/lit/ - Literature

Nick tore a page out of his notebook and began to write, in sloppy ballpoint, using the floor as a table. "I was in this room for 15 minutes before. Now it is seeming like I will be here for 30 minutes total. What can I do to stop this? How can I help you?" He crumpled up the paper and tossed it against the wall. Staring at it and puffing on the Pall Mall, an idea occurred to him, and he grabbed it and uncrumpled it. He scrawled his e-mail address just below the note, feeling a little silly, but making the effort nonetheless.

Then, just as it had begun, it was over. The white walls faded, leaving Nick standing in the middle of campus under a canopy of fall trees. Nick realized he was covered in a cold sweat, and wiped his brow. As he walked back towards his dorrn room, people stared. I must look awful, he thought. People expected stoners to look a little odd, though, so maybe he wouldn't draw too much attention to himself. When he arrived back at his meager dorm room, he tossed his backpack onto the bed and called Sam. He knew precisely what he was going to do, and the thought gave him a sense of purpose and drive. “I need to borrow your car,” he said to Sam.

Someone else had been in the room between the last time he had visited and today, and they had left this note. Who was the note for? Did whoever wrote it expect someone else to visit the room? It seemed likely. Had the person seen the marks on the walls and the floor, and known that others were being pulled into the room as well? More importantly, what did the note mean? Been here five days. Nick's previous visit to the room had lasted only fifteen minutes. He checked his watch. He had been in the room at least fifteen minutes already, and obviously hadn't been summoned back to the real world. Next will be ten. That seemed to imply there was a pattern to the room. Did it summon it's victims for twice the amount of time it had previously? That was a terrifying thought. Nick wasn't good at math, but knew that an exponential increase like that would eventually be deadly for anyone trapped inside. As the note intimated, a person couldn't survive forever without food and water. The note seemed to indicate that the person leaving it had brought food with him, however.
Was it possible to bring things into the room? Nick realized his backpack was still on his back, and chided himself for not noticing it sooner. He was so used to wearing it that being without it was exceptional, not the other way around. Inside, he found his Econ book and several notebooks, his bags of weed and pipe, and a pack of Pall Malls along with his lighter. He checked his cell phone again. It was 3:33, much longer than the time he had spent in the room before. If what the note implied was correct, then he would be in the room for another nine minutes. With little else to do, Nick opened his backpack and extracted a cigarette, lit it, and began to puff. The room quickly filled with thick bands of smoke. The familiar taste and smell gave Nick cold comfort.

He paced back and forth, and suddenly noticed a crumpled piece of paper lounging against one of the walls. Nick snatched it up as if it were made of gold, but his enthusiasm soon waned when he saw it was a receipt of some sort. Derry Andrews Dry Cleaning, 412 Perrysville Avenue, Oakland, CA. Below that it listed several items of clothing and a total at the bottom. California? How had a receipt made its way into the room from California? Nick was nearly positive he had first seen the room in Bundy Hall, on his own campus in Indiana. Was this happening to other people, in other parts of the world, just as it was happening to him? There seemed to be no other explanation.

Nick noticed that there seemed to be some kind of stain on the reverse of the receipt, so he flipped it over and gaped. In the tiniest print, and written with a purple pen, there was a note on the reverse of the receipt. He read it and felt a layer of cold wash over him, as if he had just stepped into a freezer.

"Been here five days. Next will be ten. Water running low. Help me."

>>1897755
Good idea, thanks.

If this visit was anything like the last, all Nick had to do was wait it out. And then what? Continue living his life, occasionally interrupted by a windowless, doorless room? That didn't sound very appealing. He looked around him, noticing a series of long scratches on the floor. He bent to examine them. Five horizontal scratches, each about five inches long. They weren't terribly deep, and cut into the wood only slightly. They looked for all the world like the marks of fingernails, and they, combined with what appeared to be fist marks on the walls, sent a chill through Nick.

He may be alone in the room right now, but he clearly wasn't the first person to be in it. There was too much evidence of struggle. Someone else had been in here, and had pounded on the walls and scratched at the floorboards in an attempt to escape. Judging by the fact that the walls and floor were still intact, they hadn't been successful. Clearly, however, they weren't there now – what had happened to them? Had they simply been summoned back to wherever they had came from, much like Nick was yesterday? Or had something worse happened to them? Nick surveyed the room. Nothing seemed threatening, but he couldn't be entirely sure. He began to survey his prison, bit by bit. Nick was unsure what exactly he was looking for. More signs of struggle, perhaps?

As he left Bundy Hall, Nick was feeling pretty good. It might have just been the drugs, which tended to make the world more bearable, but he no longer felt sick to his stomach or afraid. Surely he had just imagined his first visit to the room in Bundy's lobby, and then hallucinated a return visit last night. Nothing like that could happen, not in real life, at least, and it wouldn't make for very interesting fiction if it did. There was no mystery to solve, except maybe figuring out how LSD had gotten into his weed. He had no reason to be worried-

Suddenly, the campus was gone, and Nick was once more staring at a blank white wall. He looked down, and saw mahogany flooring. Nick was in the room once more. He blinked, as a force of habit, but knew that nothing he could do would shake him out of this predicament. He glanced around at the white walls, mahogany floor, and a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Nick didn't know what to do. He knew that pounding on the walls and screaming was probably pointless, so he took a seat against one wall. He checked his cell phone clock, which he had reset earlier this morning. It read 3:12, which he recognized as almost exactly the same time he had gone into the room before. Oh, fuck, he thought. This was a reoccurring phenomenon.

He opened the door, and stared blankly into a phone booth. There was a wooden bench against the wall, and a beige phone affixed to the other wall. This was not the room of his nightmares; this was a completely ordinary location. It looked nothing like the room that Nick remembered. The walls were wooden and the floor carpeted, like the rest of the lobby. The room, if it had ever been there, was gone.

Nick's stomach turned. He must have been visibly distressed, because Jonathan piped up. “What's wrong, man?”

“Nothing, I just...” Nick stammered, and before he could think, ended up blurting it out. “I thought there was a room here?”

“A room?” Jonathan said, picking a leaf from his long, ratty blond hair. “That's the phone booth, man – it's not really a room.”

Nick shrugged, but didn't say anything else. He didn't want Jonathan thinking he was crazy, because then the other boy might refuse to sell to him. As if Jonathan had read his mind, the boy said, “You lookin' to buy?”

“No,” Nick said, but then thought about his answer for a moment. If the room was real, he would need to stay as sharp as possible, and Adderall was a good way to do it. “Yes,” he said sheepishly, and followed Jonathan upstairs to his dorm room to collect the drugs. Nick popped one of the orange pills and waited for the amphetamine buzz to kick in.

At lunch Nick barely touched his pizza, electing instead to sip coffee incessantly. Sam noticed this, and perked up. “Is something wrong, man?” he asked.
Nick didn't want to respond. He knew his friend would think he had taken way too many drugs if he told him about the room, so he just shrugged.
On the way to Bundy Hall, the growing feeling of terror returned. Nick felt nauseous and tired. He hadn't slept much the night before, that was true, but there was only one reason for feeling this way, and that was the room. He had seen a picture once in some class or the other of a man tied beneath a swinging sword. Nick was beginning to understand how that man felt, having something so dangerous hanging over him. He wasn't entirely sure if the room was dangerous, but that was beside the point. It certainly felt dangerous. He wondered if life would ever return to normal. Could anything be normal, now that he had been to the room? Nick wasn't sure, but he didn't think so.
Bundy Hall was a large dorm with great windows in the front that looked out on half of campus. Access to the dorm was controlled by key cards, and Nick swiped his, still feeling a little sick. The lobby was deserted at first glance, but soon Nick noticed Jonathan, the campus's most reliable Adderall dealer, lounging on the sofa with a laptop computer. Nick nodded at him, but wasted no time chatting. He could see the door to the room, along the back wall of the lobby, buffeted by a few chairs. Ahah! Nick thought. He knew he had been in the room before, and here it was, with a door and everything. Clearly the room was just a conference room, for use by student government or something, and Nick had simply imagined-

“I hear ya,” Sam replied. “Hey, you wanna go out for a smoke?” Nick nodded.

As he was leaving the room, Nick quietly checked his cell phone. The clock was fifteen minutes ahead of the one in Sam's dorm room. A slow, but definitely building sense of abject terror filled him. Nick spent the rest of the evening and then the next morning trying to shake himself of this. He couldn't explain what had happened. No hallucinogen could account for it. It wasn't even an experience he could contextualize in some way with references to fiction, as he usually did. He went to his morning classes, but barely heard a word the professors said. Halfway through Econ, he hit upon the idea of going back to Bundy Hall and finding the room he had been trapped in. Nick wasn't terribly optimistic about this, and almost didn't see the point, but it would make him feel as if he were doing something, which was comforting. He could have sworn he had seen the room before; however, if it really was in Bundy Hall, there should have been a door.

“Help,” Nick said plaintively. “Help!” He didn't expect an answer, but it was worth a try. He heard no reply. With his stomach still churning, he pressed his ear against the cool surface of the wall and listened, only to hear deafening silence. How long had he been in here? He reached into his back pocket and extracted his cell phone, feeling an irrational wash of relief when he saw the familiar device.

Nick knew that if he wasn't simply hallucinating, his situation was rather unusual, to say the least. He had always secretly wished something extraordinary would happen to him, but this was hardly what he wanted. In the stories he read as a kid, people wandered into magical worlds through wardrobes or mystic portals. No one ever simply found themselves there, and furthermore, an empty room was about as far from a magical world as one could get.

His cellphone clock read 3:24, which was about twelve minutes later than when he had last checked the time in Sam's dorm room. As far as he could tell, he had been in the room for at least ten minutes. His cell phone got no signal. Nick really began to panic. He pounded on the walls and shouted until his throat burned. His prison showed no sign of relenting, his efforts eliciting no response whatsoever.

Then, as suddenly as it began, it was over.

“Help!” Nick yelled, “help!” Before the word could fully leave his mouth, he found himself back in Sam's dingy dorm room, sitting across from the other boy on his bed. Relief slowly seeped in. Sam gaped at him silently, then spoke.

“What's wrong, dude?” he asked, running a hand through the stubble on his neck.

Nick blanched. What had just happened? Had he imagined all that time spent in the strange, yet somewhat familiar room? Sam didn't seem to have noticed anything out of the ordinary, so maybe it really was just an odd hallucination. “I'm trippin'.” he said.

The strangest part about it was that he recognized the room. Nick had been there. One day while waiting for his college's most reliable Adderall dealer in the common room of Bundy Hall, Nick had noticed a door he hadn't seen before, and pushed it open. The door led to a room just like the one he was in now, aside from the fact that it had a door. After a few minutes in the room, Nick had left, feeling a strange chilling sensation. He hadn't thought much of it, until now.

Was this the same room? If so, what had happened to the door? Nick didn't even see any outlines in the wall to show where a door would have been.

Nick smiled briefly, considering the possibility that his weed had been spiked with acid. Nothing else would quite account for such a vivid hallucination, and it just had to be an hallucination! He rubbed his eyes again, trying desperately to shake whatever possessed him to see such things. Nothing happened. The white walls remained; the mahogany floor remained.

Nick ran his hand along the wall. It certainly felt real. The wall was solid under his hand, much moreso than would be expected. Thinking about it more closely, acid didn't really account for it.

Nick's palms grew sticky with sweat, and he felt his stomach twist. Whatever was going on, he certainly seemed to be in a room with no doors, and that was not an ideal situation. Nick reared backwards and punched the wall, hard, with a resounding thud. Nothing happened. He hadn't made a hole in the wall, barely denting it.

It was at that point that Nick noticed something. His fist had made a distinctive mark on the wall, but it was not alone. He could see what looked like other fist indentations up and down the wall, as if someone had been wailing on it.

It first happened on a Thursday, when Nick was in Sam's dorm room, buying his usual two bags of pot for the weekend ahead. He had a nice buzz going and the world seemed shimmery and light, even in dim auspices of the dorm.

Sam was saying something about some movie he'd recently seen, completely forgettable, when Nick's vision started to blur.

“Whoa,” he said, blinking in an attempt to clear his head. The drugs were definitely messing with him. Sam was saying something in response, but Nick didn't really hear him – everything was distant, like viewing the world through a thick haze. Nick closed his eyes momentarily, shaking his head vigorously and waiting for his vertigo to pass. It did, but what happened next was decidedly worse.

Nick opened his eyes. Gone were Sam and his mangy dorm room. Instead, he found himself staring at a blank wall, and gradually became aware that he was no longer sitting, but standing. He blinked, but the visage persisted. The wall was white, and marred by scratches and scrapes. Nick whipped his head around, a surge of adrenaline passing through him. What was this new madness? Behind him, another dented and scraped wall, just like the first.

Gradually the awareness dawned on him that he was in a small empty room, with badly battered walls and a plank wooden flooring, also showing signs of wear. Nick blinked again, waiting for Sam and his dorm room to reappear, to no avail. He twisted his head in every direction, spying nothing but white walls and mahogany floor. Nick was in a room with no door.

Oh yeah? Well I had sex with the Void and I liked it. So you're a pussy.