I awoke, breathless and scared, as if from a long, long nightmare. It was full dark, dark enough that closing my eyes changed nothing. My body was hot and my skin was sweaty, clinging to leather, like I had fallen asleep in my car in the middle of summer. I peeled my skin away from the material and wiped at my face and arms. I was on a couch- I could definitely confirm that. There were cushions and seams where I could fit my hand through, and an armrest to my left. But that was all I could tell at present. How big was this room? Was I even inside a room? Regret began to swell inside me at that thought, because as soon as I had it I knew I wasn't in a room. Pressure was building up behind my ears and I couldn't hear anything and my body was telling me I couldn't- shouldn't- move. I was in a darkness, the space beyond the couch empty; the light, gone; my name, even my memories- absent. There was no world or even any me besides the darkness I lay in and the present moment. The void around me was pressing in, telling me if I took a step off the couch I would topple over the edge into... Well, I wasn't sure.

I was pretty sure I didn't like open spaces. At least not pitch-black ones. Tentatively, I dangled my legs off the edge of the couch, trying to repress my fear, telling myself there had to be something beyond the couch. My feet didn't touch ground. Concerning, if unsurprising. I was sitting on the left edge of the couch, so I decided to feel along the couch's cushion to see how long it was. My hand slid along and then brushed against a foreign object. It felt like bristles, like the tiny hairs of a tarantula. I threw my arm back in recoil, letting out a shout of alarm.

"Shut up," a girl's voice said, heavy with sleep, a bit slurred, the words coming from where I had just touched. It must have been her hair I had felt. So I wasn't alone. That... was probably a good sign? Maybe I had just drank too much at a party and blacked out. Seemed reasonable. I felt like I was probably a person who would drink too much at parties. I didn't feel sick or hungover though. The girl turned in her sleep, and the leather made a rumpling sound as she shifted. Then, as though it were an echo of the leather (or maybe the leather was a trigger reminding the rest of the world that noises were supposed to exist), another sound began to surface- that of rain, fading in from silence. The new noise was comforting, if only because it added some kind of context to this void, but it felt off, somehow. It took a second, but I realized why.

The rain wasn't hitting anything. There was no noise dampening, no sound of it coming through a wall or beating against a roof. It was everywhere around me, cascading, tens of thousands of raindrops, their downpour ringing in my ears. But I wasn't getting wet. It was like every inch of this darkness should be drenched, but I couldn't feel any of it. I reached my hand out and tried to grasp at the sound, to catch a drop or two or a hundred, but it came back dry.

Then, as though a filter had been slipped in place, the noise transformed. Just like that, it sounded the way it was supposed to when you're sitting on a leather couch surrounded by four walls and a roof. Now I was in an actual room. But where had I been before? When I set my legs down a second time, they touched a floor, sinking a few inches into carpet. I turned to check on the girl, and lightning struck, letting me catch a quick glimpse of the world- and her.

She had thick and curly black hair; bedraggled, tangled into rat's nests and splayed out onto the leather. I thought she looked small, but it was hard to say for sure with how quickly everything fell into darkness again. She was trying to tuck herself into the space between the couch's cushion and the back, and I saw her convulse and tremble when the lightning hit. A whimper came from underneath the mess of black hair, and I felt a swelling of concern for her. I probably knew her, right? Or we were at least acquaintances. Why else would we be sleeping on this couch together? Pretty safe assumption. I started to shake her, to wake her up to ask... who we were... but lightning struck a second time. I whipped my head around, trying to imprint the room in my mind. But I failed, because there was a something in the center of the room, and my gaze was pulled to it.

It was a man, but even if my mind told me that, something deeper down, in the parts of your head you listened to on instinct, placed him as something else, something inhuman.

His skin was sallow and fluid, as though he had pus instead of blood in his veins. Bloodshot eyes stared at me over an impossibly wide smile, one that stretched across his face. His hair was the same shade as charcoal, a match for his tuxedo, and it hung in knotted strands across his face. He was tall as well, like an easy eight or nine feet; tall enough that he had a towering presence even when he was sitting down, tall enough that leaning forward his head brushed the ceiling of the room. His limbs looked compressed, as though to stand would require them to unfold, giving him the overall impression of a mantis. He was relaxed, calm, with one leg resting on top of the other and his upper body stretched forward, one hand supporting his face. He never blinked.

Mentally, I titled him Satan, and then I wondered if I was religious.

The lightning struck a third time, and now the girl jumped, sitting up. As the light flashed, something new was left behind: the flickering, dying flame of a lone candle resting inside a candelabra. It was between me and Satan, perched on a desk I was pretty sure hadn't been there a second ago. Two more candles to either side came to life, followed by two more, until the candelabra had draped the room in a dusky glow. The man's gaze was locked to me. I was nervous and the only muscle that seemed to be working was my heart, which was pulling triple time for the rest of my body; I had that same helpless feeling you get when you're suffering from sleep paralysis, but I struggled to shake it off and eventually tore my eyes away from Satan to look at the rest of the room.

It was like an office, or maybe a study. An ornate red rug set at our feet, and the only window in the room was the one behind the man, black and light-less in the storm. I saw now that there was a little girl sitting on the desk, with flowing blond hair and a face that was featureless save for a small, frowning mouth. She reminded me of a doll, but the rise and fall of her chest betrayed that she had some life within her body. Actually, she was something closer to a marionette, all of her limbs subtly shivering, like they were connected by strings that swayed in a breeze. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the shadow of the girl on the couch lean forward.

"Hey. You okay?" I asked her, as quietly as I could. She flinched, looking my way in surprise. It felt like she was taking me in, seeing all of me, and judging. I... didn't know how to feel about her stare. Or how to react. I didn't hate it, but it wasn't really a happy face she was making. It was like she was searching for something in me.

"Do I know you?" she finally asked after a few seconds, cocking her head curiously to one side.

"I was going to ask you the same thing," I said.

"You don't remember?"

"Nope."

"What a failure," she said, turning her attention back to the two in front of us. Were we in a less distressing situation, I would've probably been offended. But I let it go, shifting my attention back to Mr. Satan and the puppet girl.

"We wish to bid you welcome," the puppet-girl said, after she seemed convinced we were giving the two of them our full attention.

"Does he, uh, talk? Or blink?" I asked.

"Not frequently. I relay information on his part."

"Poor shy guy," the girl beside me said. She was slouched forward, one hand supporting her head. I saw that her hair had fallen over her face, and I thought that was kind of cute. Her eyes shifted toward me, catching me staring. I looked away.

"It is not bashfulness, but rather a disinterest in verbal communication. But setting his silence aside..." the puppet-girl let her voice trail off for a second. "You two have interested us greatly. We've never had multiple guests simultaneously before."

"Guests? Where are we?" I asked.

"A dream," the puppet-girl said, touching her cheek with a finger. "A very long dream of a house. A mansion. A castle, even. It comes to those at a crossroads, and helps facilitate journeys."

"I feel kind of thrown into this," I said.

"You are," Puppet said. I couldn't tell if she was being sarcastic, short, or serious. Her voice was dead, without inflection, and the lack of eyes clouded her facial expressions. "But you came here of your own will. Which means you have a journey to take."

"So are you going to be really vague about the journey?" the girl beside me asked. "Saying things like 'you must walk your own path'? Or do we get some actual direction?" I had the impression she wasn't taking this very seriously. Puppet fixed her face towards her, in what would have been a stare for a normal person with normal-people-eyes.

"No one ever takes this seriously anymore. We are here to facilitate growth, and every guest lately has had such a lackadaisical attitude." Her voice never changed from its passive, disinterested tone, but it felt like she might be pouting.

"That's just how the world is now," I said, leaning back into the couch, trying to relieve some of the tension in my body. It was hard with Mr. Satan still staring at me. Unblinkingly. "We don't take anything seriously because everything is kind of fucked to begin with. Better to just go with it."

"I had not considered that. Using indifference and passivity as a defense mechanism. Thank you, guest, for bringing that possibility to my attention," Puppet said. The girl beside me fidgeted, shifting her weight around on the couch. She cracked her knuckles. "But I must caution you that indifference leads to stagnation. How can you say you are truly alive if you do not care about anything?"

"Isn't that kind of hypocritical, coming from you?" The girl asked. "You don't seem particularly excited about life, over there."

"I do not know what you mean," Puppet said, expressionless. "I am a woman of many passions. I scrapbook." I couldn't help it; I laughed. Puppet turned her head towards me. "Putting me aside, you two are an unheard of exception to the norm. We have multiple visitors to the house every now and again, but two people have never found their way to this room at the same time. It is... exciting"

"We must be soul mates," I said. The girl beside me coughed, laughing a bit.

"Keep dreaming, chickadee," she said. Ouch.

"I was kidding."

"I'm not."

"Okay, you two," Puppet said, deadpan. "Settle down."

I shimmied a little to the left and crossed my arms. "Sure." The girl didn't say anything, but she gave me a smile, with a raised eyebrow, before turning back to Puppet.

"Much better. Perhaps it is as you said, that you are soul mates." Couch girl rolled her eyes. "But whether you are or not, you are definitely linked. Your stay here is sure to be an interesting one, and interesting guests are a delight. As for the condit- okay, will you please stop thinking of me as 'Puppet' and 'Goldilocks'? And both of you, my partner is not 'Satan'. My name is Mu, and his is Hugh."

"Wait. You can read our minds?" I asked.

"Of course not," Mu said. And then she smiled.

"O-kay, that's creepy. If I remember any of this when I wake up, if this is actually a dream, that smile is going to haunt me," couch girl said.

"Agreed," I said. Mu ignored both of us.

"Now. The conditions," she said, jumping straight into an explanation. "The journey is simple: you go from room to room in this mansion, until you have examined all of them. Some rooms will not be immediately accessible. The architecture itself enjoys shifting around from time to time. This should not be a concern to you; as long as you move forward, you will make progress. In this house, to move between rooms is to move through your memories. We offer our guests a chance to look at their lives objectively, a degree of separation from when they first experienced them. Explore the house, collect your scattered memories, and come to your own conclusions about who you are, were, and will be."

"So how does that work with two of us?" the girl beside me asked.

"We have no idea, and we are very eager to find out," Mu said. "We will be watching you as you go. If you find yourself back here, we can speak again. For now, though, I think it is time you begin your stories."

"Wait," the girl said. "What if... our memories are bad? What if we're better off without them?"

Hugh opened his mouth and spoke for the first time. His eyes still bore straight into me, even while addressing her. Why was he so fixated on me? "Everyone has memories they would prefer to take out or throw away," he said, and his voice was impossibly deep. It vibrated in my chest, in my bones, in my locked-away memories. "Parts of ourselves we think we're better off without. But often it is those memories- the most painful ones- that shape our empathy and compassion. Tragedies can propel humans to greater kindness- or greater cruelty. Here, in this place, you will not be able to bury those tragedies."

"Sounds awful," the girl said. I had to agree. What if I didn't like who I was? If I was a terrible person? If I was happy or good, why would I be here in the first place? Inside the me of right now was this whole person that I didn't know, and I realized that that scared me.

Mu pointed at the wall behind us, and when I turned I saw that there was now a wooden door there. The girl and I gave each other a glance, one of several we had shared since we woke up. I wanted to say something to her then: something to reassure her that things would be okay, or that I was sure we'd get along. But I didn't even know my name to introduce myself, let alone how anything I said might affect her. So we just looked at each other, not knowing what to do, before getting up and heading towards the door.

It opened into a long hallway, and the girl from the couch slipped through, leaving me to hesitate at the precipice. I looked back towards Mu and Hugh, towards the flames flickering on the desk between us.

"Go on then," Hugh said, his voice sending a warm pulse in my chest. He never stopped smiling, even as the candelabra went out and I stepped into the hallway. All was dark again, leaving me blind and fumbling.