I was sick of waking up in this dim hallway, but at least this time, I wasn’t on a chair. Instead, I was sitting on the dingy floor, leaning against one of the walls. I don’t know if I’d say that it was an improvement over how I usually found myself, but at least I was able to push myself off the floor without any sign of being trapped.

  I stood and stared down the long hallway, keeping my back to the wall as best as I could. Even though it seemed lighter than the last few times I was here, there was still a dimness about the hall that made it hard to differentiate the lighter shadows from the darker ones. Nothing seemed to be moving, however, and the same held true when I switched to look down the other side of the hallway. For once, I seemed to be alone here.

  I waited in silence for another beat before turning my attention to the chair in front of me. It had always been flimsy, I thought as I stepped toward it. I grabbed the back of it and lifted it upward, testing the weight and finding that it was just light enough for me to be able to lift it. Perfect. I hoisted it above my head as far as I could, then slammed it back to the ground, squinting my eyes to keep away the splinters. As I had hoped, the poorly made legs broke off in a fractured mess. I dropped the husk of the remaining chair and picked up one of the broken legs. If I was going to be trapped in here with it, I thought, then I was going to make it a problem.

  Testing the weight of the chair leg, I thought I’d be able to swing it well enough, not that it mattered. It was the only thing I could use in here as a potential weapon, so I would take what I could get regardless. Then, I started stalking into the darkness in the direction I’d frequently seen the girl.

  It was quiet, I thought as I walked through the growing darkness. It seemed that, while I couldn’t exactly see a light source, all of the light was centered around where I landed, and as I walked farther away, the shadows seemed to grow. I tried to hear the sound of my own feet - I wasn’t walking particularly gingerly, after all - but I could hear nothing. That meant that if the demon was here, it wouldn’t hear me coming. But it also meant that it could be sneaking up behind me without me noticing as well. I whipped my head around quickly, just to make sure, but there was nothing but the dim hallway behind me.

  After a few seconds of walking, I hit the first room. My eyes had focused on this room plenty of times when I was stuck in the chair, so I had to admit that even though my nerves were on edge, there was a certain amount of curiosity about the building that made me eager to look inside it. I turned the corner, ducking into the room before I could think better of it.

  I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I definitely wasn’t expecting what looked like a hospital room. It was fitting, after having been here so many hospitals recently, that my last showdown would be here. I walked toward the bed, as though from muscle memory. The sheets were worn, clearly old, but as clean as they could get in this place. The same could be said for the things on the bedside table. Clearly, someone was using this space.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  I wasn’t naive enough to think this was an actual space, though. I hadn’t physically gone anywhere when I’d passed out, and every time I’d been here, I’d been transported back to my body without any of the injuries I’d sustained. So clearly, wherever I was was somewhere at least metaphysical, if not in my own mind.

  That didn’t mean I could let me guard down, though. While I didn’t retain any physical injuries, that didn’t mean that the injuries I got here weren’t wearing me down in some other way. That’s how it always worked in the movies, wasn’t it? And after every time I’d been here, I’d felt more connected with the demon. Given what Circe said about the demon being so strong, I had a hunch that that was because it was stealing my strength with every drop of blood that was drained from my system. Every time we tried to fight it, it just fed off our weakness.

  And that was going to happen again if I kept getting lost in thought, I realized. I dropped the thin hospital sheet - I hadn’t even realized that I had picked it up and started worrying it as I thought, but as I dropped it, it felt like the vibe of the room seemed to change. It had felt warm, almost comforting in a strange sort of way, but as I dropped the fabric, a cold breeze hit me. I turned around to face the source and saw the door to the room closing.

  Instantly, I sprinted to the door. The path there felt longer than I could have ever possibly walked, as though the room was growing around me, but as the door closed enough to only see a few inches of the dark hallway, I thrust the chair leg forward into the crack. A heartbeat later, I felt the reverberation of the door hitting the wood, hard enough that I knew it couldn’t have been closing naturally. I grabbed the door handle and yanked it open as hard as I could, pulling back the chair leg to attack if necessary.

  There was nothing in the hallway.

  I looked behind the door, and there was nothing there either. I felt a few cold beads of sweat pop up on my forehead as the fear deepened its roots. Eventually, every other time I’d been here, I’d seen the little girl, but how could I know if that was her choice to show herself to me? I tightened my grip on the chair leg - I was ready to fight, but how was I supposed to fight something if I didn’t know for sure that I could see them?

  I guess I’d find out, I thought, taking a deep breath and stepping back through the threshold of the door into the hallway. I turned to close the door behind me - after all, a closed door meant one last place a demon could sneak up on me from, assuming they obeyed the same laws of physics here, that is - but I froze in place the minute my hand hit the doorknob. Where before there had been a complete hospital set up, there was now just an empty room.

  I nearly stepped back into the room in my shock, but I’d already been almost trapped in the room. But I had just been in there - I had felt the sheets! I knew it couldn’t be empty. But then again, did I really know anything about this place? As far as I knew, everything I could see, touch,and smell was what the demon wanted me to sense.

  “I know, it can be a bit of a trip, can’t it?” said a voice behind me, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck standing up straight. There had been no one in the hallway, but especially not him.

  “Things come and go in here,” Liam said. I heard him take a step toward me, but not come close enough that I could reach out and grab him. “Sometimes there’s a full room, and then you blink and it’s gone. I’m not sure if its a trick of the light or just a sign that this place can drive you crazy. But either way,” he said, taking a step toward me again, “I’m glad I found you. It’s been crazy lonely around here lately.”