The Hallway

"The kitchen's just down the end of the hallway and to the left," Luke directed, his voice casual as if leading a friend through his own home rather than guiding a near-stranger through someone else's property.

As I walked down the hallway, the wooden floorboards creaked beneath my boots with that particular sound old houses make—not threatening, exactly, but announcing, as if the house itself were aware of my passage, were noting my presence. The sound echoed in the narrow space, each footfall a declaration that I was here, that I'd chosen this, that whatever happened next was at least partially my responsibility.

The house felt still, almost unnervingly so, with that particular quality of emptiness that comes from places that should contain people but don't. The air was cool—colder than it should be for a cottage in July with no heating running—and carried a faint musty smell of old wood and stone, of a building that had stood for over a century, that had absorbed generations of lives lived within its walls.

The hallway was narrow, forcing single-file movement, with Luke ahead of me and the front door behind me. Walls of rough plaster, painted white decades ago and now yellowed with age. A few photographs in frames—the Owens, I presumed, from various periods of their lives. A wedding photo, impossibly young faces from the 1990s. Holiday snapshots. Grandchildren, perhaps. The documentation of an ordinary life, of people who'd built a home here, who'd invested this place with meaning and memory.

Where were they? Why weren't they here?

The questions circled in my mind but remained unasked, because I was committed now, following Luke deeper into the cottage, towards these mysterious plans that would supposedly explain everything.

Heightening my senses to every sound and movement was instinctive now, my body operating on high alert even as my mind tried to maintain calm. I could hear Luke's breathing ahead of me, slightly rapid. Could hear the settling sounds of the house itself, the subtle creaks and groans of old timber adjusting to temperature changes. Could hear my own pulse, thudding away, marking time.

Luke's assurances did little to fully calm my nerves; the promise of legitimacy was a beacon, certainly, but it was a beacon shining through thick fog, obscured and uncertain. The shadows of doubt lingered, casting long lines across my thoughts, and with each step down that hallway they seemed to grow longer, darker, more substantial.

As I made my way down the narrow corridor, something on the wall to my left seized my attention with such force that I actually stopped walking. It was a captivating artwork, stretching from floor to ceiling and spanning several metres—massive, impossible to miss once I'd noticed it, though I couldn't understand how I'd failed to see it immediately upon entering.

The colours on the canvas swirled in fractal shapes, creating a dynamic, almost hypnotic effect that drew the eye and held it. Blues and greens predominantly, but shot through with golds and purples, the hues seeming to shift as I looked at them, as if the painting itself were alive, were breathing, were responding to my observation.

I found myself slowing down, then stopping entirely, drawn into the artwork's mesmerising depths. The patterns repeated at different scales, each section containing the echo of the whole, spiralling inward and outward simultaneously. How did the artist achieve such a sense of movement? The paint seemed to flow across the canvas, creating the illusion of depth, of dimension, as if the two-dimensional surface contained three-dimensional space, as if I could reach out and my hand would pass through the canvas into whatever lay beyond.

It was beautiful. Strange, unsettling, but undeniably beautiful. The kind of art that you could stare at for hours, always finding new patterns, new relationships between the colours and shapes, new meanings hidden in the fractals.

"That's a remarkable piece of work," I said, my voice filled with genuine awe as I continued to gaze at the artwork, unable to look away.

For a moment, appreciating the painting, I felt the tension in my shoulders ease. This was normal. This was the kind of thing you did when visiting someone's home—you noticed their art, you commented on it, you appreciated their taste. It was a brief return to ordinary social interaction, a respite from the anxiety that had been building.

"I know. I've seen it a dozen times now and I still think it's spectacular," Luke replied, his voice echoing my sentiment, and in that moment we were just two people appreciating art, two blokes standing in a hallway admiring a painting.

I let myself relax slightly, let the beauty of the artwork wash over me, let my guard drop just a fraction as I studied the intricate patterns, trying to understand the technique, the vision behind it. My breathing slowed, my muscles unclenched, and for just a few seconds I was simply a man looking at art, nothing more complicated than that.

Which is exactly when Luke struck.

The attack came without warning, without any change in his voice or posture to signal what was coming. One moment we were standing side by side in the hallway, appreciating art like civilised people. The next moment, everything exploded into violence.

"Fuck!" I cried out, the profanity ripped from me by shock and pain as Luke's shoulder slammed into my side with the full force of his body behind it. The impact was devastating, a freight-train collision that my distracted brain couldn't process, couldn't defend against.

Pain exploded through my ribs where he'd hit me, sharp and immediate. My balance faltered, the world tilting wildly as my feet left the floor, as gravity became something negotiable rather than constant. I was flying, falling, the distinction meaningless as the hallway spun around me.

Instinctively, I reached out for something—anything—to arrest my fall, to stop whatever was happening. My hands grasped desperately at the wall, at the air, at the artwork itself, hoping its frame might offer support, might provide something solid to grip, to anchor me against whatever force had just thrown me sideways.

But the expected resistance of the canvas never came.

Instead, my hands plunged into the artwork as if it were made of water, as if the painting weren't a painting at all but a doorway, a portal, an opening into something else entirely. There was no surface, no frame, no wall—just the sudden, impossible sensation of passing through, of falling into rather than against, of the world I understood being replaced by something I didn't.

My heart leaped into my throat, adrenaline surging through my system with such intensity that for a moment I couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't do anything except feel myself falling into the impossible. Every hair on my body stood on end, my skin breaking out in goosebumps, my stomach dropping as if I'd just stepped off a cliff.

The canvas gave way to a bright, sunlit scene, a cloudless blue sky opening up before me where there should have been plaster and lath and the interior wall of a cottage. Light flooded my vision—real light, genuine sunlight of an intensity that couldn't exist in a hallway, that shouldn't exist anywhere in Tasmania's grey July morning.

I was falling—truly falling now, not through air but through something else, through space that bent and twisted, through dimensions my mind couldn't process. Colours streamed past me, or I streamed past them, the distinction lost in the velocity of whatever was happening. I tried to scream but had no air, tried to grab at something but there was nothing to grab, tried to make sense of what was happening but sense had abandoned me entirely.

And then, impossibly, a voice—not heard through my ears but felt within the depths of my mind, resonating in my bones, in my blood, in the electrical firing of my neurons. A voice that was everywhere and nowhere, that came from outside and inside simultaneously, that bypassed all the normal channels of perception and spoke directly to whatever part of me existed beyond the physical.

Welcome to Clivilius, Nial Triffett.

The words detonated in my consciousness with the force of revelation, of transformation, of fundamental change. Not spoken. Not heard. Simply known, with a certainty that transcended sensory experience.

And then the falling stopped.