The Mansion Of Silence

I usually have normal dreams, a chaotic mash up of places I have seen, people I have known, and things that I want. Sometimes the situation terrifies or delights, and if the experience does not fade from memory before I climb out of bed, it usually does not last long after. They tell me this is normal. Humans are primarily creatures of sight and sound, and so these are the senses our mind applies when dreaming, and only brings the sense of touch in when the situation is relevant. Even when you are lucid, you will not notice the cold or the heat until you notice the absence, the subconscious is quite lazy, but will catch up in an instant to any discrepancies you discover, trying to preserve the illusion. For me, not every dream has been like this. Of course, there have been the occasional anomalies that everyone has, something so bizarre that you cannot believe you made it up or previously encountered the elements of the dream, and the rare fleeting moments of lucidity, where you know you are dreaming, and briefly control the world. While these are all relatively normal, sometimes I find myself in the Mansion, and I both love and fear it. When I visit the Mansion, it is always empty of people, utterly silent, and I arrive in a room I have not seen before. My first visit was when I was still young, nearly twelve years ago. After falling asleep as usual, I found myself in a beautiful, vaguely roman hall. I felt the slightly damp air on my skin, and looked around in confusion and awe. Each of the walls had a few doorways, but what quickly diverted my attention was the area the room enclosed. Perhaps a dozen raised fountains occupied the floor, spaced in no pattern, but each given a modest amount of personal space. Each fountain's figurehead was a dull stone color, spraying water in a few directions, always landing in another pool. I realized that the abstract shaped fountains were not only changing shape, but also the basins were also moving in what I assumed was a menacing crawl toward me. When I fled into the nearest corridor, I woke up. The remainder of my sleep was uneventful, and I did not return for many years. As I think back to that event, a simple fact cements my belief that this was, if not my first time inside, the first eventful time. I remember the cold tiles on my bare feet as I fled, and that I could smell the brine that the fountains traded about, but the dozens of fountain streams made not a sound. I have often blamed myself for not staying, for when I watch them in my memory their movement was not threatening, but a dance. Each time I remember a dream in vivid detail I am sure it is the Mansion. I have an occasional scrap of normal dreams that cling to my memory, only in those have I seen people, or the sky. The endless rooms and corridors linked together by empty doorways contain something, perhaps best described as an aura that makes the place real in a way nowhere else in dreamland is. Dreams are never consistent, if you flip a light switch repeatedly in real life, the light will always match the switch. While asleep, if the switch works at all, it will not do what you expect more than once or twice. Objects of reality do not change when you look away. Objects of the stuff of dreams last only as long as you watch them, for if you look away for a moment, they will change perceptibly, and this nature is easily observable with repeated glances. The Mansion has never exhibited this behavior; any detail I chose to examine would survive even when I completely exited a room, leaving nothing behind for the easily distracted subconscious to use as a basis.

Only once do I remember actually entering the Mansion from a normal dream. I include the event in this for completeness's sake, as I cannot relate here all the features I have encountered in the rooms, but must relate the important events that occurred. I was in a large shopping complex full of faceless crowds, and the noise that always accompanies a large crowd of people with their own private goals. I had been searching through stores at random, futilely seeking an item. I do not remember what I wanted, but this is a common theme in my dreams, as well as for others. After abandoning one store to return to the throng of people, the crowd had become even denser, and I pushed through to see why. On the other side of the wide concourse, I saw a door, and I remember an intricate carving upon it, all aimed to direct the eye down to the plain brass doorknob. The crowd around me was giving the door a wide berth as if intentionally avoiding it, which is what was causing the bottleneck, I presume. I did not bother to wonder why they all avoided it. In my suggestive state, I unhesitatingly reached to open the door. Grabbing the doorknob, I twisted it, and the door refused to open, but I still felt change. I looked down and saw my hand gripping the doorknob, cold in my grasp, and I could even feel the tension the twisted knob gave to my wrist as it waited for release. Also in that short twist, the noise faded, as if something was cutting off each source of noise one at a time, the last voice of nonsense giving a few clear syllables before going silent. When I turned around, it was to a different view, the mall completely gone. Naturally, the door was gone when I looked for it. I found myself in a dark room, full of stars. As I moved through it, I realized it was no darker than any other place in the Mansion I had been; the cloth that covered every feature of the room, finely woven to cover it all without a crease, had caused the first impression of darkness. It was an elegant dining room with a long table, six chairs on each side, and a chair on each end. The contours on the fabric let me see that the cloth covered a fully set table, with empty plates, perfectly placed cutlery, and an elegant candlestick, complete with a candle, stood in the center. When I looked closer, I saw that under the strange cloth, a flame flickered, trapped under the cloth with no light escaping, but unhindered, the cloth moved about, holding close to the flame without damage, or extinguishing. I felt the plate, and then lifted a knife, still hidden by the strange cloth. I tried to cut through with no success, but I turned the knife downwards and felt the serrations carve into the wood. I felt the friction as the knife dug into the table, and yet I heard nothing, even when after a bit of effort I brought enough force down on the plate to shatter it. While the strange contoured fabric held the burning candle, I at first was convinced it was a ruse, perhaps a rotating shape affixed to the tip. I delicately reached out, intending to pinch the flame, and felt the heat until I squeezed the cloth around the wick, the hidden flame going out, and did not reignite when I let go. I was tempted to stay and vandalize the hidden layout further, but I decided it was a pointless effort. Sometimes I found a pair of rooms directly connected, but these were the exceptions to the Mansion's layout. Exiting a room usually brought me to a normal corridor, sometimes with a staircase within sight, and of lengths that vary from so short only two doors could fit on either

side, a few steps apart, or so long they curve down out of sight. Where the rooms followed the basic unbroken pattern of a few features surrounded by walls and ceiling, a random soft color or simple pattern, the halls follow a different template. Like the rooms, the floors have a wide variety, but the walls are always plain white, and the only features that are in evidence are the staircases leading upwards, and the picture frames. Most corridors have a frame, plain, square, and affixed to the wall at my eye level, each containing a single image, photographical or artistic renditions. In my early years, the frames contained scenes that were often unusual, but not unpleasant. The photographs from the beginning were still images. Sometimes they featured a landscape of strange lands and occasionally alien skies, or group of beings gathered for a group photo. I have never been religious, but one image I recall with regularity in my waking life was a completely naked group of five, with the frame level with the tallest's waist. The shortest of the group stood in the middle with angelic wings outspread, covering the torsos of one to either side, and while they all had radiant beauty, I assumed those two were female. The images that were not photographic, paintings or drawings, and one picture made out of the folds in a piece of paper, moved as if I looked into a living world. I once watched a painting reminiscent of the flowered fields painted by the impressionists, but with many vaguely painted deer, silently grazing until something startled them, and they all fled out of my view. While the moving pictures were mostly less alien to my experience, the general mood of all the pictures changed over time. The hallways often had a straight staircase, usually attached to one wall, but ones that were free standing with space to either side, or starting at the end of a corridor, usurping the usual final doorway. In the beginning when I was young, I only rarely climbed to a higher level, when I had no interest in any of the connecting rooms. As I grew, my hunger for exploration did as well, and I had a brief phase where I ascended at every opportunity and each climb gave a subtle pleasant sensation, silently coaxing me up with unspoken promise of wonder in an attic that might be just one more story upwards. This hunger, perhaps addiction, shattered when I stopped blindly climbing, and looked at a portrait that hung between a doorway and the beginning of yet another staircase. If I had only allowed it to pass by, in the corner of my vision, I would have seen a simple family photo, clearly human, but this was common enough to be no concern. A young couple sat on a couch, with their child in a dress sitting between them. Because I actually looked at it, I saw how the girl was headless, and the only the first blood had spurted from the wound. I went through the routine of looking away for a few seconds, but each time I looked, it was the same. Shaken, I abandoned the mad dash up, searching out more pictures. They had all changed from unsettling and alien, to horribly wrong. The least disturbing family portrait I have seen since the day I abandoned climbing was an older woman and three children staring at the camera, the choppy sea behind them, the only hint of what was wrong was the small patches of bright orange in the corner, just barely showing a life raft.

I spent several visits looking for stairways leading down, and while I found no shortage of upward ones, I did not find my goal, and I cannot recall ever seeing one before then as well. Before I gave up hope for finding a frame that did not contain something that shook me, I saw landscapes of war, famine, and worse. The constant repeated theme of images frozen just before a disaster hit finally made me stop searching the frames, for I had to look at them the longest before I understood them. I saw a train just tipping past its center of balance, a large plane with its nose just touching the window of a building, or a car full of people on a lake's ice, surrounded by fractures, and not until I took the image into my mind, and played out what happened next, did the horror hit. In one image that took on the appearance of a crude heavy-handed charcoal sketch, was a black silhouette of a man repeatedly walking in circles, and only after a few times around did I realize he was not shaking his arms. He was pounding silently and mindlessly on invisible walls, and I spent the rest of my visit there, feeling the tears drip off my face, just being there for him, if there was the chance he could see me, or if he was even alive. After this, I devoted most of my visits to exploring the layout of the Mansion; I did not waste valuable time examining the rooms in detail, but simply noted the basics of the room before moving on. When I backtracked, the rooms stayed consistent down to the smallest detail. In normal dreams, where once out of sight an object or area is gone forever. If you retraced your steps, you would be lucky to find an area vaguely similar in theme, but the details change. At this point, I had already documented each visit in detail, complete with layout of the floors I had left, and the path between each staircase. I memorized the complex path, hoping that one visit would lead me to the last staircase I had climbed. A few experiences had allowed me to create a few assumptions. The most important was, while I did not arrive in the same place, I would not enter on a different level than I had awoken on. Secondly, the layout did not change while I was inside, and nothing heralded my arrival, so I assumed it would not rearrange while I was gone. In more than a decade since the first visit I remember, I have dreamt of the Mansion less than a hundred times. From the private journal I have used to record my visits, I have entered the same room on two separate visits only thrice, unless my assumptions that the rooms do not change and no two have features similar enough to be mistaken for each other are false. If the former is false, and the rooms change shape, formation, and contents while I am gone, the building may be much smaller. If the latter is false, it could be impossible to know the whole building, even given an infinite time to explore and chart its contents. While most features of the rooms are rather ordinary affairs, a single piece of furniture or sculpture, everything had one of two characteristics. It was immobile, or something prevented it from leaving the room. When this was not sheer bulk, some restraint was in place, for example, the cloth that kept everything down in that strange dining room I once entered into. A room with the upper half of an animate mannequin, featureless face and torso shaped like a man, had a golden shackle around one elbow with a chain that ran to a hole in the floor, always retracting slack, returning when it was pulled, but would give no more chain when he reached the doorway.

One room, one of the three I have entered twice on different nights, contains a reflected grand piano. On a marble floor, strangely warm to the touch, stands a black piano with the curve of its back set the wrong way, so that the shorter strings are on the left, rather than the right. After I tried to play it, I opened it up, feeling irritated that even this did not break the silence. I pounded on the keys, and watched the felt covered hammers hit, and while I could clearly see the strings become a blurred waveform, I heard nothing from the great instrument. Even when I placed my hand up close, I could not feel the vibration of the strings. In frustration, I pushed the piano and it rolled along the smooth floor, colliding with the doorway, and stopped. This is what allowed my good fortune, for many years later, I was in the corridor that doorway opened onto, and I found the piano still there, its corner just sticking out. When I pushed it back out of the way, I found no damage from the impact, and no dust suggested any time had passed. It was still silent, so I wandered onwards. I had two more assumptions, completely unfounded. To me, the abundance of upward staircases, and the complete inability to find a down staircase, implies that each staircase led up to a completely different floor, exclusive to those who chose that specific staircase. My second was that despite the threatening images I found in my years of exploring without ascending further, I felt that it was not good or evil, it was simply a construct, and held no threat, nor malice should I be lucky enough to find the stairs down and descend as far as the last mad dash up had been. My most recent visit proved the former assumption wrong, at least without making the topology even more confusing. The latter was also shattered, and rationalizations will not repair it. I arrived in a blue room housing a cardboard box filled with concrete, with a glass flower growing out, but I did not stay long, and begun my long practiced slow spiral outwards, searching for one of the landmarks that heralded the downward path. Surprisingly quickly, I found something different. I entered a room that broke the pattern, and after a pause of shock, I tried to cheer, but I quickly remembered where I was. The octagonal room had perfectly white walls, the sort that usually meant a hallway, but this was not what had excited me. The center of the room contained an ornate silver spiral staircase, rising through a hole in the ceiling. I briefly walked around, considering each of the other seven doorways, wary of the possibility that this feature was a distraction from one of even greater significance, but none gave a more interesting view than what I already saw. When I approached the stairs, I stepped on the first stair that led up, and the jolt of excitement was almost electric. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, be it the absence of a loved one, or a drug. I pulled my foot back and looked down, noticing this path led downwards as well. I took a step down, initially disbelieving what I saw. That faded as the gut-wrenching spasm hit me, as if the Mansion was taking back the feeling it had gave me when I had first ascended, plus interest. Upwards would be easier, but I could go up anywhere. But going down was clearly going to be a struggle. I decided to attempt some of the struggle, and climbed down and around, the room below identical, complete down to the continuing path down. I paused to reconsider the chore.

Perhaps it was an illusion, I could go up or down on this forever and not get anywhere. I checked the surrounding rooms, and they had all changed, I had truly found my goal. Did I want it? I stared downwards, unsure which was worse, the easy to give into pleasure of climbing, or the hard to bear discomfort of descending. Why was I choosing suffering over bliss? The picture frames I had been glancing at for far too long answered that, any short-term pleasure would be overwhelmed soon enough. I chose to take a stand. Even if the Mansion was not malicious, I opposed it, and would not give in to its temptations, even if at the top was true eternal paradise, I would first get to the bottom and face what the Mansion was hiding, even if it was made to protect me from the secret. Each time around and down was easier. I counted the floors I passed, I had recorded a hundred and five floors, and after that many I began to feel doubt again, but my momentum did not cease spinning around the core, and Three more rooms passed before I stopped, and that's when rooms stopped, leaving the staircase in a tunnel, no longer opening on a room. I decided I must have climbed two and not counted them, or perhaps I had started on the third level originally. So I began what felt would be a final trip, I felt I was about to uncover the purpose of the Mansion, who had built it, and maybe even why I was allowed to explore it. The narrow shaft did not change until I had gone down another dozen or so revolutions, my left hand gliding down and holding the core, my only support. The core began to thicken, gradually the stairs widened until I could only just touch both the outer wall and the supporting column, and the steps were becoming more shallow, eventually merging and becoming a corridor that curved down and around to the left. I had not expected anything to be stored down here, so the first cabinet was quite a surprise. I felt over the raw wood, feeling how the edges threatened splinters, and then opened it with a little effort. It contained a collection of white stones, many with holes in them, similar to a collection I had collected on a trip in my waking life soon after my first visit to the great cursed maze far above me now. Before I moved on, I spotted something in the scatter, and pulled it out. It was a jawless human skull, only the size of a golf ball, and the shock of realization made me drop the object, where it shattered silently, the fragments vanishing once I took my eye off them. Undeterred, I continued down, the furnishings becoming denser, most of them containers all holding a random object or two that I recognized, or a collection that outside of dreams was more complete. After nearly a complete circuit down, the wooden containers collected spots of finishing, and then paint, as if a carpenter constantly kept losing interest in his work, beginning anew. The line of furniture ended, and curious, I opened the final cabinet. Inside laid a new checkbook and a cheap pen, both objects I had acquired from the bank less than a week ago. I briefly looked back at the line of cases, wondering how many had objects I had found in the last decade, and what significance this had on the possibility that this was all an elaborate hoax in my head, only now finally breaking. On the left, unsupported bookshelves began, full of books arranged without any order I could see, hard and soft covered, the faded spines naming fiction and fact. Whenever I tried to remove one, it would collapse at the touch into dust. The smell was not of mold or damp, but of ink and wood pulp, and before I attacked the line with my fingertips, I only saw titles of books I have never read, but some looked familiar. Were these the memories of books unwritten or unread?

Were they waiting for solidity and text, granted by some unknown method as I read them in a possible future? I continued, watching for a while how the books were following a similar pattern, growing denser as I descended, but still losing cohesion at the touch, as if the creator was using dust to build the books, then fine sand, packed tighter the farther I journeyed downwards. I could no longer push my hand through the line, and yet none would stay together when I tried to remove one, losing their shape with the slightest contact. The other side quickly drew my attention away, as it had something I had never seen in the Mansion before. At regular intervals, at what I guess would be every ninety degrees of the helix lay a window. I do not remember the views I saw out of them, but I do remember the shock of recognition, seeing places I have been when dreaming normally, maybe they all were windows to my past dreams, and those places did not shatter completely when I left, merely going dormant, waiting for return of a dreamer. Losing interest in examining each window, I began to run, seeking to find whatever lay at the end of the corridor before I awoke. As I ran, I held my hand against the books, feeling the rough thick powder run over my fingertips, making them gradually rubbed raw, and I hoped that I would at least get an intact book before I left. Suddenly, both wishes came true, and I stopped in front of a barrier preventing further descent. The right half merged with the outer wall, and was the same dull stone as the wall, and so I was sure it was not a door, or if it were, I would not find the hidden method of opening it. The other side I first assumed to be a door without a doorknob, and seemed to float off the wall. The dark material, soft to the touch, made me reconsider, and the thick spine in the middle of the corridor, reaching up to the low ceiling made me sure that I was looking at a large tome, that would open to cover the entire corridor. Reaching both hands into the gap between the cover and the wall, I pulled, feeling the heavy cover slowly give, opening to an empty page of black paper. I turned one page back, shaking in anticipation at discovering what the book held. After the second turn proved to be just as blank, I reached down the gap again, feeling the cold wall scrape the backs of my hands, pulled the entire sheaf of pages, nearly a hand span thick off the front cover, turning to the first page. There was writing, of a sort. Unreadable cursive columns of a beautiful rainbow script ran down the tall page, glowing dimly, colors fixed, seeming to be part of the very language, or maybe it was just used to separate the myriad of symbols that otherwise flowed together. I looked away three times, and yet the first few symbols remained the same. I had hoped they would change, but even though I was far removed from my familiar surroundings, I was still inside the Mansion. The first few pages were dense script, and frustrated, I flipped through the pages, angry that even now the place's secrets were opaque. Something different caught my eye, and I opened the book to that page, and no longer felt anger. In the center of each page was a jumble of lines making what clearly depicted a map of some far off cluster of rooms, each labeled simply with a few characters in the colorful script. A nearly white line traced a wandering path through the complex, with a separate perfectly straight line of red, linking a point of the path and a short column of writing off to the side of the map. Was this book recording what I did? Was it a manifestation by some deep part of my subconscious? Was

something else altogether writing in this when I was no longer around, and already now watching me from some strange angle, eager to see what I would do next? Fear and rage warred within me, but I managed to stay calm. I was not sure if I was in danger, and losing my wits if I was, would be just a bad as giving up. I pull on the page showed that not only did it stay intact when I touched it, the book also resisted my active attempt to damage it, like most things in the Mansion above had been. I stood close to the book, reaching up to curl my fingers around the top of the covers, and gradually managed to tip the book forward, jumping back as it impacted on the stone floor. The impact raised a cloud of dust, but otherwise, I felt not even a tiny vibration when it landed. I looked at the plain cover, the front cover was just as blank, and not even the spine contained a single mark to suggest at a title. When I looked up, elation briefly filled my emotions, for the book had been placed across a gap in the barrier, Large enough to easily pass though. I quickly continued onwards, the excitement slowly eroded away by the fear of treading where I was not sure if I was welcome. Beyond were books that did not break or dissolve at the touch, and they were all stacked haphazardly against the outer wall, the collapsing piles often covering the periodic window The first book I picked up had a cover with a simple painting of a brick tower set against a blue sky, and while it had no title, it felt like a normal pulp paperback. When I flipped it open, the pages contained gibberish, mostly English letters, but they shared the space with other common symbols, like old alchemical signs and letters of other alphabets, Cyrillic, Greek, and a few I guessed were some flavor of oriental, but I did not see a single word. Against the inner wall, large pieces of craftwork were stacked, carefully arranged to fit together. Each piece was ornate and painted to perfection, but the shapes varied between deformed and utterly useless. Only rarely did I see something that would stand upright. When I inspected these, they had no useful flat top. The collection had drawers without handles, doors that would not open because several hinges disagreed on which direction it should open, and other mistakes no sane carpenter would have made. Only sometimes could I recognize what the creator was trying for, as if he was a master of the art, but did not understand the purpose of furniture. A sound slowly entered my awareness, I feel ashamed that I had not noticed it at once, but it had started so quiet it was a while before it came to my attention. It was a random noise, not in the sense it was plain static, but it was never a fixed noise. Sometimes I thought it was breathing, footsteps, or any other otherwise normal sound, animal or mechanical. Briefly, it even sounded like random sequence of musical notes. At first, I ignored it, moving on, picking up a book of gibberish, or trying to open a piece of furniture that I could only consider a cabinet because it had a door. The noise got closer however, and I was sure it was coming from above, and each time I looked back, the area was lighter. I paused to watch once, and saw how shaking light, like the pursuit was carrying a torch of flame. The chaos of sound increased with the brightness, and I ran. I got less and less time to examine the books and objects around me, opening one book and only glancing at it before moving on. The letters were alone, and although capital and lower case letters mingled equally, I recognized a few words, and the punctuation and spaces were in place.

I did not waste any more time, if there was a sane object in this place, it would be past all of the nonsense, and I felt I was getting closer. The light behind me was reaching a brightness that was making the objects indistinct, and almost hurt to look at. Even at a full run, I felt I was running out of time, and while I had never before exerted myself to this extent inside the mansion, I was not surprised when my strength began to wane, And with no sign of the corridor ending, I felt I would be overtaken in moments. I considered standing and fighting, but as the sound grew louder, and I could not bare to look at the blinding light already, I decided to abandon my search for the end, and escape. The window nearby, half buried under books, gave a familiar view of the rough cobblestones of a road from a distant past. I wasted no time in digging out the window, and After struggling with the latch with shaking hands, it opened, swinging out and letting a cold rush of air in. climbing over the lip, I turned for one last look-I hit the ground running, trying to scream, and while I still have no memory of what I saw, or even of looking away or jumping, I fled terrified into the city at night, Hoping to lose it in the alleys, and all that remained as the Mansion's gift of lucidity faded was the fear. After, running for what felt like ages through my dream I awoke, feeling surprisingly refreshed, but still full of dread. My visits to the Mansion have encouraged one thing besides a love of exploration, and that is to achieve lucidity in even my normal dreams, which I have managed with more success recently, but since that last visit, all my dreams have all been silent. I have discovered through casual conversation that others find sound to be rare or absent altogether in their dreams, suggesting something similar happened to them very early in their life. It is my hypothesis that the Silent Mansion's occupant is somehow feeding upon this aspect of my dreams. Either other members of its race, or itself, began the process while most hosts were too young to defend themselves. I can live with silent dreams. What keeps me up at night is the fear of returning to the Mansion, and the inhabitant deciding that the impossibly small chance of me reaching the end of that corridor is not worth taking, and making me a permanent guest, but no longer free to travel from room to room, or worse. I write this now before I risk sleep once again just in case, and to the reader, if your dreams are still full of sound, I ask you, what will you do if you find the silent place? Will you give in and let its owner take what it wants, be it sound from your dreams, or even more? Will you run away? Maybe you will you seek the secret place, and risk it all for the truth, however horrible it may be? Like the first scientists to deal with radioactivity, I fear I have doomed myself out of pure ignorance. I pray whoever the Mansion's occupant decides to play with next will never descend the staircase, or failing that, does not stop until the very end, outpacing the pursuit.