Opening the door I'm immediately blinded by a sudden brightness. As my eyes adjusted, I slowly begin to make out the room.
Not a room...a hallway. To my left there was a dead end.
'Right, it is then.'
Jogging down the hall (not wanting to spend another minute in this place) I gaped at what surrounds me. It's like I stepped back in time into Edwardian England. More paintings and flowers fill this hallway but they were obviously well looked after. A long plush rug huged the floor and flower wallpaper covered the hallway as far as I could see. It was the perfect image of the time period. I try to look out the large windows to gage where I could possibly be but all I saw was a sprawling lawn with nondescript trees.
"How could this possibly get any weirder?" I ask to no one in particular, "This is crazy."
And then I heared voices.
I sign with relief then noticed I was covered in another man's blood. Oh God. I looked left and right but only found the mockingly smooth walls of the hallway.
'OH GOD.'
"Calm down!" I say to myself in a harsh whisper. Mabey I could explain what happened.
No, no why would they believe a crazy woman covered in blood.
'For all you know you're the one who caused the death. The KNIFE was in YOUR HAND!'
Where could I go? Where could I run?
But there was no where to run, except for a dead end and a room with a dead body in it.
"I have no out," I paced around in a little circle, hopping one would present itself in the next ten seconds.
The voices got louder and louder until I had no time left.
My face adopted "a deer caught in headlights" look as two figures rounded the corner and gasped. One was in the uniform of a soldiers, the other wore a uniform of a maid. Both looked like they just stepped out of a period piece.
Looking at my disheveled appearance the guard took a step towards me. I threw my hands up and dropped to my knees, knocking myself in the face in the process.
Panicked I began to blurt everything out.
"I'm so sorry. I don't know what happened all of a sudden, I woke up in a room filled with blood and a dead man beside me. I-don't-know-what-happened-IF-YOU-WOULD-PLEASE-JUST-CALL-THE-POLICE-NONONOMABEYNOTTHEMJUSTCALLSOMEONE-," during my vomit of words, I could barely even make sense of what was coming out of my own mouth.
The soldier's eyes widened while I spoke. He then stopped me with a gentle hand over my mouth. I began to cry.
Admittedly not one of my best moments.
The young soldier crooned soothing sounds to me as I collapsed into his arms. Still holding me up, he turned and said something to the maid behind him and she ran back down the hallway.
Tears formed a river down my face and poured out of my nose. The guard just kept saying those calming nonsense words into my ear as I tried and failed to pull myself together.
Soon the maid came back with a severe, but well-dressed looking man (at least in the vintage context). The well-dressed man handed me a hanky and I wiped my face with it. The man then grimaced as I blew my nose into it.
He gave a few clipped nonsensical words to the guard beside me, which my wrung-out brain was just the realizing was a foreign language. The kind guard helped me stand and we headed down the hall, I tried to make sense of the situation but it was all too weird. My exhausted brain just shut off in shock.
Before I knew it, even though it must have been a while with how large this house was, we made it to a set of large ornate doors. Two more official looking guards pushed the doors open and we entered a room so strange my brain went completely blank. Still physically there, but completely shut down.
Had I just seen a real life throne with what looked like a King surrounded by flamingos, and tigers, and a harem of woman? WHAT IS GOING ON?
My eyes glassed over as I looked towards the ground. My mind desperately tried to find a reasonable explanation for this mess. I began to mutter out loud to myself, "This is not real, I must be in side some hospital somewhere in a coma recovering from my fall. Yes, yes that has to be it. This is just a disturbingly realistic dream-."
But then I stubbed my toe on an uneven floorboard, and everything began to be all too real again.