Malik kept crawling, until he was fully out of the way of the hole.
He quickly scrambled to stand up, pawing at the wall for support, the world spinning around him from the whiplash.
He forced himself to walk slowly, to stay silent and make sure that he made no loud noises.
A sense of relief found its way into his chest, the weight from before lifting at the nothingness that he had seen in there.
He made his way down the corridor, towards the front door and the old, grandfather clock, checking over his shoulder, over and over again, with each step he made, just in case that he was being followed, just in case that the beast had tricked him, hiding too far back to be seen and remain unnoticed.
As soon as his foot met the cold marble of the entrance hall, Malik found it within himself to look away and focus, once more, on his escape.
He walked over to the front doors, and gave a giant, heaving push against them, shoving all his body weight and strength into the blow, the worn out soles of his shoes slipping on the dust of the smooth floor.
Malik panted from his effort, before stepping back and looking over the door. Again, there was no place for a lock, and but the seal between the doors was more prominent, and more tantalising, insulting and desperate.
He looked over to the grandfather clock, his eyes tracking the swinging pendulum for a bit, before looking up to the clock face. The hands told him that it was apparently 5 : 40, and Malik sighed.
Not many would be awake right now, and even fewer would be walking down the streets at this time of day. It would be useless of him to try running through the corridor, which didn't contain any sleeping monsters, to his knowledge, and waving his arms about.
He sat down on the bottom stair of the staircase, refraining from any further exploration for now, needing to get all his thoughts in order first.
The mansion had shifted around him.
During the night, it was a pristine palace, at the height of its maintenance, with each and every surface sparkling in the moonlight. But now, the place looked as if it had been abandoned for decades. Dust coated everything, the carpet was matted, and there didn't look to be a corner where a cobweb wasn't distastefully draped.
The old woman had also vanished with the rising sun, leaving behind an empty, sunken chair. Malik didn't know whether she was an anomaly or not, but it seemed to be that he was the only one here in the mansion, right now.
If he wasn't, then he would probably know.
The entire world shifting around you was hard to miss, after all. If there was somebody else here, they probably would have made their presence available. The hag had told him that there were newcomers to the mansion, and he was sure, even if all the others here were killers, at least one of them would be some kind of crazy axe murderer and come out to at least try something.
The scientist must be wanting to have a field day, gathering statements up and using them to either formulate, or either use to prove or disprove, hypothesises. Wouldn't he have a vested interest in these sorts of things, and would maybe, bother to check?
Malik stood up from the step, and walked over to the door, before turning around to go to the right, reasonably sure that this was what that murderous shrivelled crone meant when she gave him the directions.
The door of the room opened with a quiet click and Malik opened the door out to him, peering into the darkness, wary of the hole in the wall, down the corridor.
The room looked as decrepit and musty as the one that he had come out of, to greet the new day.
The largest difference between the two rooms was the lack of a hole in floor, replaced with an old pool table, two of its legs missing and kneeling down onto the floor. A cue stick laid down on the floor, not too far away, snapped in half with one end of it coated in crimson speckles.
The cue balls were also scattered about all over the floor, in front of the broken table, with only a few that had bounced off the wall, and managed to roll behind it, looking as if all the balls had rolled off when the legs finally gave way and fell, along with the table.
It didn't explain why the cue stick was broken in half and why it had been snapped.
There was no trace of anyone that had been in the room recently. There looked as if there had been nobody in the whole house recently.
Malik closed the door behind him, as he left and had to concede that, even if the woman had made up the scientist, he was truly alone, right now in the house.
He wondered darkly where she went.
There really wasn't much for him to do right now, other than explore the building and find a way to escape.
Malik made a list of things that he would need to check.
He would have to test every single door to see if it was locked, opening them, and probably leaving them open for a potential later, quick exit. He needed to explore the upstairs for anything useful as well, considering that it at least had been claimed that there was an escape route up there, even if through an extremely suspicious ritual that he would ordinarily avoid at all costs. He also needed to test the windows again, this time in the day, and the windows of the inner courtyard, before trying to signal to anybody outside.
If he was going to choose a way to leave this place, then he would simply choose the most painless route possible.