The old oak staircase creaked under Brian's feet as he hesitantly and fearfully descended the steps into the darkness. He had awoken in the attic of a stranger's house with no recollection of how he had gotten there, or generally any of the previous night's events. He didn't think he had been drinking, but for all he knew someone could have slipped him something. Given his current predicament, it didn't seem like an entirely unlikely course of events, though who could have come after him or why he couldn't guess. He was a regular guy. There wasn't much special about him. He worked a desk job and just tried to get by in the world, with a few close friends that he spent the weekends with drinking and playing video games. But now he was trapped in a barren house with no windows and half the doors locked, just trying to find a way out.
The darkness was overwhelming, broken up only by the creak of each step that Brian took. He didn't see the final step, nor the door only a few paces in front of it, until he tried to step down a step that wasn't there and tumbled face first into the hard wooden frame. Without thinking, and while rubbing his pained nose, he grabbed the handle and yanked hard on it, not expecting it to swing open wide as it did. The light on the other side was blinding after the darkness that Brian had previously been experiencing, but it was a murky, ugly light, and when Brian's eyes adjusted to it he saw the figure in the middle of it.
A hideous figure. The figure of a man who looked as though he had been decaying for years, standing stock still, leaning to his left as though that leg were shorter than the rest of him and putting him off balance. His eyes were wide open, lacking any color of iris around the tiny, black pupil, as though he were blind. But he could see Brian, there was no doubt of that. The soulless, empty eyes were staring incessantly at him. They wanted something, Brian could see that, and after a moment he knew what they wanted, for the face was missing something other than the irises - its nose was hanging limply from only a few remaining tendons and a shattered bone.
Brian had been frozen in spot by the sight for only a moment, but that moment was long enough for the figure to see what it wanted and take it. Before Brian could lurch away, the shape was on him, its eerily greasy fingers surprisingly powerful as they gripped his face, tearing at the already damaged nose that Brian had slammed into the door. He cried out in pain, but could feel the skin beginning to split, followed by the muscles underneath. He tried to fight back, but the figure had experienced pain for so long that the puny, frantic blows meant nothing to it.
It felt like an eternity, but it was only a few horrible seconds before Brian's nose was forcefully removed from his face.
He dropped to the ground, blood pooling underneath him as he screamed in gargled pain, and the figure awkwardly tried to push the new nose onto its face. Tendons reached out from the empty hole where the nose belonged like tentacles, grabbing onto the bloodied and bruised nose and attaching it to the decrepit skin. Brian couldn't watch, but he couldn't tear his eyes away either.
In the blink of an eye, the door slammed shut and the darkness that had been there before was banished. Were it not for the incredible pain in his face, Brian might have thought it had been a dream. He tried to blink the tears in his eyes away, and in the process the door that he had lost his nose through simply vanished, replaced by a well lit hallway leading further into the house, with a door at the end.
He didn't want to move forward. He didn't want to lose another piece of himself to whatever he had just seen.
But if he didn't, what hope did he have of escape?
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