Joey Lamar was glad that he could finally afford his own house. Even better was that it was a two-story cabin with 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, fully furnished, and incredibly cheap. All it took was a few signatures and $40000, it was his.
The drive to his new house took 10 hours, so it was late by the time he got there. He was tired, so he lugged his belongings up to the upstairs bedroom and flopped down on the bed for a good night’s rest.
He was awoken at around 1 AM by a clattering sound outside, “Probably a raccoon,” he thought, and slowly made his way downstairs to go scare it off.
He opened the front door to find that rather than exiting out into the outside, it led to the upstairs hallway. Confused by this seemingly impossible architecture, he peeked out of one of the windows in the front of the house to find that there was no upstairs hallway outside the window, just the actual outdoors.
He looked through the doorway and then out the window again, and then he did it again several more times, his tired mind trying to figure out what sort of nonsense was going on.
After checking to make sure he wasn’t dreaming, he stepped out into the upstairs hallway with caution, checking behind him to see that the door to the upstairs bedroom led to the downstairs foyer. He walked down the hallway, down the stairs, and back to the front door, where it still showed the upstairs hallway on the other side.
He quickly realized that this meant that he couldn’t exit out the front door, so he went to try the back door, only to find that it was somehow also connected to the upstairs hallway.
Panicking at the thought that he couldn’t exist, he tried to open the windows but to no avail and then tried to break them open, only to have the lamp he threw at it bounce back and shatter against the wall behind him.
For the next hour, he tried to break or open every window in the house only to be met with failure. He also checked every door to see if any of them were impossibly connected to each other, but found that only the bedroom door and the front and back doors were connected. Due to the spotty cell service deep in the woods where he was, he was unable to call for help.
He began walking out the front door, through the hall, down the stairs, and then back out the front door again, thinking that maybe if he did it enough times, something would change.
And oh, did something change.
After doing the loop through the front door for about thirty minutes, he noticed that the wallpaper in the rooms looked slightly stained yellow with mildew, as well some sort of greyish stain around the edges. He walked backwards through the loop, heading up the stairs to see if it would reverse the change, but the stains stayed. He went back through the loop, switching to the back door rather than the front to see if anything different would happen, now paying close attention to the wallpaper to see if it changed again.
After about 2 hours of this with occasional water and bathroom breaks, he was sitting in the kitchen, staring at the wallpaper, the stains had become more prominent, and he noticed that in the top right corner, it looked like it was peeling a little. He reached up and started picking at it, trying to see if something on the other side was causing the stains. As he peeled back about an inch of it, a jet black tar-like substance started oozing out from the corner he was peeling at. Pulling his hand away from it, he looked at it as it began coming out along the entire top edge of the kitchen. It soon slowed and stopped coming out, the substance leaving greasy grey smears along the walls. He checked the other rooms, and they also had the same thing occur.
He very carefully went back to going through the loop, feeling uneasy about the black goop that had come from the edges of the rooms. Less than an hour after he had gotten back to it had he stopped to get a glass of water, only to find that no water was coming out of the faucet. He opened up the cabinet under the sink to see if something funny had happened to the pipes to find the same substance that had come from the walls was coming from the connections in the pipes, forming a glossy black pool in the cabinet. He scraped some of it into a glass with a fork, being careful to not get it on himself. It smelled of burnt flesh and garlic, the acrid stench burning his nose. He carefully reached around the dripping pipes and turned off the water pressure, hoping that it would stop it from coming out from the pipes. He did the same in both bathrooms, turning off the pressure to the sink and toilet in both.
He set out with a determination fueled solely by fear of this substance to find a way out of this cabin. He began moving quickly through the front door and down the stairs and then back out the front again, not paying attention to the changes around him. The substance had started oozing from the edges of the walls, even around the window frames too, forming a dark coat that blocked out any outside light. He only stopped and looked at the dire state of his situation when the rancid stench grew strong enough that he could smell it without being near it.
The walls were stained to the point that it seemed almost as if a large hole to some dark abyss had formed in the center of it on some walls. The closet under the stairs was completely covered, a large pool of it forming on the floor that threatened to escape through the small crack under the door. He began moving cautiously, worried about the disturbing amount of the substance that seemed to be coming out from every crevice.
What truly shocked him after going through the loop for about an hour was finding that the front door, which he had been leaving open to make moving through the loop easier, was closed. A greasy shape reminiscent of a handprint was smeared across it.
As he was crouched down investigating it, the substance began coming from the walls at an increased rate and began moving across the floor of its own volition, quickly coalescing in a vaguely human form behind him. Joey stood up and reopened the door, checking behind him as he did, finding the humanoid form made of the substance behind him. Panicking, he headed through the door, he moved quickly through the loop, practically flying down the stairs, the creature somehow not present the further in he went. The substance, however, became increasingly present at an exponential rate, every wall entirely covered. The floors became covered in it, slowing his progress.
The area around the front door was just a solid black color, individual features indistinguishable from each other. The panic that Joey felt culminated in him stumbling and falling down the stairs, landing in the centimeter thick layer of the sludge that had gathered on the floor. As he scrambled to get up and out of the goop, he wound up slipping and falling back in it, gagging as some of it got in his mouth, the taste even worse than the smell of it. He panicked as it seemed to wrap itself around his legs and slowly pulled him back from the door.
He managed to turn himself around so he could try and get it out from around his legs. He didn’t notice that the layer across the floor had grown thicker, now two inches in depth.
The creature made of the substance began rising out of the darkness that had become the kitchen.
It began taking steps with its amorphous legs towards Joey.
Joey panicked as it neared him.
The substance began rising up his body.
Joey’s arms became restrained by substance.
It weighed heavily on his chest.
The substance flooded his mouth and nose.
The creature was right on top of him.
The lights cut out.