Complex Hollow Space | Creepypasta Narration

It Reads At Night presents... "Complex Hollow Space" by Basement Dog. 
Link to the story: https://basementdog.framer.website/chs
Other stories by the author: https://basementdog.framer.website/#:IEzvAGyIY
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@BASEMENTDOGISREAL/videos

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Complex hollow space. By basement dog. A plane is a completely flat surface, created by intersecting lines. Planes are two-dimensional with length and width. Planes also include irregular or free shapes that conform to no particular geometric definition. The human mind seems to be drawn towards recognition of simple geometric shapes, perhaps because, being perfect forms, they can be held in memory and reproduced with ease. In a scatter of points, the eye will seek out a triangle, square, or circle, or find an image with a recognizable form. Interior Design, John F. Pyle, 1988. A room is an enclosure of planes condensed until they meet and form edges. A hollow space inside which we reside and make our homes. You can add depth to two-dimensional planes by adding volume or depth to these planes by intersecting them on different axes. Spaces in buildings or rooms are the primary concern of interior design and architecture. Vertical lines suggest solidity and independence. Horizontal lines suggest relaxation and comfort. Curved spaces suggest freedom, creativity, and the feminine. Diagonal lines in a home suggest dynamic action, movement. It is advised to be intentional when mixing horizontal and vertical lines with diagonal lines. It is possible for a room to disturb a visitor. Irregular shapes, such as a circle with a dent in it, or a pyramid missing the tip. Notice the usage of the word missing. Irregularity implies incompleteness, are noticeable and are incongruent with our enjoyment of whole, perfect shapes and forms. This can create a sense of tension, which may be used to create a more dynamic, unusual design. However, if this irregularity is too noticeable, it may lead to a sense of instability. Rectilinear rooms, the most common type of room, are boxy and uniform, and for this reason draw criticism for being uninteresting, and many associate confinement and stiffness to them. While others find the box space to be private and intimate, there is a mathematical formula to comfort and a formula for discomfort. It is possible for a room to disturb a visitor. In a similar vein, symmetry is one of the most common methods used by architects not just for aesthetic reasons, but also structural stability. However, even symmetry is not immune from irregularity. For example, imagine you are standing in a large room with yellow painted walls, and opposite you, on the other side, stands a pillar connecting the carpeted floor to the white ceiling that brushes your head when you first walked in. You would not at first think anything of it, but the longer you stand and watch the pillar, the more of a sense of discomfort you would feel. After a time you might realize that you are standing exactly where the other pillar ought to be. You realize that the room is only symmetrical as long as you stand there, acting as the missing pillar. So you do stand there, unwilling to break the perfect temporal symmetry of the stale room. This may cause your joints to feel stagnant and unused, and as you stand and watch the other pillar, a revelation may unfold itself to you that perhaps someone might come in and design the pillar around you. Rebar and white paint. Take your measurements and realize you're the perfect height and width and volume for this room. There's two pillars in that stale room. To be in a house is to become part of its functionality anesthetic. One divided by 0.618 is the correct proportional formula for sectioning out a room. The ends of my thumbnails, where my skin meets the nail, keeps breaking and blistering. I have a tick now where I obsessively rub my finger skin back over the thumbnail, a subconscious attempt to keep them joined together. I was in a room that disturbed me once. The attic of my grandparents' house had been renovated into a guest room, or at the very least, an approximation of one. The green walls were also the ceiling, leaning forward and meeting three feet above my head. Looking down the length of the room formed a perfect triangle with a rectangular window peeking through the wood paneling. Symmetry conveys stability, strength, and a sense of ceremony. I look down at my hands and form a triangle with the tips of my thumbs and pointer fingers meeting. I was in that room asleep when my grandmother took to her violin in the middle of the night, playing a wild, screeching, tuneless melody somewhere in the house below me that scared me so bad, I wet myself. I was so young. I thought it was a demon singing in the basement. Looking back on it now, I find it simultaneously interesting and unsettling that I assign the wailing, inhuman sounds to a basement that the house did not have. One could argue that a suddenly awoken, fearful child can rationalize and believe the first explanation its little mind gives it, but there is another part of me that wonders idly if perhaps there is a basement or room down there. An extension of the house that isn't apparent to us, creatures of simple dimensions, something much older and primal, larger, ancient, that was there before my grandparents' house was built on top of, or inside it, before that awful attic teepee room even existed. Do you have any idea how many body-sized spaces there are in your house? A domed ceiling references the universe and suggests monumentality. It is not natural for a residential home to have this. Corners are the horizon terminator for the interior space. There is no such thing as a complex hollow space without corners in three dimensions. And the meeting of two planes at angle is what lends intrigue and mystery to a house. There are two kinds of corners, inward facing and outward facing. Outward facing corners are in reference to the corners that provide subtractive space to a room. The kind that you would place a lamp or bookshelf in to fill up space. Inward-facing corners extend inward into the room. It is these corners that I would like to focus on. In every house there are inward corners. Even single room studio apartments have them. They can be found residing in the entryway and in the doorway leading to the bathroom. They flank fireplaces, support beams, baseboards, decorative wall paneling, and window frames. When the house manifests an extension of itself, you can be sure that you will first spot it peering at you from behind an inward corner. Two legs, three rib cages, six eyes, and every room a mouth. That is my house. Yours may be very similar, but every complex hollow space is a reflection of the being living inside it. If your house doesn't resemble you as a person, then it is resembling something else. I am an architect. Every night I have the same nightmare. The first time I had this dream, it went like this. I walk out into my living room and something is wrong. I turn to the hallway and I can't see anything down it, but I know something is down there. Mouth agape, watching me back. I know I'm not meant to go down the hallway just yet, so I don't. Instead, I approach the windows, but the light is so bright, I can't make out anything. The dilator pupilly in my eyeballs, refusing to pull back my iris to allow my eyes to focus on anything outside. I turn back and my rug is gone, replaced with a scrawled map. No, a blueprint, on the scratched, dirty hardwood floor. At first I don't recognize it. The building in the blueprint is massive. Perhaps a governmental edifice or some millionaire's home, but then my gaze rests on a corner of the sprawling system, and my heart sinks as I recognize it. It's my house, attached by hallways and rooms to this colossal monstrosity of right angles and parallel lines, like a tumor latched onto an elephant's nervous system. I crouch down and examine it closely. Without a doubt, it is the exact layout of my house, with new hallways branching out from various familiar rooms, leading into unexplored alcoves and hallways that I've never seen before. I notice something in the blueprint, and my eyes slowly shift up to the door to my immediate left. The door that always leads into the guest bedroom. I slowly straighten before walking over to the door, before grabbing the handle and pushing gently. The door swings on silent hinges, and my heart crawls into my throat as I see a long, dark, drywall hallway stretch out in front of me. Then I hear it. A long, slow choir of different voices, a mix of familiar and unfamiliar tones and cadences stretched out into a chirping croon coming from down the other hallway where I know that thing is. It's talking, blabbering softly to me, or to itself, I can't tell. A wavering, gentle wail of familiarity mixed with the staccato jumps of voices tuning in and out of each other. If there was such a thing as an organic living radio, this is what it would sound like. With every new tone, there's a small, wet hitch in voice, the sound of a voice adjusting as it deepens its voice before warbling to a higher octave, a constant and sectile rushing of simple vocal cords that far outnumber my own. I hear words, or vague attempts at words, pushed out of its mouth, a woman speaking firmly before devolving into a baby's shrill, bubbly laugh, followed by a whistling old man's creaking voice. I hear what sounds like a dozen hooves thumping quietly on the hardwood floor, and a sickening numbness floods my senses as I realize it's moving quietly on purpose. It doesn't think I can hear it, and it's trying to sneak up on me. A lump forms in my throat, and I can't think, can't move. I let go of the door handle and take a backward step into the new, strange hallway, my eyes fixed on the inward corner that divides the space, the only thing keeping it from seeing me, and me from seeing it. The thing shushes itself when I take a step, and the voices quiet down. A young girl's hushed laugh slipping through the throng of whispers before being swallowed. The sound of hooves stops. I wait, the air suddenly dead quiet, and I realize with horror that it's listening for me, waiting for me to make a sound. As I watch, my eyes wider than I ever thought possible, and possibly long fingers that resemble the long, wrinkled fingers of chimpanzees slowly extend out from behind the wall before gripping the corner gently, silently, the knuckles shifting and rearranging themselves, splitting and merging. My body feels like it's on fire with the amount of fear I feel. Every impulse I have is telling me to run, to scream, to fall to my knees. As I stand there, frozen, I see several tips of bone begin to slowly appear from behind the wall, and I have just enough time to register them as a giant rack of antlers before something in my brain snaps, and I let out an involuntary wail of fear as I turn away from the thing and sprint down the strange hallway as fast as I can. Something primal and ancient rising in me, filling my bones as I pump my legs as hard as I can. The hallway goes by in a blur, and I'm turning corners, sprinting through empty rooms, the smell of dust and old paint filling my nose as I try to get away from what I saw. I don't stop running. I can't, but with every turn, I feel more and more despair fill me, leading me closer to the truth I already know deep inside me. The rooms and halls of this place don't end. I run for what feels like an hour until my legs are on fire. My jaw aches, sweat courses down my face. I finally stop in a small room that resembles an office space. I turn and close the flimsy wood door behind me before collapsing against it, choking out dry sobs. I know it's coming, and I know it knows where I am. I feel a wild, primeval feeling of terror rising in me, at not just the demon, but at the place I am in. In my dream, I know that this is a place that has always existed. A place that changes and builds upon itself like some colossal beast that evolves without end. Endless fingers and arms collapsing in on itself as rib cages bloom from its chest cavity like flowers before curling inward, eyes rippling across its flesh like waves, staring sightlessly and hungrily into the dark that surrounds it. Its limbs twitch and writhe as it develops more joints and limbs than it could ever want, endlessly sprouting and zigzagging, shaking painfully and twisting like a kaleidoscopic mandela of bone spurs and sinew. A mix of diagonal lines can disturb a visitor. I place my hands on the hot cement floor, my vision exploding with color, bruised purples and sickly oranges, and I can see tiny pores in the concrete pushing up sweat. I look up at the stained tile ceiling, countless teeth ringing an unknowable head far above me, too large to ever view at once, clattering and shifting like coral reefs on a giant stone's ziggurat. A lighthouse is a finger, and eyes are the windows to the soul. A million black horns stretch up into a red desert as a sun, bloodred and massive, bears down on the glass sand at 3,090 degrees. And as I turn, microscopic shards of prismatic glass digging into my bare feet, I see a huge garish temple in no architectural style I recognize, colored in ugly blues and yellows and reds, and there is a structural meaning assigned to them, but I know for the briefest moment that I am not allowed here. Nausea rises in me. I wake up with a splitting headache and throw up. I didn't even bother to call out of work that morning. I spent most of it in the bathroom, torn between the urge to throw up and the desire to drink myself into a coma. The feeling I got from that dream was horrendous. My mind felt ruined, marked with a stain that I could not explain but knew for sure was evil. But even as the memory made me sick, I couldn't stop thinking about it. My mind had been dedicated to consuming and analyzing architecture for so long that it was only natural for it to try to understand the place I had seen in my dream. The large overlapping frenzy of hallways and rooms drawn out on the floor. I kept trying to remember the details, but could only remember the basic aspects. A large hall on the other side of a large intestinal track of hallways and small connected rooms, a large stadium with pillars lining each end, and a ridiculously long side hallway that seemed to stretch from one end of the blueprint to the other at an unusual 30-degree angle. I avoid beaches. Seeing sand fills me, as absurd as this sounds, with a sense of monstrous guilt. Every night since then, I have had the same recurring dream. I wake up in this other house. Usually the thing is not nearby, and I map out the system as best I can. I have seen the thing only a few times since then. I have not been caught yet. The dreams build on each other, and I have accepted quietly that what I am experiencing are not dreams, but visitations from my world to something else. To what I don't know, but I do know that I am being given access to something, by something larger than I can comprehend, that humans and indeed all beings of three-dimensional space are not meant to exist in. An architectural marvel and nightmare that evolves the way we do, but much faster, and on a scale I cannot comprehend. My solace is in mapping it. I will cover the floor and walls with the blueprint of the absolute, and when that runs out, I will use my own body, and when that runs out, I will use others. My new mission is single-minded. I sleep as much as I can, take as many sleeping pills and medicines as I can afford, and the thrilling dread that when I open my eyes, I will be greeted by the door that leads from my dark bedroom to the other house, held by endless sickly sunshine. I am the cartographer of the divine, a small speck in an ocean of shifting floors, closing doors, breathing domes, and groaning hallways. The ultimate complex hollow space.