She had told me not to try to follow her, and without turning back, she shut the door behind her.
The door downstairs.
That was a year ago, and I’ve been here alone ever since. Sitting in this cold room, plain tiled walls, tiled floor, no windows; dimly lit by a single fluorescent bulb hanging from the moldy ceiling, a bulb which had never been bright, yet seemed to refuse to die. It seemed like a stripped bathroom, but I never felt the need to relieve myself. There was a small bed which I laid in every night, but I never felt the need to sleep. And there was a small wooden workstation, with this strange laptop that never dies, despite showing a 0% charge. I’d never felt the need to use it. Until now.
One year ago, I let that girl walk through that door and leave me alone in this strange place I’d found myself in, unable to recall anything earlier than going to sleep one night in my bed, in my own home, and waking up in this room, me on the bed, her at the workstation fiddling with something that made a metallic noise. I tried asking her what was happening; where I was, how I’d gotten there. She told me she could not answer; that she was in a position similar to my own. Kidnapped, probably. Left to die in this empty room with no exits. Something about either her or the place deflected any suspicions I had about her. It wasn’t until several hours later when she told me she was leaving that I realized she knew something that I didn’t, and it wasn’t until she told me she was leaving that I could see the door which had been there the entire time.
She’d warned me not to follow her. She told me she’d come back for me. As soon as she was finished. With what, she would not tell me. I wanted to argue with her- to beg her not to leave me, or at least take me with her- but in the back of my awareness, I knew this was something she had to do alone. And for a reason I still can’t place, I was unable to defy her will at the time.
After the first few days from her departure, the walkie-talkie she’d left me could no longer pick up her calming voice, instead transmitting nothing but pure static, regardless of the frequency. I wanted to throw the door open the instant it’d happened.
But she’d specifically told me I’d lose her eventually; and to not panic.
“Above all else,” she warned, “Do not open the door.”
No explanation was given to me, but she spoke in a hypnotic tone that I found myself unable to disobey. I realize now that what she’d been tinkering with at that workstation must have been some sort of weapon for whatever lurked below.
So I didn’t, and I waited in this purgatory for three hundred and sixty five days. I’d marked each day with one of several pencils I’d found in the otherwise empty desk drawers.
The loneliness had finally become unbearable last night, and against the wishes of the only person who seemed to have some kind of understanding as to what exactly was going on, I opened the door. I opened the door and began descending the staircase- old, wooden, creaking under each step I took.
[tbc]
In Pieces 