Chapter 1: Six Steps Into Nowhere

The breakup text had come at 2:47 AM three days ago, and Ethan still couldn't bring himself to delete it.

"I can't do this anymore. I'm sorry. Don't contact me."

Seventeen words that had shattered three years of his life into fragments he couldn't seem to piece back together. Sarah's toothbrush was gone from the bathroom counter. Her coffee mug—the one with the chipped handle she'd refused to throw away—had vanished from the kitchen sink. Even her scent had faded from the pillows, leaving behind only the stale emptiness of his studio apartment.

Ethan rolled over in bed, squinting at the red glow of his alarm clock. 3:23 AM. Sleep had become a stranger, visiting only in brief, unsatisfying glimpses before anxiety dragged him back to consciousness. His mind churned through the same endless loop: what he could have done differently, what signs he'd missed, why seventeen words were all she could spare him after three years.

The apartment felt larger somehow, as if Sarah's absence had physically expanded the space. Every corner seemed to echo with memories—her laugh at terrible Netflix comedies, the way she'd steal his hoodies and make them smell like her vanilla perfume, the quiet Sunday mornings when they'd existed in perfect, wordless harmony.

His phone buzzed on the nightstand. For a wild, desperate moment, his heart leaped. Maybe she'd changed her mind. Maybe—

A spam text about car insurance. Of course.

Ethan tossed the phone aside and dragged himself upright, running his hands through unwashed hair. The digital clock's glow painted everything in hellish red shadows. He needed water, needed to move, needed something to break the suffocating weight of the silence.

Jake, his orange tabby, stirred from his perch on the windowsill and fixed him with those eerily intelligent green eyes cats possessed at three in the morning. The cat seemed to study him with something approaching pity before padding silently across the room and disappearing into the kitchen.

"Yeah, thanks for the moral support," Ethan muttered.

He padded barefoot across the hardwood floor, his worn pajama pants hanging loose on his frame. When had he gotten so thin? Sarah used to tease him about his metabolism, how he could eat an entire pizza and still look like a scarecrow. The memory hit him like a physical blow, and he had to grip the doorframe to steady himself.

The hallway stretched before him, longer than it should have been.

Ethan paused, blinking hard. The familiar passage to his kitchen suddenly seemed... wrong. The walls appeared to extend further into darkness than his small apartment could possibly contain. He rubbed his eyes, chalking it up to exhaustion and the weird optical effects of the streetlight filtering through his blinds.

One step. Two. Three.

The floorboards beneath his feet felt different—older, somehow. The familiar creak of the loose board near the bathroom door was absent. Instead, his footsteps echoed with a hollow quality that made no sense in his cramped studio.

Four steps. Five.

The kitchen should have been right there. The soft glow of his microwave's digital display should have guided him forward. Instead, there was only darkness stretching endlessly ahead, swallowing the weak light from his bedroom behind him.

Six steps.

Ethan stopped dead. His heart hammered against his ribs as the impossible truth settled over him like ice water. The hallway had no end. The walls on either side extended into blackness so complete it seemed to have physical weight, pressing against him from all directions. When he turned back, his bedroom door had vanished, leaving only the same crushing void.

"What the hell?" His voice cracked, sounding small and lost in the infinite space.

Panic clawed at his throat. This wasn't possible. This was his apartment—he'd lived here for two years, knew every inch of it. The kitchen was twelve feet from his bedroom door. The bathroom was eight feet to the right. The front door was twenty-three feet straight ahead. He'd paced off the distances when he'd first moved in, planning furniture arrangements.

But the laws of physics seemed to have taken a coffee break.

Ethan fumbled for his phone, muscle memory guiding his hand to his pajama pocket. His fingers closed around the familiar weight of his iPhone, and relief flooded through him. The flashlight. He could use the flashlight to—

The screen was dead. Completely black. He jabbed the power button frantically, but nothing happened. The device that had become an extension of his very soul, the electronic umbilical cord connecting him to the rest of humanity, was as lifeless as a brick.

"Come on, come on!" He shook the phone, pressed the buttons in different combinations, even tried the old tech-support trick of removing and replacing the battery—except his phone didn't have a removable battery. Nothing. Not even the faintest flicker of life.

The darkness around him seemed to thicken, becoming almost tangible. It pressed against his skin like cold water, and he could swear he felt it moving, shifting, breathing. His rational mind—the part that had gotten him through college, through his soul-crushing office job, through the slow deterioration of his relationship—scrambled for explanations.

Sleep deprivation. That had to be it. He was hallucinating, caught in some kind of waking nightmare brought on by stress and insomnia. Any moment now, he'd snap back to reality, find himself standing in his perfectly normal kitchen, maybe with Jake winding around his ankles and judging him for his 3 AM wandering.

But the cold was too real. The way sound seemed to die the moment it left his lips was too real. The absolute, crushing weight of the darkness was too real.

Something moved in the blackness ahead.

It wasn't a sound exactly, more like the absence of sound—a subtle shift in the quality of the silence that made his skin crawl. Like the moment just before lightning strikes, when the air itself seems to hold its breath.

Ethan's legs felt like water. Every instinct screamed at him to run, but run where? Behind him lay the same infinite void. To his left and right, impenetrable walls that might not even be walls anymore. Forward was the only option, toward whatever was making that not-sound in the darkness.

"Hello?" The word escaped before he could stop it, barely more than a whisper. It vanished into the void without even an echo.

The silence that followed was somehow worse than before. It felt expectant, as if the darkness itself was listening, waiting, deciding what to do with this lost soul who'd stumbled into its domain.

His breathing sounded unnaturally loud in his own ears. Each heartbeat felt like thunder. The familiar weight of his apartment above, below, and around him was gone, replaced by a vastness that made him feel like a speck of dust floating in an infinite ocean.

Then Jake meowed.

The sound cut through the oppressive silence like a lighthouse beam through fog. Familiar, warm, absolutely and utterly real. Ethan spun toward the sound, and there—impossibly—was a faint glow. Not the red digits of his alarm clock, but something softer, more golden.

"Jake!" His voice cracked with relief and desperation.

Another meow, closer now, and the golden glow strengthened. Ethan stumbled toward it, his bare feet slapping against floorboards that suddenly felt familiar again. The walls seemed to contract around him, the infinite void shrinking back to the cramped confines of his studio apartment.

He practically fell through his bedroom doorway, gasping as if he'd been underwater. The alarm clock glowed its familiar red: 3:31 AM. Jake sat on the bed, tail twitching with what might have been amusement, green eyes reflecting the streetlight from the window.

Ethan collapsed onto the mattress, his whole body shaking. The familiar creaks and groans of his building settled around him like a comforting embrace. Traffic hummed on the street below. A siren wailed in the distance. All the mundane sounds of the real world, beautiful in their ordinary humanity.

"Just a nightmare," he whispered to Jake, who responded by bumping his head against Ethan's trembling hand. "Just a really, really vivid nightmare."

But as he lay there in the dark, staring at the ceiling and listening to his heart gradually slow to a normal rhythm, Ethan couldn't shake the feeling that something fundamental had shifted. The darkness beyond his bedroom door seemed deeper somehow, full of possibilities that had no place in his orderly, rational world.

He didn't sleep for the rest of the night. And when morning came, pale and gray through his blinds, he almost convinced himself it had all been a stress-induced hallucination.

Almost.

Because deep down, in a place he didn't want to examine too closely, Ethan knew he'd stepped through a door that couldn't be unopened. The impossible hallway was still there, waiting in the spaces between his thoughts, in the corner of his vision when he wasn't looking directly.

And something in that darkness had been looking back.