Chapter II: Dreams Like Wounds

My descent into the trapdoor was not marked by a fall, nor by the sensation of movement. It was as if the act of opening it had displaced me, peeled me from one plane and pressed me into another—a smear of consciousness sliding through a crack in the firmament.

The stairway was not constructed, but grown. Veins pulsed in the walls, and a phosphorescent ichor oozed from bulging knots that resembled tumors. The air reeked of ancient milk and scorched hair, and though I did not recognize the scent, my stomach recoiled as if it had encountered an ancestral memory of revulsion.

There was no true darkness, only an uncolor—the absence of perception that still shimmered with movement, as if shadows were swimming just beyond the boundaries of sight. The deeper I descended, the more the house ceased to exist in my memory. What replaced it was not simply new architecture, but a geometry of thought and wound, of recursion and exposure.

I walked for what felt like an epoch. My watch had shattered—its hands bent backward, ticking into themselves. Time was no longer a straight corridor but a loop that devoured its own tail.

Then the corridor opened into a vast chamber.

It was a cathedral of rot. Rib-like arches stretched over a chasm filled with slow-churning fog. Statues lined the walls, humanoid but wrong—limbs twisted into Möbius loops, faces blooming into petals of screaming mouths. At the far end stood a dais formed from coiled spines, and on it a mirror blacker than night.

I approached, my feet unsteady, my breath a scraping in my throat. In the mirror, I saw not my reflection but a version of myself that wept from eyes sewn shut, hands covered in script carved into the skin. Behind this version stood the man with two shadows.

He was tall, clothed in rags of velvet and iron. One shadow clung to his feet like a proper echo; the other slithered ahead of him, twitching like an animal sniffing the air. His face was featureless save for a vertical slit where the mouth should be, as though something inside him occasionally peered through.

“Do you dream?” the mouth slit asked—not in sound, but in the articulation of my own bones.

I could not answer. My tongue had turned to salt. My memories bled from my ears.

“Then you are already dreaming.”

The chamber collapsed.

I awoke in the parlor, the manuscript in my lap. Morning light, pale and grey, sifted through the curtains. But something was wrong.

Every item in the room was slightly off-kilter—as if they had been replaced with near-perfect replicas. My books were now bound in reversed scripts. The floorboards groaned in patterns like a dying language. And the mirrors… they no longer showed my movements in real time. They lagged, subtly but unmistakably.

That night, I dreamed again—but it was no longer dreaming. It was continuation.

The chamber returned. The man with two shadows stood over a pool of ink, where images rippled with memories I had never lived. I saw myself as a woman in a red city that pulsed like a heart. I saw myself with no skin, worshiping a god made of laughter and rain. I saw myself dissolving into letters.

The man said nothing. But I felt it—an invitation, a seduction of entropy.

When I awoke, I found symbols on my arms, drawn in dried blood. I had carved them myself.

I tried to leave the house. The front door opened, but the world outside was wrong. The trees had no leaves, only eyes. The clouds hung motionless like painted scenery. The sun never moved. And though I walked for hours, I always returned to the porch.

I am trapped.

Not by walls, but by sequence. The Gutter of Yegothra has chosen me. I am becoming part of it.

Every day I lose pieces of language. Verbs vanish first. Then names. Eventually, I will forget the shape of meaning.

In the distance, beneath the floor, I hear the scraping—bone on stone. Something is coming up the stairs I once descended. It has no feet, but it walks. It has no mouth, but it whispers.

“Do you dream?”

I answer yes. And each time, it comes closer.

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To be continued in Chapter III: The Mouth in the Reflection

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If the eerie atmosphere and surreal imagery of “Chapter II: Dreams Like Wounds” captivated you, you might be intrigued by the concept of Liminal Spaces. These are places of transition, often imbued with a sense of eeriness or disorientation. Additionally, the vivid description of altered states of consciousness could remind you of Altered States of Consciousness, which explores how perceptions and experience can be shifted. If the dreamlike quality of the narrative drew you in, the study of Oneirology might pique your interest, as this scientific field is dedicated to understanding dreams and their phenomena.

If the eerie atmosphere and surreal imagery of “Chapter II: Dreams Like Wounds” captivated you, you might be intrigued by the concept of Liminal Spaces. These are places of transition, often imbued with a sense of eeriness or disorientation. Additionally, the vivid description of altered states of consciousness could remind you of Altered States of Consciousness, which explores how perceptions and experience can be shifted. If the dreamlike quality of the narrative drew you in, the study of Oneirology might pique your interest, as this scientific field is dedicated to understanding dreams and their phenomena.