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The Hallway

For a period of about two weeks in 2016, I would routinely wake up in the middle of the night to find a doorway had appeared in my room, where there had been solid wall before.  A perfect black rectangle leading into a darkness I couldn't see into from the angle of my bed.

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At first, I paid little credence to this phenomenon, because I'm quite prone to hypnopompic hallucinations.  My nightmares sometimes start while I'm asleep, sometimes when I wake up. After a million of these night terrors, you don't get as worked up by the giant spider on the ceiling lowering himself in the dark to devour you.

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But, I soon noticed this was different.  The regular shadow things always disappeared in less than a minute, but that fucking door would just sit there, no matter how long I starred, until I fell back asleep.

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A trick of shadow? A streetlight coincidence? It had to be. And yet, from what? No new lights were outside, no new shapes. It wasn't there when I first went to bed. What was causing it?

 

And if it wasn't a hallucination...Well, what kind of thing only comes into your room when you are at your most vulnerable?

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After a couple weeks, the doorway stopped appearing. I'd wake to the usual razor wire falling to slice me to bits, and have it fade a few moments later, the doorway not there. A relief to see it gone.  And yet, a kind of proof that it couldn't have been a new streetlight, because this time I was sure nothing had changed outside the window. 

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I'll never know what it was, but I did make this short video game in RPGMaker about what might have happened if I had explored it. It's the fifth or so video game I have made, but all the others are lost to ancient operating systems and hard drives baked in Las Vegas desert apartments.

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I'm pretty sure you just extract the Windows one and find a file to run.  Maybe the same for MAC, but I never actually tested the MAC one.  This is made on RPGMaker, a tricky program to work with, but one that can occasionally do some fun things.  The soundtrack is by the same guy who did the music for my movies. 

 

Windows version

Mac Version

© 2023 by Ryan Notch

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