Z3ke (Original Poster)

  I was one wing down with three more to go.

  If I was right about how this mansion worked, there’d be an echo stuck in his loop waiting to hear the song from the music box I’d found in the library. That music would break the echo out of its loop, complete another wing of the mansion, and get me closer to finishing whatever puzzle this was.

  I didn’t have any guide for this. No map or HUD or glowing objective marker hovering in the corner of my vision. I couldn’t go online and pour through a wiki filled with helpful tips written by people smarter than me. It was just me, stumbling my way forward one guess at a time, hoping that I wouldn’t accidentally walk into a deathtrap.

  Still, as I made my way back to the entrance hall, I realized that I was walking a little lighter. I wasn’t creeping around the place like a terrified raccoon, or glancing fearfully over my shoulder every ten seconds expecting something to crawl out of the walls and chase me. I’d finally started to get a handle on this world and, piece by piece, I was adapting to my impossible situation.

  Sure, I’d fumbled my way through Harbor Glen. I’d raced through the Deadlands in a panic and ran from the Eaters on the train and watched a woman die because I couldn’t do anything to help her. I’d been useless to anyone and everyone for the longest time. But here? In this mansion? I’d finally started to feel useful. I’d helped an echo and solved a puzzle and accomplished something. For the first time since waking in this nightmare world, I didn’t feel entirely helpless.

  The entrance hall was exactly as I’d left it: still and quiet. But for some reason, it didn’t feel as oppressive now. Something in the air had shifted and made the place feel a little more welcoming. Or maybe it was just me. Maybe that one small victory in the Autumn Wing had changed everything.

  Whatever had happened, there wasn’t anything around that was actively trying to kill me. No Eaters hunting me, no assholes trying to toss me from a train, and no strangers giving me angry glares. Even the thing that lived on the second floor wasn’t as terrifying as before. Sure, I wasn’t gonna go and introduce myself to it, but it still seemed slightly less belligerent and dangerous now.

  My next stop was another wing that I picked at random. I heeded into the hall and, two steps in, the cold hit me. Frost coated everything. The air itself was brittle and sharp and turned my breath crunchy. The moment I crossed the threshold, a deep achy chill sank into my bones. I pulled my jacket tighter and jammed my hands in my pockets and hunched my shoulders in a desperate attempt to trap whatever heat I could. Spoiler alert: none of that helped.

  The cold was relentless. It wasn’t like a normal winter chill. It wasn’t like an “outside on a snow day” kind of cold. It was deeper than that. More personal. It felt like the cold hated me and was doing everything it could to push me away. It clung to my skin and curled into my lungs and sucked the heat from my body one breath at a time.

  The hallway stretched on longer than the others. Or maybe it just felt longer. The swirling mist of cold blurred the way ahead. My fingers went numb and my ears stung and every step I took was heavier and harder than the last. I thought about turning back. I looked over my shoulder and wondered if I should check out the other wings instead. But as soon as I turned, the hallway opened up.

  The room I was let out in was truly massive. Both of the wings I’d wandered in previously had been large. One was a massive library and the other a gigantic greenroom. But this wing was twice the size as the other two. Larger.

  It was a vast, frozen wilderness that was impossibly large. The ceiling was gone, or maybe it was just so high up that it got swallowed in the darkness and the snow. The walls, if they existed, were too far into the distance for me to make out.

  Snow piled up around me and ice crusted everything. The cold, which had been bad while I was walking through the hallway, had grown so much worse. It slammed into me and cut through my jacket and snatched the breath from my lungs. My shoes sank into the powdery snow. Have you ever worn Converse shoes outside in a snow storm? They are not winter boots. They’re thin pieces of canvas that get soaked in seconds. My feet were ice blocks and every step I took hurt. I could barely see a few feet ahead of me with all the flurries of snow.

  But still I pushed on, hoping to find some kind of shelter where I could huddle close and keep out of the worst of the snow and the wind. While looking for a place to protect me from the chill, I found him. The echo I’d come to help.

  He was alone in the blizzard, standing next to what looked like the beginnings of a shelter. The house was a crooked thing. More a barebones skeleton than a house. It had a rough wooden frame and incomplete walls that couldn’t possibly keep out the cold. Snow had gathered around him. Blanketed him. I watched as he worked on a door that didn’t quite fit the frame of the shelter. His back was to me and every motion he made radiated frustration to the point that I didn’t want to get closer.

  Even from a distance I could tell he was big. Not monstrously big or grotesquely big. But he was definitely larger than life. Imposing. He was the kind of size that you remember from your childhood, when adults looked like giants because you haven’t grown into yourself yet. He was heavy and tall and big and invincible. He was a giant in the world. A weight. A significance.

  More than just his size, there was something about him that made me nervous. I can’t pinpoint what it was other than that something in him screamed “disappointment.” I don’t think he was aiming that disappointment at me. Well, maybe not entirely aiming it my way. It was more like he looked around the world and saw nothing but disappointment.

  He was disappointed in the door and how it wasn’t the right size for the cabin. He was disappointed in the shelter he was building and how it wasn’t up to his standards. He was disappointed that the snow was falling and the wind was blowing. And most of all, he was disappointed with himself and everything around him.

  I didn’t even try speaking with him. Granted, I hadn’t tried speaking with the other echoes, but this was different. With the gardener it felt like, if I’d tried speaking with him, I would have been interrupting some kind of prayer. The way he moved about, it felt like he was in the middle of a religious experience. I hadn’t tried speaking with the echo in the library because she was too wrapped up in her own world to even hear me.

  With this echo, I didn’t speak with him because I was afraid. I was afraid that if I drew his attention I’d be waking the storm that radiated from him. I was afraid that he’d wake up and glance in my direction and all the disappointment that he held close to himself would be released onto me.

  So, I tried breaking his loop without interacting with him. I knelt at the edge of the shelter and pulled the music box from my burlap sack. The metal box quickly gathered the cold and froze over and felt like it was sticking to my hand. I turned the key a few times and set the music box down in the snow.

  The tune played soft and simple. It was a lullaby. Gentle nose rose and fell in the frozen air, almost disappearing in the wind. The song itself was hauntingly beautiful, but the man didn’t react to it at all.

  He didn’t show any emotion or glance at the music box or stop his work. All he did was hammer at the door, trying to force it to fit in his cabin. The music drifted in the air and was swallowed by the wind. I was hoping for some sign from the echo or a shift or a signal or anything that might tell me that I’d solved this part of the puzzle. But there was nothing. The echo didn’t react and there was no shift in the mansion.

  This puzzle box was obviously a dud for this echo.

  I picked it up out of the snow and held it close so the storm wouldn’t swallow it. The last note faded into the blizzard. Whatever memory this echo was trapped in, the song couldn’t reach him. Maybe it would work with echo in the next wing. I doubted it was meant for the gardener, but if I ran out of options I’d try it anyway.

  I sighed and started searching the half-built shelter. If the mansion wanted me playing delivery boy, maybe there was something here I could take back to the Spring Wing. I wasn't expecting anything alive. This wing of the mansion didn’t feel like it had seen warmth in a while, but maybe there was some small keepsake or a tool or something personal I could bring to the gardener.

  The snow around the shelter was piled deep in some spots and scraped thin in others where the wind had bullied it aside. I kicked around a bit, checking the corners of the shelter and circling around the massive guy to see if he’d dropped anything. There was nothing that felt out of place or that looked like it belonged in a garden.

  Seeing nothing that could help, I turned away and trudged back towards the entrance hall with the wind pushing at my back like it wanted to see me gone. The cold clung to me the entire walk back. My fingers were numb and my face burned and no matter how tightly I held my arms to my chest I couldn’t stop shaking. By the time I stumbled into the entrance hall, my teeth were chattering and my skin was red with wind burn.

  I didn’t waste any time in the entrance hall, instead heading straight for the only hall I hadn’t explored yet. The air near the entrance shimmered and looked like heat coming off asphalt on a boiling summer afternoon. The moment I stepped into the hallway, all the cold that had leeched into my body vanished.

  Heat slapped me in the face. Heavy and humid and suffocating and oppressive. It wasn’t the desert heat that I’d grown used to in the Deadlands. No. This was a damp heat. THe kind of heat that sticks to your skin and chokes you and makes you feel like you need a shower even though you haven’t done anything yet. It was a sinful heat. I was reminded of this crazy dude who used to wander around Brooklyn during the summer shouting “if you think it’s hot today, wait til you feel the flames of hell.” That was the kind of heat I was walking into.

  I wiped the sweat from my forehead and kept walking. The hallway stretched on and heat blasted me and sweat soaked into my clothes. Every step I took felt like I was pushing my way through a wet blanket. The air got thicker and the light grew warmer. A few moments later the entire corridor buzzed faintly with the sound of cicadas and, just like with the other hallways, I was released.

  I stumbled onto a warm stone path and looked up to find a summer night’s sky. A real one. It was a sky that was filled with so many stars that light spilled everywhere. There were more stars there than I’d ever seen in my entire life. No city haze or light pollution was around to blot them out. It was an endless sea of glittering constellations.

  The air was still too warm but nowhere near as bad as when I was in the hallway. A soft breeze drifted past and carried with it the sweet smell of honeysuckle. Crickets chirped somewhere nearby and I heard music drifting on the wind.

  An open-air pavilion was a couple feet away, nestled beneath hanging lanterns and arches of flowering vines. Elegant columns framed the edges of the pavilion and the floor was a smooth, polished stone. Music drifted in from somewhere and everything I saw made me think I’d stepped into a scene from a movie. I half expected to see a bunch of country club socialites gathered together, talking about hedge funds and polo and summering in the Hamptons.

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  The pavilion had a long banquet table set off to one side and my mouth watered when I saw that it was weighed down with platters of food. There were piles of cheeses and bread, tiny little pastries dusted with sugar, fruit that glistened with small beads of condensation, and a bevy of finger foods. A crystal pitcher of something pink and cold sat near the edge next to a bunch of glasses.

  I gorged myself.

  You’d think that, with the books back in the library of the Autumn Wing being fake props dressed up to look like the real thing, all the food here would be fake too. But it wasn’t. It was 100% real. And it was delicious. I chugged a glass of the pink drink so fast I barely tasted it before grabbing another. The second glass went down just as fast as the first, and then came round three. I grabbed plates filled with food and shoveled it all into my mouth. Anything that looked even remotely edible quickly disappeared into my stomach.

  By the time I leaned back to catch my breath and plan out my next assault on the banquet table, I spotted him. The echo that I was here to help was standing off the side, lurking behind a pillar where light from the hanging lanterns didn’t quite reach.

  He was young. I’d guess around late teens. His dark hair was perfectly styled and his clothes looked prohibitively expensive. Despite hiding away from the rest of the party, the man looked like he belonged there. His entire being screamed nobility, like he’d grown up with these kinds of garden parties his entire life. And much like all the other echoes in the mansion, this one was also trapped in his own little loop.

  He looked nervous as hell, but he wasn’t pacing and muttering to himself like the echo in the library had been. His shoulders were hunched up and his eyes darted around. One of his hands gripped the edge of the pillar like he was trying to hold himself in place. My first thought at seeing him there made me think that he looked lonely.

  The entire scene was reminiscent of high school dances. Do you all remember those dances? They were always an awkward standoff between boys and girls with each group standing on their side of the room, pretending to enjoy themselves while feeling nothing but nerves.

  This echo had the exact same look that all those high school boys. He was shunted off to one side with a look on his face that said he desperately wanted to ask someone to dance but just couldn’t work up the courage.

  I headed over to the echo with the music box held in my hand, setting myself directly in front of him. He didn’t look up at me or even make it known that he saw me. All he did was shift nervously from foot to foot.

  I turned the key on the music box and then settled it on the ground gently next to him. The melody started up and the music flowed but I could instantly tell something was wrong. The notes were coming out much quieter than they’d been in the Winter Wing. Even with the roaring winds I’d still been able to hear the music then. But here…it was like the music couldn’t find its place. The tune barely reached my ears and the echo didn’t react at all.

  Had the cold from the Winter Wing warped the box? Had it been damaged in some way?

  I picked the box up off the ground and stared at it, wondering what I should do. With the music box in my hand I paced a little ways away from the echo. The sound shifted slightly. It was louder now. A few more steps away from the echo and the musical notes started to bloom.

  I strode to the center of the pavilion and placed the music box in the middle of the floor. The tune brightened and grew louder and came out as clear as crystal. Then, almost imperceptibly, other musical instruments joined in.

  There was a cello, a flute, and a violin. The soft, ghostly hum of an orchestra slipped into step with the tiny music box, lifting the melody into something rich and full and alive.

  The echo finally looked up and I noticed as his entire posture changed. His spine straightened and his eyes widened. He took a quick breath to steel himself and then finally took a single, hesitant step forward. It was just a small step towards the music box, but it felt like the entire room shifted with him.

  The music swelled and the boy took another step, and then another, and another. He strode to the center of the pavilion and came to a stop in front of the music box. Then he just stood there and breathed with the music. Finally, he lifted his hand. Palm up. Fingers open. I recognized the gesture from old movies and tv shows. It was an invitation to dance. The only problem was that there was no one there.

  He bowed low and threw a hand across his chest and offered the other one up to empty air. His coat flared slightly at the edges as he straightened and then, without any awkwardness or hesitation, he danced.

  It was a slow waltz, danced with the elegance that you’d only find from years of practice. Every step was taken with care. Every turn was made gracefully. I watched him spin across the stone floor, his gaze locked on empty air. The music carried him around the pavilion, light and effortless. But the longer he danced alone the more it twisted in my gut.

  Lonely.

  That’s what it felt watching him dance. It was the tragedy of someone dancing with a partner who didn’t exist. It was like he’d been waiting for someone for a long time and the waiting had finally worn him down enough that he’d chosen to just dance alone.

  As soon as that thought crossed my mind, she appeared. Just boom. There. One second it was just him and the next he was leading her.

  A chill ran up my spine when I saw her because…she wasn’t an echo. She wasn’t a projection or a ghost or a flickering memory. She didn’t have the same translucent quality that all the other echoes had. She looked solid. Real. Alive. Her dress shimmered in the lantern light as she spun around the dance floor.

  I froze and my skin prickled and every instinct I had told me something was wrong. This girl was dangerous. I knew that. I knew it. But she was the kind of wrong that I didn’t have the vocabulary for. It’s not that I was terrified of her. I mean, I was. But it was more that there was something about her that I couldn’t understand and that uncertainty scared me.

  I slid behind one of the pillars and watched from the shadows. The boy took her hand and guided her across the dance floor. Neither of them spoke. They didn’t need to. They were so in sync that they danced together as if they’d rehearsed it a hundred times. They moved as if the song had been written just for them. Her laughter floated through the air and something about the way they danced made my throat tighten.

  It was beautiful.

  It was heartbreaking.

  They spun one last turn around the dance floor. She gave a little laugh and he beamed a smile her way. Then she vanished.

  The boy glowed. Not literally. I mean his expression. He had a wide, radiant, unguarded smile that transformed his whole face from that of a brooding noble into someone warm and happy. He bowed once more to the empty space where the girl had occupied, bent to pick up the music box, turned it thoughtfully in his hands and then slipped it into his coat.

  Then he glowed.

  A soft golden light burst from him and it was enough to make me blink. When my vision cleared, he was gone. Both the echo and the music box he’d been holding had gone, and in their place was a small ribbon charm that lay on the polished floor.

  It was a pale blue ribbon with delicate gold thread stitched into it. It caught the lantern light and gleamed up at me like it wanted to be found. I walked out to the center of the dance floor to retrieve it and turned it over in my hands. There was nothing overtly magical about it. It was just a ribbon. But despite that I knew it was important. I knew that it was meant for one of the other echoes.

  It could have been meant for the gardener, but deep down I already knew that it was a gift for that man in the Winter Wing. I sighed to myself and thought of the hallway that led to the cold and wind and frostbite.

  “Of course it’s for him,” I muttered to myself, already dreading going back there. I tucked the charm away and took a few bits of food for the road and made my way back to the entrance hall and the Winter Wing.

  The wind was just as bad as I remembered it. It chewed at my skin and stole all my body heat and slapped me in the face. By the time I made my way out of the hall and back into the frozen expanse, I was shivering and my teeth were chattering and my hands were buried deep in my pockets.

  The shelter was still there: a half-built skeleton of a home that was barely standing up to the storm around it. The man was still there too, struggling with the door. He was exactly as I’d left him: impossibly tall and imposing even though I knew he wasn’t. It was more like there was a quality about him that made me attach the belief tall about him.

  There was a presence about the man. It was different from the presence that had chased me across the Deadlands. And it was different from the presence occupying the second floor of the mansion. The Eaters were terrifying and deadly and dangerous and when they’d been chasing me across the Deadlands they felt massive and powerful, almost like a jungle cat nipping at my heels. Whatever was on the second floor of the mansion was different. It felt…absolute. I knew, as much as I’d known anything, that if I ever went up those stairs I would never be walking back down them.

  The man was different. His presence felt different. When I looked at him I couldn’t help but think: father who could lift mountains and stop storms and keep nightmares at bay just by standing nearby. He was immense.

  I pulled the ribbon charm from my jacket pocket and made my way close to him. The moment my fingers hit open air the cold latched onto them. My fingers went stiff and numb and red, but I didn’t pull them back into my jacket. Instead, I pushed onwards. The snow crunched under my footsteps and the wind stabbed my ears and made my eyes water, but I eventually made it over to the man.

  He continued to ignore me as he radiated displeasure. When I got closer I could make out a few other feelings. It was disappointment, sure, but it was also frustration.

  Frustration. Anger. Sadness. Regret. All those emotions tangled together with the disappointment and it all poured off him as he hammered the broken door to his shelter.

  I held up the ribbon charm in front of him, trying to catch his eyes. I knew it had worked when he froze.

  All the other echoes I’d interacted with had quickly took up the offered items when they saw them. This man didn’t. Instead, he stopped his work and just stood there. Minutes passed. The wind howled and my hand froze but I didn’t snatch it back. Then, finally, his gaze dropped to the ribbon.

  I felt myself urging him to reach out and take it, but he didn’t. Instead, I was blasted with a massive wave of disappointment. This time I could feel so many more emotions mixed in with it than what had been there before. Fury and anger and regret and loneliness and hate and disgust and more. All of those emotions mixed together and combined and magnified. I could feel the emotions stretch. This man’s disappointment wasn’t just focused on the shelter anymore. Or the cold. Or the strange man standing near him waving a ribbon in his face.

  He was disappointed in everything. He was angry about everything. He regretted everything.

  The man was steeped in his emotions. Buried under them. Choked by them. Disappointment leaked into his tools and his skin and the blizzard and the shelter and the snow and the wind and everything else around him.

  He was disappointed in me. I didn’t need to see the disappointment in his eyes because I could feel it. It blasted me and I felt a small, cold voice whisper in my ear and tell me I was a failure and that nothing I ever did could make me matter to him. I wasn’t strong enough, fast enough, smart enough, or talented enough. I couldn’t help him. Nothing could help him.

  But even as the wave of emotions swelled out and crashed into me, the charm sounded. Something gentle had been woven into the ribbon and when the emotions struck, the ribbon countered it with calm.

  It wasn’t so much a flood of calm in the same way that the man exuded a flood of disappointment. Instead it was more a brief burst of calm that pushed aside the disappointment and the weight of the anger and fury and regret that poured from the man.

  The calm protected me. It blunted the emotions radiating off of the man. I don’t know how long we stood like that, the man glaring at me while I held up the ribbon in defiance. It could have been hours. It could have been seconds. Finally, the disappointment disappeared and I chanced a look at the man.

  His shoulders sagged. His tools slipped from his hands and hit the snow. He reached out to grab the ribbon, looking like he was afraid it might vanish if he didn’t take hold of it. I let it go and the man took it in both his hands. He held it like it was the most important thing in the world to him.

  Then he stepped away from his shelter and I got my first good look at him. Old. Weathered. He looked like he’d just spent decades fighting a war. A war against himself, the world, and a dozen other nameless things. Age lines were carved deep into his face and his eyes look hollowed by time and loss. The weight of his years settled over him and he slowly shrank down as he stumbled back.

  He wasn’t the same massive man that I saw when I first got to the Winter Wing. The giant was gone, and in its place stood someone smaller. Shrunken. Tiny. Broken. But still standing.

  Whatever had been holding him together started draining away and he just stared at the ribbon in his hands. His breath hitched and then…he broke. Just completely fell apart. Tears streamed down his face, carving rivers through the grime and stubble and frost. They ran down his cheeks in giant streaks. His entire frame shook and he dropped to his knees in the snow and hunched over. His shoulders heaved like he'd been holding in every sob his entire life and just couldn’t anymore.

  “I’m sorry,” he blubbered out. “I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Over and over he apologized and I was caught flat footed. I’d never seen a man collapse like that before. I’d never seen someone so strong and powerful and massive just fall to the ground and blubber out regrets. For a moment the only thing I could think was I shouldn’t be seeing this. I was getting the sense that this was the first time this man had ever cried. It was like the weight of everything that had ever held him back - every failure, every loss, every impossible standard of his that he’d never met - had finally cracked open and it all just came pouring out of him.

  And when it was all done and he had nothing left, he sat in the snow a few seconds longer to catch his breath. He took a few shuddering breaths, pulled himself together, wiped his face with a thick, trembling hand, tucked the ribbon charm inside his coat, and stood up to his full height.

  I expected him to vanish exactly like the last two echos. He’d vanish and in his place would be an item that I could finally take to the gardener.

  But he didn’t.

  Instead, he turned back to the shelter, picked up his tools, and went to work. I blinked. Stunned. For a second I couldn’t make out what was happening. I thought that I’d failed and was wrong about how all this was supposed to work. Giving him the charm should have broken his loop and set him free. So why was he still here? I was about to rage at him. I wanted to scream that I’d solved his part of the puzzle so he needed to give me an item.

  He was standing in front of the door that had been giving him so much trouble. Before I could say anything to him, he stood and held up the door to the sky. The thing looked perfect. He’d finished his work.

  The echo stood up straight and dusted the snow off his shoulders. He glanced down at the door with a small, quiet smile. Then he slotted it into the wall of the half-built shelter and stood back to admire his work. Before I could say anything or try to get his attention, he reached out and opened the door, stepped through, and shut it behind him.