The White Room

Content Warning: murder, drug abuse, child death, child harm, cannibalism

I’ve heard stories about the Hoffman House my entire life. From the outside to the untrained eye it’s a small, square shack for storing lawn mowers and garden tools. But inside…inside it’s a maze of brightly-colored rooms and dark, endless corridors with only one way out—and that way is unique to all who enter. So much more than just a house, it’s a Hoffman family legacy.

On the eve of my thirtieth birthday, I receive my letter from the maître d’. Within a black envelope is my formal invitation to visit the Hoffman House and partial instructions for my stay. The rest of the instructions, familial tips and tricks, are passed down through the relatives who have gone before (and returned) or are earned within the walls themselves. My cousin Wes was the last go and he hasn’t made it back. When she learns it’s my turn, Aunt Kris, begs me to find him and bring her son home. My mother quietly shakes her head and reminds her through the phone that it doesn’t work that way.

Most of us in the Hoffman lineage do return. That’s how the stories make it out, though no one relishes telling their own. Before Wes, we lost cousin Mary. Before her, Aunt Sherry. It’s because of Aunt Sherry that we know never to refuse the chef.

Letters from the maître d’ can come at any time to anyone with so much as a drop of Hoffman blood. It’s for this reason we don’t know all the secrets to all the rooms. My family has tried staying in touch but it isn’t uncommon for distant relatives to disappear or die, taking their secrets with them. Funerals are like family reunions where the survivors try equally to mourn the deceased and glean information from those closest to them—anything to help the next generation make it through the many-colored rooms. Written records of any sort about anyone’s experiences within the Hoffman House are strictly forbidden. Just ask cousin Jessie what happens to a person’s hands if they try transcribing what they know…

The night before my visit to the Hoffman House, word went out to the family through calls, texts, and emails, letting everyone know that sometime in the next twelve hours I would be calling, so be ready. Since taking notes would cost me—at a minimum—a knuckle or two, I try committing as much as I can to memory. The problem—well, one of many—is that you never know which rooms—or how many—you’ll have to enter. For some it’s dozens. For others, just one.

Of the instructions being flung my way by relatives across the country, I scrape together the following and more:

If the room is dark, do not turn on the light.

Kiss the girl lying on the floor.

Don’t feed the starving cat.

Never turn your back when someone speaks to you.

Play with the dog as long as he wants; give him the best damn day.

Let the boy drown. Whatever you do, don’t try to save him.

And a special note from the maître d’ in his letter about a new addition to the Hoffman House that said simply: no one leaves the pink room.

I am exhausted when the car arrives the following morning—the ancient white limousine that takes us all to the Hoffman House. Beneath the exhaustion there’s also humming in my veins. Acute terror. Resolve. Relief when I think about the end. Sickness in my bones when I think about the rest. Wobbly legs carry me down the front steps to the back door of the limo that has opened on its own. The windows are tinted black inside and out so I can’t see where we are going or get a glimpse of the driver. No one ever sees him. You aren’t allowed to speak to the driver either—it’s in my instructions from the maître d’ if I didn’t already know.

The door closes behind me and it feels like we are moving, but I can’t be sure. Time moves differently inside the limo, as if normal rules of time and space don’t apply. Only once has someone dared to bring their phone to track the drive—blatantly ignoring one of the maître d’s instructions that electronic devices are strictly prohibited—and for his treachery an iPhone 5 forever glows under the skin of Uncle Gus’s chest, the battery now powered by his own heart. At holiday gatherings the teenagers still dial his old number for fun just to hear it buzz.

There are no knobs in the limo to roll down the windows or open the doors. In front of my seat is a small console, and on it is a glass of water and a note that simply says: Drink. When I do, I fall asleep.

When I wake, the limo door is open. The sun is setting at my back the first time I see the Hoffman House with my own eyes. It’s just like everyone always says: small, white, weathered. Tucked into trees at the end of a dirt road. Two narrow, dust-covered windows, like two rectangular eyes with a door between them, face me. The limousine door soundlessly closes behind me as the door to the Hoffman House swings open. I had hoped the instructions I learned last night would be running through my head so I don’t forget them, but my mind can only focus on the small, dark space beyond the door. I walk toward it, through it, into a cramped space with darkened corners and a waist-high wooden desk. Behind the desk, the maître d’ emerges from the dark like an apparition.

No one ever describes the maître d’ except to say he’s a stickler for the rules. I take in his features: dark, slicked-back hair, pointed nose, pale skin. He wears a black jacket with silver buttons and crisp black pants mostly hidden behind the desk. He smiles. It isn’t unfriendly, but the smile is not a welcome. It’s a warning.

“I trust you found the place all right.”

My mouth falls open and he laughs.

“Little Hoffman House humor. You’ve done your homework?”

I swallow the lump that has formed in my throat and say, “I did the best I could.”

“For your sake, I hope so.”

In his hand appears a scroll. With a snap of his wrist, the end falls open revealing roughly three feet of faded parchment.

Instructions. He begins to read.

“Welcome to the Hoffman House, a Hoffman family tradition established in 1799. The duration and intensity of your stay is entirely up to you. All doors lead to rooms of one kind or another, except one. One door leads out. If you choose that door first, your stay may be brief indeed.”

I open my mouth and he knows what I’m going to ask before I say it.

“Why doesn’t everyone choose the exit door first?” His voice lowers and a shadow falls over his eyes. “Only one person ever has. Your Aunt Helen. Only she was brave enough to face it.”

After a breath to allow me to ponder this, he says, “Turn out your pockets and remove your jacket.”

I comply and he continues to read from his instructions, which are the same as the ones from my letter.

“Only a single layer of clothing is permitted above undergarments. No jewelry. No hair clips or pins or weapons of any kind. There are penalties for non-compliance with these very simple rules.” He narrows his eyes. “You’d be surprised what your relatives try to get away with.”

Stories about the failed attempts at bringing forbidden items into the Hoffman House are part of the Hoffman family lore. Every few years we even vote on the worst fails and award cheap trophies, as if to make light of our shared doom.  A few of the more cocky, inventive cousins claimed they sewed small items into the lining of their jeans: safety pins, a length of twine, an arsenic pill—don’t ask me where they got that—a vial of hydrochloric acid—I also don’t know where they got that—and all manner of trivial, potentially helpful treasures. The general consensus was that it wasn’t worth the risk, especially when no one knew what rooms they would end up in and what tools might be useful to survive them. That—and the swift, severe punishments for non-compliance.

Satisfied that I have dressed appropriately, the maître d’ snaps the scroll back up. He can’t possibly have read everything. Sensing my question, he tips his head and says, “You’ll earn the rest as you go.”

Panic rises in my chest when the maître d’ holds aside a black curtain behind his desk and beckons me to follow him through it. When he lets the curtain fall, we are plunged into darkness. For a moment there is nothing but the ragged sounds of my breathing until he strikes a match, and a soft, orange glow of a lantern illuminates a narrow hallway. As I follow the phantom glow, I think it’s my imagination that the walls are closing in until they scrape against my shoulders and I have to turn sideways to continue. Raw instinct to escape takes over, but when I turn back the way we came, I smack my nose into a wall that wasn’t there before, a wall that followed us, squeezing us into a box. I twist back around for the maître d’, but he’s gone. He’s gone. And the light has gone with him. I hear the frantic huffs of my shallow breaths echoing off the tiny space, then whimpering that I don’t recognize as my own.

This is it. I’m in the Hoffman House. I don’t remember any advice about this. I work hard to slow my breathing, to calm my erratic heart. I feel entombed, the air getting hotter and thicker until my lungs begin to rebel. Because I don’t want to die in what feels like a coffin, I shimmy sideways one step at a time, sucking in my stomach, wincing as the walls scrape against my breasts. I draw a breath that gets stuck in my lungs because the walls are too tight to exhale, and when my lungs burn for fresh air, a feral scream punches out of my chest, and at that moment the walls release me and I fall onto my hands and knees on the cold, stone floor. As I gasp and swallow mouthfuls of cooler, oxygen-rich air, I am aware of the maître d’ looming over me with his lantern.

“Hand it over. The knife.”

I cough and curse and reach a shaky hand down my boot, extracting the small Swiss army knife from inside my sock, and press it into his outstretched hand.  

“I warned you there would be penalties for breaking the rules.”

My cheeks burn in anger and shame. I want to argue with him. My mother, who had been here before, insisted I bring it. She said it would get me in trouble but that I’d need it—

“Do you know why we have rules?” the maître d’ asked, his voice laced in saccharine. “Your safety, not theirs. Did your Uncle Ted tell you what happens when someone wears buttons into the Hoffman House? The little girl in flowers and lace sews them into your skin.”

He stands tall again while it sinks in. I’ve seen the white buttons stitched into Uncle Teddy’s wrists. I’ve heard the stories. All of them.

But my mother had insisted; it was her only instruction to me.

“You’re not wearing buttons anywhere, are you?” the maître d’ asks.

I shake my head no.

“Good, then get up. Your stay within the Hoffman House begins now. Your knife will be waiting for you at the end.”

He stands aside, clearing the way in front of me. His yellow light fades but I can still see. Straight ahead, stretching almost endlessly, is a hallway with white-tiled walls, floor, and ceiling. A smell emanates from somewhere down the long corridor: chlorine, thick and cloying. Wet air clings to my skin and crinkles my hair.

A pool. At the end of the white hall is a swimming pool.

Thicker, even more cloying than the humid chlorine, is the dread that fills my every pore. I don’t want to go that way. As if sensing my unease, the hallway stretches further, the end swallowed by darkness. A sound echoes. A voice I haven’t heard in years, and I think I’m going to throw up. I will not go down that hall. Desperation is down that hall. Darkness. Consumption.

Death.

I whip my head behind me to ask the maître d’—no one’s ever mentioned a swimming pool or a white hallway—but he’s gone. A plain wooden door now stands in his place, the only alternative to the direction I refuse to go. I throw myself through it.

I’m in the gray room.

It’s quiet with the distinct odor of disinfectant and vomit. I hear her raspy breathing before I see the woman, then the ancient lady in a sagging white nightgown is in front of me. I recognize my great, great Aunt Lyla, my namesake, from pictures. I don’t know much about her except she died old. Great Aunt Annie, her daughter, doesn’t like to talk about it because she wasn’t there when her mother died.

Great, great Aunt Lyla takes a timid step closer. The vomit smell is coming from the pink stain covering the front of her nightdress. I scour the recesses of my memory for instructions on the gray room and come back with simply: drink.

Drink. Drink what? She extends a skeletal hand and the moment my skin touches hers I find myself in bed. My arms are weak, barely more than skin and bone. I’m wearing a white nightdress. The gray room isn’t actually gray from this position, just void of all colors and life, like I’m already teetering between this world and the next. On the bedside table is a bottle with skull and crossbones on the label.

Drink.

I’ve heard the gray room is easy. Painful but one of the least challenging. And still I’m supposed to drink poison and…and die.

Pain stretches through my bones, the kind that’s been with me for a long time and ensures that death is near—whether or not I touch the poison. The grim reaper’s promise fills the emptiness left behind by my daughter. That awful, no-good man is more important than her own mother. What kind of a name is Chip anyway? He’ll never make her a star. Why can’t she see how foolish—

I double over at the pain racketing through my side.

I want to go on my terms. And I want to do it now, to show her. She needs to know she should’ve been here, that this is what happens when you’re a selfish, stupid girl who turns her back on family. I gave her everything and she can’t even give me a few hours of her time.

I grab the bottle and put it to my lips before I change my mind. It’s bitter and burns as it singes my throat, scraping down my esophagus, finally pooling in my stomach. In the pause before my stomach erupts, I know I’ve made a horrible mistake. A mistake. But it’s too late. The poison roils in an unstoppable crescendo back up my chest and out my mouth. Chunks of my stomach cover my nightgown, pink pieces of my shredded insides getting caught in my teeth. Understanding my mistake is secondary, just a sharp awareness I can’t put into words around the pain. No matter how bad it was, no matter how bad I want Annie to feel, this is worse. I can’t stop it. I can’t even pray. I’m choking on pieces of my throat. My tonsils. My tongue. I can’t draw a breath. I claw for air. I claw for release. I look down and see so many pink pieces of myself.

The last thing I see as my body gurgles and twitches in the merciful throes of death is a little red-haired boy leaning over the bed. Watching.

I’m on my feet, in my own clothes, staring down the white-tiled hall. It takes a few moments to realize I’m no longer dying. I was never dying. The gray room feels as fuzzy and impossible as a dream, but still I clutch at my throat to be sure.

The white hall looms, dread seeping into the marrow within my bones. The terror I feel over what waits at the end of that hall is stronger than the death I just experienced as great, great Aunt Lyla, and I’d rather drink that poison a hundred times before taking one step down that white-tiled hall.

Unlike before, there isn’t a door behind me, but another hallway, this one carpeted red and lined with flickering lanterns throwing shadows off the wood-paneled walls. There are many doors along both sides of the hall. There is nothing in my memory about how to choose the right one.

In a flash of bright red hair, I see a little boy bolt from somewhere at the end of the hall into one of the rooms on my right, slamming the door behind him. I wonder if I should follow, then I remember:

The Roamer.

A ghost—or something like one. Very little is known about the Roamer, except he’s not here to help you.

I start down the red carpet, keen to avoid the room the Roamer has entered. At the end of the hall, another hall extends perpendicular to the first, endless doors down both ways. A map did not come with the instructions from the maître d’, and I know that it doesn’t matter which door I choose, they will all be terrible. Some, though, are far worse than others. The blue room—plain blue, not blue with cloud paintings—only requires you to play a game of cards with an old man in a hospital robe. You need only dance a polka with great Grandpa Chuck if you find yourself at the VFW. And, if the door leads to a carnival, climb on the carousel, find the brown horse with the red saddle, and ride until the song ends. Specific, but easy. Other rooms…

I finally choose a door down the left branch on the left side.

I’m in the yellow room. Not the bright yellow room where the little girl in flowers and lace serves you tea—and sews buttons into your skin—but the off-yellow room where cousin Harry got high for the last time.

There’s a thin haze in the air, carrying a sweet, medicinal odor, beneath it the acrid stench of piss and shit and hopelessness. There are many people in this room. They slowly walk amongst each other without speaking, eyes glazed without seeing. On a ratty loveseat on the far side of the room, two people have collapsed toward each other, rubber bands still taut above their elbows, deep purple bruises in the crooks of their arms.

I don’t recall what I’m supposed to do here. My memories of who I am, what I am, where I am are getting lost in the haze. A step forward and my head spins as if it’s on its own axis. Someone is crying, saying the name Harry over and over again.

Harry? Don’t I know that name?

My foot falters beneath me. It feels detached from my body. Do I have a body? My ankle twists and my head spins and I’m vaguely aware of pain in appendages I can’t name when I hit the floor.

“Harry,” the woman’s voice calls.

I lift my head, and through the smoke I see a woman on the ground, her bulging eyes rimmed in black, her head twitching so her neck bends at an impossible angle. I think I’ve seen this woman before. Where?

“Harry.”

She sounds miles away. The legs of zombies pass between us. I can’t feel my own legs, but I see a hand that I think is mine in front of my face, so I use it to drag myself across the floor, through black sludge that collects on my fingers, through cockroach corpses that collect in the sludge. My guts roll and something hot, wet, and stinging pours out of my mouth.

“Harry.”

The woman closes her eyes. I slide through my own vomit to get to her. Her body convulses, her chest hitching unnaturally as she coughs and sputters and goes still.

Harry. I’m Harry. And I remember Dawn. She didn’t want to come tonight. Didn’t want to do this.

She’s still. She’s so fucking still.

Out. It’s all I can think. I want out. And I want out now. I twist my head and find a door to the right of the loveseat where two zombies flit soundlessly between life and death.

Move vomit on the floor. It isn’t mine. Broken glass cuts my skin and I pull myself along leaving bloody handprints behind. More sludge. A live cockroach skitters in front of me. A dead mouse, its intestines squeezed out of its body, blocks the way. I brush it aside, stringy guts wrapping around my fingers. I need to get to that door.

When I make it, I can’t stand to reach the knob, so I push on it with a filthy, bleeding, mouse guts-covered hand.

A crack of sunlight hits my face. I tip my head back and see a red-haired boy holding the knob.

“You didn’t kiss the girl,” he says, then he disappears and so do the zombies and the stench and the haze in my head and the whole yellow room around me. There’s grass under my hands, which are clean and uncut. I hear the buzzing and strumming of grasshoppers and cicadas, feel the warmth of a summer day on my skin. It’s such a stark contrast to the yellow room, such a relief—

And then I hear the scream.

Oh no.

This is not where I want to be.

Nothing is expected of me here and that’s the problem. One of the Hoffman House’s most absolute rules: Do Not Save The Drowning Boy.

My mom made me repeat it so I wouldn’t forget, then reminded me what happened to Grandpa Gerald when he failed to follow the instructions—the little boy took his left arm.

He didn’t just take it, he ripped through the muscles and tendons leaving a bloody, shredded stump behind.

Do not save the drowning boy.

I climb to my feet and follow the sounds of splashing, coughing, frantic yelps for help, to the steep drop-off beside a sinkhole filled with water. This isn’t anyone’s nightmare. The drowning boy is punishment.

You didn’t kiss the girl, the Roamer had said. Choking on drugs that made it impossible to think, impossible to remember, I had forgotten the instructions for the yellow room: kiss the girl lying on the floor.

Kiss her with vomit around her mouth and mine, kiss her as she takes her last breath, kiss her corpse because I failed. He failed. Cousin Harry couldn’t save her, so in the Hoffman House we kiss the girl lying on the floor.

And now I’ll watch a little brunette boy drown because I didn’t follow the rules.

He chokes out pleas for help when his head is above water, gulping and spitting as he goes down again. This should be easy. Stand here. Don’t move. Don’t hold out your hand.

Don’t save the drowning boy.

He calls out my name. My name. His voice clamps a vice around my heart and I take a step closer. I can hold onto that overhanging branch, reach a hand down, catch those wet, slippery fingers before he goes under again—

Don’t save the drowning boy.

I stumble away from the edge and let the child thrash in front of me. Thin, spindly arms clawing for life. A small mouth gasps for air, swallowing water, sinking in a trail of bubbles.

Again.

And again.

And again.

I know better than to close my eyes, but I try anyway. Immediately they burn until I fling them open again. It’s not enough to stand by and do nothing. The maître d’ insists that you watch. And it takes a really, really long time for him to die. At last he goes down and stays there. Tears have silently poured out my eyes and I let out a sob as his tiny, lifeless body finally surfaces, floating facedown in the brown water.

I vomit again…and it splashes on a white-tiled floor. Chlorine once again fills my nostrils.

No. I won’t do it. I won’t go that way. The dread at the edge of the tile is a weight pressing on my body, my soul. I would do anything, visit every single room, if I never had to face whatever evil waited at the end of that hall.

So I sprint away, down the same hallway that was there before, and through the very first door on the right. I don’t care what’s in there, as long as I’m away from the tile, that chlorine, the hot, steamy air—

Another bedroom, but unlike the gray room and its aversion to color, everything about this room is brilliant. The walls, the plush bedspread, the carpet—all stained a beautiful, terrible shade of crimson.

The red room.

The room Grandma Louise won’t talk about, unless it’s your turn, and then you were sworn to secrecy. Hers was not a story we shared at family gatherings. Not something woven into the Hoffman House lore. We all had dirty secrets. The Hoffman House was a repository for family filth and shame. But Grandma Louise…

She claimed it was because she loved him. Loved him like a fool, she said, her cheeks turning the same shade of red as the door that closed behind me, sealing me inside her memory. His name was John.

I never met him. John lived only in legend for the rift that tore through the center of our family in his reckless wake.

Grandma Louise had come to town for a few days to celebrate my birthday, so she’d been at my house when my letter from the maître d’ arrived. When I turned the letter over in my hand, I saw the first cracks in her normally flawless veneer. She swallowed what was left of her wine, asked my mother to pour her something stronger, then took me to my bedroom. I braced myself for her story and whatever wisdom she could impart, but she said—should I have the misfortune of visiting the red room—to simply tie the noose.  

Tie the noose.

I don’t see a noose. I see a young woman with soft features in a sea of red satin sheets, sobbing. Then, a hard voice that I recognize.

“Damn it. Why did it have to be John?”

Grandma Louise: she was young, but her veneer unmistakable and unwavering even then.

“I’m sorry,” the other cried. “I’m sorry Lou. I didn’t mean—”

Grandma Louise stopped at the foot of the bed and whipped a length of rope off her shoulders, dropping it to the floor.

“Damn him. And damn you,” she cursed. “Damn you both.”

“Lou, please. Please, help me. I didn’t mean to.”

“Damn it, calm down Ruth. You’ll wake the neighbors, if they aren’t listening at the wall already.”

Ruth. Great Aunt Ruth. Pieces suddenly click into place, but I don’t understand, don’t fully see until I’m on the bed, clothes torn and askew, shuffling through the layers of red satin tangled around my limbs. I feel the tears burning on my cheeks, the nerves vibrating in my fingers, and see…him. John. Splayed out facedown on the floor beside the bed.

Terror buzzes through my body, the kind that I know I can’t take back. Sickness at what he had done, what I couldn’t stop, and the moment of panic when I reached for the first thing I could find. My fingers had closed around a silver bedside clock. I remembered the cool metal in my hand, the bluntness as it cracked him across the skull.

He’d rolled off me, onto the floor.

The rope Louise brought lies in a loose pile at his feet.

“Get up and get yourself together,” Louise orders. “Now. We don’t have much time before he wakes up.”

“Do you think…He’s not…”

“Dead? No. Not yet. And good thing too. We can still make this look like an accident.”

“I’m sorry Lou. I only came to help him—he, he said he needed an opinion on a ring for you, and since I’m your sister—”

“Enough. Get up. Now. Fix your clothes.”

“What are we going to do? What are we going to do?”

“We aren’t going to do anything. You’re going to take care of this mess.”

Louise toes the rope, flicking a bit of it into the air. John lets out a low moan.

“Hurry. Now,” Louise says, and I finally free myself from the sheets.

“I don’t…I can’t…”

Louise takes the rope and carefully winds it twice around John’s neck. His fingers twitch like he is moments from waking. With the rope secured, she hands the ends to Ruth. To me.

“Pull,” Louise says.

“What? I can’t—”

“Pull, Ruth. Pull like your life depends on it.”

“Lou…” I sob.

Louise grabs my shoulders and squares her perfectly stone face with mine.

“Do you want to die for him?”

“What?”

“Because you will forfeit your life if you don’t take his. Men like this are powerful, and it will not end well for you. He overpowered you once. What do you think is going to happen when he wakes up, after you knocked him out?”

Steely resolve settles into my own body, steel I might’ve borrowed from Louise. She was always the stronger of us. She never would’ve let this happen to her. John had been courting her for weeks and her virtue was, no doubt, still intact. I answered the phone, came to his door, and now I wouldn’t leave with mine.

But I could, if I was brave like Louise, leave with my life.

I grab the rope and pull. I’ve only just started when his arms move. He’s choking, his body waking in an effort not to die. I fall on his back and pull harder, back and back, harder and harder like I’m yanking the reins of a horse wagon, trying to stop a runaway mare.

“That’s it. Do it Ruth. Think of what he did to you. Think of what he did to me. Think of what will happen if you let this miserable leech live.”

Louise falls on his legs and I continue to pull, ignoring his hands reaching back, his nails scraping against my bare legs. I grunt and pull and let the roar of my own hatred and fear drown the sounds of his choking, until it stops. It all stops. His fingers let go of my legs, his own legs stop moving, his body goes limp beneath me and Louise.

We’re both breathless as Louise stands and brushes herself off.

“Good,” she said. “Now tie the noose.”

Back in the hallway I turn away from the white-tiled hall without another thought. I’m shaking, my arms limp from pulling so tightly on that rope, the memory of John—the love of my grandmother’s life—swinging from the rafters of the loft apartment where he died.

Where my grandmother and great aunt killed him.

I don’t know whose room it was—my grandmother’s or my aunt’s. Or if it belonged to both. I can’t imagine anything worse happening to either of them. And I don’t see how so much terror can be tied up in one family that we should need a place like the Hoffman House to store them all. I jog to the end of the hall and take a right this time, then a left, and another right, and the halls just keep coming, the doors continuing one after the other in infinite lines.

I visit the magenta room where I reach down cousin Agatha’s throat and tear out her tonsils to stop her from screaming at the clown with the big teeth that dances in front of her at the circus. The polka dot room where I endure a tea party with a skeletal version of a relative who died many years before I was born. The room with purple flowers where I sing another unknown relative to sleep. The roadside at night where, in the glow of cousin Frank’s broken headlights, I down a flask in the ditch and watch the woman I hit with a car bleed out on the pavement.  

After playing fetch with a mangy dog behind Uncle Otis’s hunting cabin, I collapse on the hall carpet and bow my head. I’ve lost track of how many rooms I’ve entered, how many ghosts I’ve met or become. I just keep swinging open door after door, catching the occasional glimpse of the Roamer dashing down the hall, hoping that one of these doors leads the way out, and isn’t filled with some nightmare version of my family’s torturous pain.

But every time I satisfy one room, I find myself in the white-tiled hall again.

Chlorine-drenched fingers curl around my ankle, pulling me toward the depths of the unspeakable terror that waits at the end to skin me alive, so I haul myself to my feet and shake them off, turning to choose yet another door down the endless hall—

I gasp when I see the hallway has stopped short. All of the doors have disappeared except for one directly in front of me.

Hope, foolish and ignorant, swells. This is the end. I’m sure of it. I’ve finally done enough.

I turn the knob and find the Roamer on the other side, smiling up at me.

He’s not here to help you.

No. This is wrong. I know it. He motions for me to come inside while primal instincts warn me not to follow. I don’t want to go wherever he wants to lead me, but the only alternative, the only other place left, is the white-tiled hallway.

Since that’s not an option, I step forward. The Roamer’s smile widens and he backs up, allowing me to enter. I realize my mistake fully as the door closes behind me, sealing me inside the kitchen.

My breathing hitches up as I take in the gleaming white cupboards and walls, the fluorescent lights, the stainless-steel appliances, and…the chef. Tall, portly, clad head-to-toe in white, the apron across his ample midsection stained in blood—the brightest color in the room, save for the Roamer’s unkempt hair.

He’s not here to help you.

Of course he isn’t, because no one wants to find themselves face-to-face with the chef. The instructions for the kitchen are simple: never refuse the chef’s generosity. No matter what he puts in front of you, eat it. You don’t want to end up like Aunt Sherry.

“Ah, welcome,” the chef says heartily. “Please, have a seat.”

He gestures to the shiny steel stools in front of the counter where he’s working. The Roamer sits, never taking his eyes off me. I know better than to refuse the chef, so I sit beside the Roamer, noticing the dark circles under the boy’s eyes, the gauntness of his frame.

“You must be famished. How many rooms have you visited?” The chef nods to the Roamer, “Have you been keeping track, little Johnny? Ten? Twelve? She’s trying to set some kind of record.”

The chef chuckles and the Roamer nods eagerly. Little Johnny. Something about him is familiar.

“Too many,” the chef declares, shifting his attention to me, a giant carving knife in his hand. “You clearly haven’t figured out how it works.” He pauses, chews on the fat inside his cheek. “Or maybe you have, and you just think you can outrun it. You wouldn’t be the first.”

The white-tiled hall fills my mind’s eye and I shake it away. It’s always there. Always waiting. I decide I don’t care. I’ll get out eventually—and it won’t be because I finally gave in.  

“Stubborn beast, aren’t you?” the chef shrugs, slamming the blade of the knife into the cutting board on the counter between us. “Your funeral.”

My funeral. I think of cousin Wes, cousin Mary, Aunt Sherry—the ones who never made it out. I can die here. I can become one of the ghosts. But they aren’t all ghosts. They’re not all real. The more rooms I enter, the more…beings I encounter…the less I understand about the Hoffman House. I scroll through my memories, all the tidbits offered about the chef, and something cousin Suzie mentioned on the phone last night might help me.

As long as I don’t refuse his offerings, the chef is not averse to questions while he cooks.  

I look down at what appears to be a perfectly normal bowl of spaghetti noodles that the chef is sprinkling with herbs and spices, and ask him:

“How do people die here?”

He doesn’t look up from the bowl. “Only one way to die in the Hoffman House: by not following the rules.”

I glance at the Roamer, little Johnny, who is quiet beside me, his elbows on the counter and his chin resting on his fists.

“Is that what happened to the people trapped here? The ghosts?”

“If you mean little Johnny, he’s not a ghost,” the chef says, tossing the pasta within the bowl to mix it.

“Then what is he?”

“The essence of a sad child, someone who was never offered a place on the outside.” He chuffs, “We would never keep a child, for goodness sakes. We’re not monsters.”

“Are they all essences then? Not actual ghosts?” I ask.

The chef uses a pair of tongs to grab pasta from the bowl, twisting it into the center of a waiting white plate.

“Some are real ghosts. Some of the rooms are just memories imprinted within the walls of this very special house. Some—as I’m sure you guessed—are purely fiction. Purely…fun.”

“Fun for who?” I ask quietly.

He leans in close enough for me to see the rot around his teeth.

“Fun for us.”

The chef stands back and lifts two plates of finished pasta, setting one in front of the Roamer with a flourish, and a second in front of me. The food, surprisingly, looks good and smells appetizing. Not at all the guts and gore I am expecting. Aunt Sherry was always a picky eater, but there is nothing outwardly offensive about what I’ve watched him prepare.

I’m about to ask the chef what happened to Aunt Sherry when she refused his food when he bends his head to the Roamer.

“Mama Ruth used to make you this every Saturday, didn’t she lad?”

Mama Ruth. I’m transported back to the red room and suddenly understand why the boy, Aunt Ruth’s illegitimate son, roams the halls looking for his place. No one talks openly about the reasons behind the rift between Grandma Louise and her younger sister—even if they’ve visited the red room themselves. I knew of Aunt Ruth only from faded photographs and the occasional hushed whisper. In one of those whispers, I’d heard she had a child. A boy who was sickly and didn’t live long.

Little Johnny.

The Roamer. The Hoffman who never had a place in this family, his essence cursed to roam the halls of the Hoffman House forever…

Dolling out punishments.

“Oh! I almost forgot the finishing touch!” the chef exclaims. “Hold on a moment.”

The chef turns and opens a tall, commercial-grade freezer. At first, I can’t process the form taking up all the space inside…the person who isn’t the color of a person anymore. Slowly I focus on the icy blue hue of frozen skin, the glazed, open eyes, the lips wide in a silent scream.

As the chef snaps off one of Aunt Sherry’s frozen fingers, I swear one of her open eyes flicks to me before he slams the freezer door in her face. I’m still staring, still seeing that twitch of her eye and wishing like hell I imagined it, when the chef holds the finger above the Roamer’s plate of pasta, running it over a microplane so tiny flecks of skin coat little Johnny’s noodles like parmesan cheese.

I’m not breathing as the chef then holds the finger above my plate with a grin.

“Tell me when.”

I watch the shavings dust the pasta and fight to find my voice. I cannot refuse the chef. I will not refuse the chef. But I can tell him to stop shaving my aunt’s finger over my food if I can just remember how to speak. The Roamer has already dug into his plate when I finally breathe, “When.”

With a fork curled between my fingers, I spin the noodles around the tongs and shove a bite into my mouth. If I didn’t know it was flakes of my aunt Sherry’s finger I was eating, it might have tasted good. But I do know, so every bite is like cardboard scraping against my dry tongue, every swallow slowly crawling to the pit of my stomach where it fights to climb back up again. After a few forkfuls, my mouth is coated in the flowery aftertaste of Aunt Sherry’s hand lotion.

“You must be thirsty,” the chef observes as I choke on a swallow. He grabs a glass off the counter and brings it to the sink. Instead of filling it from the faucet, he dips it into the sink itself and comes up with a glass full of dirty dishwater, setting it in front of me with a smile.

Bits of swollen noodles, parsley leaves, grizzly morsels of colorless meat, and flecks of unidentifiable vegetables slowly swirl in the gray water before settling at the bottom of the glass. I don’t think there is anything worse than eating Aunt Sherry’s finger skin until the chef pushes the glass closer and I smell the tang of soap and food particles I am expected to put down my gullet because you do not refuse the generosity of the chef.

If I hadn’t seen my aunt in a freezer, I might’ve ignored that rule. Since I can still taste her lotion in my mouth, I take the glass and chug.

Sitting in the white-tiled hall, I vomit. Again. And again and again. I’ve never thrown up as much as I have since entering the Hoffman House. There is a door in front me, still another way out—but not a way out because there was only ever one true exit.

Down the white-tiled hall.

As my guts settle and I spit chunks of food from between my teeth, I marvel at the courage of Aunt Helen who faced her own white-tiled hall without having to visit ten or twelve other rooms first. No one ever leaves with an exact count, except Aunt Helen.

Just one—her own.

I take the door in front of me instead and find myself in the pink room.

I don’t know anything about the pink room, except for something in my letter from the maître d’—a note on the new addition I’d forgotten until now.

No one leaves the pink room.

Shit. Shit. Shit. I’ve fucked up again. There is no wisdom, no information, no familial instructions in my memory banks about the pink room, because no one has ever left it to tell the tale. This isn’t just a bedroom, it’s a nursery. Pink carpets, pink stuffed animals, pink shelves with pink toys, and, in the center, a pink basinet draped in lace.

The dread is thick here—not as thick as the white-tiled hall, but palpable still. And it’s hot. A sheen of sweat has already collected on my forehead and upper lip. The basinet is the brightest thing in the room, a lure so whatever is inside can suck me in and devour my soul because no one leaves the pink room. The weight of the air and the bright, awful color press against my skin, nearly as suffocating and oppressive as the walls that closed in on me when I first walked inside the Hoffman House. I was a fool—my mother an even bigger one—to think a Swiss army knife would’ve helped me here. What do ghosts or essences or real monsters care about petty human weapons? What could’ve saved me from the chef or protected me against whatever horrors wait inside the basinet?

A vial of acid? An arsenic pill?

I approach the basinet only because there’s nothing else to do. I don’t want to stay here. I don’t want to prove the maître d’ right or break another rule and meet the Roamer, little Johnny, outside this door to lead me to yet another grotesque punishment. I want out, so I’ll do it. I’ll look in the goddamn basinet if it kills me because I don’t know the rules of this room and someone has to learn them and I have no choice if I hope to survive. Step by agonizing step, sweat dripping off my face, my head beginning to ache from the heat, I inch closer to the room’s pink-chiffon centerpiece. I reach out a hand to pull back the lace covering the top of the basinet when I see movement across the room. In a corner that I’m certain was empty before, is a man in rocking chair cradling a small bundle in a pink blanket.

I haven’t seen him since last Christmas, but I recognize him right away.

“Wes,” I sigh.

He nuzzles his face into the pink bundle.

Wes isn’t an essence of someone who once lived. He’s a ghost trapped in his own private hell. I don’t know what I’ll tell my Aunt Kris if I make it out, but I’m grateful she won’t have to see this because she took her turn in the Hoffman House before I was born. I inch around the basinet in Wes’s direction, and when I’m a few feet away, he lifts his head. His eyes are red, glazed, and puffy like he’s been crying for a very long time. The bundle in his arms isn’t moving and I wonder if the baby is sleeping.

Then I remember what happened a few months before his visit to the Hoffman House. Nobody in the family likes talking about that either—a tiny life snuffed out too soon, the negligence, the agony, the divorce, the pending trial that Wes would never attend. He said it was an accident. You’ve never seen a man more broken.

I don’t think it’s my imagination that the room is growing hotter still. I am sweating under my arms and down my back, every breath is heavier and harder to draw than the last.

I wonder why Wes ended up in the pink room—why it was a room at all, instead of a blue van baking in the midday summer sun. It was ninety degrees outside that day; the police said it only took minutes for the van to become like an oven. The pink room wasn’t the van but it was going to cook us alive.

Wes stares at me through the glaze in his eyes. He shakes his head and I can almost hear him telling me like he’d sworn to the police and reporters over and over again: I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to. I’m so sorry. I’m so—

Hot. I’m so hot. It’s happening fast. Ninety degrees outside, an oven in here. My skin is turning red. I don’t even know if I’m sweating anymore. Every breath drags like hot talons down my throat, into lungs that beg for more. For the first time since entering the Hoffman House, I think I should’ve gone down that white-tiled hall.

I dash to the room’s only window and pull aside the pink curtains. Outside is the parking lot of the Best Buy store Wes had been shopping in when he forgot his baby girl was still in the car. Twenty minutes, he’d said, and surveillance tapes confirmed. Twenty minutes was all it took.

No one leaves the pink room.

I pound on the glass. The room is so impossibly hot I can’t think. Hot on my lips, my skin, my eyes. I’m so weak and dizzy, and the heat saps the will to live from my body. Out. Out. Out. It’s all I can think. A small fire starts in the far corner of the room. Then another. Little fires closing in, engulfing the basinet in bright pink flames that reach for me, lick me, and spark another fire underneath the wooden rocking chair where cousin Wes still cradles his quiet bundle.

Lost to his own delirium, he keeps singing to his baby girl, and I see myself and the flames surrounding me reflected in his glasses before the lenses melt down his face, and I begin losing my mind to the inescapable heat, to the window I can’t open that doesn’t really lead to the Best Buy parking lot, to the floor rushing up to meet my face as I fight for one last breath before flames sear my throat and my skin bubbles and the pink room turns to black—

Then I’m gasping on my back, staring up at a white-tiled ceiling. I draw humid air that is cool by comparison into my aching lungs. Chlorine coats my nose and tongue while smoke slowly swirls around me, coming off my skin.

It takes a few more breaths to realize that I haven’t died.

I survived the pink room.

I understand the maître d’s warning then: no one ever leaves the pink room because no one had yet. The only person to go in had been Wes, and he would fulfill the room’s requirement for all eternity: comfort the baby.

I sit up. Another door beckons. Aunt Helen had the courage to face her room, her terror, right away, when I’ve run like hell in the other direction—into other people’s bodies and deaths and nightmares. I don’t want to die anymore. I thought nothing could be worse than washing down Aunt Sherry’s finger with a glass of rancid dishwater until I was cooked alive.

My knees are shaking, my skin finally starting to cool, when I stand. It knows I’m coming. A plume of green chlorine settles around my shoulders like a burden. My burden. I force one toe forward. My bones are battered with opposing forces—one that insists I turn around and another that knows there’s no other way out of this hell house. I push another forward, draw in a thick, humid breath from the devil’s own lungs.

The chlorine gets thicker, the air warmer and wetter with every jerky step that my shaking body sputters forward. Nearly at the end, what looks like a solid wall of white tile isn’t the end at all. To the left, in a gap in the tile, the space opens on an indoor swimming pool. My eyes don’t recall this place, but my cells remember. Something in my soul knows why this room is mine.

There’s a man in the pool. Tall, with a thick mane of graying hair, and wrinkles sagging around the muscles of a body that still looks strong. He’s watching the opposite wall, so I don’t see his face.

No, not the wall. He’s watching a door on the other side of the pool. A closet. And inside it, I’m trying to be quiet. From a crouched position underneath a shelf, I’m willing my four-year-old self not to cry.

I have such little feet, such short legs, and I’m wet and cold. Water drips from my hair down the back of my swimming suit. Where is my mother? I never go anywhere without her. Why isn’t she here? I’m shaking from the cold and…something else. Something I don’t yet have words for. More than mere fear, I’m overwhelmed with bone-hardening terror. He knows where I am. He watched me run across the wet tiles by the pool and into this closet. I can’t see anything through the slats in the door besides the floor just outside my hiding place. I think—I hope—that if I can be quiet enough, he’ll forget about me.

At least long enough for Mommy to find me.

Water sloshes, falling away from the man climbing the steps out of the pool. His feet slap on the tile in slow, steady steps toward me. I try to make myself smaller. My heart pounds so furiously, it forces the breath from my lungs in wild, shallow huffs. I’ve pulled my knees up to my chest. I’m tucked in the back among the soft towels. Maybe he won’t see me underneath them.

“Come on now, Lyla,” his voice croons. “Why’d you go running off like that?”

A surge of vomit climbs up my throat, but I shove it back down. He stops when he’s close enough for me to see his feet through the slats in the closet door. But it’s too much. Too much for my little heart and it beats so hard, so loud it blots out the sound of anything else he says, and I choke as my lungs close, refusing to take in anymore air.

And then…nothing.

For a moment I exist outside of time. Then, I make a nauseating swing from the closet to my feet. Different feet. Bigger. And I’m taller. And instead of looking out through the slats of the darkened closet, I am standing behind Uncle Chip, a man who’d been so attractive in his day, so devilishly charming, it was no wonder why Aunt Annie chose him.

A handsome, sweet-talking nightmare.

He doesn’t notice me since he’s so intent on the whimpering behind that closet door. There’s something in my hand. Something small and metal.

A Swiss army knife.

Only I’m not the one really holding it. It’s my mother. I recognize the shape of her nails and the silver ring etched in flowers on the middle finger of her right hand—the one gripping the knife.

I hurry the last few steps—there’s no room for hesitation now—and plunge the blade into Uncle Chip’s side. He screeches, his body contorting against the sudden pain, but my mother isn’t done. I’m not done. I pull the blade out. He staggers, his blood already dripping and swirling into the puddles on the wet floor. When he’s about to turn and face me, I plunge the knife in again—this time, at the base of his skull.

This time, I twist it.  

The noise that erupts from his body is almost inhuman, and blood pours from the wounds and onto my hand that clutches the hilt of that tiny but effective knife. Uncle Chip manages to spin on his unsteady feet to look at me. His eyes widen and his mouth falls open in a silent protest. This was not how it was supposed to happen, those eyes say. He was the predator. And predators aren’t taken down by their prey.

I let him fall in a sickening splat on the wet tile. Blood rushes out from underneath him, mixing with the pool water in swirling eddies that quickly disappear. I drop the knife and open the closet door. I see the girl, frozen in terror among the towels, and then I am her again as she is scooped up into her mother’s arms. She hauls me out of the closet and tells me to close my eyes.

When I open them again, I’m on my back on the ground. Twigs and rocks and dry leaves scratch against my palms. The sky above is the deep blue that comes just after sunset. I bolt straight up, sucking in a sharp breath of cool night air that clears the chlorine from my nostrils, and I realize I’m wearing the jacket I arrived in that I surrendered to the maître d’. I’m about to jump to my feet and scour my memory for what room this could possibly be, when I look to my right and see it.

Weathered white paint, two unassuming windows with a door between. I blink once. Again. Then it hits me.

I made it out of the Hoffman House.

I swing my head to my left just as the back door of the white limousine swings open. I force myself to stand and slowly drag my feet through the forest floor to my waiting ride. I don’t know if I’ve been inside the Hoffman House for one day. Two. A week. Or maybe just a few minutes. It felt like an eternity. I doubt I need whatever is in the glass of water on the console to help me fall asleep, but I know I must drink it because we must follow the instructions provided by the Hoffman House.

Except, I realize, when we are meant to break them. The maître d’ said I’d get my Swiss army knife back at the end, and he was right. But, as I reach for the glass, I wonder if the knife would have been in my mother’s hand in the white room if I hadn’t brought it with me in the first place. I have no childhood memory of what happened in the pool, beyond the terror that took root in my cells, and my mother has never spoken of it. Much like the red room that entwined both Grandma Louise and great Aunt Ruth, I don’t know if the white room is my mother’s or mine…or ours. Or if it happened in real life at all. Like John, great Uncle Chip was little more than a memory unwritten from our history. Did my mother really kill him for what he’d done to me? Had he done anything at all?

Or was it all a fabrication, some extravagant version of what could’ve happened if the worst had happened because the Hoffman House contained within its ever-shifting walls our deepest fears, our darkest nightmares—some so horrible they couldn’t be real…could they? I think of my cousin Wes and know that for him it was real enough to die for—and die horribly—every single day for the rest of eternity.

I don’t know if I’ll ask my mother about Uncle Chip. I don’t know if I want to know. But I am certain of the instructions I will give whoever enters next. It might mean a little pain at the beginning, a claustrophobic nightmare to serve as punishment—however brief—but it’s worth it if it means saving the girl in the closet from a terrible fate.

In case you find yourself in the white room with the pool, don’t forget to bring the knife.