The first floor was darker than above.
No moonlight reached down here. No windows that he could see. Just shadows thick enough to feel solid and a smell that made his stomach turn.
Rot. Mildew. Something sweet and sickly underneath it all. *Decomposition.* He'd smelled enough dead bodies to recognize it. Not fresh—this was old death, months at least. Maybe years.
His eyes adjusted slowly. Shapes emerged from the darkness. A grand foyer with a staircase curving up to where he'd just come from. Doors leading off in multiple directions. Wallpaper peeling in long strips.
And dust. Dust over everything, thick as snow.
No footprints in it but his own.
How long had this place been abandoned?
He tried the front door first. Massive thing, solid wood with iron fittings. The kind of door that belonged in a castle.
It didn't budge.
He tried again, throwing his weight against it. The door didn't even rattle. It was sealed shut, swollen wood jammed tight in the frame.
No way out there.
Other doors beckoned. He chose one at random, turned the handle.
A dining room. Long table, chairs mostly broken. And on the table—
A sandwich.
He stared at it. Fresh bread. Peanut butter and jelly, cut diagonally. Like someone had made it five minutes ago and just walked away.
Everything else in the house was decayed. Rotten. Ancient.
But the sandwich looked fresh.
He didn't touch it.
Next door. A storage closet. Empty shelves. And on the floor, a dark stain. Tar-like substance, still wet and gleaming.
He knelt beside it, careful not to touch. *Scene preservation,* some distant part of his mind noted. Old habits from too many accident scenes. The smell was stronger here. Sweet and wrong. Like coagulated blood left too long in the sun, but darker. Thicker.
Movement caught his eye.
The tar rippled.
He jerked back, but something grabbed his ankle. Cold and wet and impossibly strong.
The world tilted. Twisted. Reality bent like hot glass.
And then he was somewhere else.
***
Water dripped somewhere in the darkness.
He woke on cold tile, head pounding. For a moment he thought he was back in the attic, waking from the same nightmare.
But the floor was wrong. Too smooth. Too cold.
Porcelain.
He was in a bathtub. Old and stained, in what looked like a bathroom. But not one he'd seen before.
Harsh fluorescent lights flickered overhead, buzzing like dying insects. The sound set his teeth on edge.
The pattern of the flickering wasn't random. Three short bursts. Pause. Three long bursts. Pause. Three short bursts again. Over and over. SOS in Morse code.
The lights were calling for help.
He stared at the fluorescent tubes. They flickered in their pattern, desperate and mechanical. How many people had died in this room? How many had watched these lights flash their distress signal while they bled out or transformed or whatever horror happened here?
The walls were concrete. Bare. But scratches covered every surface within arm's reach of the tub. Deep gouges in the cement, fingernails worn down to nothing trying to claw through solid stone. Some scratches formed words. Most were just frantic lines. Evidence of panic. Of people who'd woken in this tub and tried to dig their way to freedom.
None of the scratches made it more than an inch deep.
This wasn't the manor's first floor. Wasn't anywhere he'd been.
He pulled himself out of the tub, dripping. His clothes were dry. He wasn't wet. The dripping sound came from somewhere else.
A faucet, maybe. Or something worse.
The bathroom was small. A sink with a smashed mirror. Glass in the basin, reflecting the flickering lights in a thousand fragments. A toilet with the seat cracked. And the door.
Closed but not locked.
He checked his weapons. Still there. Pistol, sword. Good.
What the hell had that tar stuff done to him? Teleported him? How was that possible?
How was any of this possible?
The mannequins. The ghost child. The tar that moved and grabbed.
Nothing made sense.
He tried the door. It opened onto a hallway. Long and straight, fluorescent lights flickering at intervals. More doors on either side.
The smell hit him immediately.
Blood. Fresh blood.
And beneath it, chemicals. Antiseptic. The smell of a hospital.
His grip tightened on the pistol.
This was different from the manor. Newer. The walls were cement, not wallpapered. The floor was tile, not wood. Industrial. Institutional.
Where the hell was he?
A dragging sound echoed from somewhere down the hall. Metal on tile. Rhythmic and slow.
He moved toward it, every instinct screaming at him to run the other way.
The hallway forked. Right, the dragging sound continued. Left, silence.
He went right.
The sound grew louder. Closer. Whatever was making it was just around the corner ahead.
He pressed against the wall, pistol raised. Waited.
The thing that came around the corner wasn't human.
Green skin, lumpy and malformed. Arms too long. Legs too short. It dragged a body bag behind it, the bag leaving a streak of something dark and wet on the white tile.
The creature's face was wrong. Eyes too far apart. Mouth too wide. When it saw him, that mouth opened wider, showing teeth like broken glass.
It charged.
He fired. Three shots, center mass.
The creature stumbled but didn't fall. Green blood splattered the walls. It kept coming.
He fired again. Headshot this time.
The creature went down, sliding forward on the bloody tiles until it lay at his feet. Twitching. Dying.
He stood over it, breathing hard.
What was that thing?
More sounds from deeper in the facility. Shuffling footsteps. Moaning. Things that might have been human once but weren't anymore.
He needed to get out of here. Now.
But the hallway stretched ahead of him, and he had no idea which direction led to an exit.
Behind him, the bathroom. Ahead, the facility and its monsters.
He chose ahead.
Always ahead. Always moving.
Because stopping meant dying. And he wasn't ready to die.
Not yet.
Not until he understood what was happening. Why he kept waking in these nightmare places. Who had done this to him.
He passed doors. Rooms filled with medical equipment. Gurneys with restraints. Walls covered in photographs—polaroids showing empty rooms and dark windows and faces he didn't recognize.
Through one open doorway, he glimpsed an operating theater. Surgical lights hung at odd angles, their bulbs shattered. The table beneath bore restraints—thick leather straps with metal buckles, worn from use. Dark stains radiated from the table's center like a blooming flower. On the floor, discarded medical instruments lay scattered. Scalpels. Bone saws. Syringes filled with something that glowed faintly green in the flickering light.
A clipboard hung on the wall. He grabbed it without thinking.
The top page showed a diagram. Human body, front and back views, with sections marked and labeled. "Subject 47 - Transformation Protocol." Areas highlighted in red indicated where modifications had been made. Where things had been added or removed or altered. The notes in the margins were clinical, detached. "Subject expired at 73% completion. Cellular rejection accelerated beyond projected timeline. Recommend increased sedation for future trials."
Seventy-three percent completion of what? What had they been trying to create?
One photo made him stop.
His own living room. Photographed from outside, through the window. He could see his couch. His TV. His bookshelf.
Someone had been watching him.
Before this. Before the manor. Before the attic.
Someone had been stalking him.
His hands shook. Rage mixed with fear, making a cocktail that tasted like bile.
Who?
Another sound. Closer now. Running footsteps.
He turned.
More of them. Three creatures, different from the first but equally wrong. Malformed bodies, too many limbs or too few. Skin the wrong color. Eyes that didn't belong in human faces.
Experiments.
Someone was making these things. Creating them in this underground facility.
He ran.
Down the hallway, through a door, into another corridor. The creatures followed, their shrieks echoing off the cement walls.
A ladder. Ahead, set into the wall. Leading up to a hatch.
He grabbed the rungs, started climbing. The metal was cold. Too cold. Frost formed on his fingers where they touched the rungs, spreading across his skin like crystalline infection. Each rung felt colder than the last. By the time he reached the hatch, his hands were numb, skin gray and lifeless.
The hatch resisted. Sealed from disuse or deliberately locked.
The creatures reached the bottom of the ladder. Their claws scraped metal. They were climbing.
He braced his shoulder against the hatch and pushed. The metal groaned. Didn't move.
Pushed harder. His shoulder screamed. The hatch gave slightly, rust breaking free.
The creatures were halfway up.
One final push. The hatch flew open, hinges shrieking. Cold air hit him. Fresh air.
He was outside.
Night sky above. Trees around him. And in the distance, the silhouette of the manor.
He'd gone underground and come back up somewhere else. The facility was beneath the property. Part of the same nightmare.
The hatch slammed shut. He scrambled away from it, breathing hard.
Safe.
For now.
But for how long?
The manor loomed ahead, dark windows like watching eyes. And somewhere inside, the ghost child waited in her music room. The drunk father sat in his study. The mannequins hummed their terrible song.
He needed answers.
And he was going to get them.
Even if it killed him.
