scared-butreckless

[scared-butreckless]

[scared-butreckless]

[scared-butreckless]

My eyes opened slowly. My vision was blurry and my head was swimming in a sea of nausea. I reached for my forehead and felt the dried, cracked blood caked to my skin. I coughed. No, it was more of a wheeze. My lungs felt as if they were filled with some sort of hellish mixture of chalk dust and glass. My throat felt as if it had been millennia since I tasted water. I had no idea where I was or how I’d gotten here. I slowly looked around me but I couldn’t make anything out in the inky blackness. This was true darkness. Impossibly thick and choking, my eyes straining with all their might in a vain attempt to adjust. I slowly set myself up and realized that my back was against a wall. It was cold and unforgiving but the concrete still managed to set me at ease. I was somewhere. I wasn’t dead or floating in some infinite vacuum of nothingness. I wasn’t stuck in a liminal space desperately awaiting salvation from that limbo. The concrete wall assured me that I was alive and I was here, wherever “here” may be.

My feet pushed against the floor, slowly sliding myself up the wall pressed tightly against my back. I needed the assistance to stagger to my feet. It was then I heard a sound that sent a shiver down my spine. It was the clinking of metal, the grating of a heavy object against the floor. I reached down and, to my dismay, felt a shackle around my ankle. A chain was attached to it and, with a few a pulls, I deduced that it was anchored out in the darkness ahead of me. I stood there for what felt like an eternity debating my next move. Clearly, I was a captive in some hellish prison, trapped deep inside the bowels of a modern Tower of London. Someone had placed me here but when and for what I did not know. My mind was still clouded and incapable of recalling anything before my time in this pit. Was it even a pit? I realized I had no idea the size or shape of my enclosure. No possible way to determine if I was alone. My mind conjured images of fictional prison floors, littered with bones and infested with rats.

It was in that moment that I also realized I could not hear anything beyond myself. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. There was something. One thing. A very low hum. It was constant but it seemed very far away and above me, as if a generator or factory lay somewhere just beyond the walls of my enclosure. Besides that, however, there was no sound besides my own breathing and the clinking of my chain as I moved. I decided to try and ascertain the size of the room I was in. I placed my hand against the wall, picked a direction, and began to slowly walk while maintaining contact with the concrete. I counted my steps as I moved. Ten, twenty, one-hundred, two-thousand and twenty-four. I stopped. How long had I been walking? Could a cell possibly be this large? Then it dawned on me. It could be a circle. I hadn’t thought to mark the position of where I started and, with my vision completely obscured by the pitch black dark, it would have been impossible to determine if the room was circular or not. I decided to remove my jacket and place it at the joint where the wall met the floor. If the room was indeed a circle, I’d loop back around and kick it with my feet as I shuffled along. If it wasn’t, I could merely turn back around after awhile and retrieve the jacket. I decided that if I went beyond one-thousand steps, I’d assume this room was not round and double-back for my jacket.

Two-hundred and ninety-three steps was the count before I felt my foot kick the jacket. Oddly, a deep sense of relief washed over me. Despite the inescapable dread of finding myself chained up in an unlit room, I had been even more terrified of the idea that I could somehow be trapped in a room of unknowable proportions. I had simply circled the room an ungodly number of times on my first venture. I placed my back once more against that familiar wall and sat down. As more time passed, I began to slowly recall bits and pieces of what lead to my current predicament. I remembered that I was walking along a street in a busy city. I couldn’t remember everything but I did remember my phone going off with an alert. Not just my device, either, but also those of everyone around me. It had been a weather alert urging me to seek shelter but I hadn’t thought much of it. The weather had been perfectly fine and I assumed it was a test. The next memories, however, were very much a muddied canvas. I couldn’t be certain that the events actually happened but, being that I remember nothing else, they must be true. I saw a falling star. A missile perhaps? It was relatively bright and came streaking from the heavens before there was an impossibly white flash. With a horrifically loud roar, everything became nothing once more and I now find myself alone in this cell. Maybe I was dead. Maybe I had died in some apocalyptic fireball and came to my eternal rest deep in the pits of hell. All that I could be certain of was that I was alone in a room with a circumference of two-hundred and ninety-three steps.

I awoke with a start before the crushing disappointment of my reality hit me once again. I was still trapped inside this room. Just the wall, the hum, and I. I had dozed off and gotten some much needed rest but now it was time for another excursion into the dark. This time, I’d follow my chain to its anchor point and see if that provided me with new information. I reached down and took the chain firmly in my hands. Like a solo game of tug-of-war, I placed hand over hand and pulled myself towards the center of the room. It didn’t take very long before I felt the chain begin to dive down towards the floor. My fingers followed it and I felt what seemed to be a small hole in the floor that the chain was fed through. It was barely larger than the chain itself, not even enough to fit one of my fingers into. I sat down dejected. I had hoped that if the chain was anchored to a bolt or weight that I’d be able to find a weakness and exploit it. Not that freeing myself would do me any good in here. The room was devoid of an exit. Surely, I’d have felt it along the wall as I circled before. I clambered back away from the center of the room to my only respite: that solid concrete wall. I sat myself up against it and again tried to recall the events that preceded my demise. City. Phone. Alert. Star. Explosion. Impossibly light. Unfathomably dark. These events were all I could remember. I knew nothing of my life before those events either. I couldn’t remember my name, my age, or even what I might look like if I was to gaze into a mirror. I leaned myself over and pressed my face against that cold, unforgiving floor and closed my eyes. I drifted off to sleep not long after. There seemed to be little else to do inside my cell.

I was walking down the sidewalk on my way to an after-work function. The city’s night life was on full display and mobs of people lined the busy streets. A brisk chill hung in the air and I pulled my jacket close and held it shut tightly against my body. It was then that our phones went off. Everyone around me and I seemed to be receiving the same notification. An alert “EMERGENCY ALERT: SEVERE. NOV 4, 21:37. The national weather service has issued a severe storm warning for Davidson County. Multiple atmospheric anomalies detected. Please seek shelter immediately.” What an odd time for a test, I had thought before tucking my phone back into my pocket. I continued walking, noticing most of the others around me doing the same. A few, however, were staring upwards. I stopped and followed their gazes. I couldn’t see a single star, the sky seeming unusually dark. It roiled and swayed as if a mighty ocean. It was then that I saw something streak across that black expanse. At first, I thought it was a plane or a missile, but as it grew larger in the sky it was clearly a celestial body of some kind. It crackled and boomed through the air and went screaming overhead. I felt the ground shake, felt the earth give and release a mighty groan. Then the flash. It was too bright to comprehend. I stared into it knowing full well that my eyes could not withstand the light but I found myself unable to look away. There, within the hot-white blaze, I saw something otherworldly. It shouldn’t have been possible for me to see at all but I could clearly make out Its shadow. It was as far removed from evolution as something could be, Its form consisting of impossibly sharp lines, precise angles meeting before splintering away from one another again. It stood before me, a god of Euclidean design, so geometrically perfect that It almost seemed to have no discernible shape at all. Light shimmered and refracted around It, camouflaging Its outline. But I was acutely aware of Its presence. I was profoundly conscious of Its immeasurability. Scale beyond all comprehension, a doorway into a dimension that I did not have permission to enter. It appeared before me as a mighty octahedron, towering above the skyscrapers surrounding me. Oh God, why hadn’t I sought shelter? Why hadn’t I taken the warning more seriously and fled before I was forced to come face to face with such a terrifying sight? The flash had reached me now and I could hear the roar of the blast. A mighty gale washed over me but It never broke Its gaze with me. I searched desperately for Its eyes but I could not find them. Did such a god-shape even need them? It did not matter. I could feel It staring at me and as the air around me grew hot and boiled, I at last found myself freed from Its gaze as I fell unconscious.

I awoke once more on that cold, concrete floor and, suddenly, remembered: that was no mere dream. That had happened. I had been caught in some sort of cosmic collision. Except that it was no mere ball of ice and stone that had caused my predicament. No, I had remembered It. I had briefly caught a glimpse of some celestial terror from another dimension. I found myself wanting to cry from a mixture of sorrow and relief but the tears wouldn’t come. I reached up to wipe my eyes…but to my horror, they weren’t there. My fingers found only empty sockets. The humming was growing louder...

I could only barely hear it over my screams.