The Attic

My name is George Ellis. I know that the contents of this letter may sound absurd and that many will ignore it because of my dark skin and lack of worldly possessions. Indeed I hold no estate, nor even a house to call my home, but I implore you to look into my past and records at Miskatonic University, from which I graduated with a bachelor's degree. My numerable academic and extracurricular achievements brought me to good reputation, and it was only the economic depression that followed that left me unable to find work to suitably recover all of the funds that I had poured into my education. In was in this squalor and joblessness that I found myself leaving Arkham in search of opportunities elsewhere.

What you will find within is a true account of what I experienced somewhere in the wilderness between Massachusetts and Connecticut. Though I may not wish to believe it myself, I feel it prudent to inform the wider world of what I encountered so that perhaps others of more able situation might be able to investigate and explain its strangity.

In a stretch of the road that was beset by overgrown foliage, unkempt grasses growing over every departing path. My eyes followed the fingers of a festering ivy, tracing its path up the sides of a large, dilapidated manor looming over it. It was quite immense in its width, but such a descriptor wouldn't begin to describe the many stories it possessed. Seven of them, I counted, in addition to a furtive attic, apparently contained within a truncated hip roof. The building outwardly resembled a peculiarly spireless second empire domicile, but yet its many stories hinted that this ornamentation was merely a renovation upon its original construction, perhaps purposed as a sanitarium.

You might question my rationality in moving towards a building so unfurnished. I know the dangers of a structure uncared for, but a hunger for food and need for shelter drives a man towards places inadvisable in common circumstances, I've found. Indeed, a need for that which I had been deprived of moved me forwards, and I ventured into mysterious abode.

What I found was that it was in a state of disrepair, but not wholly abandoned as I had once thought. A ponderable multitude of people lived there, of varying ages and features in a smattering of both Blacks and that of the native Indian tribes. They were apprehensive of my approach, and I believe it was because of shared heritage with that of the latter ethnicity that I was allowed to enter, moreso than my familiar state of dishevelment. I decided I should adjust my speaking so as to match their uneducated mannerisms. Moreover, I found them to be repellently odorous and plainly unfriendly. They made it certain that I was not welcome to share in their space, but that space of my own may be available higher in the manor. So, without reluctance, I climb higher into the mansion, upon stairs that seem scarcely used and comparatively clean in contrast to the squalor that I moved through to get to them.

As I ascended, I found similar lots on the higher floors, except with populations of a steadily waning order. With their smaller numbers though came a growing superstition. There seemed, implicitly, to be a fear of the highest levels of the mansion, and a general desire to populate the lower floors in order to put distance between their kith and its presence. Finally, explicitly, I was told that there was some kind of malevolent entity in the attic, in words that were unable to supply any tangible information about it. I concluded that what they feared was a ghost, a fantastical creation of the mind whose bearing on reality was only that I would surely find uncontested space for myself at the top of the mansion. Dissatisfied with the crowded company of the floors I had walked through, the thought it spurred me on.

At long last I found myself at the highest inatticular level of the mansion, presenced only by scurrying, small rodents and postered moss. If not for the scratching and pattering within the walls from the small creatures, the scene I beheld would have been utterly serene. A hall devoid of manmade decorations except for a row of large windows spaced four feet apart, flooding the space with the dim, sunsetting light of the outside. The view towered above the treelinear panorama, the verdant beauty of the botonous multitudes provoking imaginations of what stretched on beyond sight. The endless evergreenery seemed to ground itself in Earthly delights within my comprehension, yet somehow removed from Earth's mongrelity and hardship. It was of my desire to behold this beauty without end, but I tired, for I had traveled much that day. I endeavored to see the attic for myself with a hope that the rodents would not bother me up there.

Mercifully, I judged in my sleep-yearning mind, the attic was entirely absent of pests. Nothing to bother me as I layed out my many blankets and bundled myself within them. I heard their patterings down below, but they seemed anathema to treading up the stairs. It is in retrospect that I should have taken this as a hideous warning of the place's inhospitable nature, for what abode, suitable for human habitation, will a rat not follow in the occupation of, save for those kept suitably clean and dutifully warded with fresh mint and raw garlic.

The attic seemed the ideal environment to sleep in. Entirely enumbralated due to a lack of windows, and not even a single crack in the time-worn walls. My only indication of the time was the nearly-gone light bleeding in from the stairway. A soft draft flowed through the space, cooling enough to make my makeshift bedding a warm, coziful embrace by contrast. Within but a few minutes of the time I settled down, from which point the sun had long since fully set, I began to sense queer happenings above me. Sounds of creaking, and munching, and something I could not quite place. With nothing else to focus on, I honed my hearing in on those noises as best I could. They were unaccountably distant, as if not on the roof directly above me, but several floors removed; but wasn't this the attic, a place, by definition, the highest level of the building? The sound, however distant it might have been, supplied me a gnawing feeling that I was not alone.

It was at this point I realized that the ventilating air that moved through before was absent, disappeared at some point while my attention was directed audioward. The air was uncannily still at this point, as if it had been purposefully halted at my awareness. It was not so unnerving as to ward off sleep, however, as I drifted off not long after this and slept through the night.

When I awoke, it was assuredly daytime, and I rose to explore the attic space, now dimly visible in the indirect morning light. Regrettably, I had not an electric torch or similar lampescent device to truly observe the darkened space. I had to squint and gander at what details I could make out, of which there were virtually none. Not one piece of furniture, decoration, nor even refuse. Deductably, it makes sense that there would be nothing of value up here, for the vagrants below had ample reason to pick it clean; conquer their fear of the ghost for the pettiest of acquaintances. It did not stand to reason that it should be picked clean, for surely some amount of trash should provoke no imaginations of use to even the crafiest of urchins. There was not even the droppings of a jaunting rodent nor an olfactory hint of dust.

It was in this pseudo-blackness that I cautiously stepped about with increasing bewilderment, until I found a door, whose frame was oddly misshapen. It was angled slightly in a horizontal way that, in isolation, one could attribute to a measuring incompetence, if not for the fact that the edge of the door was perfectly parallel to the offending slope. It shivers the mind to consider a builder who would enact such a design intentionally, but surely the proof of such planning was right before me. I tried the knob and swung the door open with a tentative readiness, imagining that there might be something behind it. Behind the door was another room, identically barren except that it was even darker, due to the intervening wall obscuring the light source. Again I explored, with gratefully abundant time on my hands to determine, definitively, this was an empty room.

Yet again I reached a passage into another area of the attic, but this time a set of stairs leading upwards. The discovery of it was baffling, provocative even. In what earthly home does an attic possess an atticular crown of its own? When the thought of ascending the steps crossed my mind, I hesitated. The existence of these steps is consistent with where my mind sought to locate the noises I heard the night before. I, of course, did not account for the idea that those sounds may be coming from a queer ghost, as those who warned me below likely fear, for such a thing does not exist in any objective reality, but there was a real fear retarding my legs. What if some feral animal made its home above me, and ascension would only serve to provoke it? I considered if I should simply take the convenient sleeping space that I had acquired and leave the upper stairs alone, but my architectural curiosity got the better of me. I needed to understand what lead the builder of this attic to make such an unorthodox design, and queried that I might find this answer above me.

It hardly took a meter of ascent for me to be overwhelmed by a feeling that something was supremely wrong. Each step of the wooden staircase was distractingly misaligned. The sureness of my footing and the lack of any disruptive creaking discredited the natural degradation of time, wear, and tear, and seemed to confirm a dreadful fear that was lurking in the back of my mind. By some mathematical perversion, these stairs, and possibly the whole of this attic, came to be by calculated misconstruction. What unspeakable madness could drive a man to shape the raw materials of Earthly wood and forged steel into disingenuous shapes such as these? The only alternative in my mind was that it could have been conjured into existence, generated by some alien intelligence unknown to mankind's foundational understandings of angles and symmetries.

I reached out a hand to steady myself, but what I caught did nothing to quiet my reeling mind. The banister of the staircase, a symbol of stability and safety in the vicinity of an ascending structure, was unmistakably off-kiltered by at least an entire inch! My breath caught in my throat, and my body froze, hunched as if the attic were a predator whose attention I was desperately trying to evade. After a tense moment, I exhaled, realizing my folly. It should not be the disfiguration of this stairway that concerns me, it should be the noises that I heard above the night before. If I should hope to continue sleeping in this place, it would be pertinent to chase the beast out.

I brought out my combat knife and steadily forged ahead into the greaterly abyssal second level. The layout was familiar, I daresay completely identical, if not for the stairway, which I suspect was tangibly straighter in its design. I would wager that the door frame was too, but I had not the light to judge. A primal fear was growing inside of me, that of the increasing dark and a bit of paranoia caused by the complete lack of offending sound.

By the fourth floor, I had nearly convinced myself that there was nothing of worth this high up, but something piqued by curiosity. The space in front of me was still not entirely unseeable; an impossibility if the only light present was from several floors below. The queerness of this observation spurned me forwards. What I found on the fifth floor froze me for a moment: the clear presence of light around the corner. I hazarded a glance to see the light coming from the frame of a closed doorway, in the same place as all the others, but notably more measured in its design. Gone were the mathmaticless angles of the doors before it. This sight almost put my heart at ease, if not for the obvious presence of the slight wind blowing from that very same frame. I approached the door tentatively, listening closely for the strange sounds that accompanied the wind before; there were none. I tried the knob, but it seemed to be locked. I considered in that moment bashing the door down, but something put a stop to my considerations. The wind poiniently stopped, as if in response to my trying the door. I felt a gnawing feeling that I was not alone.

I retreated, intending to disregard the door. I descended from the attic and emerged back into the sunlight upper hall, and after spending some time there it cleared my head. I realized that I was falling victim to the same ghostly fears as all the others, but I would not remain daunted. Later, after the sun set, I climbed to that highest level of the attic and slept there. There was no light waiting for me that time, nor wind, so I had to feel around and rely on my memory of the layout. With each level being functionally identical, the layout had been fixed into my mind by this point. Still, it is firmly fixed into my mind, but that is for reasons that are elaborated further below.

I awoke to the worrisome noises that had haunted me before. They were horrifically clearer now. Sounds of creaking, like feet on floorboards, but far too soft to be that of a human feet, and not muffled enough to be on a rug or carpet. Munching of something far too crunchy to be any human food I could think of. That sound I couldn't place before sounds similar to the crinkling of paper, but not quite.

I could stay still no longer. I approached the door and tried the knob to find that it was still locked. It occurred to me that I could try knocking, but I hesitated, the fear of some nameless entity preventing me from committing an act that would so deliberately call its attention to me. But I resolved not to allow this illogical fear to control me any longer. I mustered up the courage and knocked, hearing no answer at first. But as I begin to consider my options for breaking the door down, I hear those minuscule footsteps again, now approaching, and suddenly a new fear gripped me. I felt disadvantaged, vulnerable even. I'm in total darkness and don't know what was on the other side. I wouldn't be able to tell what it is, and if was truly is some malevolent entity, I might have needed to run. I might have needed to stumble around in pitch blackness in this thing's home territory. The light then came on from behind the door with a loud switch, but this didn't quell my fear. What if I were to be blinded by the light suddenly flowing out of the door like the alien tendrils of a portal to a place so unlike here that it hurts to even perceive. I lost my nerve and retreated, using the little amount of light to see my way around the corner before the door opened.

The door opened and the room around the corner flooded with light. The air pressure noticeably changed as the wind blew in strange, undulating patterns, as if the wind itself were tendrils extending out of an eldritch mass. Shaking, I hazard a glance, not around the corner, but enough to see that there is a shadow on the ground, cast by the juxtaposing bright light behind the figure standing before a dark room. I remember it looking human, but not entirely. Could it just be a trick of how the light is cast? Or does its figure look inhumanly squat, and are there truly strange things growing out from its head as the shadow suggests there to be; flailing around wildly, as an animal might extend a sensory organ out to guage a space before it moves into it.

Seconds pass that felt like a shudderable eon as I fought the urge to hyperventilate. Trapped between the animalistic urge to fight or flee, should the figure step out, but it never left the door frame, only stood there for a few, terrible moments before closing the door again, which squeaked loudly on its rusted hinges. The light remained, as much as leaked in through the frame. In my fearful and irrational state, I convinced myself that there was an evil behind that door, and that I would barge in and and rid it from this manor, vanquish it before it could deduce what was happening. The sound of those hinges suggested that they would make it easy to bust the door down, and the way those lights switched on suggested electricity. I waited for those soft footfalls to cease, and the crunching to subside, and that nameless other noise to die down. The light switched off and I waited an hour longer, in the hopes that whatever it was would be asleep.

Slowly, stealthily, I approached, until gathering my nerve and ramming my shoulder into the door. With a loud crunch and a metallic breaking, the door splintered and fell inward off its hinges. I quickly groped the wall, finding a light switch where one would naturally be in a house of this archaic style, and flipping it to bathe the room in an incandescent light.

I remember the next moment as clearly as though it occurred the day of this writing: my vision darted around in a frenzy, and as soon as I caught movement, I ran towards it with something like a war cry. What answered was a scream. A shrill scream. An arrestingly human scream. I froze in place and beheld the mundane sight of a young boy, just leapt out of bed and cowering snivelingly. All of my fear transmuted into overwhelming guilt.

His appearance was entirely disheveled and his scent a very familiar, human odor of unwashedness. His clothes were stained, his hair a mess, and a layer of grime covered features of a Anglican lineage. Profusely, I apologized, the boy responding with an undue forgiveness, understanding my point of view with far more sympathy and maturity than a child ought of his age.

Even now it feels embarrassing to admit, but I had simply never considered that a lone boy would find himself in the same grotesque situation as myself and the other homeless adults I had known. It was unthinkingly apparent that those soft footfalls has been his, and I quickly learned that the crunching sounds came from the massive stash of package foods including fried potato chips and dry, oriental noodles. The light was obviously electrical as I had suspected, and the room was oddly well organized and plain.

Do not think this story over, however, for among the half-rotten furniture and lamps that lines the walls, was a stack of trash organized meticulously and stacked up in the corner. The sight of it was unaccountably foreboding, as if not done by human hands.

I was allowed to eat from the stash of packaged snacking foods, all of which had thin, paper wrappers. I was instructed, by the boy, to simply toss the wrappers in the middle of the floor, which I found to be perplexingly contradictular to the pristine arrangement of the room. I did not question it, figuring that I ought to respect the boy's hospitality. The boy did not, at any point, get up to deal with the wrappers. He simply moped about with a lethargy which I, at the time, attributed to my interruption of his sleep. Graciously, I was permitted to bring my things inside and sleep in the room.

With the lights off and some time passed after I bundled myself, that curious breeze started up, and I could hear the wrappers scraping across the floor. I awoke the next day to find all the wrappers removed from the floor and neatly organized into the corner with the rest. When questioned, the boy responded with the befuddling declaration that the trash "just kinda does that." I remember his voice being scratchy and strained, almost uncanny in how it sounded, but I merely believed this to be the muscular atrophy of his throat from speaking to none other for far too long.

I began to worry for the boy's well-being, for his skin was unhealthily pale and he did little other than lay or wander the room in a malaise. I suggested that we go beneath the attic and walk the sunlit halls, and he merely shook his head at me in response. I regret now not pressing the issue, but I felt a need to experience the sunlight for myself and didn't want to delay myself by dragging him along.

It should not be taken as an understatement when I write that emerging back into that hall was like a breath of abnormally fresh air for my unaccountably frazzled mind. I understand now that there is something invisibly rejectable about that attic, but even then I felt an inarticulate fear to return to it. After spending more than a few hours in contemplative silence, I convinced myself that the immediate threat of the rodents in the walls, the possibility of them carrying disease and their probable willingness to pilfer what canned food I carried in my pack, made it more advantageous to retire to the attic for the night. Besides that, I had something tugging at the edges of my thought-addled mind. A curiosity that I could not leave without sating: I needed to know how the trash on the floor "just does that."

I know that there was nothing that someone could have said that would have deterred me at the time, so perhaps it is entirely in vein that I write this cautionary account, but I greatly hope that the following description will be enough to quell the ambitions of any would-be excursionists that would take this account as an exciting quest. I insisted that the lights remain on as we slept that night, and just at the same interval as the first night, the trash became quickened by the unaccountable breeze. At first it merely slid along the hardwood boards, like a procession of slobbering dogs awaiting their treats, forming a loose line until they gathered near to the corner. Unassisted by any visible force, they /lifted/ into the air, resembling that of a puppet obeying the tug of its strings. The wrappers then /folded/ mid-air, an occurrence so blatantly exceptional and anomalous, yet repeated in sequence for each and every wrapper with downright /magical/ implications. I could not believe my eyes, I thought it more probable that I had somehow fell fractionally asleep sitting up, peering into wholesome reality as the part of my brain responsible for constructing dreams perverted what I saw. It was all a slow process, methodical as an overworked mother, and one that I could only deny myself the witness of for so long. I stood up and quit from my blankets, determined to find the source of this approximation of wind that could be no product of nature. It did not take long, as the more I moved about the room, the more the movement of the air grew in alienage. It ebbed and waxed with an intensity that felt calculated, elemental, almost sentient. At one corner in the ceiling, it felt as though the air was impossibly thick, comparable to jam pouring out of a jar; and in that corner, I saw a small crack, no larger than a few millimeters. I considered wedging my knife into it and prying it wider open, and I am endlessly grateful that I did not. I decided first to knock against the ceiling in that spot, and what I heard was a ghastly echo. It wasn't that of knocking on wood below a vacant, unfurnished room, it was more like dropping that wood into a crevasse to gauge how far an unlit cavern goes down, except this cavern was above me, overhead. Judging by how many echoes of the sound were continually produced, it did not seem to end. I shuddered, my mind reeling from the cyclopean, expansive image my mind was producing.

It somewhat ashamed me to say that the only thing grounded in reality that it really reminded me of is a lurid description found somewhere in the pages of the fantastical "Necronomicon", a book written by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, a translation of which resides in the archives of Miskatonic University. My colleagues had always considered the Necronomicon and its contents to be laughably exotic, and I had too until I encountered the echoes of this endless, eldritch expanse. If that description is to be believed, the enlargening of that hole could unleash something that this world is wholly unprepared for. Think, if whatever furtive entity was able to exert such fine control over an entire room from such a minuscule opening, what could it to with a greater inlet?

I do not know how I managed to sleep after that experience, for it shook me to my very core, and I still lay awake thinking back on it. I remember the feeling of walking back to my blankets, the air rolling smoothly off my back, and that gnawing feeling that I was not alone.

I should have abandoned that place as soon as I discovered that blasphemous cleft, but lacking in any sort of food security, it was hard to pass on the free source of food available me in the snacks. It was a considerable hoard of the bags, taller than myself and spilling forth from a wardrobe affixed to the wall. It was my intention to depart the moment that the snacks dwindled to a mass small enough for us to carry. So I stayed, taking my daily trips down the hall and angering at the boy's insistence to stay put. But I too, began to become numb to the whole situation. My trips downstairs became shorter and shorter, and a kind of indifference to nature's healing touch began to grow. It took more and more snacks to make me feel full, while it fed a growing emptiness inside me. Each night felt more singularly dreadful than the last, yet my intent to leave only seemed to wane. Each night, that unholy wind moved, and organized the trash with a clear, but unspeakable methodology. Each night, that gnawing feeling that we were not alone grew stronger.

I remember a particular moment of clarity in the never-ending haze that my waking hours became. It occurred to me that, despite the accelerated rate in which we were consuming the snacks, the stash never seemed to lessen in size. It was as I finished filling myself with the artificial sustenance that I decided to feign a lapse in attention. Just then, the stash seemed to bulge outwards, replacing the mass of what I had eaten. It is possible that what I saw was a mere hallucination; psychologically probable in my maddened state, that I would assign intent and powers of conjuration to a force that had neither, but in that moment I was certain that whatever specter had taken hold of this space, had me in its grasp and intended to keep me there. It is my sincere hope that I had already lost my mind by this point, and my experience was sheer misconception. Indeed, on some nights I heard what sounded like whisperings overhead, and I could not say if they were mere imaginations my mind was making out of the unnatural flow of air, or if there was truly some communicating happening in some language unknown to mankind between entities not of this physical reality.

Finally, I reached a breaking point. One night, while the trash was still organizing, I flipped on the lights, stuffed as many snacks into my bag as I could fit, grabbed the child, and left, resolving never to return. Until this point, I had never seen the child so active, now thrashing and screaming, not wanting to go. I held fast, descending the path that I had tread countless times before, even past the point where I could see no longer. But something was wrong, for the sets of stairs I descended were too numerous. I rounded the same corner too many times. It was impossible to count with the boy writhing in my grip, but I am wholly certain that it was many more than five. The attic was repeating, and kept repeating the further down I went.

A herculean ordeal was upon me, stepping safely down uneven boards in complete darkness and wrangling the boy for his own good, and it all proved too great. He finally escaped me, and made his way back upstairs, sniveling and stumbling around up the steps. I could only catch my breath and deliberate the decision to go back or keep delving deeper. As the boy's whimpers became distant, I finally relented and followed the sound back upstairs. When I returned, the trash was still in the process of neatly organizing itself, insultingly inattentive to my escape.

I could not sleep that night and merely sat there, running through those impossible events in my mind over and over. The many layers bore into my mind with an indescribable weight. The turns I went through weren't a perfect repeating pattern. Each layer was slightly off from the last. Each stair was at a slightly different elevation than the previous level. Each banister at a slightly different angle. Millimeters at a time, surely, but for as far as I got, it must have looked cartoonish, unlike anything a human could have built or natural degradation could have inflicted.

There's just one hope that I clung to as my mind teetered at the edge of despair, the one tiny thread that kept my sanity attached: That was the first time I had ever tried to leave at night.

I had in my possession: a pocket watch. One of the family heirlooms that I was unwilling to part with. I could not be more thankful for such attachment. I needed to wait until I could be sure that the sun had fully risen, so anxiously, I checked my watch every few minutes. Seemingly less time passed between each time I checked, and I could not be sure if that was due to my mind being so riddled with fear and panic, the malaise that I had sunken into, or some daemonic manipulation of temporal flow, as if thickened like the air near the spawning crack I had observed. I can't describe to you the depths of darkness I felt in my mind as I waited, fearing that day may never come again for me. The sunlit hall beckoned to me like the caring hand of a lover, promising to pull me out from the lofty abyss I was trapped in. I could not grasp it yet, fearing the consequences of descending the endless attic at the wrong time. So I would check my watch again and see that hardly any minutes had passed. I paced, I ate of the accursed snacks, I scowled at the young boy. I must admit, I felt an anger towards him, unfairly blaming him as the cause of my current predicament. If you are astute you will have noticed that I have not mentioned his name, and that is because I do not remember it. It would be very unlike me to not bother to learn the name of someone I was to spend so much time with, but my recollection of such formalities is like a smudge in my memories, lost between the cracks of madness and malaise.

When the time finally came, I hesitated no longer. I grabbed my bag and left without another word. The task I had ahead of me was somehow even more daunting than the last time I descended. It started out easily enough, hurriedly descending the first set of stairs and walking through the empty room that followed. Soon, as expected, the incandescent light grew thinner until I was in pitch black. I counted the staircases as I descended them, finding it to be an objective truth that there were more than five levels now. I kept going further, following my muscle memory just as I did in the dead of that eldritch night before. It took great effort to take it slowly, to observe the increasingly exaggerated corruptions of the attic to confirm that they were, in fact, real. My mind filled with dread, and my heartbeat quickened as I experienced this nightmare a second time. My body screamed at me to flee, as if persued in predation, but I suppressed the urge, knowing the danger in running through a place so unilluminated.

Finally, mercifully, my eyes began to adjust to some source of light. It was an immeasurable blessing to be able to see something, anything, again. My pace hastened, and hastened still as I began to see more of my environment. Twice, I nearly tripped over a horrifically misplaced board, but I did descend down the last twisted, blasphemous staircase into the providence of the sunlit halls. I escaped that place, but it would be hubrical to say that I learned the laws that govern it. Do not attempt to find this place unless you are amply prepared for the unthinkable.

As for myself, I will never go back.