted.
Made alien.
And then he saw her.
A figure in the far corner.
Motionless. Cloaked in shadows.
The woman.
Her features hidden in the gloom, her body barely more than a silhouette, but her presence was undeniable.
She was the axis around which the room twisted.
The fulcrum of the nightmare.
Ansel couldn't move.
His body betrayed him, rooting him in place, forcing him to watch.
He knew her.
He knew he knew her.
But her name—the shape of her existence—slipped through his mind like water through clenched fists.
Still, recognition pulsed in him.
An old, aching familiarity.
"Who are you?" he croaked, his voice barely more than a whisper.
She didn't answer.
But the room did.
The walls trembled.
The ceiling sagged.
The floor beneath his feet seemed to ripple like disturbed water.
The air grew colder, heavier, as if a glacier were slowly pressing down upon him.
The woman stepped forward.
Her eyes caught the sickly light.
Twin pinpricks of pale fire.
Not like human eyes—too still, too hungry.
Like looking into deep holes punched into the fabric of the world.
"Why are you here?" she asked.
Her voice was the sound of dead leaves scraping across abandoned pavement.
Soft.
Inevitable.
Ansel swallowed hard, the words catching in his dry throat.
"I—I don't know," he managed. "I was… looking. For answers."
Her lips twisted into a smile.
Not cruel.
Not kind.
Just knowing.
"You don't need answers," she said.
"Not yet."
She moved closer.
The shadows clung to her like a living thing, rippling with each step.
Ansel could feel the world tilting around him.
The walls pressed inward, warping.
The floor buckled.
The ceiling dropped lower and lower.
The room was folding, collapsing, turning inside out—dragging him with it.
Panic clawed at him, but his legs remained frozen.
He could only watch as the space around him unraveled.
"You're part of it now," the woman whispered.
Her words slithered into his ears, burrowing deep, deeper than memory, into the marrow of his being.
Ansel opened his mouth to scream.
But there was no air left to scream with.
The room crumpled like paper.
And then—
Nothing.
The hallway returned.
Empty.
Cold.
Silent.
Ansel stumbled forward, gasping, clutching at his chest as if he could hold himself together by force.
The door behind him was gone.
The memory was gone.
But she—
She wasn't.
Ansel could feel her still.
Not beside him.
Inside him.
A presence wrapped around his soul like a spider's web, unseen but unmistakable.
Tightening.
Tightening.
The hallway was no longer passive.
It wasn't just twisting itself into strange shapes—it was shaping him, too.
Changing him.
He felt it in the way the air seemed to buzz against his skin, in the way the shadows crawled just out of sight.
The hallway wasn't just a place.
It was a living memory.
A dreamer.
And now, it dreamed with his memories too.
Every step he took was harder.
Every breath tasted of dust and sorrow and something else—something bitter.
Regret.
The lights overhead flickered violently, casting rapid flashes of shapes along the walls.
Faces.
Hands.
Eyes.
All reaching for him.
All pulling him deeper.
He wasn't just a visitor anymore.
He was part of the story.
And the story was alive.
Ahead, barely visible through the murky grayness, he saw another door.
This one was unlike the others.
It wasn't broken or rotting.
It was clean.
Smooth.
Almost new.
But there was no handle.
No keyhole.
Just a symbol burned into the wood—a spiral, endless and devouring.
Ansel stared at it, feeling the spiral twist in his vision, making him dizzy, making the world around him wobble and fade.
Something pulled at him from beyond the door.
A heartbeat.
A whisper.
A memory not his own.
And for the first time since entering the hallway, Ansel hesitated.
Because somehow, he knew—
Whatever lay beyond that door would not just change him.
It would erase him.
Or worse—rewrite him into something he would no longer recognize.
The door pulsed once, gently, like a breath.
And somewhere deep inside, the woman's voice returned, soft and coaxing:
"Come closer, Ansel."
His fingers twitched at his side.
The world spun faster around him.
The hallway waited.
The story waited.
The spiral spun on.
And Ansel—
He took a step forward.
Ansel's struggle wasn't just against the building. It was a battle within himself, a silent war that raged inside his mind. The hallway had already rewritten his world in subtle ways, twisting his perceptions, his sense of time. Every step he took now felt like walking through a fog that threatened to swallow him whole. The deeper he went, the more the hallway seemed to stretch and distort, becoming a living thing, pulsating with an intelligence that seemed to know him, that understood him better than he understood himself