I wasn’t sure how long I’d been suspended in the room. I couldn’t remember the last time light had elucidated these claustrophobic confines, nor exactly when I realized I was trapped within them. Vague outlines surrounded the silhouettes of objects filling the room, slightly blurred and perfectly still. These things themselves were not strange, but when I saw them, my mind whispered dissimulation: “This is a dream.” And as I listened to it, figures of shadow formed within the depths light didn’t dwell. They were staring at me with quite a malignant intent for being hallucinations.
I was cold in a peculiar way, not like the familiar, fresh Autumnal chill of things to come, but with an absent numbness. My physical being and my consciousness were inexplicably disconnected, possibly even entirely disembodied. I could not move a single piece of me I felt, remaining perpetually static within a room in which nothing moved. Panic rose, panic like waking up in sleep paralysis greeted by hollow whispers of languages unknown. The voices are otherworldly, of a surreal type that was so unreal it was tormenting. But they also murmered with an eldritch disdain.
And they know about the paralysis.
The ubiquitous darkness of the room pervaded all of my vision so deeply I would forget that darkness was something I could look at. An impulsive subconscious recollection that the opposite of darkness did exist would flicker briefly every once in a while until, growing faint amidst the abysm of black, it would be snuffed and forgotten. Innumerable times.
How long have I been in this place?
There were edges sticking out in the dark of the room, very reminiscent of mannequins. The limbs were splayed strangely , however, and unnatural contortions within their forms induced feelings of sickness: they looked like people. They weren’t breathing.
I could not move my face to see the rest of the room, but I could hear a muffled, sluggish breathing off to my side. It was heavy, deep, droning, over and over. Incessantly ceaseless. It was the only thing I heard besides the strange auditory hallucinations. There were so many low hums, different pitched beeps, echoes, sometimes footsteps. And the long, eerily spectral cry. It was toneless, ghostly, and instilled within me a primal, intrinsic fear that I was in the vicinity of something I needed to escape. A predator.
I smelled the results of a death, which were putrescent, and ripe with decay. The air was filled with necrosis, that explicit malodorous stench of cadaver, and it’s very decomposition seemed eternally anchored in my nose. I had lost my sense of taste, and I could not feel a jaw, tooth, or tongue near what I thought to be my face.
Time passed. I was never sure how long, but it was what I always imagined a sentence in Hell would be like: eternally alone. And then, after time immemorial had gone by, in just a single instant, a door opened. The first perceivable change I could ever remember happened.
“It’s right through here,” A man uttered, anticipation flagrantly noticeable in his voice. A pair of shadows entered. The door closed quickly and light spilled through the prison. As it hit my eyes, it felt like my retinas died. There were no eyelids to bring back the sweet darkness. How I beseeched my nocturnal mistress to come steal me back again.
“Wait – what the fuck is this place?” I heard a voice, different from the first man. “What are these things?” He said, realization slowing his speech down. Trepidation trembled the beginnings of his words. As he spoke, I imagined the horror shooting adrenals through his nervous system. I could hear the beat of his heart, thunderous, echoing through the room, immersing us in his terror. I could feel the very essence of his sadness, his dread, his defeat, they all dispersed and seeped inside the corners and cracks of the room. Inside my pores. I swore I heard him thinking.
