Either way, I have the feeling I’m not going to like it.
I inhale as deeply as my lungs allow, and I reach for the door knob. I pull it open into the room I’m currently in, revealing a narrow hall that goes straight for a few feet and then abruptly turns left. Only one way to go, and that’s forward.
Well, here goes literally nothing.
I step out of the room and into the hall. The narrow hall guides me, only giving me one option. I don’t know where it’s leading me, but after a few sharp turns, I eventually come upon another closed door.
No message written on this one, and yet something in my lower gut is telling me I probably won’t like what I find inside this room. Whether I like it or not, it doesn’t really matter, does it? I have no choice but to press on and see just what the fuck this is all about.
I yank open the door and step into the room, and the very moment my two feet cross the threshold, something changes. The light in this particular room flickers, and I take a single step deeper into the room when I feel something sharp slice my cheek. I freeze and take a tiny step back.
It’s not an overwhelming amount of pain; more like a papercut than anything else. My brows furrow as I reach up and touch my cheek where the sting is, and as I draw my hand away, I look down and see bright red smeared on my fingertips. Blood. My blood.
What the fuck?
Once I realize what it is, I sharply glance up and stare straight ahead. With the flickering light, it’s hard to see, but the room—which is maybe only five feet wide by five feet long—is full of thin, silvery strands attached to each side wall at varying levels of height. Given how easily the first one cut into my face, I can imagine someone who’s not paying attention could cut themselves up quite badly in a room like this. Someone who was rushing might not even realize what they were walking into until it was too late.
This time I have to say it aloud, “What the fuck?” Where am I? What the fuck kind of weird shit is this? It’s almost like a deadly maze or something. Who the hell would do something like this?
Past the razor-thin wires that line the room, I see another door, the only other way out of here. To get to it, I need to traverse this room and hope I can artfully dodge the other wires and not cut myself up to shreds in the process. A room like this could kill someone if they aren’t careful.
It’s funny. The past few months I’ve felt like death, like I was already dead. It reminded me of how I felt in the immediate aftermath of being kicked out from Black Sacrament, only it was a different sort of loss that made me spiral. But here? I don’t want to die here. I can’t fucking die here. This place, wherever it is, whoever took me; I don’t want to disappear forever. I need to see Wren again.
So I push forward, because it’s the only thing I can do. I duck beneath the first wire, careful in stopping before the second—the second is lower, chest-level. With how sharp it is, I don’t doubt that it can cut through cloth just as easily as it can apparently cut through flesh. With the right force behind it, I’m sure it could saw through bone, too.
This is some crazy shit right here.
I have to duck majorly to get past the second, and when I go to stand once I’m past it, I’m greeted by a sharp pain on the top of my head, telling me there’s another wire up there and I don’t have room to fully straighten myself out.
It’s like one of those spy movies with the red lasers pointing every which way, only I’m not a superspy who’s been trained to get through a trap like it. I’m just me, and this shit is way out of my comfort zone, but I’ll be damned if I die here, wherever the hell here is.
It isn’t easy, maneuvering my way through that room. I get cut half a dozen more times. It’s worse when I hurry through it, so I learn to move achingly slowly and take my time. The worst cut I get is right on my neck at the very end, the last strung wire before the door. A wire at that position is meant to decapitate, orseverely cut those important arteries in the neck. Thankfully I’m moving slow enough that I won’t bleed out in a minute or two from the wound.
Hurts like a bitch, but I’ll live.
Once I make it to the door, I practically hug the damn thing. I don’t know what I’m going to find on the other side—seems to me this place gets worse and worse the farther you go into it—but again, I have no other options but to push forward, so onward I go.
I make it to another short hall, although this one doesn’t have any turns in it. It leads right to another door a good four feet away. I stretch out my left hand in front of me and wave it through the air, just to make sure there aren’t any more wires strung across that I overlooked.
The hallway is just that: a hallway.
Throwing open the next door, I start to step inside with an abundance of caution, and it’s a damn good thing I’m not letting the adrenaline pumping through my veins cause me to rush, because if I would’ve been rushing, I might not have heard the sound of a gear shifting or felt the tautness of a string at ankle-level just inside the room.
The moment I hear metal moving, I step back into the hall—just in time, too. With the flickering light in the room, I barely see the axe as it swings down from the ceiling. It’s a fucking boobytrap. Someone trips the wire with their feet, and a fucking axe comes down out of nowhere, cleaving your head in two and killing you on the spot.
Seriously, this is some horror movie shit right here. I would ask if I’m dreaming, but the numerous cuts on my body and the pain from them tell another story.
This is real. This shit is really happening.
After the initial axe, the room is clear. I make it to the end and get to a long, winding hall that reminds me of a maze. Thereare numerous spots where it dead-ends and I have to turn back. It takes me forever and a day to find the next door, and before I enter it, I pause to hype myself up.
I can do this. I have to do this. Whatever’s in the next room could very well kill me, but I’ve made it this far. What’s a little more? I’m not going to die in this place, wherever the hell I am. I’m going to get the fuck out of here, find whoever brought me here, and kick their ass from here to Sunday. Hell, maybe I’ll even kill them. Obviously they were okay with killing me. Never thought myself a would-be murderer, but a situation like this kind of lights a fire under your ass.
Once my nerves are steeled for whatever comes next, I push inside the next room. This room is the biggest out of all of them, by quite a bit. It’s also the most dimly-lit. I don’t trip any wires on my way in. No axes to the head or other parts of my body. I step inside and am faced with two doors on the opposite wall.
Two doors. Centered above the two doors is a message:Make your choice. On the left door the wordsYour Lifeis spray-painted, and on the right door…
Let’s just say my heart sinks when I see the word on that one.
