William did not look back. Instead, he kept going for the door ahead of him. He would rather walk across the tattered, red carpet in the hallway a million times over before turning around. The closer he got to the door, the more he expected the voice to call out again. It never came. When he reached the last chair, he noticed another hammer, smaller than the last, laying on the ground amongst the other tools and bloodied objects. He picked it up and kept moving. When he reached the door, he heard a familiar sound behind him against the floor. "Sshhlick-crack. Click click clack."

He bolted forward out into the hall and slammed the door behind him. He paused for a few seconds, thinking the Broomsticks would barge through it at any moment. The door never moved and the sounds never happened. He looked down the long hall to the right where the lanterns hung and then to the portrait on the wall. It was as if the young Father in the picture was looking at him and he felt a strong urge to look away. He stared at the door straight across from him and hoped to God it would lead him to someplace that had food. 'I'm so hungry,' he thought.

The portrait, hanging there proudly on the wall beside him, begged for William's attention. It was such a glaring thing, presenting itself upon the wall like a king on his throne. Like a hand had physically grabbed ahold of William's head and twisted it toward the picture, he reluctantly stared at it once more. He noticed something on the bottom right corner that he did not notice the first time. He let his hand off the door, using it as leverage to move, and walked closer. There was black scribble there, definitely words, but written in a way he hadn't seen. The lines connected smoothly and with great attention to detail. The curves and loops created something out of the letters, normally more singular and separated, that all felt united.

He tried to spell it out in his head and make out the words, but he needed to break the code of it first. He could tell the first letter was a large 'M'. 'Great start,' he thought. The next letter was much smaller and abruptly ended with a period. He guessed this one as an 'R', for the simple fact that he knew of the prefix 'Mr.' which also ended like this. He knew then that it was a name.

'Mr. what?'

The next letter was also quite simple and large - an 'S'. After a bit of head-scratching and holding his hand up to his chin, index finger spread across his cheek, he made out the rest of the word.

'S - C - R - A -T - C -H,' he sounded out, 'Mr. Scratch.'

The name did nothing but confuse him more. He had never known a person by that name, nor had he ever heard of it. All he could muster was that it was written there and so it must be his portrait, whoever he was. He glanced back at the young Father, who seemed to glare into his very soul with those small yet purely evil-looking eyes.

"Look at me," William said to it, "talk low, talk slow, and fuck you."

The clicking began again, tapping against the door as if to say, "We know you're out there, you can't hide from us!" William had been so distracted that he completely forgot about the hammer. It was on the ground by the door but he didn't remember dropping it. He looked at the door, with the clicking and clacking against it, and wondered just how much he needed that thing. Then he thought of how defenseless he would be without it.

'Please God keep that door closed.' He thought as he made a lunge for the hammer. Once he had it in hand, he turned around for the other door. It was, after all, the only way he could go.

He held the cold, rounded door handle in his palm and hesitated. What waited for him on the other side of the door was anyone's guess and that's what he feared. He envisioned a baleful and malignant Father crashing down onto his skull with a hammer of his own. He pictured the Broomsticks rushing out and enacting unspeakable horror upon him; another mutilated girl, sitting propped up in a chair and asking him to "look at her." Beyond these dark ruminations, beyond the sickening images of death and terror, William also saw freedom from those things. He could open the door and feel the long-awaited cool breeze brush against his thin face, inviting him into a forest of maple leaves, each one perfectly spaced apart like a pathway to somewhere safe. Somewhere he could rest. Perhaps even eat a freshly picked apple or drink some water. A place where he could talk to someone friendly and warm with no ill intent towards him. Somewhere clean. Somewhere far. 'Anywhere,' he thought.

When William entered the room, one that irritated him for the fact that there were so many damn rooms at all, he noticed right away that it was unlike the others. It was nice, with a cool breeze coming down from the twirling ceiling fan above him. Adorned on it was a light bulb that gave off a warm yellow glow. There, in the right corner, was an empty bookshelf about five feet tall. Empty, except for a single piece of white paper on the second shelf. Next to the bookshelf was a large, brown leather chair that must have been the most inviting piece of furniture he'd seen beside the couch in the living room. A small wooden end table was next to the chair and across from that, directly to William's right in the other corner, was a mirror. It must have stood eight feet tall and had a cherrywood frame with a carved-out design of vines and flowers. The only thing unpleasant there was how it reeked of a bedridden, elderly man who hadn't taken his sponge bath for weeks.

Floating around the room, barely visible without looking at the perfect angle at the light above, were tiny dust particles. There did not seem to be dust on anything in the room, only in the air around him. It was like someone had been there and dusted everything into the air and then left. He walked across the room to the bookshelf containing the sheet of paper, feeling the hard brick floor turn into a soft, tightly knitted rug beneath his feet.

He set the hammer on the end table nearby and picked up the sheet, subconsciously listening to the continuous buzzing sound that the ceiling fan made during its rotations. The paper was blank. He noticed something dark through the semi-transparent paper and flipped it around. In letters united, like the one's on the portrait, William worked it out in his mind until he was able to make out the words: 'Gone again, don't let him...' It ended there as if whoever had been writing was interrupted and had to more pressing matters. Suddenly, he felt a pull. Not a physical one but something deeply mental and powerful. He saw in his periphery, the mirror. Standing so tall above William that it made him nauseous.

'Why would you need such a huge mirror,' he thought, 'you'd have to be one big guy.'

Then he saw it. The eyes sunk into the skull like a man long dead. The upper ribcage poked through the shirt like lines on a sheet of paper. The arms were wiry and seemed unusually long in correlation to the rest of the body. It was so striking and shocking that William had forgotten to breathe. He was looking at himself. He was reminded in that moment of just how sick and inhuman he was. He was reminded of how much he hated his reflection. His mind, the thing William had often thought was just as sick as his physical self, had temporarily broken.

He witnessed something truly awful; The deterioration of himself. It was bad, much worse than he'd ever seen before. He thought if there was even any use of escaping.

'Probably too late.'

He grabbed the mirror and shoved it to the right in disgust, propping the mirror toward the middle of the room at an angle. He investigated the mirror and studied its reflection of the room behind him. For a split second, he thought he had seen something. It was like it floated there, directly behind him. A large, black mass. The slight glimpse of a protruding mouth with many rows of tiny, serrated teeth were stretched from one side of its upper body to the other. Six small orbs of piercing light, which must have been its eyes, rested above its mouth, which glowed as bright as the hallway of lanterns. He took the mirror in his hand and twisted it back slightly towards himself, reflecting the very right side of William's body. Whatever he saw - and he knew he had seen something - had simply melted away. His stomach rumbled and a headache followed. Was he going crazy? His throat begged for moisture and his body screamed out for rest. William's left eye had a small twitch that wouldn't go away. He wondered if it was all residual from the drug he had consumed or if they were hallucinations from lack of nutrition and sleep.

'Have to get out. Must find water. Have to eat.'