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Wednesday, Apr. 07, 2004 - 02:32 Haunted Mansion: A Dream Hello gentle Reader. I find myself in an impossibly enormous Edwardian mansion. I can see through the windows that it is night outside. The mansion is in semi gloom. I am not alone, there are several other people with me. Everything about the structure of the mansion is exaggerated; the rooms are mind-blowingly big, the hallways extraordinarily wide, the ceilings nose-bleedingly high… We prowl around the mansion in silence. There is an air of foreboding. The mansion is immaculately clean and beautifully furnished throughout with period pieces; it’s an antique dealer’s dream… or nightmare, depending on how you look at it. We arrive at one large, solid oak door. I open it. Inside is an impressive chamber, though little of it can be seen, as dominating the room is a gigantic armchair. It is higher than your average bus, and you could park six or seven family sedans, side by side, on the seat of this armchair. It is covered in a light green, slightly coarse looking fabric, which is embellished with a flowery motif. The arms of the chair are huge, round rests and the back is high and square. The legs cannot be seen as a valance of sorts dresses the bottom of the armchair, hiding them from sight. It is, for all intents and purposes, quite an ugly chair and out of place, given the décor. It looks like something your granny might choose, if she were severely enfeebled. The armchair sat facing the doorway like a large, fat god; you could feel an evil energy radiating from it. And somehow I knew what it was, and what it’s nature was. I warned the people near me to run, and even as I said the words, tendrils of fabric shot out from the armchair like greedy, undulating vines, desperately wanting to clutch the nearest victim… you see, this armchair eats people… We turned and ran down the hallway, pursued by grappling, viper-like pieces of fabric that moved with shocking speed. I could hear the screams of those people too slow to escape as they were snatched and then dragged back to the always ravenous armchair… Somehow (as happens in dreams) we’d escaped the clutching vines, and now found ourselves in another hallway within the house. Approaching a new room, the door was opened to reveal what appeared to be a salon or library. It was ridiculously large. The walls were lined with bookcases stacked neatly with volume after volume. Within this seemingly deserted expanse a large open fireplace dominated the room, casting soft, warm light across a stunning Oriental rug. The rug was the size of most peoples’ living room, dining room and kitchens combined. Tentatively, we stepped across the threshold into the salon. The moment we did, I noticed a curious oval shaped depression form directly beneath the centre of the rug, as if the floor had caved in…. Then, to my alarm, the depression began to expand outward, faster and faster… and once again, I somehow intuited what lay beneath the rug; I saw a blackened, gummy maw, that opened and contracted like some fetid sphincter from Hell. It was part of some elaborate trap, functioning not unlike the sand-traps of ant-lions, who snare their prey in collapsing cones of sand while the ant waits patiently at the bottom of the trap, eagerly snapping its mandibles in anticipation of its dinner… Well, something very much like that, only far more grotesque and savage, lay in wait for us beneath the rug, and defying physics and reason, the horrid maw continued to open ever wider, drawing everything in towards the centre of the rug. The entire room took on a distorted slant; the walls became twisted and out of shape, the floor beneath our feet was no longer flat but angled… angled towards the rug and the thing beneath it… Once again we ran, back out into the hallway which seemed to be effected by the pull o the strange, unearthly trap; the walls and floor all buckled towards it, making escape desperate and difficult…. Yet somehow a few others and myself alluded the threat…. Only to find further strangeness… We came upon an empty bedroom. Lamps lit it softly and invitingly, as did the blaze from the fireplace in the corner. The room had a lovely safe, cozy feel to it, and the large bed looked incredibly tempting and comfortable. One member of our group, a man, approached the bed. Despite the rooms overall sense of tranquility, he stepped cautiously. He went right up beside the bed, until his legs were pressed against the mattress, and looked down upon it. He tilted his head to one side, as if he had heard something the rest of us hadn’t…. Breathlessly, we watched as he then knelt beside the bed, as if to pray, and placed one ear to the mattress, looking as though he were listening to something inside the mattress… Unexpectedly, the bed shot up to the ceiling; not in the sense that it ever left the ground, oh no; it remained a solid block, yet it grew, like a rising skyscraper, until it was firmly pressed up against the ceiling. But what was more bizarre, and certainly more terrible, was the consequences this had on the man who’d been kneeling beside it, head on the mattress. You see, his legs were still there in a kneeling position beside the bed, unaltered, unchanged… no sign of trauma… and his body was still there, too… in fact, he was still in one piece… it’s just that now that ‘piece’ was one very long piece. His body had been stretched to the ceiling like a piece of toffee, even his clothing had stretched... of course, we couldn't see his head, as it was squashed against the ceiling, but we could assume by the way his one free arm was twitching madly that the process had not been a pleasant one from his point of view… Again we turned and ran… and somehow, I managed to find my way out of the mansion, but I did so alone. Outside I was shocked to discover it was broad daylight, and looking back at the mansion, its exterior was worn, dilapidated and ugly…. And surprisingly not so large… The garden around the house was dead and dry, filled with rusting weeds and cracked, scorched earth. I made my way to the front of the estate and onto the street, where I saw a number of unhappy looking people, many malformed and disfigured, tending to market stalls, peddling sick and twisted looking vegetables that one would not ordinarily feed to pigs. I examined the prices of the vegetables and they were asking for obscene amounts of money for limp, discoloured carrots that were covered in furry black spots, bugs and worms… At about this point, I woke up…somewhat gratefully, I might add.
Copyright Jay Kerin 
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