He stepped inside almost delicately, trying to not disturb the walls from their slumber. Each foot had a light conversation with the floorboards, that went something like: squeak, squack, creak. As he moved through the inner hallway he placed a hand and a second along the wall, textured like a dried sponge, hard. He put a finger to his tongue, tasted the iron in the paint that had come off. He squinted his eyes, as if the compression of his lids might lift the curtain of darkness at the end of a hall.

His hand never found the light switch it was seeking, but it did find an object screwed in and in the shape of a box. He treated it with the care of a bone china goose, used his hand to define the limits of this object. A flap on the front could open and exposed an array of buttons, all of the squishy plastic, all of them functionless. Onward down the dark hallway he came across a feature that is a was a very unusual architectural decision. Shrouded in black, without an access of a photon to see, he had to confirm this design choice.

The weight of his knee on the wood floor panels was undeniably uncomfortable. He cursed his mother for him having inherited her exposed, bony, kneecaps. He started his hands flat on the floor by his legs and gradually slid them forward until he was almost in prayer to the deities he had always disregarded. With his arms entirely straight, he then reach what he suspected: a lack of floor. One by one he folded each of his fingers until he had the end of the floor in his grasp, and pulled, sliding his folded form forward. As he came close to his hands, his face had only looked down at its knees at this point, but now they looked upon a very different kind of floor. A floor that was not there at all, a void of a floor.

“Interesting,” he said to the void, which took its time but responded.

“Gnitseretni,” the void spoke. It came as his voice but like it was cast across the middle of the ocean.

The reflective properties of this acoustic hole were not of immediate interest to him as much as the mind of the one who conceived of such a melodic vacancy. He considered, also, how this void below him might look under light – say a crystal chandelier he imagined – this likely changed the very interpretation of the designer. They certainly could not have designed this space under the assumption it be experienced in total darkness.

“But how do I know the designer?” he found himself saying out loud.

“Rengised eht wonk I od who tub.” was the reply he was given.

And then a wave of familiarity dawned on him like a blanket might be thrown atop someone unsuspectingly cold. He straightened his back, knees just hung over the lip of the ledge, his legs folded behind him. This position was far more suitable for deep thought. It was the words of the spaking expanse that had encouraged a memory from a dusty recess of his mind. Because he was so accustomed to speaking other’s ears off in contemplation, he spoke his thoughts to the air:

“Rengised eht,” he said, “Hmmm.”

With only a seconds delay came back: “Mmmh the designer.”

It struck him no quicker than a ballistic ball. He swam his hand in the pocket of his coat, which was deep enough to store a life’s worth of tools. It resurfaced gripping a phone. Flipped open, it cast an electric green on the walls and floor, adopting a swampy aesthetic. With the quick memory of his fingers, he found his contacts and scrolled from A to T so fast he went to U and had to scroll back up more carefully.

“Ah hah! If it were so simple.”

“Elpmis os erew ti fi. Hah ah!” He looked up for a moment, pondering the response, and then returned to the phone to type a message. Before hitting send, he read it to himself in mumbles and gurgles and various sounds that required his lips not part more than a hair. The void tried it’s best to replicate it and produced:

“Mmhhm Mbmm Bm.”

Just before putting his phone back in the reservoir pocket of his coat, he chanced a glance to see what he might find under this green hue. Seeing the wall did not change how he had seen it in his mind: cracked, dry, and bulged with tiny popcorn texture. The floorboards were more eaten and rotten than he had imagined, certainly not safe to walk along if he were a couple pounds more heavy. And above him he looked up and saw, hanging from the ceiling and adorned with crystal droplets, a chandelier. He raised a mocking eyebrow and prepared a smirk, a face he employed at parties or smaller gatherings to display his triumph at a correct prediction. And the moment his eyebrow peaked, he also realised there was no audience for him to plant this expression upon, and so he put it tidily away by relaxing the muscles in his face.

With his phone held near his shoulder, it functioned as a flash light, but one deeply unwell. It shone only sick green beams and these did not make it farther than a stride or two of his feet. Despite the dire situation of his light, he saw the void was not as expansive as he had first thought, and on the other side of this black stream the floorboards continued. He stood up and took a himself almost all the way back down the hall, then turned suddenly and with the emphasis of a dancer, a full one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and ran.

There are certain events that occur that place someone within the more fortunate of individuals in the world, in the universe even. Such events include choosing a sequence of numbers that perfectly coincide with the numbers on the annual lottery, for example. Or noticing your shoelace is untied and bending over to attend to it just as a ballistic missile cruises past. Or having evaluated from zero evidence the presence of a crystal chandelier, and then upon finding a light, confirming your prediction was perfectly accurate. All of these listed events had happened to him, so it was of course not uncalled for that he now believed such events would continue occurring – which is the curse of having experienced such events in the first place.

He thought, for instance, that the wood flooring which was so digested by little woodworms it was more porous than a sponge, that this floor would hold sturdy as plundered down it in a sprint. He thought, too, that his trainers which were about a year old and needed resoling, that these same trainers would have their laces down tight. He thought, also, that the expanse – which in his head he saw himself leaping across in one great stretch exactly like an eagle in flight – this expanse was not too wide at all. This is to say that, when he was two lunges away from the edge of the expanse, he so happened to step hard on a floorboard that was just suspended dust, his foot breaking clean through. He tried to lift it out quickly, but his shoelace, which had become untied, caught on the shattered corners of the board, and he tipped forward. This put him in at an angle not suitable for leaping across large holes. He attempted a recovery by pushing himself forward and still attempting the leap, all the while facing directly down. The motion was now a swan dive than a leap. Some of him did arrive on the other side of the hole, but was only his hands, while his feet were left behind.

Suspended across the two, this put him in a prime position to stare directly at the hole below him. The height made him woozy and he imagined its shadow creeping up and swallowing his belly and neck.

“Oh drat,” he said out loud.

“Trad ho,” said the hole. Trad ho!, incidentally was the phrase that the highland monks chanted as the crossed the stripped, sharp expanse of their homeland, up and down their homeland crags. He had never met a highland monk before.

And soon his fingers and toes both agreed that it was time to stop this silly game, and his abs was quick to join too. He felt himself bow, like a plank of wood being prepared for a boat, and his belly kissed the dark surface of that swallowing lake.

Tentacles, very cold ones, seized him. They were no thicker than a phone wire and they glowed. The ends, he felt they were weighted, something heavy on their ends. Suddenly he was pulled away, and where he should have dropped instead he was lifted, high and clear of the hole. It shrank smaller and smaller and he looked up but it was dark and he had dropped his phone in his attempt to jump the hole. But he used his hands to explore the situation he was in, and found that what had made the ends of these tentacles feel so heavy was that they were cut, sharp, bulbous like teardrops of a giant – crystals. He went soft and relaxed as the arms of the chandelier pulled him towards a different void, this one a mirror of the one that had been below him.