Mike woke with a start
with his back against a cold wall.
The world around him
was pitch black, the kind of darkness that feels thick and syrupy,
the kind that seems to ooze over you and stick to your skin. He
gasped deeply and felt the blackness fill his lungs, no air, just
blackness. Immediately he gasped again, and the panic that comes with
such overwhelming darkness began to settle in as he gasped a third
time. He kicked is legs out in searching agony.
Where was he? What was
this place? Where had he been? What was going on? A million questions
formed a long ribbon of accumulating fear from his mind that
stretched out and seemed to wrap itself around him like a snake,
squeezing at his ribs, tightening with every new panic-ridden
question.
He gasped again.
He had to find the
air. He knew there was air hidden in the crevices of the dark, and he
just needed to calm himself down to find it. “Breathe,” he told
himself. “Air first, then everything else.” He closed his eyes
and covered his face and tried to imagine the open ocean, but his
mind plunged him beneath the waves into unknown depths haunted by
strange and horrifying creatures. He gasped again, and tears burst
from the corners of his eyes. He imagined a green field with deer and
rabbits foraging lazily in the sun, but again his mind tricked him as
a thick curtain of darkness fell hard on the landscape, and even with
no stars in the sky, he could feel the night covering him, close
enough to touch. The only thing that seemed to work was imagining
pinpoint holes of light in the darkness, tiny bubbles of air that he
couldn't see but had to be there. In his mind, he shrunk himself down
to the size of the bubbles, stepped into one that seemed brightest,
and finally was able to breathe slowly and deeply for the first time
in minutes.
Breathe...
He stayed like that
for some time, huddled against the wall with his hands over his face,
trying to shake the blinding terror of his situation. He pushed aside
the questions, sometimes waving his hand in front of him to
physically swipe at them, until he was sure he was breathing at a
somewhat normal pace, but the terror hung over his heart and wrapped
around it tightly, occasionally squeezing gently to remind him that
it was going nowhere.
Mike finally opened
his eyes and found that the room was still as black as ever. “At
least it's not even darker,” he thought, a glib attempt to make
himself feel better by trying to keep some good humor. The wall
behind him felt rough like stone. Where on Earth was he? Where on
Earth was there a place like this? Was he in a cave?
“Hello?” He
shouted into the blackness, expecting to hear a distant echo. Instead
he was confronted with a sound similar to singing in a shower. The
space was much smaller than a cave, in fact it seemed to be about the
size of a closet. He felt a hard squeeze on his heart as though a
belt had been tightened a notch too far, then closed his eyes and
covered his face again to fend off the encroaching claustrophobia.
In spite of the
terror, Mike realized that he could not sit there cowering forever,
that he needed to find out more about this strange place, this
terrible situation, so he slowly got to his feet, keeping his back
against the wall. He reached out in front of him and, to his relief,
found nothing. He reached out to his left and his fingertips grazed a
wall, to his right his hand barely grazed another wall, both
apparently stone. He reached above him, the ceiling was about a foot
above his head. He felt around him, looking for cracks or doors in
the walls or ceiling, and he found tiny crevices where the walls fit
together. He tried to wedge his fingers into the cracks and pry, but
they were too small. He pushed against the ceiling, but it was rigid
and immovable. Finally he knelt to check the ground for openings.
Here he was surprised to find the ground smooth and warm, a marked
departure from the cold stone walls and ceiling. In fact, the floor
felt more like wood.
He shuddered in the
darkness. Could that mean... No...
Was this place made by
someone? Some person?
Where the hell was he?
The terror tightened
another notch, so he took another deep breath and collapsed back to
the ground. His mind raced: what is going on? What is this place? And
the fear rose up in him as his mind ran in furious, ever-tightening
circles. He rocked back and forth trying to calm down, but instead
flung himself madly at the ground and began clawing at the wood and
screaming for help. He felt his fingernails bending backwards against
the floor, finally chipping and breaking, but even this could not
stop his mad pleas, but the closeness of his voice as it bounced
around the tiny chamber only increased his panic. It came back to him
sounding alien and horrific, and soon began to feel like a hundred
close-packed voices fighting desperately to overtake him. He stopped
screaming and clawing and frantically pushed away from the spot and
back to the wall. He let out a final tiny whimper of “help” then
let the tears burst forth. His insignificant whimper was stopped dead
against the cold stone.
He breathed again, he
had lost track of time. How long had he been here? Days? Weeks? Or
worse, minutes? He peered out into the darkness, but the room had
taken on a shape in his mind. The shape of a box, the shape of a
coffin, the shape of death. He didn't understand, he couldn't find
the point, why had someone made this? Why had someone put him here?
Slowly he realized
that there seemed to be only one direction to go, and while he was
undoubtedly meant to go in that direction and possibly to his death,
he also determined that he did not have any other choices than to sit
and wait for starvation, or likely more immanent, suffocation. There
was only forward. There was only death.
He breathed again.
He got to his feet and
reached out his hands to touch the walls at his sides. His fingertips
stung as the raw ends pushed delicately against the rough stone. He
didn't think he could run in the darkness, despite his mad desire to
do exactly that, but he thought that going slowly and paying close
attention, he might be able to find the traps that may have been set
for him. He began inching forward, sliding his feet along the smooth
wood floor, paying careful attention to every extremity and trying to
notice even the smallest differences. As he pushed forward, he began
to relax. There didn't seem to be any traps at all that he could
feel. He pressed onward.
Soon he realized that
his arms had started to slacken, that he was still able to touch the
walls but the walls themselves seemed closer. The room seemed to
gently taper, sharing another similarity to the shape of a coffin. He
stopped, and his heart beat hard against his chest. “If it gets too
tight,” he thought, “I can just turn around. I know there's
nothing behind me, my only hope is ahead.” So he started again and
continued further into the stone wedge which only got tighter and
tighter.
Eventually he had to
turn and begin squeezing sideways down the narrow corridor. His hot
breath bounced off the wall and back into his face, and still the
heavy blackness filled his lungs like liquid. He pressed on, still
feeling as though he could make it a little further and holding out
hope for an opening or a clearing.
Finally he could go no
further. He reached out desperately, but only found more stone and
tighter spaces, so he resolved to turn back and think of some new
plan, or at least wait to die in relative comfort. He began sidling
back from where he came, but found something new and startling. The
wedge of the two walls seemed to switch directions with him. As he
struggled further backwards, he felt the walls tighten again. It made
no sense, but that was nonetheless the reality.
Perhaps forward is the
only way to go, he thought as a manic and desperate fear once again
began to take hold. He switched direction again, but again found the
walls had read his mind and tightened even further on him.
Rabidly, he tried
backwards... tighter.
Forwards... tighter.
Backwards... tighter.
Now the terror
accumulated into a lump in his throat. He was trapped. He began to
scream again and pounding the walls as his screams reverberated back
into his throat having no other place to go.
Dr. Millner took
another sip of his wine, watching his invention at work with the
other spectators sitting in a circle around the huge machine. In the
center stood his masterpiece, a towering behemoth of pulleys and
gears wrapped around several huge stone slabs. A malevolent glee took
hold of him now, as it always did, as he watched the gears slip, the
pulleys pull, and the muffled sound of desperate fear bursting forth
from the machine, but he knew the best part was still to come.
This was really his
favorite bit, the building tension. The suspense growing and growing.
He took another sip of
his wine and held it on his tongue indulging in the bouquet of
flavors before finally swallowing it.
Click went the gears
as they pulled the slabs closer together and the muffled screams grew
more urgent and plaintive.
Click again and the
satisfying crunch of bone could be heard echoing throughout the room
mingled with screams of agony and, he liked to think, defeat. It
would not be much longer now, he smiled as the struggling between the
two slabs intensified.
Click...
Click...
Click, click...
Click, click, click,
click... All the while bone crunching and desperate, almost clawing,
screaming.
The screams had
finally tapered off into a barely audible whisper through the stones
now. Dr. Millner had begun to take another sip of wine when a final
click was heard that silenced the voice at last. He stood and walked
over to his machine, and there he bathed in the applause of everyone
there.
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