The Study

You step through the door and slip the key back into your pocket.

Directly before you stands a desk bestrewn with papers and battered books. There are half-drunk goblets and tumblers of burgundy and amber liquids, respectively, left at various points around the room — on the desk, atop a stack of books, perched precariously on the chair rail. There is a large, gilded globe in one corner and a candelabra in the other. At some point someone must have knocked it down because it lies on its side, tapered candles loosed from their sockets, broken glass shards and a faintly gleaming stain beneath one of the arms.

You were right — this is an office. A study, if you will.

Behind the desk a peculiar square hole in the wall catches your eye. You squint at it and try to place what it could possibly be used for. It occurs to you that it might be a dumbwaiter. Why the thought comes to you, you have no idea. When have you ever seen a dumbwaiter in real life? You can’t recall, and yet, you feel certain that’s what it is. You decide to ignore it and refocus on the rest of the space.

Something tugs at the back of your mind — a nagging thought that you know this room, have spent time here. Is it your mother’s or father’s office? You can’t place the uncanny feeling of familiarity.

You drift closer to the desk as you wrack your brain for any glimmer of recognition. A sheaf of paper brushes against the knuckles of your left hand. You look down and pull it from the pile. The handwriting scrawled across the page also looks familiar. You grab up a few more pages scattered across the desk and compare them all, reading snippets of writing all in the same hand. One of the papers seems to be a discarded draft of something you’ve read before.

You pull the original note you arrived with from your pocket and compare it to the papers you hold. They are one and the same. Your head grows fuzzy as you right the papers on the desk so that they all face upward, the scrawling suddenly legible as a repetition of the same note. That nagging at the back of your head is unbearable now, an itch that you can’t reach to scratch.

You snatch up a pen from the desk and a piece of paper unblemished by writing. You move your hand to write down whatever thought it is that gnaws at the inside of your skull, but when you step back, you realize what you’ve written is the same as every other note.

Remember: Your name is P. M. Sunderland

The time and date is 3:33 PM, October 30, 2002

Find the house. The address is 

33 Rose Lane, Washington Hill, Illinois

I pray it will not take you, too.

Panic begins to tighten your chest and your breaths come ragged and quick. Light-headedness swims behind your eyes and you reach subconsciously for the doorknob. You turn it and exit, letting the door thump closed behind you.

You wander the house in a daze, the reality of the situation still dawning on you. How long have you been trapped? How many times have you forgotten yourself and looped back through the house?

Countless of your lives must have flowed through these hallways, dwelt in these rooms, roamed the pathways outside.

A part of you is indelibly part of the house.

You stumble out the front door, down the gravel drive. The note you scrawled is still clutched tightly in your hand as you descend the drive. You must leave.

You must leave.

You must….keep walking…

At some point down the drive, you must have gotten turned around. 

Before you looms the house. You reread the note clutched in your hand and approach. 

It Begins Again