There are no dramatic sound effects or flashing lights, or views alternating between sharp focus and blurry when one's mind falls apart.

I know that now. First-hand.

It comes at you quietly and in the form of something as uninspiring and unthreatening as layers of dusty shelves carrying random, unimportant items in a shallow closet with no window and no teddy bear.

Wait! I was wrong. There are sound effects. I can hear a muffled keening sound growing gradually louder as the closet door slams shut, just to be yanked open again and slammed again, over and over.

It is me making those sounds, and I cannot seem to stop myself. Every time I open the door, I expect the small room to be back, to set things straight, to tell me that I have not gone insane, but it's not there. There are only shelves and dust and some moth-eaten blankets, and I'm really crying now in loud, uncontrollable sobs.

"Belle? Belle!"

I scream when hands grab mine, spinning me away from the closet, and then I fall quiet, staring up into David's startled face with eyes that have frozen in place.

"Are you here? Are you really here?" I ask, moving towards him, freeing my wrists from fingers I know I am feeling wrapped around them. I reach up and touch his face, his hair, and his broad shoulders. "You are, aren't you?" I sob, pressing my body into his, clinging to his shirt. He must be real because he smells like smoke and sunlight, just as he should since I met him in the smoke and the sunlight. I snuggle closer, breathing him in, taking comfort from his warmth and the fragrance of normalcy.

"Belle, what's going on? What scared you?" he is asking, wrapping his arms around me instead of shoving me away or running for the nearest door, which is scoring him a gazillion brownie points.

"The closet," I croak into his chest.

"Was there a rat?"

I could say yes, and that will be the end of it, but my legs won't hold me, and my mind is flying away in a disconnected haze. I'm trembling so badly; I can barely hold onto him. There is no way that he could believe that a simple rat could have this effect on a human being unless they suffer from some kind of debilitating phobia or ran into a six-foot sewer rat straight out of a steampunk adventure. 

Maybe I stepped into one of those. That would be so much more fun than having a meltdown in this strange house where nothing seems to be what and where they're supposed to be.

"Am I sleepwalking again?" I ask hopefully.

"Again? You do it often?" David is being incredibly kind and patient; he couldn't possibly be real or even here. I conjured him, just like I conjured the room where there is now only a closet, laughing at me with its open mouth. I want to slam it shut again, but instead, I turn my face into David's shoulder. He sits down with me when my lame legs cause me to sag to the point where he probably would've picked me up if I wasn't wrapped around him like strangling ivy.

"I'm losing my mind," I tell him in a shoulder-muffled voice. He's probably not really here, and I'm cuddling the mop, so I might as well tell him the truth. "I don't just walk in my sleep; I paint, I run around on the beach, I enter and leave the house through secret tunnels, I unearth hidden treasures, and this morning I woke up on a bed in that closet that was a room, clutching a scratchy teddy bear. There was no dining room before... where did the dining room come from?"

"Are you having bad dreams, Belle?"

I finally push away from him, looking into his dark eyes, surprised to find a hint of green looking back at me. His eyes are green, but they are so dark in hue that they're almost black. I can see myself reflected in their beautiful gleaming surfaces.

"Is this an experiment? Am I a lab rat?" I ask him, and he is either really baffled and more than a little freaked out by my weird statements, questions and behaviour, or he is an exceptional actor.

"What do you mean?"

"Are there cameras recording me walking into the traps? Is the place rigged to make me think I'm nuts?" 

He is not answering, and his expression is not changing; he really doesn't seem to understand what I'm on about. 

"Look at the floor! Look at the floor of that closet! It is clean. Freshly mopped. I mopped it just before I met you in the garden, but I wasn't mopping a closet! I was mopping the floor of a little bedroom with a window that looks out into the backyard! I was mopping that floor. See?"

David looks at the clean closet floor, slowly blinking his eyes, and I suddenly wonder if there were cameras recording me frantically mopping the inside of a closet, thinking I'm mopping the floor of a room. The thought is making my brain scream.

"It's clean..." he agrees, his voice sounding hoarse. If this is not an elaborate experiment, he must be calculating the many ways he could escape from the crazy woman sitting in his lap, clinging to him in a stranglehold.

"I had to mop it because it was covered in muddy footprints. My muddy footprints because before I woke up on the small bed in there, I was running around on the beach trying to save a man that wasn't even there."

"Perhaps you had a dream..."

"This morning, just before I met you, I was very much awake, and my prints were in the cellar, on its stairs, on the kitchen floor... in the room that used to be here. I walked those steps. My feet were dirty. Dreams don't make a person's feet dirty."

I'm shaking so much now; David tightens his grip to keep me steady.

"It's probably not going to be there, is it? The cellar is going to be locked, just like Ron said it is, and there will be no secret door, no tunnel, and no beach. Just like there was no man and now... no small room..."

My breathing is rasping through my chest, exploding from my mouth in harsh gasps as panic takes over. I'm nauseous, my head is spinning, and my brain is seizing up in a loud humming. I can hear David calling my name and feel him shaking me a little, but I cannot answer; I can barely hear him. The droning is growing louder and louder, drowning out the present, the sound of the ticking clocks, the sound of David's alarmed voice.

I'm falling down a deep dark well.

And then there is warmth spreading from the surface of my lips, lighting a path to my brain and to my lungs. Focus is slowly returning, the present dragging me back from the swallowing darkness. First, I taste coffee, and then I smell smoke, and finally, I am aware of soft lips on mine. When my tense muscles relax, and my breathing eases, David draws back, his eyes, completely black now, gazing into mine, worriedly searching their brown depths.

I stare back at him, my lips still slightly parted, and I can feel his heart beating heavily under the palms of my hands trapped against his chest.

"It always works in the movies," he says, and then he grins a little self-consciously. "Did it work?"

I can only nod my head, my thoughts too disjointed to try to form any words. He kissed me? I'm glad he didn't go for the version in movies where they slap people out of their panicked stupors.

"Mould," he says, and now I know that I've probably passed out and am dreaming because the word is so random and out of place; he couldn't possibly have said it. "Black mould. It can cause hallucinations and many other symptoms. I'm so sorry, Belle. I'll take you to the hospital and try to find the source and pay whatever medical costs you might have-"

"Mould?" I finally manage to form a coherent word. "So quickly?"

He blinks his eyes, thinking it over while his one hand absently strokes my messy hair from my face. How wonderful will it be if the answer to all this craziness was something as straightforward as mould?

"I saw the little boy statue from the small bedroom window long before I knew it existed," I point out, my mind slowly returning to normal, but every well-formed thought, every measured word, is opening a new door to more panic and confusion. I don't want that... even if it might lead to more sweet kisses.

"Are you sure you didn't glimpse him at all before that?" he asks, sounding calm and reasonable. "Were you not outside at any time before that?"

"The lights were tripped; I went into the utility room to turn them on."

"I think you could glimpse him from the top of those stairs... We can go check."

I really don't want to check. I'll rather just accept the possibility that I saw the statue and dreamt the room, adding details of the pond with such accuracy because I have an incredible imagination.

"It's raining..."

David nods his head, looking past me at the kitchen door where the small windows are being attacked by the branches of the tree growing too close to the steps.

"We can look at the cellar. If it's open now, I'd like to see if there's anything useful in there anyway."

"It probably doesn't exist," I whisper, looking at the shelves mocking me from the open closet door.

"Belle-"

I gasp in shock, wrestling my hands from their prison between our chests to clamp them over my ears when the clocks burst into songs of joy about the success they and the entire house are having in wreaking havoc on my sanity. David instinctively wraps his arms around me, cradling me against him, burying his face in my hair. 

He is so incredibly warm. I could happily stay here like this forever... if I wasn't sliding into madness and we weren't on the wooden floor of a treacherous old house, having our eardrums battered by explosions of sound... and if this man actually exists.

The noise ends, as it always does, the vibrations and echoes slowly fading away. I feel David's muscles tense around me, hear his sharp intake of breath and lean back to look up into his face, seeing my own horror reflected there as we listen to the last sounds still lingering in the atmosphere for a few seconds.

Cuckoo-cuckoo...

☼☼☼

A fun steampunk adventure to escape into, six feet sewer rats and all: https://www.wattpad.com/story/334520259-steampunk-heroes