Hidden Things

It is said that your mind can venture anywhere in a dream, but do you want to explore all that your brain has to offer?

The man arrived in the corridor just as he had before for several months now. Walls shot out as far as the eye could see, containing a hallway going on towards infinity. The only thing to break the endlessly repeating pattern was an old wooden door located directly in front of the man. As he had for noths now, he turned the handle and stepped inside the room. 

The room was the same tonight as it was every other time: random junk lined dust-covered tables, nothing of value seemed to be anywhere nearby. Rotten wooden furniture and moldy old sofas were all that the room seemed to contain. Puzzled, and wondering what it could possibly mean, the man went ahead and left the room. Experience had taught him that this would take him away from there. This tradition continued for many months without changing, the man would arrive in the room, make sure it was the same, and then leave. 

One day, for no apparent reason, the man noticed a slight change. There was a box of girl scout cookies laying on the desk nearby, opened and partially eaten. There was no way that he had missed that for so long.The first sign of movement in a room that had for so long been motionless unnerved the man, but he approached the box cautiously. Picking it up, he peered inside. And then it hit him. 

The memory came slamming back into his consciousness with a painful blow, something from so long ago, and so far away that he had thought it gone forever. He was 24, standing on the sidewalk of his new house, looking at the lawn, filled with the immense pride of investing time, money, and effort into making his house look great. A young girl was walking down the street, pulling a wagon full of cookie boxes behind her. He watched her make her way to the neighbors house, and then down the sidewalk to him. As she approached, he noticed that she pulled her heavy wagon right across his lawn, crushing the grass and flowers he had so carefully cultivated. He was filled with an uncontrollable rage, and the world went black. 

Reeling backwards, the man in the room tried to escape from the memory of that day, throwing aside the box of cookies as he yelled in terror. As he frantically looked around he began to see more and more objects that didn't belong, and one by one the memories came. All at once, he was everywhere and he was nowhere. There was the co-worker that had laughed at him for messing up a simple file. She had disappeared. There was that boss that had to let him go, until they had to hire a new boss. And hadn't he once had an ex-girlfriend who told all of her friends that he was a terrible boyfriend? Thinking back on it, she had mysteriously vanished as well. The people and the memories and the anger came rushing back at once, so many memories that he could barely process them all. In every single one, he was filled with an almost insane rage that encompassed his very being, and then his memory faded. 

What had happened, what had he done to those people? Even as he frantically searched for an answer, he knew what it had to be. Those reports of a killings in the neighborhood, all the people that he knew who had died, it was no mysterious hooded stranger. It was him! Screaming, sobbing he ran out of the room, hoping that this hell he was in would vanish then like it did every other night. But it did not. The nightmare continued. Instead of being transported away, the only thing that happened was that the door disappeared as soon as he made it into the hallway. Now he could only see the one hallway extending in both directions indefinitely. As the door clicked out of existence, he realized that he was trapped. Scared out of his mind, the man ran. 

He ran and he ran until he couldn't run any more, gasping for breath he fell down and clawed his way down the hallway, hoping against hope that he would find something or some way to escape. Finally, able to take it no longer, he collapsed. At that precise moment, a 73 year old man in a small town Kansas woke up screaming, had a heart attack, and died.