This page contains sensitive content not suitable for all audiences. Readers including you might consider these topic(s) disturbing, anxiety inducing, or inappropriate: Mentions of suicide/self-harm..
If the content mentioned above is suitable for you, click here to read the page.I know because I lived through it.
It was a normal day. I remember every second of it. It’s seared into my mind. I was walking through the hallways of my school when I decided to go to the bathroom. I went in there and stepped right through the floor.
You might think this was just some structural failure or something, but it wasn’t. I’ve checked ever since I returned. The floor’s solid. I didn’t break it. I went through it. I could see it going past my eyes as I drowned in a black void.
I fell out of reality itself.
I landed not on the floor below me, where I should have been, but in a strange place—a room converted in old, strange yellow wallpaper and a soaking wet carpet. It could have passed for any regular unused office space, save for the fact that nobody in their right mind would want a room decorated like it was. I looked up, wondering where I was and if I could call for help, but there was no hole in the ceiling. It was solid. I never made any hole when I fell in.
I started walking, calling out for anybody, anybody to find and help me. The rooms went on forever, a maze of hell. I did everything I could think of—kept one hand on a wall and followed it, tried to break through the ceiling to climb on the roof, yelled as loud as I could—I even returned to the religion I abandoned years ago. None of it worked.
My mind began to crumble. I knew from a class I took in high school—a boring one that I would have sold my soul to the devil himself just to go there instead of here—what was coming. I heard voices and sounds that weren’t really there. Or maybe that’s just what I told myself. An hour felt like a day, a day like an hour. I never knew what was going on, or how to get out. I eventually gave up hope.
That’s when it happened.
I glitched back into reality. I don’t know how it happened, just like I can’t describe how a floor that had been there for decades suddenly disappeared. It just happened. God hadn’t closed his eyes after all.
I somehow wound up on the opposite side of campus a couple of minutes before I went into the bathroom. I didn’t care about what others might think of me, or what my teacher would say when I ditched his class—I just sat down on the grass, put my head up against the building, and cried.
Life went back to normal. I tried to forget what I went through. A couple of people noticed I was different, but nobody paid any attention. I never wanted to bring up what happened, and nobody would believe me if I did.
But that’s when it started.
I began feeling strange things. I was drawn to ordinary-looking walls and doors. I opened one of them, and it was the hellish maze I had escaped. I shut the door in a panic, gasping for air.
I saw more and more of these as the days went on. It was as if it was calling me back to it. I began to notice things that I hadn’t seen before. A door in my school’s gym 20 feet above ground. A wall in the cafeteria a shade darker than all the others. Going near these places put my hair on end. And they had always been there.
Don’t you get it? There is no true escape from the halls. They are always calling me, whispering to me, trying to reclaim their meal so they can devour me again. Even if you leave, they will be with you again. The barrier between this world and the halls is an illusion. There is no magical wall, no theorized curtain between them. They are much closer together than you think. And a single misstep could send you there to be devoured.
Or to devour yourself.
I tried telling people. The mental health I had regained after my journey began to deteriorate. I became irrational. My As became Bs, my Bs became Ds. My parents got me a therapist. But who would believe me? And even if they did, how could they know what I went through?
It became worse and worse. I took drugs—prescribed at first, but as time went on I developed an addiction. I sought anything that would free me. And it did, at first, but as time went on it didn’t. My life fell apart. I wanted to escape, but I couldn’t.
Please don’t try to save me. I don’t want to wake up again just to re-experience the hell my life has become.
Save yourself.
Author: RiverMan18
A Multipart Story |
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