And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee

The idea was to walk, slowly and casually, and to not draw attention to himself. But of course one of his steps causes an apparently rather loose board of the hardwood floor to creak loudly.

"Roger? What is it? Did you see something outside?", Becky asks, her voice still slightly intimidated.

All he could see was heavy raindrops falling right in front of the window and not much else but pitch black darkness. He didn't want to alert his already startled wife or to unsettle her further without cause. Whatever he had seen outside earlier, or rather not seen, was surely just a fluke of his unnerved mind playing tricks on him. 'Friends, family, confidants, and true believers', there was no way for all these invitees to leave the old mansion and drive away, leaving them alone in this godforsaken place. Not without him noticing it. Not when a few moments ago Becky and him still had been in the entrance hall without encountering a single living soul. And cars couldn't simply vanish into thin air and neither could people, right? For example those who had been inside this sort of game room, they must have gone through the door on the opposite side from where he was standing now, that was the only logical explanation.

"Nothing, honey, it's nothing", Roger replies in an attempt to reassure his wife as well as himself. However, he doesn't turn around, although he knows that whatever he believes to have seen must have been just a figment of his imagination.

Vanishing cars. Vanishing people. That's crazy. But for some reason Roger already braces himself for the very unlikely possibility, that once again he was about to see only a single vehicle parked outside, namely the little red Honda, their own rental car, and nothing else. And if that should be the case, what did that mean exactly? That he had gone crazy? Or would it confirm that he hadn't imagined things earlier? That in fact he was very much and completely sane, implicating that something crazy and insane was going on out there?

"Okay... so why are you still looking out of the window?"

Why indeed? Roger just kept staring through the window. As if he could somehow push away the veil of shadows by trying and concentrating hard enough. To see something. To spot something. Anything. Whatever was out there in the black void. At least their little red Honda surely was still out there. Or was it? Had he really seen it earlier? Roger suddenly wasn’t sure anymore. Had he perhaps just assumed, that the dot of red in the middle of the gloom of nothingness simply had to have been their rental car? Could it not have been something else entirely? Something not of this world? And had he even seen something red? Or had he in fact seen nothing, nothing at all?

"Roger?" A faint voice reaches his ear.

The voice of his wife? Or had something called to him from the outside? As he kept staring through the window, a chill crept over him. A feeling that there had to be something out there. Something unexplainable, that didn't want him to turn around. Something otherworldly, that wanted him to keep looking?

"Roger, say something. Please.", his wife pleaded now.

Even the anxiety and fear of her voice wasn't enough to shake Roger out of his trance, wasn't enough to drive away whatever strange thoughts had taken hold of him. Instead an exceptionally loud noise, a prolonged and almost deafening rumble, a roar of thunder, which he no longer expected, causes his body to cringe.

Twenty...
Twenty-one...

He began counting inside his head to estimate how close the electrical storm had come by now. A flash of lightning had to follow any time now. He was waiting for it, waiting for it to brighten up and repress the pitch black outside for a fleeting point in time.

Wait, that’s not right, is it? The voice of reason told him, that this is not how physics of this world should work. Sound doesn’t travel faster than light, it is the other way around. The lightning should come first, and the thunder afterwards. This didn’t make any sense. If he had heard the thunder, he should have seen something already. Yet he had seen nothing. There had been nothing. He redoubles his effort to spot something, but he could now not even see the raindrops right in front of the window anymore. Only a vast black emptiness, as he keeps staring right into the heart of the darkness. Right into the abyss.

"Roger, you're scaring me!", Becky yells hysterically as he grabs her husbands arm, not understanding what has caused her man to behave so strange.

Follow up ideas:

• [End] Swallowed by the abyss
• Something comes through and takes possession of him or her
  • for example a demon
  • or the ghost of the deceased uncle
• Or of course nothing might happen at all and it was really just Roger's stressed mind playing tricks on him..