Excerpt 1

The Gray Place

Daniel peered up at the loft doors of the barn. So haggard was the building that if he lined up just right, he could look right through the loft doors, through a hole in the roof, and see the entire cupola sitting behind it. Taking a few shots as he went, Daniel moved around the perimeter of the barn. It really was a mess. Weather and inattention had caused the siding to rot and crack. The backside had a huge hole in it, and the two paddock doors hung askew. Feeling satisfied with his external documentation, Daniel pulled on one of the big paddocks, eager to see the inside.

The door opened to a wave of silence, and the shock of it made Daniel stop short with his hand still firmly grasping the door handle. Time appeared to slow almost to a standstill, or so he imagined, and the air became stiff. Color faded to grayscale, as though drained from the world. He became acutely aware that the only sounds were the rasp of his breathing and pulse of his heartbeat. They were loud, and the only noises to be heard anywhere. Daniel knew immediately what had happened. He had experienced this phenomenon before many times before. It wasn’t something he could explain to anyone – he had certainly tried. He was in the gray place again.

            When he was little, Daniel found himself in the gray place all the time, and it had terrified him. Complete silence, no color, intense pressure pushing at his ears and skin, as though the emptiness was enveloping him, stealing his senses. For a child it was a nightmare like no other. His mother had taken him to therapists, specialists – all the ‘ists’ she could think of, but they all said the same thing: that he was hallucinating. Or he was making it up, and it was all simply a construction of his mind, some kind of escape mechanism. But Daniel knew differently; the gray place was real. And even though he hadn’t encountered it but once so far this summer, the familiar terror took root in his gut.

            But something was wrong. Something was different. The gray place took on the appearance of Daniel’s surroundings. Right now, though everything had changed, he should still be seeing the barn. But the inside of the building before him was no barn. It was some kind of home – a big one. It was huge. Daniel couldn’t see the end of the hallway ahead of him. And it was filled to the brim with expensive, if tired, looking carpets and furniture and paintings and statues and books and all kinds of fancy stuff.

Looking over his shoulder, Daniel saw the dirt pathway leading back across the green field he’d just walked through. There was his grandma’s formerly red truck way out on the main road. When he leaned backward and looked left and right, he saw the old barn, just as he had before. But inside, there was a lavish home, plain as day. It didn’t make sense. The gray never took him somewhere new, it only seemed shift the world slightly. At least, every other time.

            He stepped back and walked around the barn. When he peered through a hole in a board… yep, it looked like a barn inside. He tried entering through the alley doors on the side of the building instead of the paddock doors. The moment he passed across the threshold, quick as blink, he was inside of the mansion again, the gray and silence and pressure overwhelming. He tried popping his ears, but nothing happened.

            Daniel’s heart raced, but more with excitement than fear. He’d been complaining about nothing happening all summer and, now, something was definitely happening. He burned to explore the place.

            Daniel wondered what had triggered the gray place, when it hadn’t happened in so long. Was it linked to this barn mansion? Nothing ever happened in the gray place; he could touch and move whatever he liked, but nothing else ever moved, and nobody ever showed up. He could see people’s outlines, like ghosts, but they never moved or did anything. The real world just shut off for a while, he would walk around aimlessly, and then he suddenly would be back in normal space.

Now that the initial shock of the barn being different inside and out had worn off, and Daniel realized he could control the effect by simply going outside or inside, he grew more and more confident about exploring the interior. He knew from experience that as long as the gray remained, nothing bad would happen to him. Nothing good would happen, of course, but more importantly, nothing bad. Daniel stepped over the threshold and into the foyer.

Everything inside was super old – the kind of stuff he saw in those boring British period TV shows old people watched – and all of it was in terrible shape.  Decayed Victorian era ceilings had collapsed leaving crumbling plaster and gaping holes. The once lavish furniture, now sagging and stained, recalled happier days or at least a once comfortable life in this house. The worst sign of age and neglect, at least to Daniel, was the wallpaper. Even through the grayscale, he could tell it was stained horribly, with huge sections of flowery print pealing back from the walls. It left large bare patches thick with a residue of glue, plaster, and paper lining.

Slowly, Daniel proceeded through the corridor. The lack of color and general empty grandeur of the building made him feel as though he were in an murder mystery or playing a bizarre video game. Extravagant hanging mirrors separated elegant portraits on the wall. As he passed the mirrors, no image appeared, making Daniel feel a bit like a vampire.

Without any particular aim and unable to really affect anything, Daniel explored the mansion. At first it appeared to be a completely normal building: There was a large dining room, a kitchen, several bedrooms, bathrooms. But then as he progressed it quickly became more and more bizarre: A room filled with hundreds of toys, a room with all kinds of scientific instruments and liquid filled containers of various shapes and sizes, and one room was completely upside down – with furniture that Daniel assumed must have been nailed to the ceiling. He even opened one door to an entire greenhouse. It seemed never to end; the size and shapes and theme of the rooms become more and more insane. Room after room, and clocks. Clocks everywhere.

Each room had its own clock, placed in the same location, respectively, on a wall. Of course, they didn’t move, because nothing moved inside the gray, except Daniel. He said out loud, “They all show the same time,” but his words were muted, barely audible. He checked his phone for the time, but it was blank. He should have known. Even so, with this place in such disarray, it surprised him that all the clocks would be synced. That meant either they all stopped at the same moment – unlikely – or that they were correct and still working.

Daniel stopped walking and looked around. He was back in the foyer. He didn’t think he’d backtracked, but he must have gotten mixed up somewhere along the way with all the crazy rooms and wound up where he’d started. He walked to the exit. He expected that eventually the gray would disappear and he’d be able to explore the mansion with a little more color. He pulled open the front door and gaped.

The ocean sprawled out before him at the bottom of a steep hill. A gray wave was frozen, crested, about the break against the sea wall of small town nestled into the hillside.

“Where… what happened?” Daniel mouthed soundlessly.

            The houses were all tiny with little pointed roofs and crammed together, mostly separated solely by narrow alleyways. Daniel wasn’t sure what color they were, since the world was still grayscale, but they were definitely bright and cheerful. He could see outlines of people in the streets. An oceanside ghost town.

            Daniel’s heart raced as panic set in. He could feel the vibrations from each pulse in his chest. He whirled around, afraid. The mansion remained across the threshold. Daniel ran back inside and shut the door; opened it, and shut it again. Still the ocean town. Daniel sprinted away from the door into the mansion, down the hallway that seemed to go on forever. The silence and constant pressure pounded Daniel’s head. His footsteps made no sound. He wished desperately for noise. Every time his foot hit the floor his ears pressed in, trying desperately to hear a slap, a creak, something. Doors passed on either side, until suddenly, without having turned, Daniel found himself back in the foyer staring at the front door once again. Confusion and fear drove him to rip open the door.

            Daniel almost fell over backwards. He stood on the edge of a mountain. Huge white-capped peaks rose all around him. So much snow hung frozen in the air, caught in the gray, that Daniel could barely see in front of his face. He slammed the door shut.

            Panic ensued. Normally, the gray would stop after a short time, and everything would return to normal. What if he were trapped permanently in this place? Even if the gray disappeared, this house was not normal. How could he run down the corridor and wind up in the same place? What if when the gray went away, the mansion locked down or something?

            Daniel sprinted down the hallway again. He would just keep opening the exits until Louisiana showed up again. But this time the hallway didn’t lead back to the front door; it ended at a wall forcing him left. He turned, but could only go a few feet before he hit a dead end. Daniel cursed, reversed direction, and opened the first door he encountered. This led to a bedroom.  He rushed across it and opened a door on the other side. This led to another room and another door. He opened it and continued running from room to room, becoming more and more lost in the mansion. The rooms and their contents grew stranger and stranger as he moved ahead, but Daniel couldn’t take time to notice. Eventually, he felt the gray beginning to thin, and he knew from experience that he’d soon return to the normal world of sight and sound. That was a relief in one sense, but not if he was trapped in this creepy fun house. He didn’t have much time left.

Frantic, Daniel opened the next door and stepped into a small room. Immediately, the hairs on his neck stood erect, and his silent breath caught in his chest. Cutting through the monotonous grayscale shone a brilliant golden-white light. Daniel knew it immediately to be a person. It filled out the shape of a body. The light traced vein-like to and from a heart, where at the center it shone brightest. Whoever it was sat behind a desk in the tiny room. The five lines drew the person’s head and limbs, clear as day, and so bright and compelling was the golden white at its core that Daniel couldn’t look away. He’d never seen anything like it before.

Daniel felt his grip tighten on the handle of his umbrella. He’d almost forgotten he still had it. If he could have sweated, he knew his hand would be drenched. Then the light moved. The entire mass shifted, and standing tall the person of the light looked directly at him. Daniel took a step back. Nothing could move in the gray. It never had before. The arms pointed at him, and light flowed from the core to the tips of the fingers, swelling with golden white. Terror moved Daniel’s feet.

He turned to run, but as he did the normal world returned with overwhelming impact. The release in air pressure sucked the breath from his chest, color poured into the room, sound and sight and smell and every human sensation hit him in an instant, knocking Daniel to his knees. As color returned, so too did the room come to life. In the gray, everything in the mansion had seemed broken and decrepit. But now, everything had become lavish and immaculate. Wallpaper lay unpeeled, furniture was polished. Daniel couldn’t make sense of it. Returning from the gray proved too much for his body to handle at once, and he reeled trying to find his equilibrium.

“What are you?” A wheezing voice called from behind Daniel. “Some sort of magical creature? A wizard perhaps?”

Daniel coughed and blinked, slowly catching his breath. He turned to the source of the voice and faced a skeleton of a man. So old was the person before him, that Daniel could hardly imagine how the man was still alive. A baggy, bright orange and green shirt hung loose on the man’s withered arms, his back was so bent he had to hold his head up to see Daniel, and his eyes peered from the tops of deep sunken holes in his face. A scraggly white beard hung straight towards the floor.

“How on Earth did you get inside this house?” The old man smiled widely, and then with sudden and unexpected quickness, he crossed the room to press a powerful hand against Daniel’s forehead.

“Ahhghh!” Daniel screamed as the old man dug his fingers down onto Daniel’s skull. Something was happening that Daniel couldn’t describe. Whatever the man was doing, Daniel felt him push his way inside Daniel’s head. Not physically, but the man’s consciousness was there probing around, and it wasn’t pleasant or welcome. Everything in Daniel’s body rejected the intrusion. He fought desperately to push the man out of his brain, but to no avail.

“There is something, but… how did you penetrate my mansion without being detected?” The man frowned. “I have to know!” He pushed harder.

“Aghhh!” The pain was excruciating. Just when Daniel thought he would die, the man stopped, and the pain was gone.

“You’re either very powerful to block me, or you simply don’t know anything.” The old man squinted at him, then asked, more to himself. “Why have you come here? Did the Matron send you?” Daniel panted, unable to speak – out of fear or exhaustion he couldn’t tell which. He simply stared wide eyed at the old man. “No, I think not. Not really her style.”

            The old man looked down to the floor, and Daniel followed his eyes to see a large and equally colorful tabby cat coiled around the man’s ankles. The cat’s dark green fur and orange stripes complemented the man’s hair and clothes like some kind of weird accessory.

“What do we do with him? Shall we add him to the collection? It’s been a while since we had a new feature.” Daniel looked around. Was he talking to the cat? Daniel didn’t see anyone else in the room. “Ah, well we don’t really have a choice, do we?” The man laughed at himself, sending a shiver down Daniel’s spine. Daniel really didn’t like the sound of the word collection. Desperately, he tried to think of something to say, but before he could utter a word, the man clapped his hands loudly once.

Suddenly, the room began to grow larger and larger. Panic took hold of Daniel, and he was overcome by nausea. “Hey! What are you? Stop!” Soon the strange man appeared to have moved so far away, Daniel’s voice couldn’t reach him anymore. Just as suddenly, the room stopped expanding, Daniel fell to the ground, and watched in shock as the man bent down and scooped him into the palm of his hand like a beetle.

Trapped inside the man’s enormous hand, Daniel stumbled, but somehow managed to get to his feet. When the man’s hand moved, Daniel was thrown back down again. From his backside, Daniel stared, terrified, into the man’s face. A gigantic, round eye, as big as Daniel’s whole body moved closer and closer. He could see the intricacies of the iris, great golden kaleidoscopic hexagons cut into each other and seemed to turn the longer he stared. He felt as though a god were looking straight into his soul. Finally, the man pulled back, his exaggerated smile unchanged.

“Welcome to the family, Daniel.”