It was by no means a normal day, but the mayhem in Melissa's life had nothing to do with what ultimately happened. Pure luck, or misfortune, ultimately led her to a room she had never seen before.
There was an event at the school, and while she had no real desire to go, she was part of the International Club, and had helped to organize the event. She was expected to be there. Social events were tough enough, as Melissa didn't have the world's greatest social skills, but was at least aware enough of her own awkwardness to not make an ass of herself most of the time. This was a big one, requiring a little more effort. Dressing up for a social event, that was a chore she wouldn't mind avoiding. It was her attempt to fit in, knowing full well that she didn't fit in anywhere. At least not yet.
As always, unsatisfied with her outfit, Melissa went into her walk-in closet for the 7th time in the day. Instinctively she closed the door behind her. Unknown to her, she had closed that door for good. She changed into what she hoped would be the outfit. In high heels and a knee high yellow dress, Melissa tried the door to her closet, and found that the door knob would not twist. There was no lock on the door, from either side. She panicked, of course. But she was a reasonable person. She took a few deep breaths, then tried again. A firm grip and a hard twist, but no results. A few more deep breaths, and then Melissa began to pace. After the fifth trip to the back of the closet, her eyes caught something she had somehow never noticed before. There was an outline for a door in the back wall. It took a discerning eye, but Melissa could see where the paint was slightly indented because of the cracks created by the door.
She stepped slowly forward, temporarily forgetting her panic, and traced the outline of the door with her finger. There was something else there in the wall now. Something that just could not have been there before. It was a knob. It beckoned to her. Unable to resist its pull, she made her curiosity a top priority, grasped the brass cylinder, and twisted. The door opened easily, and before she realized what she was dreamily doing, she had already stepped across the threshold.
In one step, she had carried herself from a small, carpeted room (a closet, really) to a much larger, colder, wooden floored room. In fact, the whole room was wood. The wooden ceiling matched the wood paneling on the walls. The floor was different, making the experience a little less dizzying. Melissa, had she taken time to consider it, would have thought that having a defined "down" was quite comforting in a completely wooden room.
She had never taken her hand off the door knob, but when she turned around, to go back the way she came, she discovered that she was holding a very different looking knob, and that the room behind her was not the closet she came from, but what looked to be an old musty wine cellar. Standing in the doorway between two clearly unrelated rooms, she looked back and forth, waiting for reality to kick back in, so she could just return to her closet, and figure out how to unlock the darn thing. No such luck. The wine cellar remained the wine cellar, no matter how many times she looked away. The room with that awful wood paneling stayed the same as well.
At a time like this, Melissa could have reacted in one of two ways. She could have broken down, figured herself insane, and otherwise, chosen to be useless. Melissa, however, accepted quite quickly that something beyond her concept of possibility, had happened. She was in a new place, teleported to another location somehow, and it was going to be up to her to find her way back home. She looked one more time at each room. The wood panel room had another wooden door at the far end. The stone lined walls of the wine cellar did not appear to have a door, but there was an alcove or hallway, it appeared, just around the one barrel that was in the room. Melissa decided to try that way. She took a few steps into the room, and the door closed behind her. The sound of it shutting made her jump, but after the second it took for her to regain her composure, she continued to walk toward, and eventually down that hallway.
It was a narrow hallway, ending in a rickety looking wooden staircase. Her eyes followed up the steps. At the top was another door. She scooted up the stairs, taking them one at a time, but very quickly. She nearly twisted her ankle on the penultimate step, and decided that maybe the heels were a bad idea. She kicked both of them off, and stepped up onto that final step. This door was some sort of metal door. Melissa reached up to it, turned the knob, and walked through to find herself in an enormous dining room. A very long table filled nearly the entire room. There were enough seats for thirty or forty people. Each seat was set with a plate, all the necessary silverware, and crystal goblets.
Melissa was shocked, not so much by the elaborate set-up, but that the room could be so well prepared, and yet, not a soul was to be seen in the room. She walked toward the table, slowly, and ran her hand across the top of one of the chairs. She picked up a plate to examine it more closely. As she put the plate back in it's place, she heard a loud bang.
A door off to her right flew open and an armor clad swordsman backed through it, clashing swords with another she could not see just yet. Melissa turned toward the door she had come through. From this side, the door was incredibly ornate and beautiful. She did not have the time to fully appreciate it, as she just wanted to be on the other side of it as quickly as possible. In spite of her hurry, she did hesitate when she also realized just how much bigger the door was from this side. Couldn't worry about such things now. She pulled the door, and heard a crash from behind her. She couldn't help but glance over her shoulder to see the two sword fighters crashing into the table, breaking plates and glasses. She walked through, slamming the door behind her. She could still hear the ruckus on the other side, but hoped, and figured, that neither man had seen her, and that she was probably safe as long as she could stay quiet.
Melissa's eyes scanned the room she was in now. It was not the wine cellar. It was a study, or perhaps a library. Bookshelves were built into each of the walls, stretching from floor to ceiling. There were two doors other than the one she had walked through, two leather chairs, and a coffee table placed directly between them. The room was lit by a candle chandelier, suspended from the ceiling. Between the lighting and the furniture, an ambiance of calm overwhelmed the room. She had only been in this new world a few minutes, but this was a welcome reprieve from the madness already. Her first three rooms had been ugly, dank, and violent. This was the kind of room she could stay in for awhile, and perhaps to think things through.
Walking along the wall, she scanned the bookshelves for something that might be useful to her. Most of the books were in foreign languages, many using symbols that she didn't even recognize as Chinese, Japanese, or Arabic. The few that used the Alphabet she knew, were also unrecognizable as to what language these books might even be written in. She eventually passed through a couple of titles in English. "Heaven and Hell and Everything in Between," "8 Orbs of Power," "Alpha vs. Prime," "Dead and Alive, a Practical Guide for Afterlifers." Then she saw one book, very old looking, that had no writing on the spine. She grabbed it off the shelf, and took a seat on one of the leather chairs in the middle of the room.
She slowly opened the book to the middle. The pages were blank. Perhaps it was a journal. She let most of the pages fall, until she was at the beginning. Those pages were blank as well. She tried leafing through, hoping to find something written on one of these pages. As she flipped through, she almost missed the one page that had writing on it, but she was able quickly flip back to it, and see, in beautiful calligraphy:
"Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….."
"What madness is this?" she asked herself. But the madness had not yet begun. The lettering faded as she stared at it, just to appear again, one letter at a time.
"How is this, how is any of this possible?" It was hard for her to keep hold of herself, and the book, at the same time. She flipped it onto the coffee table, and watched as the Z's disappeared. They were quickly replaced with one word, not in calligraphy, but a simple type font, "Ouch."
"Ouch?"
The word slowly faded. It was replaced by, "Oooh, geez, how long have I been asleep?"
Melissa just stared at the words in the book, unsure of how to respond.
New words appeared, "I'm sorry. That was a silly question for me to ask. You probably don't even know who I am, let alone, how long I might have been sleeping."
"Can you… can you hear me?" Her voice was hardly more than a whisper.
"I can. And I'm glad that you can see, and read me."
"What are you?"
"I am a book. Though, judging by your current state of shock, I'm guessing I am unlike any book you've ever seen before."
"I'll say. In my world, books don't interact with the reader."
"That is a shame. Though, I guess, in this world, most books just sit there, unchanged from birth to death. Come to think of it, I'm the only one I know that changes."
"How is it that you can hear me?"
"It's not about seeing and hearing, touching either, for that matter. It's just a sense. It's hard to explain without turning you into a book and letting you see for yourself, metaphorically speaking, of course."
"Is that what happened to you? Someone turned you into a book?"
"Actually, I turned myself into a book. I was once human, like you… you are human, right?"
"Yes I am."
"I thought so. Yes, in my former life, I was a human, a powerful wizard, but unable to cheat death in my human form. With so much to do in this world and others, I found a way to convert myself into what you see before you. And while I will still expire one day, I'll have you know I have outlived everyone I knew in my human form, as well as their children, and their children's children."
"You were a wizard?"
"Still am. Watch."
The book turned a page, and started to show strange symbols Melissa had never seen before. In a matter of seconds, a vase with a single flower appeared out of thin air, right in the center of the coffee table.
The page turned again, and wrote, "I can tell you're new here, and I wanted to welcome you. There's one thing that seems to be true of all worlds. Pretty ladies like pretty flowers."
"Well, that was very nice of you… uh…"
"I was once known as Jerome Vander Mantuk. Not a name that just rolls off the tongue, I know, but I've heard worse."
"Well, thank you, Jerome. Or do you prefer Jerry?"
"Jerry? I love it. I've never been called that before. Jerry. Yes, I do prefer Jerry."
"Jerry it is. Jerry the book."
"And your name?"
"Melissa."
"Very pretty. I like it. Do you prefer Melly?"
"No. Melissa is fine. Mel, if you're in a rush"
"I'm hardly ever in a rush. So, Melissa, where are you from?"
"Uh… Earth?"
"Lots of beings refer to their home land as Earth. You'll have to be a bit more specific."
"I think the scientific name for it was Terra Ferma. It was the third planet from the sun in the Solar System."
"Ooooh. You're from The Prime."
"The Prime?"
"Yes. Before all these other worlds came about… alternate existences, if you will… there was only one, yours."
"I feel so honored."
"And to some degree, you should be. On the other hand, the world you know is guided by rigid rules, laws of physics and what not. Here, there is a lot more freedom with what we consider to be REAL."
"It's my turn to ask. Where is here?"
"This, my dear, is The Mansion Eternal. Once a madhouse, it grew and grew and grew into this ever changing, never ending maze of disconnected rooms. There is no beginning, there is no end, no middle, no top, no bottom. But supposedly, there are ways out."
Melissa interrupted as Jerry continued to type his pages. "There is a way out?!"
"Don't get too excited. There are ways out, but they are few and far between. You're more likely to run across one by pure dumb luck than you are to find one by looking. And when you do find one, it won't necessarily take you where you want to go."
"Oh." Melissa sounded dejected.
"But that doesn't mean we can't give it our best shot?"
"We?"
"Sure. What am I going to do, lie around on the shelf for another hundred years and wait for someone more interesting to come along? Unlikely. We're going together. Where? Who knows? But maybe, just maybe, we'll find what you're looking for."
"Great. 'Cause I don't know one thing about this place, and I could certainly use some help understanding it."
Melissa reached out to grab Jerry, but he quickly typed, "No need to be carried, my dear."
He closed himself and levitated off the coffee table. He did a quick circle around the woman, opened up and asked, "Shall we?"