You step into complete darkness, neither cold nor warm, but it clings to your head and body like lukewarm foam. You try to shake it off, it relents but only slightly as you travel deeper inside with its grip sliding over your arms and ears. Snatches of sentences can be heard in varying levels of volume but always in the same neutral voice; is it an older girl or a younger boy? You can’t discern the gender for the voice overlaps itself over and over in a dizzying swirl over your head. It gets louder and louder until the volume physically hurts you; you feel like a pounded drum and your ears begin to throb. Rough carpet presses against your knees as you stumble and fall, your eyes watering from the dull pain growing between your ears.

But then gradually, the voices soften themselves and you are able to slowly get to your feet, your heart a rapidly stomping foot in your chest. Breathing becomes easier as music begins to play, completely drowning out the voices so only the music remains to be heard. It’s a familiar tune, but the name escapes you as you take a few glances around the gradually lightening darkness.

A dome soars above your head, be speckled with windows that reach from the rough beige carpet to the oil lamp at its center, hanging by brass chains. The outside is dark with clouds and fog with a continuous rain that drives sideways against the glass. A tan colored hallway, bordered in wood smelling of pine, stretches before you down to a smaller room. You walk down it noticing the pictures hanging on the walls, pictures of wild-eyed fighters and many of one particular teenager with blue streaks in his hair. The pictures aren’t just portraits but also of events more appropriate for the movies and paper entertainment; a dual in a hot, dusty arena, a large bedroom in need of cleaning, a city alley lit by a neon green sign reading exit and many others. The pictures seem to make the journey down the hallway longer than you thought, for you are curious and stop to look at each one; such is natural, you suppose.

When the hallway finally ends, you arrive at a smaller domed room but this one is absent of windows. The rain drives against blind walls covered in T.V screens and monitors of different sizes displaying moving video of people you have never heard of in daily life at a high school and at home and at social gatherings. A dark-haired boy appears in a majority of the screens with his pale pointed face grinning like a child’s. In front of a laptop resting on a large wooden desk sits a person hunched over its keypad. A high-backed computer chair makes it difficult to see who is furiously typing away, but from the curses and noises of annoyance you guess that it’s best not to disturb…whoever it is. A soft scratching sound from your right causes you to glance over.

What looks like a ghost is hunched over a large sketchbook, drawing furiously with a blue-colored pencil. Brown hair obscures this person’s face, but not enough to cover the glasses perched upon the little nose. A hand rubs said nose and then freezes, mid-rub, head tilting back to look at you.

“You see how she abandons me?” A whining voice simpers, “Here I am drawing nothing of value, because she’s gone and separated us!” A sniffle and the hand rubs the nose again. “Everything she’s got is going into writing pointless little stories that no one will ever read anyways!” The chair give an agonizing squeak as it whips around to face the ghost.

“I said five more minutes and I’ll come back! Five minutes! But here you go again, whining and complaining and moaning so much that I can’t write a goddamn thing!” The ghost shrinks back, but then composes itself, sitting up fully erect.

“Well if you didn’t ignore me so freaking much, you wouldn’t have this problem! It’s not too much to ask, is it?”

The person in the chair, a more opaque mirror image of the ghost, glares venomously at the ghost opening its mouth to speak but then starts, realizing your presence.

“See? You work so much on that, that you ignore everything else!” The ghost says mockingly, twiddling the pencil between its fingers. The figure in the chair ignores the ghost, its gaze fixed firmly upon you.

“How’d you get in here?” It demands, a hand curling into a fist. “Was the door open again?” Mouth curls into a dissatisfied purse of the lips. “Thought so, she always leaves it open.”

“Well, how am I supposed to breathe?” The ghost yells throwing up its hands into the air.

“Its fine in here! You just love to complain!”

“I do not!”

“Yes you do!”

“No, I don’t!”

You take their argument as your cue to make a stealthy exit. You slowly back out of the room, down the hall and the pictures, now with words flickering across the paint; attempts to read them causes the words to disappear back into the picture.

The darkness you felt in the windowed dome returns in greater force, enveloping you in a misty black cloud. Your view of the dome and the hallway beyond is quickly obscured by the dark, the voices of the person and her ghost rising higher and higher above the music and then you see nothing.