Chapter 1: The In-Between Floor

Chapter 1: The In-Between Floor

The waking was not gentle. It was a violent rip from the depths of sleep, a primal yank on his consciousness that left him gasping in the dark. Alex Mercer’s eyes snapped open. The red digits of his alarm clock burned through the gloom: 3:12 a.m.

It wasn’t a sound that had woken him. The silence in his apartment was absolute, a thick, suffocating blanket that felt heavier than usual. It was a feeling. A deep, cellular dread that coiled in his gut like a cold snake. The kind of primordial fear that whispers of a predator in the dark, a wrongness that his modern, logical mind had no framework for.

He sat up, the thin sheet sliding from his gaunt frame. The glow from his triple-monitor setup in the living room cast long, dancing shadows across the walls, illuminating half-finished architectural blueprints and cascading lines of code he’d been wrestling with for the past eighteen hours. Sleep hadn't been a priority. Now, it felt like a distant luxury.

His throat was sandpaper. A glass of water. That was the mission. A simple, logical task to push back the irrational fear. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, his feet meeting the cool wood of the floor. Each step from his bedroom to the small hallway of his fourth-floor apartment felt amplified in the crushing silence. He was a freelance graphic designer. He dealt in pixels and deadlines, not nameless, nocturnal terrors.

It’s just stress, he told himself, his hand hovering over the doorknob to his apartment. Too much caffeine, not enough sleep. You’re having a waking dream.

He needed to prove it. He needed to see the familiar, boring hallway of the building, with its faded floral wallpaper and the scuff mark by Mrs. Henderson’s door in 4B. That would ground him. That would make the dread retreat.

He turned the knob and pulled the door inward.

And the world fell away.

It wasn’t his hallway.

The faded wallpaper was gone, replaced by walls the color of old parchment, stained with watermarks that looked vaguely like screaming faces. The worn carpet was gone, replaced by a sickly, bile-yellow linoleum that seemed to absorb the light. And the light itself was wrong—a weak, buzzing hum from recessed fixtures that flickered erratically, casting everything in a jaundiced, unhealthy glow.

But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was the sheer impossibility of it. His building’s hallway was short, ending in a stairwell to the left and an elevator to the right. This... this was a corridor. It stretched in both directions into an infinite, repeating pattern of identical, dark-wood doors, each adorned with a tarnished brass number plate that, upon closer inspection, was completely blank. The perspective was nauseating, a perfect, sterile vanishing point that his brain screamed was fundamentally incorrect.

The air that drifted into his apartment was cold and still, carrying a scent he couldn't place—a sterile mix of ozone, ancient dust, and something vaguely metallic, like old blood.

“No,” he whispered, his voice a dry rasp. He stepped back, letting the door swing shut, the latch clicking with a sound of profound finality. He leaned against it, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He counted to ten, his breaths coming in ragged, shallow bursts.

A dream. It had to be a dream. A hallucination.

He squeezed his eyes shut, knuckles white as he gripped the doorknob again. See? You’ll open it, and it will be the normal hall. You’ll laugh about this tomorrow.

He pulled the door open again.

The infinite, yellow hallway was still there. Unchanged. Waiting.

A horrifying, morbid curiosity warred with his terror. This defied all logic. It was a glitch in reality, and some broken, analytical part of his mind needed to understand it. He took a hesitant step out of his apartment, the doorframe feeling like the threshold between worlds. The door clicked shut behind him.

The sound echoed with an unnatural resonance down the endless corridor. He was in.

He stood frozen, every nerve ending screaming. He looked down the left corridor, then the right. Identical infinities. He felt a profound sense of being watched, a pressure building in the air around him. He took a few tentative steps, his bare feet cold against the waxy linoleum. The silence was so complete that he could hear the frantic beat of his own blood in his ears.

Then, far down the right corridor, a flicker of movement.

Something emerged from the distant, hazy gloom. At first, it was just a tall, thin silhouette against the sickly light. But as it drifted closer, the details began to resolve, and Alex’s rational mind shattered into a million pieces.

It was impossibly tall, its head scraping the low ceiling. Its limbs were elongated and spidery, moving with a liquid grace that was utterly inhuman. It wore something like a janitor’s uniform, but it was dark and seemed to drink the light around it. It floated, its feet never touching the floor, gliding forward with a silent, inexorable purpose.

And its head... its head was a smooth, seamless expanse of pale, waxy skin. There were no eyes, no nose, no mouth. Just a blank, vaguely skull-shaped ovate of featureless flesh.

The dread he’d felt in his bed was a pale shadow of the raw, undiluted horror that seized him now. This was not a man. This was not an animal. This was a thing that should not exist, a walking violation of nature. As it drew closer, the lights above it flickered more violently, and a low hum vibrated through the floor, a sound that felt less like a noise and more like a pressure inside his skull.

It raised one of its impossibly long arms, its fingers ending not in nails, but in clean, sharp points, as if the bones themselves had been sharpened.

Alex didn’t scream. The sound was trapped in his throat, choked by a fear so absolute it paralyzed him. His legs finally broke free from their stupor. He spun around, scrambling, slipping on the slick floor, his mind a whiteout of panic. He fumbled for the doorknob of his apartment—his door, which was suddenly the only thing in this entire impossible universe that mattered.

The knob wouldn't turn. For a heart-stopping second, he was locked out. He threw his weight against it, twisting with all his strength. The silent, gliding thing was getting closer. He could feel the temperature dropping, the air growing thick and heavy.

The lock finally gave way. He burst back into his apartment, slamming the heavy door shut with a resounding boom. He threw the deadbolt, his shaking hands barely able to manage the simple motion. He didn't stop there. He slid the chain across, his breath hitching in his chest.

He was safe. He was back. He pressed his ear to the wood, listening. Nothing. Just the familiar, comforting silence of his own home. He risked a look through the peephole, the fish-eye lens distorting the world outside.

He saw the familiar, faded floral wallpaper. He saw the scuff mark by 4B. He saw the normal, steady light of the standard building fluorescents.

The infinite hallway was gone.

A wave of dizzying relief washed over him, so potent it made his knees weak. He stumbled away from the door, laughing a ragged, unhinged laugh. A dream. A nightmare. The most vivid, terrifying hallucination of his life. That’s all it was. Stress and exhaustion had finally broken a wire in his brain.

He turned, his back to the front door, and looked down the short, safe corridor of his own apartment, towards the living room’s faint glow.

And his blood ran cold.

On the wall opposite his bedroom, where only blank, beige-painted drywall had been for the three years he’d lived there, was a door.

A dark-wood door, identical to the ones from the nightmare corridor. It had the same tarnished brass number plate, smooth and blank. It didn't belong. It was an impossible intrusion, a cancerous growth on the blueprint of his reality.

He stared, unable to breathe, unable to move. The nightmare wasn’t over. It had followed him home.

As his terrified eyes remained fixed on it, he could have sworn he saw it shift, a movement so infinitesimal it could have been a trick of the light.

It slid a fraction of an inch along the wall, getting closer.