The 8 Tasks

I looked up to the cracking, plastery ceiling. It was falling down on me. And it did.

I was 22 when I had entered this ghastly mansion. I didn’t want to, but somehow it attracted me to enter, just like magnetic force. So I had walked in.

The massive wooden doors shut behind me, not even leaving one gap. I tried to escape, but I could never go against the force of souls. That left me hopeless and helpless.

I had to walk in; there was just a sudden urge to. There were colossal paintings of people who looked like royalty. If not, they had to be rich. There were eight of them, I remember. Each was about 8 feet tall and 8 feet wide.

Everything is revolving around the number eight, I thought.

Suddenly I heard a scream upstairs. I climbed and climbed and climbed up to the very top floor, when I met a person.

“You saved me,” she faintly said, “I could have been possessed.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Oh, Melissa Blake. And you?”

“Effie Deveaux.”

Melissa and I soon learned we had to complete 8 tasks to escape, each on a different floor of the eight-story mansion.

On the first floor, we had to fight a sinister soul in the dark by pushing it into a pool of acidic ink. The floorboards creaked as the malicious spirit stalked us, its rattling breaths echoing in the darkness. After a struggle, we outmaneuvered the fiend and sent it plunging into the corrosive black pool, its shrieks of rage fading as it dissolved into nothingness.

On the second floor, every inch of the floor was permeated with razor-sharp pins. We had to painstakingly pick our way across, wincing as the needles pricked our skin at every step. The pins seemed endless, opening hundreds of tiny wounds, yet at last we crossed the deadly carpet of spikes.

On the third floor we met Meredith, an ancient soul, who at first captured us with gnarled fingers cold as death. But she fed us a potion with the moldering relic of her heart, granting us preternatural vigor to survive the coming trials.

The fourth floor windows were gateways for the Minora souls, the most pernicious spirits conceivable. We dashed from curtain to curtain, drawing each closed just as bony gray fingers grasped the sills. Their enraged snarls echoed outside but we had eluded their evil gaze.

The fifth floor again assaulted us with pins and spikes underfoot, but our newfound vitality from Meredith's gift protected us from harm.

On the sixth floor, we confronted the swimming pool where the remaining Minora soul languished. It burst from the water with a roar, slashing at us with claws like swords, before we managed the impossible and cast the demon into the churning pool. As it shrieked in protest and disappeared, I claimed the key from around its ankle, hoping I would not share its fate.

On the seventh floor we met the enigmatic Meridian, who gave us two calman pearls as insurance against the coming doom.

The eighth floor was in utter pandemonium with Minora souls run amok. Though the pearls protected us from their wrath, the floor soon buckled from their frenzy. Melissa and I plunged into darkness as the room collapsed, entombed in that place of evil forevermore, the mansion's final victims. Our souls now dwell imprisoned within, warning all who venture near of the eternally grim fate that awaits them in the ruins of the haunted manor.

I had shut this story deep inside my heart. But now I was possessed and was one of them.

Who?

The Minora.