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In the Mansion of Sleep

Owen slept, and in the darkness of sleep, he saw a house.

He was above it. Outside of it. It floated in a crimson void, the house a mutant shape of jagged roofs and gabled peaks. Siding rippled. All of it strained and stretched and bulged. The house had no windows, and no doors. It turned in void space, rotating on every axis.

It was awake, and aware.

And it was growing.

When its siding swelled and buckled, a shape would burst out of it—like a swiftly growing tumor, a pillar of wet cement and raw flesh hardening with callus and chitin, wrapping itself in a skin of brick, of stucco, of crackling slate. Whole rooms grew this way, one next to the other, until its exterior was again flush and level before another growth burst forth.

Then, a single window—a shifting window that was first a bay window, then a circular porthole, then a casement, a transom—appeared in its center. But it was no window. Not really. It was an eye. It saw him. It knew him. He felt himself itch. Heard his father mumbling in the dark. Asking him to come inside. To come home. To a room whose floor was bitten fingernails, whose walls were lacerated skin.

Come inside, the voice said again.

Then the same voice, Let me in .

Knock-knock.

Suddenly, Owen found himself wandering the ever-shifting rooms of this place, but they were half formless, bubbling and melting even as he passed through them, like the sloppy hallucinations of so-called artificial intelligence. Eyes bursting in electrical sockets, heating vents like grinning mouths, torn wallpaper showing gleaming threads of muscle. Doorways danced away from him. Trapdoors opened beneath him.

A voice, again partly his father’s, but also a hundred voices singing together with it, braiding together:

Look at the room in which you rest your head, Owen.

The voice faded and what was left was one sound: the soft sobs of a crying woman. The kind of weeping that was like a storm—the crashing rain and the howling wind and the lash of rising waters. He couldn’t help but follow it forward and up and down. Stairs underneath his feet turned to wet, clayey mud. The floor buckled and turned to splinters, sinking deep into the soles of his feet. Streaks of blood trailed behind him in his wake. But still he went, moving forward, almost tumbling, like something had him by the throat—a noose dragging him through the house, because that’s what this was, a house, one big endless nightmare house. And then it dragged him through a door, one last door, and as he bouldered into it, it burst open and—

The playroom again. The same room in which he slept. But he wasn’t there. And the Christmas tree had not lost its needles. Lights danced up and down it.

A woman sat in the center of the floor, sobbing. And with each hitching sob Owen felt himself sliding backward and forward in time—she and her husband, both young, both ruddy-cheeked and with chestnut hair, almost looking as though they could be brother and sister, and they were playing in this room with a little girl, maybe two years old. Mutate, shift, warp—now they were building those big chunky LEGOs with her, the ones for kids, the DUPLO blocks. The floor fell out and Owen landed in the playroom again, and they were there putting up the Christmas tree and popping ornaments on it, and the child looked a little older now, maybe three years old, and in her hand was the blue doggy plushie, and she coughed, one good cough with blood in it, and it wet the floor, and then—somewhere behind it all, the crying rose again, and there came the sound of medical machines, a ventilator hissing breath, a heart monitor beeping, then all of them in alarm, a cacophony of sound. A single tone. A flatline sound. The crying rose, rose, and the tears came pouring out of the woman’s eyes and then her nose and then her mouth, streaming forward, filling up the room, coming now not just from her but purging from outside the room, coming in—from around the light fixture, through the socket, out from the vents, tears and snot and spit and flecks of lung blood from a dying child, and Owen felt it all rising around him. Rising to his chest. Pushing toward his mouth. He could barely breathe, and then he plunged underneath it. Holding his breath for—how long? Not long at all. He couldn’t do it. The woman’s tears were drowning him. Trapping him at a crushing depth underneath. And as the darkness stained the edges of his vision—

The woman, the mother of a now dead child, swam toward him, her mouth open just enough so that he could see the pills on her tongue, gummy with spit—she closed her eyes, closed her mouth—

Gulp —

Then gasp —

Owen gasped awake in the chair, his body thrashing once in a hypnic jerk.

“Jesus,” he said, coughing as if his lungs were still full of floodwater (tears, spit, snot, blood). He wiped at his mouth. All dry.

And there stood Nick. Right over him. Eyes like windows. Teeth like the flat bright boards of a freshly painted picket fence. Skin like popcorn ceiling.

“Rough sleep, huh,” Nick said, and once more he looked…normal. Eyes, skin, teeth. Just the dream lingering, Owen thought. Or at least hoped.

“I…yes.”

“It’s really something, huh? You and me paired together. The two washouts. Lore got huge, did everything she wanted. Hamish—well, fuck him, but at least he made something of himself. But us? Not so much.”

Owen grunted and sat up. Again he saw something flash in Nick’s eyes: eyes like window glass. And like something moving behind that glass. Your mind is playing tricks on you, Owen thought. No, the house is playing tricks .

He didn’t want to have this conversation with Nick. So instead he talked about his dream. About what he saw, there.

“I think this house is…alive.”

“It’s not alive, Owen. It’s just a house.”

“Sure, a house that’s an endless labyrinth, with shifting rooms.”

Nick scoffed. “Doesn’t mean it’s alive . Just means it’s…” He shrugged.

“I think this room belonged to a family that lost their child.”

“I saw some ornaments on the tree, one had a picture of a kid in it. Cute kid. Sucks they’re dead.” Way he spoke, he sounded lost, almost. His voice flat, his tone a straight line.

“But the house wanted to show it to me. To us. That something happened in this room. Why?”

Nick shrugged. “Who the fuck knows. This place is a mystery, Nailbiter.”

“I saw my father’s bedroom. And—” He was about to say, I saw my knife, too. A few times, now. The Old Timer. The one I… but he couldn’t make his mouth form the words. “I just don’t get it. What’s the point of all this? This place? Trapping us here and showing us—what? Nightmare room after nightmare room? Some that have to do with us and a lot more that don’t?” Because you deserve it, Owen thought. Because you’re weak and pathetic and Nick is right, you’re both washed up and washed out and you deserve to be here, in this place, with him . He shook his head to try to shake free the bad thoughts. He so desperately wanted to chew his nails, but he knew Nick would say something cruel. So he shoved his hands in his pockets and endured the vibrating itch that ran through him.

Chew, chew, chew.

Bite, bite, bite.

“I dunno what the fuck’s up with this place,” Nick said. “But one thing I do know? Your trick’s not working.”

Owen stood. His legs felt numb and wobbly. And still his chest burned from dreaming about drowning. He almost stepped on the blue dog toy—

And next to it was a small patch of darker carpet.

Smeared, as if someone had tried, and failed, to clean it.

Blood.

From that cough.

The sound of it looped in his head like sampled music.

Owen shook his head and walked to Nick. “Trick? What—what’s not working, what trick?”

“The rooms changing. You’ve been asleep for a couple hours already—”

“Really? That long? Did you—”

“Sleep? No. Tried but didn’t manage it. Fuck it. That’s okay. I poked around and I checked the door, and, well.”

He did a weary flourish toward the door.

The attic remained.

The boxes, the junk, the memories.

The mattress, the swaddled body.

“Same fucking thing,” Nick said, an implicit ta-da added in his face.

“That thing move any more?” Owen asked, quietly, talking about the body.

“No.”

“Good.”

Nick sighed and eased the door shut.

“We need to go in there. It’s like the staircase—we just have to do it.”

“The staircase was the trap, the bait; once we went in, it was too late,” Owen started to say, but then something clicked. Lore talking about games, about rules. About how things worked a certain way. “Maybe the doors are like the staircase.”

“I don’t follow you.”

No, but we followed you , and what a mistake that was, Owen said to himself—a surprisingly acrimonious thought, intrusive on the face of it. He shook it off. “Um. So, okay. The staircase sits there, right? It sits there and waits. It waits till what—?”

“Until someone goes up the goddamn thing.”

“And then—”

Nick grinned like a fox. “And then it goes poof .”

“To us, it disappears. But really…it shifts. We don’t know where it goes. Maybe it goes only to the inside of this place. But maybe it transposes itself somewhere else—some other forest, some other tract of wilderness.”

“You think the doors work the same way.”

“Maybe.”

Nick’s grin twisted into a fresh scowl. “Yeah, but how’s that help us? Means I’m right, and we still have to walk through.”

“What if we walk through, then walk back? Then close the door and…”

“And hope the roulette wheel spins and lands us on a new number.”

“A new room.”

“Wanna try it?”

“Better now than never.”

Nick winked and grinned again, as if he knew this was gonna work. He practically attacked the door when opening it, like he had to sneak up on it— gotcha —and it swung open.

“All right,” Nick said. “I’m gonna hop in, hop out—”

“Nick.”

“What?”

“The body.”

“The body?” Nick turned back toward the attic and looked. “Oh shit.”

The body was gone.

The mattress sat there, filthy with stains, but bare of anybody or anything.

“Yeah. Shit.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing. It’s gone. Right?”

“I…” Owen didn’t have an answer. It seemed like that could be true. Though in this place, that didn’t seem likely. “I don’t know, Nick. But I think we should both step through. You go first, and I’ll be right on your heels.”

Nick batted his eyes. “We could hold hands, sweetie.”

“Don’t be homophobic.”

“I’m not.” He scoffed. “I’m actually kinda serious.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

Owen reached out, took Nick’s hand. It was cold and clammy. But welcome just the same.

“Let’s Thelma and Louise this shit.”

Nick stepped through, Owen right behind him.

The air in the attic room was immediately different—it smelled like, well, an old attic. Like dust, mostly. It was still and stale. And behind it was something else, too: the pickled smell of death, like roadkill you passed in your car, its stink crawling up through the heating vents.

Owen scanned the room, looking for the strange sheet-swaddled body that had been on the mattress—that sat up before. But nothing.

Still, the skin on the back of his neck prickled.

“Let’s go back,” Owen said.

Nick nodded like he was vibing it, too.

Owen stepped backward through the door, and Nick came through with him, shutting the door as they did. Nick said, “All right, let’s see if it—”

But as he spoke, he turned to look at Owen—

Owen, who was still facing Nick and the door.

Nick’s eyes went wide as he stared past Owen.

Oh fuck .

Owen spun.

There, on the little microfiber loveseat—

Was the swaddled body.

It was in here with them now.

It lay there, still.

“Jesus fucking fuck,” Nick said, swallowing hard. “You see it, too, right?”

“I see it, too.”

Up close, it was easy to see that the bedsheet swaddling the body was once white, now stained with time, but also fluids. Blood, probably. Around the chest. Around the head and neck. The bedsheets themselves were cheap, nearly threadbare.

The dark brown stains began spreading. Shining wet.

From within, something whispered, a whisper barely escaping a clog of something thick and humid in its throat—

“ They kept me and they killed me .”

“Who?” Owen asked. The word seemed to come out automatically, like it was part of a script and he had to read his line. No, he thought. It’s because I have to know. Maybe this person wants to talk. Maybe we need to listen .

“Owen…” Nick cautioned, but Owen ignored him.

“Who kept you? Who killed you?”

A gurgled hiss. A slop of sound. Then: “ My next-door neighbors. ”

The stains continued to spread.

“Can you tell us more?”

“ They t-t-took me from my— ” The body shuddered with one racking cough. The sheet above the mouth went from a red-brown to black. “ Backyard. Right out from under my parents’ noses. They searched and searched everywhere but I was next door. They used me. They used me and they used me and they used me, and then when I was all used up, they killed me and hid me in the attic. Do you know how they finally ffffffound me? ”

Owen couldn’t say any more. He only could shake his head no.

Something under the bedsheets tumbled and swelled. A rise and fall, something pressing underneath and then sinking again. A tightening, then a relaxing. Little shapes, little textures, like—

Like macaroni noodles.

“Owen,” Nick said, pulling on his elbow like a child hiding behind his mother, trying to get her to leave. “Owen!”

“ It was the maggots crawling out the attic vent .”

The seams of the bedsheet ripped with a great tear—a bulge of raw, bruise-dark flesh bubbled up underneath it, the ribs gone gelatinous, the skin splitting as the sheet did, and even before the worms burst forth, it was easy to see their outlines under the dead flesh—

The young man’s body howled a scream past the clot of worms in its throat, its mouth under the remaining sheet stretched wide, too wide, a tubular pillar of larvae pushing free of it, and Owen was frozen, struck in horror as Nick dragged him back through the door, the maggots rushing toward them in a tumbling, flopping river—

Wham .

The door closed.

The attic was gone.

This was somewhere new.

It shifted. We did it .

Deeper into the house they went.