The Study

You look around yourself and wonder where you are. This clearly isn’t the kitchen into which you had expected to descend. 

Across from the dumbwaiter opening is 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.

It occurs to you that this is an office space. 

Unfolding yourself from your uncomfortable position, you swing your legs over the side of the dumbwaiter and climb out, rubbing at your sore knee and hip joints.

You cross the oriental rug to the door, carefully avoiding knocking down anything hanging over the edges of the desk. Convinced you already know the result, you try the doorknob. It’s locked — just as you expected.

You’re in the study.

Turning your back to the door, you survey the room again. 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 your back pocket — a pocket you haven’t touched since you approached the house.

You feel something there, small and hard.

Reaching into the pocket, you dig out a small key. You were unaware that it had been there the whole time. Had it been there the whole time?

With a palsied hand, you try the key in the lock. It fits and clicks when you turn it. Now that the door is unlocked, you turn the knob 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 stumbled out the front door, down the gravel drive. The key is still in your hand and you shove it back into your pocket. The note you scrawled is still clutched tightly in your hand as you descend the drive. You must leave.

You must leave.

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