A/N: Just a quick note, I made a minor edit to Chapter 2 to acknowledge that Mario has encountered hills with eyes previously in Super Mario Bros. 3, as was kindly pointed out to me in a review (thx supermariobroultimate). So he has seen hills with eyes before, but the ones he's seen previously looked more cheery than the cave-eyes Mario's seen in Dinosaur Land so far here.

Sunday, May 20, 1990 (cont'd.)

As soon as I was inside the house, the doors slammed behind me and locked shut with a click. The only remaining light came from the darkened daylight shining through several windows high on the wall, and a few flickering candles floating above me. The room I'd entered wasn't particularly wide, but it was quite long and tall, its ceiling hidden in shadow. And hovering above me was a massive swarm of Boos, some of which occasionally dropped down lower.

And as I ran down the hall, I noticed something else too: there was music in the background. Violin music playing at a quick tempo, at least at first. But after about twenty seconds, another instrument joined in, one I couldn't place, but it had a more mournful sound to it. I couldn't tell where the music was coming from, it seemed to simultaneously be coming from above me and in the floor, behind me and far ahead.

There were a few gaps in the floor too, opening into a yawning, pitch-black void under the floor. And after that underground excursion a couple levels ago, I was in no hurry to see what was at the bottom of them. Before long, I reached the end of the room, and a pair of doors were in the wall ahead of me, almost identical to the first pair of doors I'd gone through back in Iggy's castle. I opened the door and quickly shut it behind me. Some of the Boos were floating a bit too low for my liking, and I didn't want any of them following me through the doorway.

The next room wasn't as long as the first one, but was just as tall, though this time instead of candles, a few lights mounted into the walls cast circles of pale white light around them that hardly reached down to the floor. Halfway through the room was a flight of stairs that I ascended; another door was waiting for me at the top. A few scattered Boos floating throughout the room were closing in on me, so I opened the door and stepped through it.

And this was where it got even stranger, because I knew right away where I was, only it was impossible.

The ceiling of the area I'd ended up in was mostly wooden, except for a single yellow block lodged in it, and at the far end of the space, the ceiling gradually dropped down like it was under a flight of stairs. I was right underneath the room I'd been in before, but there was no way the door could've led down here.

I turned around, but the door was gone. There was nothing behind me except a few more feet of floor, then a wide gap between it and the wall. I walked forward, the floorboards creaking under my steps, and jumped and hit the block in the ceiling. It turned brown, as though something had emerged from it. But if that in fact had happened, I couldn't tell, seeing as how I had no way of seeing above the ceiling. So I looked for another way out of this space. Wind whistled through cracks in the wall, blending with the uncanny, omnipresent violin music.

Suddenly, I heard a faint cackling from behind me. I turned around just in time to see a Boo literally phase through the ceiling and float towards me.

Okay, so that was new. But it did give me a thought. A long shot, but, it seemed the only shot I had at getting out of this crawl space I'd ended up in.

I took a deep breath and took a running jump towards the underside of the stairs. If this didn't work, I'd just bounce off them and end up falling straight into another huge gap in the floor.

But somehow, it did work. I passed right through the stairs and emerged on the topside of them, where they supported me like solid ground. I knew there had to be some way out of that space, and I'd encountered platforms like this other times, that I could jump through from below but were solid from above. The trouble was I could never tell just by looking at a platform if that was the case or not, so I sort of had to just guess.

I ran back up the stairs and saw that a P Switch had emerged from the block. I jumped on it, and it made several coins appear in the shape of an arrow pointing back down the stairs. And at the base of the stairs was a blue door, giving off an eerie, ethereal glow. I walked down to it. It was just a door, in the middle of the room, with nothing on either side of it. But the second I grabbed the doorknob and opened it, I was suddenly transported to another room. This one was empty except for a regular-looking door at the far end, a "?" block about halfway between it and me, and a cloud of faint green mist that further diffused the light entering through the windows.

I dashed across the room, wanting to get out of there as fast as possible. I didn't trust that mist; it smelled like a faint chemical scent crossed with the odor of decaying flesh. For all I knew, if I stayed here breathing it in long enough, it would knock me out (or worse), and I didn't even want to think about what would happen to me then. But before I left the room, I had to be sure I hadn't missed anything in it, because I sure didn't want to have to come back here. So I hit the "?" block to make sure there wasn't anything important in it.

There wasn't – just a string of coins that imitated whatever action I took. If I looked up, the string ascended towards the ceiling. If I walked forward, they went forward. If I ducked, they ducked.

Even more unnerved by this strange and useless trick, I grabbed the doorknob at the other end of the room and yanked the door open.

Immediately, I landed sprawled on another wooden floor. I sat up and looked around.

"You've gotta be kidding me."

I was back in the room with the stairs. The exact same room, except the blue door was gone again, and the block lodged in the floor was now yellow again, which I assumed meant it had been reset, so I could activate it again if I needed to.

Maybe there was something here that I'd missed, and that was why I got sent back, like that nonsense with the fake exit from the underground level.

But despite my looking, I wasn't able to find another way out of the room. I ended up going back through the mist room (whose "?" block now only produced a single coin this time) and finding myself back in the stairs room again.

"What the heck is going on here?" I shouted, but the Boos in the room gave no response.

After two more futile attempts at the same escape route, I got the idea to, after hitting the P Switch, run through the door leading under the stairs to see if anything under there had been altered by the P Switch's effects to give me another way out.

Initially, it didn't look like anything had changed, but when I passed back through the stairs, I saw that this time, hitting the block in the floor had caused a vine to emerge and climb towards the ceiling, rather than make yet another P Switch appear. I grabbed the vine and climbed up it, and towards the top, climbed off onto a platform with another set of normal-looking doors on it. I hadn't been able to see this platform from below because it blended right in with the ceiling.

I opened the doors and daylight streamed in from outside. Ahead of me was a short path leading from the back of the house to another pair of goalposts.

I wasn't even stopping to think about how the front and back doors were both supposedly at ground level, yet the entrance was on the floor in the first room and the exit was near the ceiling in this room.

After I passed between the goalposts, a path appeared in front of me, leading to the east. I set off down it, glad to put that dilapidated old house behind me.