The hallways were dark and grungy, this kind of Silent Hill rusty that made me want to hiccup in the back of my throat because I knew in the back of my mind it smelled stickysweet red and dirty. But it didn't really smell like anything, and as my brother streaked into the darkness beyond my sight, and I also knew that I had to follow him.

There were wide open rooms - or perhaps they were smaller than they looked, because some of them appeared to have mirrored walls everywhere, with turns and corners on the walls so it was hard to find where illusion began, only the whole thing was illusion anyway so it didn't really matter after all - and they unfolded just as I came to them behind him, and the phantoms there were so wily that I parted my lips and bared my teeth. I started to scream at them, trying to scare them off - can you imagine? The things that frighten me the most and I tried to shoo them away as though they were mice - and to my surprise, but also delight, they snapped away like wisps as I called them out. Eventually, trampling through the halls of what I knew to be my own mind, I was the great huge noble half-beast that I so often took in mindless flight or fleeing in other sequences during my sleep, and I was roaring - foam-flecking, spit-hurdling, ear-shattering roaring - I felt the noise rage through my throat and around my ears like a hard wind swirling around my head, cold and hollow like the feeling you get when you stick your head out of a car window.

I prowled along the halls, letting them fade behind me and materialize underfoot. My brother was no longer my brother, but a small girl in a white summer dress with short, platinum blond hair. She giggled soundlessly and frolicked ahead of me with no fear or hesitation, and bounded into shadow after shadow with only playful curiosity. I knew that I kept after her, roaring the ghosts away as though I was the slayer of all apparitions and the bravest creature to ever be, because I was afraid. I did not want to let her go into the darkness alone for fear of what would happen to her alone - and even more so, for fear of what might happen to me when I was alone. I, the great black beast that had no eyes but saw every evil and tore at it with apprehensive gleaming teeth that rowed from the front most of the mouth down into the depths of the throat.

I kept after her, turning into each room momentarily. A bedroom with light carpet and armchairs, the bed much smaller than normal, in which bodies slumped and dolls moved around my peripheral vision, to vanish when I whipped my head around and roared at them with fury and might. A room resembling a public bathroom, but with the same khaki carpet and worn, peeled, faded once-blue paint along the wooden stalls. Sunlight had begun filtering through somewhere not too far ahead, and nothing was rusty anymore, but everything was still just as anxious and thick. I pushed aside each stall and chased away the shadows with my guttural voice, and even so as each stall swung by I could see the contents behind it changing into bedrooms, my bedroom, other rooms, hospital rooms, and I would swing the door back to scream again - only it would be the same stall I had seen just seconds before, unchanged.

I left the bathroom, swinging to see a large glass display case filled with china, and a crowded living room just beyond where my sight landed - containing a large picture window, that's where the light came from - on an elderly man, fat, pale, with hair like Einstein, walking pointedly by like a zombie in a dark blue janitorial jumpsuit. He moved close to me, but not towards me, just passing, and without waiting I twisted my head and snapped, clamping my teeth around his shoulder - only he whirled into nothing as I chomped down on him, leaving my teeth nothing to shred but air. Gone.

The child, a beacon of light in this unsettling place - no, this horrible, evil place, there was no doubt that this place was evil - turned a corner just behind me and skipped down a staircase I had not seen before into unknown darkness. I went to follow her down as she vanished from my sight, but was jarred from my dreams by a timid knock on the door.