Peculiar ♡ Alma Peregrine

Chapter Sixteen - Out of Hell

I paced back and forth across the room, trying to think of more things I could try. I could see a vase of flowers outside the room - lilies, I recognized. They were wilting as the hours passed, these people must have been getting tired by now, so was I. These people knew me, they knew what I could do, but they couldn't help me. They couldn't do the one thing that would get me out of this place. I tapped my foot on the ground, even the obvious ideas escaping me now. Even the simplest things leaving me now.

In the end, I decided to leave the room and walk around. I looked out of the window in the front door, there was actual land and not just an endless hallway of doors. I pulled the door open, letting the breeze blow against myself. I wondered what these strangers were doing right now, they knew my name and so much about me, but I knew not a single thing about them. Were they really who they said they were, or were they just using me like most others were? I walked down the street, not knowing where I was going.

I walked and walked, the cogs in my brain working to try and come up with something. Anything, but nothing came up. I felt eyes all around me as I looked at the paper with drawing all over, it was creepy... And considering what I had gone through earlier, I wasn't even disappointed in myself for being scared like I normally would. I didn't yell at myself mentally, telling myself to suck it up and face my fears like a big girl. But the security of this house wasn't even enough to make me feel safe enough to be really strong.

The people in the paper were telling me to be strong, to be brave and face my fears head on because I could defeat them if I believed I could. They said I was just in my head, so nothing could hurt me... But that couldn't possibly be true, right? The pain in my leg felt too real to be in my head and only my head. If they had seen what I had seen today, they would understand how I just couldn't be brave. My thoughts were quickly cut off by a stomach lurching feeling - I was falling down.

I fell and fell and fell, the hole seemed never ending. Maybe it was, I'd seen enough today to believe that never ending holes could be real. After what felt like hours of falling, I hit something soft, breaking my fall painlessly. I looked around, scared that I was about to come face to face with a monster that would eat me, but there was nothing. This place was light enough for me to see everywhere, and there was no monsters. I sighed in relief, standing up from whatever I was on top of - it felt like a pillow.

I looked down, it was nothing in particular. It was just a bunch of black pieces of fabric, they looked like clothes. I tumbled off them after accidentally tripping over one of the hoods, and went to the closest door. The top of the hole was so far away that not even a pinprick of light was visible to me. The door was not like any of the others. It was not glowing blue, and it was not metallic silver. It was just a normal door. Something in my gut told me to turn away, but I ignored it and went inside.

What I saw was unexpected, it was a normal village with normal people roaming around doing their normal chores. Selling bread, making clothes... But though they looked normal and acted normal, something was off. Was that the baker selling bread wrapped in pieces of fabric, or the bread selling the baker who was tied up and screaming for help? Was that the seamstress sewing the clothes together, or the clothes sewing her mouth and nose shut? Everything in my body told me to run away, but something else compelled me to keep going further into the likely dangerous and terrifying village.

As I walked, everything started getting more and more strange. But they didn't seem to occur to me, I somehow knew exactly where to go so that I could find where I needed to go - and I ended up at a house that looked familiar. It wasn't like the house that I had just been in, it looked normal. I went inside, the inside was rotting everywhere. There were whispers surrounding me, whispers that I recognized easier than I could ever recognize anything else.
"Mama, Papa," I called out, stepping into every room to find the source of the eerie whispers.