We walk through a long hallway of tunneled stone, stopping halfway through when another percussive DOOM vibrates through us as the Doom Clock sounds yet again.

  This time it’s barely the force of displaced wind by a subway car. Nico puts his hand on my back as though he’s going to steady me, but the pulse isn’t strong for either of us to worry about losing our balance.

  “Does it feel like it’s getting weaker to you?” I wonder out loud.

  “It’s my first Doom Clock, so I don’t know what I should expect.”

  “Living here isn’t normally like this,” I say, shrugging off his hand once the wind dies down. “It’s usually…” I start to say normal but my voice dries up at the word. What could I even say? Or how would I explain Morecroft Manor without telling him about Wrath.

  I hope Wrath is okay…

  His voice interrupts the reverie. “Unless you need to go into the basement. Then it’s cloudy with a chance of incineration.”

  I turn to face him. “I don’t think anything down here wants to hurt us.” Off of his look, I feel my hackles raise. “The house is protecting itself. It’s not trying to torture us.”

  “And what do you think the Doom Clock is trying to do?” he asks.

  I don’t have an answer for that, and he knows it.

  “There are places designed to keep things like that safe,” he says gently. “You said yourself you didn’t even know it was here before. Wouldn’t it be better in a vault that could be safely controlled?”

  “A vault that could just as easily be broken into. Or a vault controlled by someone that can’t be trusted.”

  The gentle tone fades. “So you think something like this is safer with you, a person who doesn’t even know what kinds of dangerous items are hidden in his basement?”

  “I trust me better than anyone else,” I shrug, and then continue walking.

  The moment we close in on the next room, Nico huffs. “Another puzzle?”

  The room with the fireflies hadn’t ever felt dangerous to me. Not in the way it probably had to Nico. I don’t believe Morecroft Manor would ever hurt me, even in something like these basement rooms. But then again, I don’t know who exactly designed these rooms. Or what they designed them for.

  The house may not hurt me. But we may not be in the house anymore.

  The room we walk into now is something out of a Victorian nightmare by way of a Sinterest board. What may have started as an ordinary sitting room has been washed out in hundreds, if not thousands, of similar looks all plastered one on top of another.

  Heavy, darkly lined wallpaper covers the walls in varied shades of black. Each strip is embossed with its own pattern, and single strips ran from floor to ceiling so that one wall boasted nearly a hundred slightly different blacks and greys and purples. Some are obvious - black background with a fleur-de-lis, a slightly deeper black with a Yellow Sign roaming free. Another shade offers up grey faces screaming in agony. No two are the same. No two are even remotely similar.

  Tables are spread all around the room: one circular, one square, one pentagonal. No two are alike. No two are even the same number of points. Each is set with a lace tablecloth in a different shade of brown: November litter, spring agony of new growth, forgotten water, troll excrement.

  Then there are the dolls. Dolls. So many dolls. They had all been harried by a life of unending service, one with the porcelain mouth and jaw completely torn away, another with deep ocean whirlpools for eyes. Some are old, aged cloth repurposed with life, one carved from knotted, desiccated black wood, but many are shaped from porcelain and ivory, with too-human eyes and lips fragrant with glistening blood.

  One doll leans towards us drunkenly. Her clumpy, blonde hair is bloody at its roots and even the scalp looks red and infected where other bits of hair have been ripped free.

  “It…makes my eyes hurt,” Nico says from behind me. “Does it make your eyes hurt?”

  There is certainly something… wrong with the room. That much I agree with. It’s not the room itself, but more all the pieces and parts. Every inch of the room has something in it, something to tug at the eye - like a shirt string snagged on a nail. Each of the dolls are turned to face entrance of the room.

  Some of their expressions are haunted. Some rapturous. Some in agony.

  There’s something insidious under all of it, like putting a Victorian gown over a scaled beast. It doesn’t hide the fangs, or the gristle from its hungry maw, but it does turn it into a monster… in a pretty dress.

  I take a tiny step into the room, and vertigo seizes me. The visuals of the room become oppressive. All at once it does my head in, and I feel like I’m going to lose my balance until Nico pulls me back.

  “Moron, get back in here,” Nico rolls his eyes. “Plan first.”

  “What plan. There’s no exit.”

  He grunts a moment later, once he’s confirmed it for himself.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  That’s when the patterns catch me. Not on the walls, or on the tablecloths. But the patterns on the doll’s dresses. They’re all fractals, twisting inward and seeming to move. A different sort of design than the fireflies in the last room but no less as demanding to my subconscious.

  “Do you… see that?”

  I feel myself sinking into them, the patterns are hypnotic. They burn the inside of my eyes, and tears well up. But they’re so pretty. So horrific and beautiful in equal measure. Then a moment later I’m yanked back into the hallway.

  “What are you doing?” Nico demands.

  “What?”

  Nico reaches forward and wipes a finger under my eye. He pulls away and I see the blood. “Stop staring.”

  But I can’t help it. Even Nico is prone to it. As soon as we approach the room, our eyes are drawn in. Somehow it changes every time, growing more and more frenetic and intricate.

  Every time I see some level of detail that is new and unbelievable. The pattern on the floor looks like the recovered Cthonic script carved into the ritual stones of Roanoke.

  The fringe on one of the dolls looks like the cave paintings in Lascaux, depicting wildlife being hunted by creatures emerging from the oceans.

  “Why is it so… oppressive?” I find myself asking out loud. It’s the only word that feels like it properly describes the pressure of the room. Every time I try to understand some piece of it, it doesn’t make sense. When counting the number of chairs around one table, counting left to right there are three that I can see, but if I count right to left I can see four. Nothing makes any sense.

  “How are we supposed to find our way through the room if we can’t even look at it without bleeding from the eyes?” Nico asks.

  I close my eyes and lean against the wall, sliding down and just giving myself a minute. Just taking a minute.

  I hear him slide down across from me, and both of us are quiet.

  “I changed my mind. I’ll head into town for coffee.”

  “Only one more,” I say faintly. “These sorts of thing always come in threes.”

  “Of course they do.”

  The room demands attention, and the more it gets the more it hurts. The more the details become heightened. Maybe that is the trick of it all.

  I relax my eyes, and don’t focus on the room at all and out of the corner of my eyes I see things… shimmer.

  “What color are the tablecloths?”

  Nico stirs, but a moment later he answers. “They’re gray.”

  “They were brown before.” But sure enough, when I open my eyes and look for them, they’re gray now.

  While it’s in focus, the room demands we see it for all the intricacies inside. But as soon as we look away, it changes, becoming something else. So that way, when you turn towards it again, the hell is fresh and new. It’s a puzzle. But it’s not one we’re going to solve with our eyes.

  “Why don’t we just force our way in?” he asks, but there’s an uncertainty softening his voice.

  I let the question hang in the air. I don’t want to go into the room. It’s not fear, though, it’s something more like repulsion. The idea of stepping foot into the room makes my skin crawl.

  But I normally don’t feel things unless I realize it first. So to be hit with a wave of something strong enough to make me change my behavior… “It’s the puzzle. It’s trying to keep us out.”

  So I close my eyes and charge into the room, only opening them once I’ve crossed the threshold.

  Another gong shudders through the room first. The walls shake, the floor trembles, and even the candelabra above me - which I hadn’t noticed before - swings wildly. But the one thing that doesn’t move is… me. I turn back, and see Nico standing easily as everything else rattles.

  Then the presence collapses down on us.

  Again, I’m pressed down into the ground as something PEERS into me. A powerful eye of something beyond the Doom Clock looks into me, and the pressure of its gaze threatens to squash me beneath it.

  Something primal explodes into me, an electric storm that blasts my nervous system apart. Frenetic and surging, it rips through feelings and fears that haven’t been spoken out loud since the stars were young. I drop into the smallest form I can, dwarfed by the eye of the Doom Clock.

  Layers of me peel away - memories of my life in Morecroft Manor, memories of my mother. Memories of the times before. I shred apart like skin from a chicken. Only one life. Only one soul. I must seem so tiny to the Doom Clock, which is something greater and beyond my understanding.

  Weak, in every sense of the word.

  Then the pressure releases, and the Eye turns its attention somewhere else.

  “What… was that?” Nico calls from the hallway.

  Inhale. Exhale. My heart thuds in my chest and for so long I just focus on my breath. On the air coming in. The air going out. Nico’s question hangs in the air, I hear the words but it takes so long for my mind to process them. To make sense of the words. To formulate a response. I focus on my breathing. Calm myself. Swallow down the bile in my throat.

  “I think the Doom Clock is waking up just a tiny bit faster than expected.” I climb to my feet, pushing down everything it awakened inside me.

  “I feel…” he trails off.

  “Yes,” I agree. That is it exactly.

  “I usually pay a psychiatrist a lot of money for something like that,” he says quietly, maybe more for himself than to me.

  Despite the rumble of the Doom Clock, we are left untouched. And so is everything else in the room. The floor trembled. The candelabra swung. At least some of the dolls should have been knocked from their perches. It should have been a Cabbage Patch Massacre at the very least.

  I look around the room. Every time before, we were waved off by the feeling of too much but now I am already inside. I take another step, then another. I’d hesitated trying to find an exit, or to figuring out the room before we walked into a trap.

  But maybe that was the trap all along.

  Last step and the perspective changes.

  Literally, my perspective of the room becomes immediately skewed. The lines and angles of the nearest table shift in a way that doesn’t make sense. It’s as though it increases in size by another three or four feet, and also gets narrow and thin. Another experimental step, and it happens again. I reach out my foot and very gently brush over a spot where I can clearly see a chair with a doll, and my foot steps down onto…two dimensions. A drawing, or a photograph. A drawing of tables and dolls and doilies.

  It’s not a room of Victorian migraines after all. It’s an empty room designed to be anything but. The further we walk into the room, the more unrecognizable the room becomes.

  Nico sees my foot over the flat surface, realizes what I know and steps into the room. Just like that, it seems like the spell is broken. He keeps extending his foot, tapping down on what is supposed to be real furniture. Real dolls. The light, the shadows everything is photorealistic. Not a painting but something more. Somehow more.

  “You’re good at this,” he says grudgingly.

  “You aren’t.” I haven’t forgotten that ‘moron’ crack earlier.

  Again, it feels too simple, like something is playing games with us. I don’t know how I know, but I don’t think it’s the house. I think it’s the Doom Clock. Measuring us. Pushing us down onto the scales and then pressing down on us with its talons. Judging us.

  Once I cross the room, I see the doorknob recessed into the shadows of painted wallpaper, hidden by nothing more than a trick of the light.

  “Come on,” I turn the knob. I am resigned. “The last will be the worst.”