Chapter 21: House of the Collector – Part 4

The old man was alone. His knife was clutched in his hand, down by his side, and he peered into a dark corridor. The first new thing he’d seen in who knew how long. What a fool he was, to trust something like that.

He had been standing there for several minutes already. It was the darkness that did it. The shadows were oppressive, full and heavy, a vast, breathless weight that seemed to want to squeeze every last bit of air from his lungs, and so he stood at the end of his little corridor, his back to the wall that had once been a door, taking rapid, shallow breaths, his knuckles tight around the handle of his knife, waiting for something to emerge.

At first he was hopeful for his companions. They had been at his side only moments ago, one of them with a lit lantern. But the lantern had gone out, and now he was alone. He knew he had to find that lantern again, or some other source of light, but some small but strong part of him was keeping his feet rooted to this spot, just waiting for other things to come and find him.

It took a long time, how long he wasn’t sure, for he didn’t appear to be good at keeping track of such things, but eventually he summoned the willpower to start moving, and that was quite possibly the worst mistake he could have made.

In response to his movement, the shadows around him deepened, darkened, and extended. They were reaching inwards, grasping towards him, encroaching on the space around him, and he began to imagine that they were whispering to him as well, in thin, high-pitched voices that invaded his mind and buried themselves in his subonscious, just muttering away while he walked, seeding what dreads and doubts he wasn’t yet sure, and tried his best not to pay any attention to.

Before long, he was wishing very strongly that he was not so old. It was terribly unfair, he thought, that he must have lived long enough for his skin to begin wrinkling, his hair to turn grey, and his body to begin to grow tired and aching, and yet he remembered none of his past life save faint hints and half-finished memories, like flashes of an old dream.

He had skills and likes and hates and fears, but nothing to justify them, nothing to go with them. There was no name to his soul, and though he grew ever more certain each time he flipped the knife in his hand that he was extremely well-practiced with it, he still had no clue how or why, beyond that vague, vague thought that he might once had been a criminal; a thought that grew to occupy every corner of his mind whenever it resurfaced, that made his chest tight and quickened his heartrate, as a possibility he would rather not entertain seemed, in his mind, to become ever more certain.

Although he hadn’t been walking for that long, he stopped as he came to the bottom of a spiral staircase, and wondered not for the first time what had brought them all here. Four people who had never met each other, dragged into this maze of trees and corridors that made no sense, and for what reason? Was it punishment? Was he here to suffer the pains of whatever crimes his past self had committed?

All he could say for certain was that he needed to find light. The darkness in this place was strange, oppressive, and at times he thought he saw faint shapes shifting in the corner of his vision, though there was never anything when he turned to look. He could only hope that with a bit of luck he might find a light, for he was sure that if he could turn it upon these shadows, he would find the way out of this nightmare.

Such concrete surety as that, however, is one of the cruelest tricks the mind can play.

It began with a glimmer. First a glimmer of light, somewhere ahead, down at the end of the corridor, wavering like a candle. Then a glimmer of hope, kindled by the thought of that flame, and followed soon by a burst of excitement, its flames flaring up through the old man’s mind and urging him forwards with quickened step and heart alike.

But when he reached the light, it had no source, and it dissipated around him, fading into shadow even as he grasped at the air, as if he could somehow hold it and keep it with him. When he looked down another hall to his left, he saw the light reform there. It hung, silent, gently shifting, beckoning. Reaffirming his grip on the hilt of his knife, he hurried towards it.

He followed it for quite a while, this way and that, though never up or down any stairs, and whenever he reached it it would flit away as far as it could without leaving his sight, and he would follow it. It didn’t take long for him to work out that he was being lured somewhere, but what was he supposed to do? Stay and cower in the darkness? No. He knew one thing, if nothing else: he would much rather face a danger he could see than imagine one he could not.

So he followed the light without hesitation, drawing his knife and holding it ahead of him as he walked, ready for whatever it was leading him towards, and he found reassurance in the feel of it in his hand.

Before long, the light led the old man to an old door, even older than the others, made of thick, heavy planks infested with woodworm and bound together by bands of rusty iron. Creeping tantalisingly through the door gaps, a faint glimmer told him the light had reformed behind it, so he set his hand on it and pushed. It moved very slightly, but did not open.

Grumbling to himself, he knelt in front of the lock and slid in the tip of his knife. To his surprise, it fitted quite well, and the lock gave in without trouble, a swift click voicing its surrender. The door creaked when it opened, and the light faded once more, reappearing at the bottom of a long set of wooden stairs leading down, down, through shadow.

When the old man stepped through, the door swung shut behind him, slamming against the frame, and when he turned back to it with a start, he could see small holes in the wall just around it. Holes that, as he watched, began to produce small tendrils of wood; root and branch, slowly crawling out, across the door, until they reached one another and wove together, tightening into a wall that blocked his exit, as he took a slow step back and down, to put himself farther from reach.

Briefly, he considered hacking at the wall with his knife, but he could see it was too thick already for that to do any good, so instead he just gripped it with both hands and set off after the light again.

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At first all there was at the bottom of the stairs was a corridor, but something was different. The light didn’t fade away like usual ― instead, it floated gently down the hall, carefully, slowly guiding the old man along the straight, plain corridor. The only variations in the walls were the places near the floor, where they splintered a little as thin roots pushed their way through.

The old man had decided that he did not like trees.

He knew, somehow, that in other places trees were beautiful, that huge swathes of green canopies stretched away to infinity, covering every inch of their lush landscapes, but the trees here were not like that. The trees here were not just alive, they were sentient. He could feel their thoughts as they moved, see their goals unfold in the things they did: they were here to lure him farther into danger and trap him there forever. Even these ones, down at his feet, unmoving, emanated an ill will.

They should have stayed back at the very beginning of the maze, where they had woken up, with the lantern sat between them. He had said at the start of it all that they should stay there, but no one else had listened, and now where had it got them? He was clutching a knife, descending into darkness, following some fleeting, beckoning light, as behind him roots and twigs and vines closed off his escape.

His thoughts were brought to an abrupt halt when he came to a doorway. There was no door in it, but there was a room on the other side, and he stepped cautiously into it and looked around.

The soft glow of the light moved with him, illuminating stacks of crates and barrels at the walls. There was another doorway in the far wall, also empty, with another corridor beyond it. Lining the walls were wooden shelves held up by rather flimsy looking brackets, and on the shelves were jars, all full of some sort of translucent liquid that he somehow knew was most definitely not water.

There were things in the liquid, too. In one there was a foot. In another, a heart; in third, a pair of lungs; then two ears; ten full fingernails; a tongue; the wrinkly, grey shape of a brain; and finally, a line of thirty-two teeth all sewn together with what looked like hair, to make some sort of horrific necklace.

As the old man was looking at all these things, his free hand over his mouth and the knuckles of his other hand clenched white as bone around the hilt of the knife, he noticed something else in the room, far worse than anything he had already seen.

It was a shape, hidden between two stacks of wooden crates, hunched and curled, lying on its side. It was a human shape, in fact, with a dark stain on the side of its head that faced up. Its hair was frizzy, its arms muscled. When the old man crouched beside it, he saw dark eyes staring at nothing. He peered closer at the dark stain, only to close his eyes so as to shut out what he saw.

The ear had been torn off the head, and a good deal of skin with it.

When he worked up the courage to open his eyes again, he didn’t need to turn the woman’s head to confirm that her other ear had been taken too; the dried blood on the floor and the presence of the two ears in the jar on the shelf above her did that well enough.

Slowly, the old man stood up. He did not quite know what to do with what he had found. And as if to make things nice and simple for him, a sound echoed down the corridor he’d come from. A sound he’d heard before, out in the maze of trees. Feet, dragging along the floor, accompanied by the tap of something like a walking stick, and faint breaths.

Moving towards the middle of the room, the man hid the knife behind his back and looked out into the hallway. Out there, lights had appeared, like the one he’d followed here, but there were so many more them, leading all the way back to the stairs. And moving slowly forwards was a shape wreathed and wrapped in shadow, a tall rake brandished in front of it as it moved forwards with a slow, lopsided gait.

In the light, the old man could see that the hands emerging from the shadow were not human. They were wrapped in pale, tattered sack cloth that seemed to be only barely staying in one piece as it dragged against the rough, interwoven strands of straw that twined around each other into the shape of the skeletal fingers gripping the rake. All was messy and frayed and old, but somehow holding its shape, holding together as the thing advanced on its prey.

The old man took a step backwards, flicking his knife out from behind his back. The thing did not stop. He reached the knife back behind his head and waited, poised, for it to inch just a little closer. Close enough for him to be sure he would hit, even through the shadow.

Just one more step.

That step came, and he hurled the knife forwards. At least, he would have, but his arm did not move. Something gripped the knife, and as he craned his head back to look, he saw roots and vines reaching up and out from the floor and the walls, grasping, curling up. By the time he thought to pull away, it was too late. They had seized his arm. They had seized his ankles. A vine whipped out and wrapped about his head, sliding across his mouth like a gag, holding him half-twisted around, frozen, listening to the footsteps, to the breaths, to the thunk, thunk, of the rake against the wooden floor.

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