Even half panicked, a large part of me already knew the front door wouldn't open. Knew it would be stuck in it's frame, knew I would be trapped just as I'd been trapped in Took Manor House.
I had so convinced myself of this, that when the front door opened wide, I was so surprised, so completely caught off-guard, that I stumbled right through the open door, tripped, and went sprawling halfway down the front steps.
Dazed, I just lay there for a moment, eyes a few inches from the ancient railing in front of me. Wood is weird, all it's mystic loops and swirls in the woodgrain, like some kind of mini, two dimensional labyrinth, custom made by nature.
Not sure how long I stared at the railing for, but definitely a few minutes at least. Which spoke volumes about my rather stunned little brain.
Eventually, shaking my head to clear away the stars, I got to my feet, nearly fell back down, steadied myself and managed to stand upright at last.
There were no creepers in sight, nor spiders or any other monsters. I was surprisingly alone for once, with no real threat other than the fact that I was lost.
Dusting off my clothes, I stood a little taller, took a stance that felt heroic and made me feel a foot taller than I in point of fact was, and set off down the stairs.
Now that my panic was finally receding, I could stop and assess the situation. Corral my fractured thoughts and actually make up some kind of gameplan.
"Okay," I said aloud, in an effort to calm myself further. "Alrighty then. So, I'm kinda lost. But the road isn't far. But there's a creeper out there somewhere. So, I'm probably safer hanging out near here."
I felt a weight drop from my shoulders.
"There now! That was easy. Easy as pie."
And feeling a little self-conscious that I was talking to myself like a nutzoid, I shut my mouth and started actually looking around for once.
Surrounding the house was what looked like a field of corn. It was all brown and dead looking, but not knowing much about corn, I wondered if maybe it was just hibernating through the winter.
Aside from the corn was the desert-like path I came through. And in the distance was something that looked like a silo or a windmill. Or maybe they were both the same thing, since I didn't know much about farm life.
Other than that, there was pretty much nothing else. I could see something that might have been mountains way off in the distance, but it could have just been the sun playing tricks on my eyes. A sun that was looking alarmingly close to sunset. And being out here with the sun down was the last thing I wanted in my life right now.
"Welp," I said, and picked a direction at random, though on later reflection it happened to be exactly the opposite of where I'd come from. "Time to get movin!"
I spoke the last bit in what I thought of as a Wild West accent to cheer myself up. It sounded more like I had a throat infection, but I didn't question myself and went with it anyways. Critics be damned.
Then, shrugging my awfully small shoulders, I set off into the corn.
And only minutes later it was not... going very well for me. Once deep in the corn, I quickly lost all sense of direction. There were just brown corn stalks on all sides, rustling ominously as I went through them.
I couldn't see to either side, couldn't even really see in front of me. After a few minutes, since I often had to step around the largest stalks, I began to worry that I'd veered too far to the right or left, and had lost direction completely.
Minutes after that, panic set in again. Pure and simple, do or die panic. I wasn't even aware when I started to run, didn't feel the corn slapping into my sides as I picked up speed, barely heard the snapping of broken stalks, like muted gunfire, as I went faster and faster.
Fifteen, maybe even twenty mintues passed before I finally realized that I was running in full on panic, brain having taken a little vacation to a cheap, rundown motel in Hawaii, with no view of the beach at all. And by then it was far too late to do anything about it, so I found the will in my struggling little muscles to put on a little extra speed.
When I burst out of the corn in my haste, I almost realized too late that I was headed right into the side of what looked like a barn.
Unable to stop my momentum, I instead veered to the right, just narrowly missing bashing my tiny brains in and instead running along the side of the barn until I tripped over a large stick.
I went sprawling in the dust and dirt, but felt a little less panicked now, which I figured was a fair trade for scraped palms and knees.
Getting carefully to my feet, I looked at the huge wooden wall in front of me. It couldn't have been taller than fifteen feet or so, but from my perspective it seemed gigantic, like some mid-american version of the Great Wall of China.
I walked carefully along the side, headed for the edge of it in search of some kind of entryway. Dead corn bordered the barn on the entire side that I'd come in on, but I was interested to see if any of the other sides had some kind of path or road.
Plot twist, they didn't. The right-most side just opened up on more corn in every direction, so I couldn't really get a feel for the geographic layout of the property. To my left was the door to the parn, a huge wooden thing that was standing half open.
Against my better judgement, I sidled inside.