Brian rounds corner after corridor, room after room after room. Eyes wide, round like golf balls, he saunters through and swooshes by each different room.

He sniffs the sticky air, the smell of hot rubber shoots up his nostrils. He rapidly makes his way through a maze of various exercise equipment. Mirrors hold his image, but he is too occupied, too focused to check his reflection.

Brian deftly maneuvers by sofas and loveseats and exits a living room area that looks as if it’s never been “lived” in.

He races by numerous unremarkable bedrooms where the beds are all neatly made. His pace hastens as he rapidly visits the kitchen as well as a tidy, yet unmemorable bathroom.

Face tight, fixed on perhaps a finish line, Brian slows his pace and carefully listens. He hears water. As he enters a room with a fancy hot tub in it, the odor of strong chlorine sears his nostrils. He admires the pool of crystal clear water as the surface continuously cascades down its blue ceramic tiled side.

As if he were caught staring, Brian snaps out of his gaze and exits. The stench of hot rubber once again hits his nostrils. His look of intense determination dissipates momentarily as he realizes that he’s back in the exercise room.

Again he weaves through the maze of equipment, dashes through the living room with the bland furniture. Now panicked, he skirts by the perfectly-made beds and strides by the forgettable bathroom. Brian slows as he enters the room with the fabulous hot tub. The chlorine alerts him to one tiny detail he overlooked. The rooms he had just gone through for a second time looked different. “They appeared slightly distorted,” he states to himself as he studies the steaming waterfall.

Brian bites his lip and furrows his brow. With trepidation, he steps into the first doorway. He peeks in and sees the rubber mat, the treadmill, several benches and various pulley machines. Rather than going in, he reverses, heading toward the tranquility of the hot tub room.

Brian freezes at the door’s threshold. Except for his quick lively breaths, it’s completely silent. There is no sloshing water. A gulp of non-chlorinated air shudders down through his Adam’s Apple.

Brian’s feet begin to arch. He face looks like he’s lost something valuable.

He heads toward the doorway, stopping right in front of the entrance. His heart drums like a cattle stampede. His countenance contorts into a look of irrevocable shock. The serene room with the hot tub and the crystal clear water is no more. The room, everything in this room, is now a very vivid red. From the carpet to the curtains to the ceiling, glowing, infernal, relentlessly red.

Brian, lost like someone in the center of a flying saucer’s tractor beam, is a statue.

His attention is instantly thwarted by the only non-red object in this room. The shape begins to filter through the red radiance, a dark blur lying on the floor.

It is a dusty black rectangular trunk.

The inconceivable pitch of Brian’s gasp, similar to that of a peacock crying, is frightening in itself, but the length, the sheer length of it, is certainly unearthly as he sees black again. He feels it in his soul that this time is the last time. Standing next to the trunk and pointing at it, is a tall, thin, mustached man. The man is wearing the same exact black hat and suit that Brian buried him in three years prior.

The DEATH TRUNK groans as it slowly opens, and Brian strips off his clothing, steps in, curls up inside of it.