text: [Themes: Horror, haunted house]
  
  Memories, that fuzzy affair. You're never certain enough how true they are to reality. I can't clearly remember, just as an example, what rumours said about the McDaniel Mansion...
  
  There was something about a stranger who came to visit on a cold Autumn day many years ago, just before the house got abandoned for decades.
  And then there was the wild speculation about monsters in the basement...
  
  But the thing I really remember from those summer holidays is our improbable and not quite balanced trio of friends. There was Doc. Brown-haired, thin, handsome, annoyingly arrogant every now and then, always the charismatic. Then there was Rose, shy, with the soft, delicate look under her golden hair. The three of us united by the bare fact that we were the only people of our age in that too quiet, too boring, village, wasting the best of our late teens during the early eighties.
  
  "Now, Mike, I hereby declare you as our official Torch-bearer" solemnly joked Rose when giving me the switched off torch that dry, hot late summer evening when, just out of having nothing else to do, we decided to play kids and go to explore the ruined McDaniel site, as isolated from the rest of the village as the village was from the rest of the world...
  
  So there we stood, at the entrance of the old mansion, just the three of us and a former elegant door which was as rusty as firmly closed.
  
  I could see Rose and Doc there.
  
  > Inventory
  I was carrying:
  a switched off torch
  
  "A stranger coming out from nowhere causing the house to be abandoned..." said Rose. "What an odd story!"
  
  > examine door
  On closer inspection, there was a crumpled piece of paper showing under the door. I wondered how much time it had been there and why no one had taken it before...
  
  Doc asked "Where did that piece of paper come from?"
  
  "What about those weird noises they say that can be heard from within..." said Doc. "As if a monster was buried somewhere in the basement?"
  Rose and I looked silently all around and then at each other, trying to grasp any suspicious sound. Nothing. Just our own breathing, some far away tweeting bird, and... a howling roar coming from our back? ...
  "Jeeez" exclaimed a livid Rose while Doc was laughing "You just gave me the creeps!"
  "Well" he replied "How was that for a buried monster-like creature?"
  
  > About yourself
  No, no, I didn't do that... Did I? I was too excited about finding a way into the house to care about my own appearance that evening.
  
  Rose and Doc looked to each other and then at me, as if expecting my decision to move on... but I just hadn't a clue what to do next!
  
  Rose looked puzzled at the paper...
  
  > take the paper
  Taken.
  
  > read it
  There was some handwritten text in the old paper. "Magic word, say: PL..." no... "PLE"... wait, "PLO"...
  Damn, I couldn't understand that. The paper was so crumpled and the handwriting was so old-fashioned and weird...
  Suddenly Doc took the paper off from my hands with a mocking remark "You! Silly Mikie, didn't they teach you to read properly? Lemme see "Magic word: say PL..."
  I wouldn't allow that. I was used to his disdainful jokes in front of Rose, but enough was enough. I removed the paper from him with an abrupt gesture, and then...
  ... then, showing a side of herself neither Doc nor me had ever seen before, Rose took it away from me with an exasperated look "C'mon kids! Will you at least try to fake some mature behaviour in the presence of a lady! Let's see, Magic word: say... PLUGH"
  ...and then... PLOF!
  ...she just disappeared in a cloud of smoke. Before we could react, her scream could be heard from somewhere inside the house. Doc just kicked the door, which opened with a suspicious ease now, and hurried into the mansion, so worried to show he was in charge that he forgot I was carrying the torch. I followed, but could only be aware, to my regret, that the door violently had slammed itself just as we entered, and then... no Doc, no Rose, just me and the dark...
  
  Overwhelming darkness all around me... as if I just was floating on an infinite sea of empty blackness... made me feel so little, so helpless...
  
  > turn on torch
  I switched the torch on.
  
  Under the dim torch light, the house seemed to scream its whole desolation all of a sudden. Everywhere I turned it was just an unrecognisable, deformed, amount of dust and cobwebs with some unidentifiable pieces of furniture beneath. I guessed I was in the foyer, and there seemed to be some kind of ways south, east and west.
  
  > examine the furniture
  Cobwebs and a thick layer of dust made a gallery of surreal forms everywhere I looked at.
  
  > look under the sheet
  No, no... I couldn't see any such thing there.
  
  > search the cobwebs
  I thought of all the possible unclassified lifeforms that could be lurking beneath the cobwebs... I'd better not get too close...
  
  > go to the south
  I began to move on... but I started to see all kind of blurry images. Iridescent snaps of Doc and Rose going frantically from one place to another. Fuzzy, nervous, fragmented shots of an unordered story I was witnessing as in a sci-fi film hologram. I tried to call them, but they wouldn't listen. I moved to reach them, but their images just would go through things, through walls, through me... As soon as they appeared they would vanish. Perhaps those were images of events that took place there, but not then, or they might have been happening then, but not there...
  
  > listen
  Silence... Everywhere it was so creepy silent...
  
  > go south
  Somehow I knew I was in the den, and then I retraced my steps when I saw Doc's image gangway through it... chased by a suit of armour. That was so crazy I thought I felt better when the vision just disappeared. I could go north, to the foyer, and east.
  
  > go to the east
  I entered a corridor... and suddenly, someone turned the lights back on...
  
  No, no... it wasn't like that, was it? It took me a short while to realize... Until that moment, I'd been seeing luminescent visions of my friends going erratically around me. That time, I was inside one of the visions. A big one, indeed, as it covered most of the corridor I was suppossed to be in, its inner dim bluish light surrounding me. At the other side of the corridor, I could see Doc and Rose. They both were staring right at the spot where I was, as if they couldn't see me but were somehow aware that I could be there, watching them. They nodded at each other, Rose snapped her fingers, and they simultaneously drew away some curtains back them, revealing a huge elegantly framed painting with a family portrait...
  I could see a wealthy couple, a few kids... but the whole scenario vanished before I could dig into any detail, leaving me back at a dark ominous corridor again.
  
  Were they trying to show me something?
  Had they figured out how that strange vision phenomenon was working? Was that a portrait of the McDaniel family?
  
  I couldn't tell. I was just alone in a corridor where an impassable mountain of rubble and debris completely blocked the way south.
  
  I could go east and west, to the den.
  
  > look at the debris
  It seemed the consequence of a massive collapse of part of the walls and ceiling. Going through it was totally out of the question, but there was a tiny gap I could use to take a peek into the other side. Scattered along the debris I could see the recognisable pieces of a richly ornate frame, but there was no trace of the canvas it could have contained.
  
  > look at the gap
  It all happened so fast...
  I could see the huge hall of a wealthy mansion, some stairs leading to the upper floor, where a blue, unnatural light came from an open door. Silhouetted against it, the contour of a woman. She instantly ran away slamming the door, leaving the room back into utter darkness and my eyes with an inverted image of it all, black and blue, that lasted for a few seconds.
  She was not Rose, that I knew for sure. So I realized, with a mix of hope and fear, that maybe I was not alone in the dark, haunted house...
  
  > Continue
  Light from the torch wouldn't reach enough into the hall. I couldn't see anything at all.
  
  > take the frame
  No, no, I didn't do that... Did I? Can't clearly remember... Perhaps I tried but it didn't lead anywhere...