The hallway we found ourselves in was carpeted in a deep red. It was that super cheap kind of carpet that apartments and industrial places use that is little softer than the concrete it’s been laid on top of. The walls were paneled halfway up in dark oak wood…or something. I don’t know, it was wood and probably cheap. Above that was a burgundy wallpaper with little golden accents in weird geometric designs. Pictures and portraits hung sporadically along the wall. Animals, circus scenes, and people in costume. Even the occasional clown. Ugh. I shuddered at each one.

  The lighting was odd. I could quite clearly see dozens of feet down the hallway, and then it was like everything was cloaked in shadow. But as we got closer it would brighten imperceptibly until it was the same as the rest of the hall I could see. Every step exposed more and more of the hallway before it disappeared behind us. Looking back the same thing happened. It wasn’t long before I could no longer see the doorway we’d broken through.

  It only took a few minutes before the first complaints were made. I made them, it was me. “Ugh,” I groaned. “How long is this hall?”

  “I don’t know, but it beats the hell out of more riddles,” John called over his shoulder.

  “This is oddly long, and it’s a little weird we can’t see the end of it,” Mara commented.

  “Nothing posing asinine questions. Nothing trying to eat my face. I’ll take this leisurely stroll any day,” John said.

  I just shrugged my shoulders and we continued on our way. It’s not like it could go on forever or anything like that.

  Ten minutes later I began to seriously doubt that. The hallway seemed to continue on indefinitely. There was no end. There were no doors to either side. No other hallways branched off or intercepted this one. I began to seriously wonder how big this dungeon could possibly be. And how was this a part of it? Like, was there a catch? Had we missed something? Were we being punished for breaking the clown door?!

  John finally began to join in on the complaining. “Ok, so…maybe the hallway is a little long.”

  “Yeah. You think?” I asked sarcastically.

  “Well it’s not like we can turn back. By now we’ve got to be more than halfway, right?” Ashley asked.

  I started paying attention to the hall around me instead of zoning out like I had been. I almost immediately noticed something odd. “Ummm…didn’t we already pass that clown?” I asked.

  “What? Which clown?” Mara hopped over to me. I pointed out the painting of the particularly creepy clown I’d noticed. “Damn. That does look familiar.”

  With no other clues we continued down the hallway. I began paying more attention to the paintings on the walls. And I began to notice how familiar most of them were. It was like we’d been down this hallway before, which was weird because we hadn’t ever left the hallway we’d entered.

  Five minutes later there was the creepy clown again. Mara and I stopped in front of it. “Guys? Something is wrong,” I called out to the group. “That is definitely the same painting. It’s even the same exact slightly crooked that the last one was.”

  “How? We’d have noticed if we were walking in circles,” John insisted.

  “Actually,” Ashley began. “People tend to circle when walking in a straight line without any other visual cues. It happens to people lost in the wilderness without a compass all the time.”

  “Yeah but something to bring us back this quickly? We’d notice the curve in the walls. Right?” John argued.

  “I mean, five minutes walking isn’t that short of a walk,” I pointed out. “We might not notice.”

  “Ok, but then where is the door we came through?” Oliver asked.

  “I don’t know. We need to put a mark or something to test it though,” I suggested.

  John’s hands shifted into long blades and he pierced the wallpaper under the painting in question with one blade. Without a word he began walking forward again, dragging his blade along the wall. It left a waving line along the entire length as his hand moved with his walk. The rest of us followed quietly behind him.

  The longer we walked the more and more familiar all the paintings became. I hadn’t paid much attention to them at first, but now I couldn’t stop seeing that we’d been passing the same series of paintings the entire time. Five minutes later John’s line ended at the beginning of where we started. The start of the line of cut wallpaper sat in front of us. “Fuck. How did this happen?” John asked.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  I shrugged, “I don’t know. There has to be a way out though. Right?”

  Ashley snapped her fingers as an idea lit up her eyes. “Paintings!”

  “Huh?”

  “Paintings. I bet the exit is behind one of these paintings,” she said.

  With a shrug we all turned to the paintings on the walls and began yanking them off the walls. It would have been difficult if we cared about keeping the paintings safe as some of them were quite large and heavy. But as soon as I lifted a painting off its hook I’d just drop it to the side and check behind it. The others quickly followed suit. Paintings littered the hallway haphazardly behind us as we advanced.

  The first paintings were all a bust. Nothing but discolored wallpaper. We continued down the hall, flipping paintings off as we went. Taking into account that this had been a five minute-ish leisurely walk, this was going to take a while.

  My arms began to turn to jello not too far down the hall. Looking back I could still see the first painting I’d shoved off the wall. John, Oliver, and Ashley were all going strong. I looked over and Mara gave me an encouraging thumbs up with a grimace on her face. Neither one of us were lifting heavy objects over and over kind of people. But we continued on doggedly.

  I groaned when I saw the beginning of our wreckage come back into view. It had taken us more than twice as long to make it around our loop this time. And my arms were threatening to quit if I lifted them one more time.

  The others looked up at my sound of defeat and there were more disgusted grunts and groans from around me. By now the idea that we’d been so close to where the exit must surely be if only we’d gone in the other direction was cruel. I wanted to weep at the stupidity of it all.

  Finally though, all of the paintings had been removed from the walls and nothing was revealed. There were no conspicuous exits on any of the walls. No cleverly hidden holes for us to discover. Just discolored wallpaper.

  “Great, what’s the next brilliant idea?” I said grumpily.

  “That’s not fair,” Mara retorted. “All of us thought it was a viable idea. No one suggested anything else.”

  “Sorry,” I muttered. I may be angry, frustrated, tired, and sore, but that didn’t mean I could take it out on them. Mara was right. Ugh. I did not want to admit that out loud ever. She’d be insufferable. More insufferable.

  “Punch holes in the walls looking for a false wall?” John offered.

  “Baby, you are literally the only one that could do that this entire length of hall. And there are two sides,” Oliver told him.

  “I mean if we have no other choice we can do that,” I said.

  “We could all do our own thing?” Ashley suggested. “Like each of us try something different instead of all of us doing the same thing. John can punch holes, I could feel for seams, I don’t know what everyone else could do,” she shrugged her shoulders.

  That’s how we found ourselves walking down the hall, trailing our fingers, knocking, prying on the wood paneling, and punching holes in the wall. We’d gone down maybe half the length of the hall, tripping over and stepping on the paintings strewn all about, when Mara found something.

  She’d been knocking on the walls ahead of John’s punching when she heard an empty space behind the wall. Mara called out to us and we all hurried over. She knocked all over a stretch of wall until she’d rounded out the dimensions she could tell were definitely empty space. It was pretty small, no more than a foot or so wide and about shoulder height high.

  After looking around, John stepped forward and punched into the wall in that spot. When he tore his metal coated hand out of the wall, a large part of the wall came away with it.

  Mara had been standing right behind him when it happened and the next thing I saw she’d reached over him and threw a small fireball into the hole in the wall. Something made a high pitched metallic screech that made me cover my ears. Then it fell out of the hole, smoldering. John immediately stomped on it and the sound cut off. When he lifted his boot there wasn’t much more than a blackened smear on the carpet.

  “There’s something in there,” Mara muttered.

  “Still?” I asked a little surprised.

  “Yeah,” Mara reached in and then her eyes went blank for a moment. As soon as it passed she pulled her hand out of the hole with a manic grin on her face. “Guys!” She was practically bouncing up and down in place. “You’re not going to believe this shit. It’s a cosmic essence! It’s exactly what I was hoping for eventually.”

  “You mean, like the dungeon knew and gave it to you?” John asked.

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Maybe. We don’t know anything about dungeons really.”

  “There is a theory that they're at least mildly sentient,” John offered. “They’ve been known to fight back when someone tries to destroy them.”

  “I’m going to absorb it,” she said reverently. She sat down cross legged on the floor between two paintings. She closed her eyes and held the essence tightly in her fist. A moment later there was a soft glow from between her fingers. Her eyes popped open and we were flashed by blinding lights from them.

  “Oh my god…” she exhaled and her eyes dimmed, but didn’t completely go out. “I got gravity manipulation from the cosmic essence. And they combined into stellar confluence which allows me to mess with the entire electromagnetic spectrum,” she was grinning from ear to ear.

  “And your eyes glow,” I told her.

  “For real?!” She pulled out her phone and looked at herself in the screen. “So cool,” she breathed out.

  Her face fell a minute later as she put away her phone, “Damnit. Still no way out though.”

  I helped her climb to her feet. “Well, let’s keep going. Maybe there’s more stuff to find in the wall.”

  Mara grinned at me and we all moved down the hallway. Everyone returned to their method of finding the next hole in the wall with more pep in our step than we’d had since we entered the hallway.

  A few minutes later we actually found the end of the hall. Whether we’d done the requisite number of laps or Mara finding the essence unlocked the way forward we’d never know. But there at the end of the hall was a regular, plain wooden door ready to be opened.