TABLE OF CONTENTS Grey Hall by Dexter Andrews............................................................................................... 2
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GREY HALL
BY DEXTER ANDREWS – HONORABLE MENTION: SURPRISE ENDING You wake up, chained to the wall. The cold, windowless room reeks of feces and sweat, and your eyelids flutter, adjusting to the yellowish, fuzzy light from a tiny bulb hanging from the ceiling. A line of ants marches across your vision, forcing you to move back. Standing up, the chains break, rusted, as if you’ve been stuck to the wall for decades. Your head hurts, you don’t remember a thing. Dazed and confused, you sit there for a moment, watching the hundred legged creature crawl towards a small hole in the wall. A white noise can be heard from the other side of the black, rusty door, and you go to open it. The bleak environment of the room has transformed into an old, bland, grey hall. Curiosity overtakes you, and you leave the cold room, and enter the hall. Tattered photos of strange family members, along with old oil paintings of a house on a hill, scattered across the walls, all the way down the grey hall. The hallway ends with a sharp left, leading into a foyer. Approaching a cabinet, the noise becomes more clear- it’s a radio, slightly off channel news station, reporting a random shooting in a local neighborhood home. The man’s voice drones on. “A family of three, with a little girl the age of five, was brutally murdered in their own home late Tuesday night. There was no forced entry...” You go to try the front door, but it’s locked. Looking out the window, it’s pitch dark outside, with a light rain beating on the glass. Your face, old and rugged, with patchy, rough facial hair dotting your visage. That face is reflected in the glass, distorted in the pale light of the hall. There’s another door, which you also try, to no avail. Puzzled, you return to the door once you entered. It’s locked too. Your head starts to pound, a bead of sweat dripping down your forehead. A loud noise jolts your attention back to the foyer. Quickly turning the corner, you see the radio has fallen off of the cabinet, unplugged, and the back door has opened, leading to a cellar. What caused the radio to fall? Cautiously, you walk into the now-ajar door, which leads to a dark, musty room with nothing inside except for yet another door. Walking through, you’re taken aback. 2|Page
It’s the same long, grey hall, again, with the pitter patter of the rain still pounding on the glass. You walk through, faster this time, and see the same paintings, the same faces, the same ugly walls of the grey hall. Peeking your head out from the hall, you look into the foyer. The radio is on the ground, same place as before. No sound comes out of its small, dusty speakers; it must have broken on its journey to the cold, linoleum flooring. You rush past the cabinet, and enter the cellar door again. Opening that door, the hall welcomes you yet again. Only, this time, something feels wrong. The air is much warmer than before, and the rain comes down as if the ocean has evaporated into a giant cloud, spilling its contents on the roof above. Panicked, you run this time, through the grey hall. With your head pounding harder than ever before, your vision is hazy as you reach the cellar door. This time, the steps down to the final door seem longer, as you rush through the door. A painful, high-pitched wail greets you as you open that same door, to the same hall. The squealing, awful noise causes you to fall to the ground. That’s when it touches you. The cold, rough hand pressed against your calf muscle jerks you away. Eyes, open wide, are darting around the room, looking for the stranger, who is nowhere to be seen. Running back towards the door you bang, scream, and toss yourself at the black, rusty door. Head pounding, you hear a giggle, like a baby, ringing in your ears. The sounds of the Thunderstorm fill the long hall, and the lights flicker, shifting towards a bloodlust red. Knowing there’s nothing the black door will do for you, there is no point but to move forward. Stepping over the radio, you try the front door again, with no luck. A heavy sigh exhales from your dry lips, as you look for another option for escape. But the only thing there is the cellar door. That dreaded cellar door! Over and over you run through it, leading to the same place, sometimes longer, wider, fouler, darker than the last. Occasionally a hand will graze your shoulder, but you will never see it, always sending chills tingling down your spine. Over and over you walk through that grey hall. Walking at a brisk pace, your eyes are glancing every which way for the tiny, cold hands, and their torturous owner. After it seems like hours, nothing has changed. You arrive at the cellar door. Eyes closed, you open it again, yet this time, a bright light greets you. The shock and awe of something different overwhelms you, until you realize it’s a dangling lightbulb, in a cold, windowless room. A horrible scream echoes around the room, and you realize it’s you, 3|Page
wailing in the stinking, damp room. Realizing you’re chained to the walls, you begin to sob uncontrollably. Who would do this? Is any of this real? A line of ants walks across your gaze, and you watch it disappear into the hole in the wall. A plan forms crazily in your head. Yanking off the chains, you leap towards the tiny hole, digging, clawing at the tiny hole. After what seemed like days, the hole is now large enough to fit an arm inside. You reach inside, fishing around for anything worthy, a key, an axe, anything. What you find, however, is entirely different. A standard, 9 millimeter pistol meets your grasp, pulled away from its oncepermanent home in the hole. “The hands won’t touch me now,” he said. He gets up, loads the pistol, and exits the room. This time things are different. He arrives at bus station, outside in the pitch darkness, in the pouring rain. Static runs through his mind, his head pounding, as he makes his way to the home across the boulevard. The front door reminds him of something horrendous, urging him in, begging him to spill its contents. Stumbling to the door, he pulls the rusty, black knob. A blast of warm air greets his face, his nostrils filling with the delicious smell of peanut butter cookies. A young woman, stares at him, dropping the glass in her hand. Her husband holds her close, as he yells at the man to go away. But none of that matters now, for the man knows where his pain has come from. His eyes dart to the little girl in the room to his left, playing with an ant farm, giggling like a baby. She looks at him with eyes like liquid gold, smiling at him, motioning for him in for a hug. “Your hands won’t touch me now” he says. A painful wailing echoes through the house as three bullets pierce through the toddler’s skull. The man can’t take it any longer, the sound only intensifying. Wine and blood mix on the kitchen floor as the wife and husband collapse to the floor, with shrapnel in their hearts. But the pain doesn’t stop for the man, his ears are still ringing. He runs through the home, reaching a cellar door. Nearly falling through the doorway, he makes it to the other side, only to see the foyer of the grey hall, with a radio, sitting on the cabinet across from him, as if it never fell, reciting its nightly newscast.
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“A family of three, with a little girl the age of five, was brutally murdered in their own home late Friday night. There was no forced entry...� Ants begin to swarm out of the radio, as the walls begin to tear themselves down, decomposing into a bloody heap. The man aches for escape, lunging through the hall, past the murals of old family members, of old houses on a hill. A door appears, bursting through, the man hopes for redemption, something to escape to, but nothing is there to greet him, only a set of chains clasped to the wall of a cold and windowless room. Collapsing to the ground, wailing to the heavens, he collapsed. The last thing he saw was a single line of ants, crawling their way towards that dreaded grey hall, their shadows flickering in the yellow light from that pathetic little bulb, hanging from a string attached to a ceiling that seemed to go up for miles, fading into the darkness, into nothingness. Static fills the void, as the radio sings its song, an epitaph for a family brutally murdered in their own home.
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