The Unwritten

The Unwritten Part X - Tom

In the stairwell Tom leaned back against the closed door. The room was pitch black. On the other side of the door the kitchen torture table lay bloody on its side. A dead man was stretched out upon the living room floor. There were those bastards out beyond the front door and God knows what had been floating around the ceiling.

Tom shivered just thinking about it which only made him feel the emptiness before him even more and the possibilities of what it might hold, what it all might mean, even more still. He closed his eyes tightly, trying to put down the fear, trying to understand what was happening. But he had nothing. None of this made any sense.

He had to hold onto the fact that there was only here and now. There was only, survival. He would just have to deal with things as they came up and hope that he could pull himself out of this nightmare one step at a time.

He listened at the door carefully, but there was only a mute blackness sharing the stairwell with him

Opening his eyes, he looked toward the staircase. Now that his eyes had adjusted somewhat, he could see through the dark to the banister and the deep rectangular center of the winding staircase beyond. He still couldn't figure out where the light in the room was coming from. He thought he saw something near the ceiling, a dark movement. Quickly he did a double take and was relieved to realize it was just his eyes adjusting to the dimness of the room.

Shaking his head, he forced a couple of deep breaths.

“You really need to get a grip. Pull yourself together!” His voice sounded foreign to him in the odd acoustics of the room.

He stood upright and straightened his back. It cracked in a few places but felt better. His side ached but it was endurable; he was getting used to the pain. Or possibly going into shock. He took a few steps forward to the old wooden railing. His fingers felt the wood. It was worn and ancient. And dusty. It wasn’t recently a well-used room.

Grasping the bannister with his left hand it felt solid, well built. He grabbed it with his other hand and gently but solidly shook it to test its strength. It seemed quite firm but he also got a feeling of anxiety in realizing there was a great depth to how far down the stairwell descended. As if his body recognized how far down the stairs went, even if his mind didn't, he nervously pulled back from it. There was the feeling of a vast distance before him that he just couldn’t shake.

Walking around to the left of the railing, he followed the floor. About ten feet ahead was the end of the railing where the stairs went down to the right. A walkway below then headed back toward the door, then with another turn there was another flight going down.

From what he could see it repeated that pattern, flight after flight, going down into the dark yawning void. He could just start to make out that it went six or seven flights down becoming too dim to clearly see beyond that. It made the hackles on the back of his neck stand on end. He had never been big on heights, or depths, for that matter. Especially when he couldn’t tell exactly the extent of those depths.

"Damn." He breathed the word listening to how the surrounding room dealt with it. There were no echoes, walls and depths seemed to absorb any sounds. "Okay, then..."

He moved to the end of the banister and stepped down onto the first step. Nothing happened. No monsters ran up at him. He almost chuckled to himself. He wasn't quite sure what he was expecting, but there was no doubt that he was still in grave danger. Literally.

Tom looked back at the door he had just come through, realizing it was indeed a treacherous place. He took another step down. Then another. Seven more and he was at the first level below the main floor of the cabin. Ten steps. So far so good.

There seemed to be nothing on that level, only silence. He turned right and walked along the long walkway to the end banister, then turned right and crossed the shorter end, turning right to find he was again facing what should have been the long walkway back. But he was at the top of another, longer flight going down. 

It was an odd way to build flights of stairs, not congruent at all and it lent a surreal impression to it all. In fact all of this had a surreal feeling to it. This entire place was surreal. Tom then had an odd feeling, that his entire life had been somehow surreal. He tried hard to remember, but his mind was as dark to him as this stairwell.

Figuring he had no more to lose in standing there than in continuing, he headed down the next flight. This time he counted twenty steps going down. He was now on the third floor below the cabin. Looking up to where he had started he could still see that level. He smiled. Still so far, so good.

Looking around, he saw no doors, certainly no windows. He put his hand on the wall as he walked around to the next flight of stairs. That brought him back around the other long side to the short end where there was another flight going down just like the first flight only at the other end, which would be beneath the doorway upstairs. He headed down what he figured would be another short flight of ten steps.

He noticed that the air seemed to be getting heavier as he descended. It was also even more silent, if that was possible. Before he got to the bottom of that flight he realized, in looking back up, then down, that this flight wasn’t the expected ten steps. It was instead, eleven.

“What the hell?” His whispered words spooked him, as if someone else had spoken them. He looked around, but there was nothing much there. Starting to feel more confident, Tom continued on, wondering just how far this inconsistency and this descent, would continue.

Couldn't be too far, he figured.