Here's a long story I wrote about nothing

Jamie sat by his window in the morning trying to figure out what it felt like to be a cloud. After a short inner debate, he concluded that there is no reason that clouds should feel anything like the emotions humans typically associate with them. Having accomplished nothing, he walked to the beach feeling something like satisfied.
Seven a.m. was usually too early for Jamie to be outdoors or awake, but he couldn’t sleep. He had few responsibilities, though, so he didn’t mind operating on little sleep. His walk to the beach was pleasant, and he sat on a rock just the right distance from the ocean. He closed his eyes, listened to the waves, and relaxed. His head was empty and his heart beat calmly and quietly.

The sun broke through the thick, dead clouds and crawled across the sky. Jamie hadn’t moved or thought for hours when he noticed a man plodding along the beach. His hair was grey, greasy, and tangled. Jamie noticed nothing else about this stranger before he realized the man was walking towards him, perhaps with the intention of speaking to Jamie. Jamie felt unprepared, as if he had almost forgotten the concept of verbal communication.

He considered initiating conversation, then decided to let the other man say something first. The man said nothing, though, but sat next to Jamie on his rock. He took out a wood pipe, packed it, struck a match, burned the brown leaves, and inhaled serenely. For some reason, Jamie liked that this man smoked a pipe, and contemplated how he might look smoking one. He wouldn’t want to smell like smoke, though, so he concluded that he would not start smoking a pipe. These thoughts turned slowly in Jamie’s head and the moments continued to pass without consequence.

The man finally spoke as Jamie stood up to leave.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. Jamie thought for a second.
“Yes,” was all he could think to say.
“You should come with me, then.” The man stood up and walked away. Jamie didn’t feel much like considering the offer, so he just followed. He left the tranquil grey shore behind him without looking back.

Jamie walked with his head down, looking for pebbles and trash to kick. He dragged his feet and played with the rhythms of his steps. He occasionally lifted his eyes to check the stranger’s path. He wasn’t paying too much attention to the stranger’s pace, yet he never seemed to lag more than a block behind. Eventually they reached neighborhoods Jamie hadn’t seen before. The houses were battered and mostly abandoned. The man opened a rusted iron gate and walked up the steps to a massive house with splintered pillars and a warped, heavy brown door for an entrance. The man paused for the first time and turned around, finding Jamie staring from the gate.

“Please, come in, there’s something I want to show you.”
“I thought we were going to eat something,” said Jamie, confused.
“We will, but I have something to show you first,” the man replied before opening the door and walking inside. Jamie wasn’t as hungry as he was curious, so he followed the man into the house.

He closed the door after walking in, sealing himself the dark, moldy mansion. His thoughts seemed to echo off of the high ceiling as his eyes slowly adjusted. He felt content noticing cracks in the walls and missing tiles before the old man emerged from a doorway holding a candle. “Come downstairs. There’s something you need to see.”
Jamie hesitated, but didn’t feel much like thinking about what to do. It was much easier to just do as the stranger said. He walked to the doorway and descended the stairs, let by the man and his candle. He thought he heard a sad, poorly tuned organ playing faintly, but the creaking of their feet on the stairs soon drowned this mysterious trickle of music. When the two men reached the bottom of the staircase, the stranger set the candle down on a table and walked slowly to an enormous door that seemed like a vault from a bank to Jamie. “Come inside,” said the man, unlocking the door and pulling it open with great effort.

Jamie didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t sure that he could make it up the dark stairs and out the door if he left, but he certainly didn’t feel like going through that door. The man stood patiently, watching Jamie and waiting for his compliance. Jamie eventually grew tired of deliberating and walked toward the man and the door. The man seemed pleased and stepped inside the dark room.

The door shut behind the two men and they were left in complete darkness for a moment. Jamie’s spine and heart screamed for him to leave, but he had stopped listening to these warnings many years ago. Without warning, the man flipped a lever on the opposite side of this jail-cell room and Jamie saw it standing on a white table: a tiny, shriveled human being, with the face and proportions of an old man but standing no taller than twelve inches high. The man’s expression was unchanging and terrifying, like a person basking in excruciating pain.

When Jamie saw this man, he tried to scream. He may have succeeded, but he heard nothing. What he actually heard was the sound of nothingness, like finding oneself inside a vacuum in space without being crushed to death. A thousand disembodied jet engines crammed into Jamie’s brain and revved themselves simultaneously. Jamie’s senses were destroyed and he stared paralyzed and wide-eyed at this petrifying abomination.

The stranger watched Jamie with glee. He finally turned off the lights and guided Jamie out of the room. Jamie fell to his hands and knees, convinced he had just experienced eternity in that room.

“It wasn’t always so beautiful!” shrieked the stranger. He giggled and rubbed his hands together. “He used to make dark feelings. My experiments changed those into that noise! I am sure that I can make the noise beautiful soon.”

Jamie retched, disgusted and terrified. He gathered his strength and pushed past the stranger to run up the stairs and out the front door. He ran several miles back to his apartment. His heart wasn’t used to beating so madly, his lungs whimpered and his throat blazed. He reached his apartment, slammed his door, locked it, and fell to the floor. He couldn’t control his thoughts. His mind thrashed and spat and split itself amongst the wretched image of that shriveled man and the maniacal smile of the stranger. He climbed into bed, clutched his blanket, and shut his eyes.

His head swirled, he found himself back on his rock watching the grey, sad clouds, which split apart as the sky reached down to crush him. Jamie didn’t know how to escape the sky, so he hid under the rock he was sitting on. Under the rock, he found the stranger, waiting for him. Jamie forgot his fear of the sky, now more concerned with distancing himself from the stranger. He emerged from under the rock in the front room of the stranger’s mansion. Hoping to leave the house, he opened the door, which led him back to the basement. Jamie realized that he must be asleep.

He opened his eyes and saw his familiar ceiling. His mind awoke before his body, though, and his limbs struggled to respond to the commands of his screaming brain. Finally, Jamie felt his arms and legs. He propped himself up in his sweat-soaked bed and breathed heavily, trying to calm his frantic heart. He focused on his breathing, making it steady and deep. When he thought he had calmed himself, he noticed the faint organ music coming from outside his door. Perplexed, he walked to his door, unlocked the deadbolt, and turned the knob. He opened the door and saw the hallway of the home he grew up in. The same red hallway carpet and family pictures from his parents’ house. He stepped into the hallway and the organ music grew louder. He followed it past his sister’s old bedroom, past the children’s bathroom, and came to his mother’s bedroom. The walls and door shook from the music of the organ and the knob trembled in Jamie’s hand. He turned the knob and was blasted by the same noise he heard in the stranger’s basement. He saw his mother in a rocking chair, grinning madly, clutching the shriveled old man. She began to laugh hysterically, cradling the shriveled man in her arms. Jamie tried to escape the room, but the door he walked through to enter the room had disappeared. He only saw a window behind his mother. He darted past her as she clutched desperately at him. He opened the window and climbed out.
Jamie panted and coughed and slipped. He rolled out of the window and down a steep hill full of dead shrubs and thorns. He finally collapsed at the bottom of the hill. His dizzy head bled into the dirt but the blood didn’t soak in. It amassed sickeningly on the soil in a dark red puddle. Jamie stood up slowly, brushed himself off, and saw that he was in front of the stranger’s mansion.

He burst through the gate, ran up the stairs, and struggled to open the massive door. He walked through the dark room and found the door to the basement stairs. He opened the door and stepped through, into the grass. He was outside the house again, facing the front door with nothing but a dark field behind him. Bewildered and exhausted, he wondered if he would ever escape.

He breathed deeply, climbed the stairs, and pushed through the door once more. When the door shut behind him, he stood a while in thought. He turned around, and decided the best way to the basement was through the front door. So he opened the door, which led him right to vault in the basement. His skin started to tighten, he felt like he was shrinking. He knew he had very little time. He opened the heavy door. The illuminated white table sat silently in the middle of the room. Soon he wouldn’t be tall enough to climb onto it. He struggled to the top of the table, stood on it, and faced the door. He was now no larger than twelve inches high. When he looked to the back of the room, he saw the stranger flip the lever that turned on the lights. Jamie turned to the door and found his former self. There was a soft, beautiful sound, the sweetest any man has ever heard. As Jamie looked at himself, an expression of excruciating pleasure spilled from his terrifying grin.