He was walking down the wet, slippery, concrete sidewalk under a stark-white sky when it occurred.
It had stopped raining about an hour ago, which gave Lucas Alders the chance he needed to make this little journey. Unfortunately, there were still some puddles on the sidewalk. He wasn’t paying attention—his mind was on . . . other things.
He stumbled in a strange motion towards the sidewalk, his left foot barely scraping the cement.
His foot entered the puddle before it could become solid enough to interact.
And Lucas slipped out of reality.
All around him, the noise and throng of crowds of people moving through the streets—the smattering of speech, the rush of feet pattering the road and sidewalk—suddenly ceased, and silence pressed in on his ears, as though it were a physical pressure.
By the time he noticed he was falling, all he could do was brace for the inevitable impact.
But when it came . . . something was wrong.
He hit the ground later than he should have.
He opened his eyes. Instead of the familiar green trees and towering brick building that was his high school, he was inside . . . an unfamiliar building. Fluorescent lights buzzed loudly over his head, illuminating what seemed to be a small maze of hallways. Each wall was covered with a disgusting beige-yellow wallpaper. The carpet was moist as if the rain had seeped through into it.
His initial thought was quite understandable.
What?
His mind was in a state of pure, calm, confusion. His mind was black for a time, really just registering what had happened. It was such an alien event, such a jarring change of scenery, that, already, he was in danger of losing his sanity.
After he noticed what had happened after his mind chained together the sequence of events that had occurred and concluded that, only moments before, he had been walking down the street, he started listing rational possibilities.
Maybe this was a new part of the school that was . . . under construction . . . ?
Maybe they were finally building a tunnel to connect the main school and the new science building—the kind of tunnel the seniors all tricked the freshmen into thinking existed.
If it was under construction though, it was almost done. All that needed to be added to this space was furniture, accommodations, and of course, the usual decorations and visual balance that came with a new room or hallway before the walls were crowded with other things, posters bulletin boards doors, and such. However, the more he thought about it, the less it made sense. Who in their right mind would give a new room such an ugly yellow color? And why would a hallway have random walls jutting into it?
Furthermore, how in all hell had he entered it?
Perhaps a hole in the ceiling or something?
He looked up at the ceiling for such a feature for a split second before remembering obvious facts about the road he was walking down, and how no hole into any room had ever existed.
He started walking anxious to move from the spot from whence his problems had originated, and he discovered something that put the whole "New Building" theory to rest. This didn’t just look like a maze—it was a maze. A maze that seemed to stretch on forever, a maze in which he quickly got lost.
He tried to find anything that stuck out—maps on the walls, a telephone, even a simple power outlet.
Nothing.
There was only the yellow maze. He had no idea what to do. Never once in his life had he been faced with a situation like this. There was no obvious choice to make, no sense of purpose. Just a singular option: walk.
Hours passed.
This can't go on forever, he thought.
But it did.
And he was truly alone here.
More time passed.
Eventually, he stopped looking for help and just kept moving, looking for an exit. Eventually, he gave up on that too, and just kept moving. It helped him keep his mind off of everything else, from his ache to know what the hell had just happened to his desire to pound his fists on the walls in pointless frustration. The strange gibberish, which was as random as his terror.
Unfortunately, soon everything else would become all too difficult to ignore.
First came the thirst. It grew over the days—or whatever “days” were here. It then became a constant longing for anything, anything to replenish himself. Hunger came soon after, and although it wasn’t as bad as the thirst, it was hounding him as much as his parched mouth and sandpaper tongue. He felt like Tantalus, tormented forever with hunger and thirst. But at least Tantalus could see what he wanted so badly. The liquid in the carpet had long ago soaked his shoes and socks as if to mock his thirst.
At some point, he remembered something from a book he had checked out from his local library at random— a survival guide for people stranded in unknown environments.
"Water is always your priority," it had said. "No matter what, you will last much, much longer without food than without water. If you happen to be stuck somewhere without a means of escape, you will need to find water."
The loneliness drove its spear into his heart and mind as well. He wept for himself, mostly, but also for everyone he had ever known. He would never see anyone else again.
He could feel his mind fracturing under the strain. He knew he must resist, knew that he must find some way to pull it all together. He tried reciting the ABCs, what he knew of the periodic table, anything he could think of. But nothing could slay the beast of hunger and thirst.
Eventually, the world he had left became less than a distant memory, and he found himself thinking that this place was all there was, all there had been, and all there ever would be. He was so disconnected and isolated from everything else—trapped in the bowels of an infinite hellscape. At times he pondered infinity, magnitude, scale, and monumentality—thinking it fitting that he should focus his mind on these abstract concepts.
More time passed.
He was growing too tired to keep moving. Time after time, he found himself on the floor, too tired, too lost to walk through this twisted horror. Often, he was moaning, crying out in low, guttural groans for everything he’d left behind.
More time passed.
He had no clue how much time had passed. It could have been days, it could have been hours.
Lucas collapsed on the ground. It was too much to take. He began bawling, not able to hold back the flow anymore. He had shed tears in the past, but never like this. He knew he needed to conserve what little water he had left in his system, but he simply could not. What was left of his reason had long lost control of his body. Impulse reigned supreme.
He had resisted it for so long, but he couldn’t do it anymore. He knew it could be very dangerous, but he did it anyway. Bending down to the soaking wet carpet, he pressed his lips to its surface and sucked, swallowing whatever things were in there. He felt great until he vomited sometime later. But he kept doing it again, too high on the feeling of finally having some sort of liquid to drink to care about what it was doing to his body.
He didn’t know when he found it. After what could have been a year of walking in the yellow lobby, he could make out a strange shape in the distance, at the end of a long hallway. Curious, he walked towards it. Yes, it was a door. Summoning what little strength he had left, he speed-walked as fast as he could. When he opened it, he hoped against hope that it was an exit. Alas, it was, but not in the way he thought.
All it led to was a smaller room, just with a different, whiter wallpaper and some furniture in the center.
Back when he had a normal life, he was constantly told to work so hard he “couldn’t do it anymore.” He wished he had never found out the true meaning of that phrase. He was exhausted. Somehow, worn out from all he had been through, he went to sleep.
More time passed.
He was awakened by loud knocking. He burst up, half overjoyed that there might be another person here, another person he could finally talk to, and half terrified that it might mean that something . . . else was out there.
But the knocking didn’t return. Relieved, he went back to sleep, only to be jerked awake from a light slumber by more knocking. This continued, wearing him down even further. Eventually, he stopped trying, and simply sat on the chair, his fingers in his ears to block out the sound.
He was tired of all this. Tired of all this torment. Tired of all this pain he had gone through.
Who knew how long he had been gone?
Sobbing, he shouted at the ceiling, “Where . . . AM I? Answer me!” before breaking down for what could have been the tenth time in three days.
His hands were shaking, his vision was blurred. Coldness, clamminess, and a dull pounding in his head told him death by dehydration was only hours away.
The only answer to his breakdown was another, louder knock a minute later, and the flickering of the lights. Lucas finally snapped.
Although something inside himself was telling him that he had to stay, he paid no mind to it. He jumped up, flung open the door to this room (with his luck, he half expected it to be locked from the outside), and threw a chair at the floor. He yelled in a cry of sadness and anger and threw the chair again. Suddenly, he stopped and threw the chair again.
Once again, something felt wrong. The floor sounded strange.
Bending down, he punched it. Yes, it sounded . . . hollow. Like there was space under it. Somewhere he could escape to. He didn’t care if it was worse than this place, all he wanted was to escape.
Driven by a single-minded, lizard-brain instinct, he began banging the floor with the chair. Then, when the chair broke, he continued attacking the floor with another chair from the white-wallpapered room. And then another. Finally, he resorted to pounding it with his fists, hoping against hope it would break, letting all the torture he’d endured within this yellow hell rush out.
And break it did.
He could see a tiny crack in the carpet and the hardened wood underneath it. Something else was down there. He tried pulling the floorboards up, but all he could manage was a couple of inches of extra space.
Desperate for an escape, he started jumping on it. He was about to give up hope when it happened.
The floor gave way.
He fell into the darkness.
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A Multipart Story |
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