HALLWAYS
Mike Ramon
© 2015 M. Ramon
This work is published under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0). To view this license:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
If you wish to contact the author you can send e-mail to:
[email protected] Web addresses where you can find my work:
https://www.wattpad.com/user/ZeroTheHero
The Man woke up with a start, like someone waking from a bad dream. He had not been dreaming, however. At least not that he could remember. He knew only an empty black nothingness, and then the bright white light shining in his eyes. His eyes roamed around, squinting against the harsh bluish-white light coming from somewhere up ahead. His vision was somewhat blurry. As he blinked away the cobwebs of sleep (if the black nothingness could be called sleep) he realized that the light was coming from a flat, frosted, rectangular pane of plastic. This shining pane was fixed to the wall ahead of him. But no, it wasn’t a wall. He was lying on his back. It was a ceiling. He was lying on the floor and staring up at the ceiling.
He hesitated to make any movement, filled with a fear that if he tried to move his limbs he would find that they failed to obey his commands. He lay there on the floor motionless for some minutes, his eyes closed against the light, eyelids lit red by the harsh glare. He needed to move. He knew this. Eventually he would have to stand. With eyes still closed the Man tried to move his right arm. To his pleasant, happy, joyous, (and relieved) surprise the arm moved. He tried the other arm, and then his legs; they moved also.
Opening his eyes, the Man rolled over and pushed up off the ground, finding his feet. As he stood up straight a wave of vertigo hit him and he leaned to the side, steadying himself against a clean, white wall. After a moment the dizziness passed, and he was able to stand without the aid of the wall.
For the first time since waking the Man was able to take in fully his surroundings. There wasn’t much to take in. Ahead of him stretched a long hallway. The walls, floor and ceiling were all the same shade of white. Spaced every ten yards along the ceiling there was another of those flat, rectangular light banks. The Man turned around to find that the hallway stretched away in that direction as well. He couldn’t tell how long the hall stretched in either direction. It seemed endless from his position in it.
Where am I?
There was no answer to the question. The Man tried to remember how he had gotten to that hall. The answer to the how was the same as the answer to the where:
I don’t know.
He tried to think of the last thing he remembered before waking up in the hallway, but found only the black nothingness. Before the black nothingness? Just nothing. He couldn’t remember where he had been. He couldn’t even recall his name. Panic started to set in at the realization that he couldn’t even remember who he was. Heart racing, sweat popping out on his forehead. Looking down at himself, the man saw that he was wearing a white dress shirt, a black tie, a pair of black trousers without a belt, and a pair of black Oxfords over navy socks. He checked his pockets, but found only a ring with a single key on it. The key had no lettering on it; he didn’t know if it was a car key, a house key, or what. He searched his pockets again. Nothing else. No wallet, no identification. He slipped the key back into the pocket where he’d found it.
Am I dead?
No; this was not some strange afterlife. He felt certain that he was alive.
Then what?
Then…what? He didn’t know what. The only thing he knew was that he was standing in a seemingly endless hallway, a white corridor that stretched on in both directions. He also knew that, though the hallway seemed endless, it must have an end. All roads had to lead somewhere, didn’t they? So the only thing to do was to follow the hallway to its end. With this thought, and with a clear purpose in mind, the panic that had seemed to fill his chest like dark, stagnant water ebbed away.
The Man looked first in one direction, and then the other.
Which way?
As both paths looked the same, he decided that it didn’t matter which one he followed. He made his choice and started out. After a few steps he had a thought. If he followed the one path and it came to a dead end, he would need to double back. There should be some way for him to know when he had reached his original starting point. The Man thought for a moment, thinking of some way to leave a landmark. He considered and discarded the idea of tearing off a piece of his shirt and leaving it. Remembering the key, he took it out of his pocket and stepped to the wall to his right. Pressing down hard, the Man marked the wall with a hash mark, one long vertical slash. Satisfied, he pocketed the key again and continued on.
His thought had been that the hall could not stretch on forever, even if it had looked that way, and he was right. After walking for several minutes he reached the end of the hallway. There was no door or exit, however; the hall ended in a T, and now there was a second hallway that seemed to stretch endlessly to both his right and left. He considered going back and seeing what he could find in the opposite direction, but decided against it.
Again he made a choice, and turned left. After a short while he came upon another hall that branched off to the left even as the hallway he was in continued on as far as he could see. Up ahead, just ten or so feet up the hall, he could see that there was another hall that branched off to the right. Now he had three clear choices: take the first (left) branch, take the second (right branch), or continue moving forward.
No, four choices. I could turn back now.
He took the right branch, first leaving a mark on the wall of the hallway he was leaving. He left the mark directly opposite the opening of the right branch, so that he could see it as he approached if he turned back to come this way. This time he left two vertical hash marks side-by-side. After a moment’s thought he left another mark, a small x. He made this new mark on the left side of the two vertical hashes to show the direction from which he had come.
The Man followed the right branch for what felt like a very long time, though he was aware that in such monotonous surroundings time could play tricks, and that it may not have been a very long time at all. Eventually he found where this hall ended. Near the point where the hall ended there were four more hallways opening off of it, two heading right and two heading left. After some time he decided on one of the left-hand branches. Again he made marks, this time three vertical slashed with an x to mark the direction from which he had come.
And so it went. With each new branching-off of new hallways the panic started to flow back into him. He fought against it, pushing it down within himself. But still it was there, threating to overwhelm him. When the time came to make his fifth mark, he cut four vertical hash marks with a fifth slash than ran through them diagonally.
Hallway led to hallway led to hallway. The lights glared down on him from the ceiling. Eventually, as he lost the fight against panic, he started to first jog, and then run, stopping just long enough to make his marks and pick a new hallway, usually being presented with several branches to choose from.
Maybe they are watching me.
The thought stopped him in his tracks. His breath was ragged. His lungs felt like they were on fire, and he had to wipe sweat out of his eyes. He didn’t know who they might be, but yes, maybe they were watching their pet rat running in his maze. They were probably getting quite a laugh out of the whole affair. He looked along the ceiling, searching for a camera. All he saw were the lights. He couldn’t see them, but he knew there must be cameras hidden somewhere. Someone had put him there, and they were watching him. This was someone’s game. What other explanation was there? He promised himself that when he finally found his way out of the maze of hallways, he would find whoever i
t was that had put him there, and he would punish them. Severely.
But first there was the matter of escape. Breath still hot in his lungs, sweat still streaming down his face and spreading out in dark circles from under his arms, he ran. At some point, unthinking and barely aware he was doing it, he flung the key and its ring aside, no longer caring about making the marks. He just needed to get out of this place. He needed to breathe fresh air again.
He ran and ran. And then he stopped. He saw it up ahead, on the right wall.
No; it’s something else.
But it wasn’t something else. As he walked slowly further along the hall he knew what it was. When he stood before it, looking straight at it, he knew that, even if he wasn’t dead, he was in some kind of hell. On the wall there was a single vertical hash mark. It seemed an age ago when he had made it. That was when the screaming started. It took the Man a moment to realize that he was the one who was screaming.
The Man lay in a bed, his face placid, his eyes flitting back and forth under closed eyelids. On his head he wore something that resembled a football helmet without the face mask. An assortment of wires ran from the helmet to a computer. On a display a live stream showed a white hallway. The view was a first-person perspective, and changed so that anyone watching the display could see whatever the Man was seeing in his dream state. There were more wires running to and from various parts of the Man’s body. His heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen saturation levels were monitored around the clock. One tube kept a steady drip of a golden liquid (the Golden Drip) flowing into the Man’s right arm. There was a feeding tube, and a catheter snaked out from under the crisp white sheet covering the Man’s lower body.
Two people stood near the man. The woman looked briefly at the display that showed everything the Man was seeing.
“Is he all right, Jeff?”
Jeff was bent over the Man, the earbuds of a stethoscope planted in his ears, the cold chestpiece placed directly to the Man’s chest.
“Yeah,” Jeff said. “His respiration is increasing, and his heart’s beating like a madman, but he’ll be fine. There always turn out all right.”
Jeff set the stethoscope aside.
“Have you ever had one of them die on you?”
“Well, there have been a couple of people who have suffered cardiac arrest, and we lost them. But our methods are such that most everybody suffers no actual harm during stasis.”
They walked down the row of beds, each bed occupied by a person lying in “stasis”. The woman couldn’t help but glance at each person’s monitor as they walked along. On the various monitors could be seen what each sleeper was seeing and experiencing. One woman was adrift at sea with only a piece of flotsam to cling to. An older man climbed an endless staircase. One man writhed around on the ground, his body covered in flames that could not be extinguished. She winced when she saw this last one, and she looked away. Jeff noticed.
“Like I said, no real harm comes to them. When their time is up, the helmets will be taken off, the Golden Drip will stop, and within hours they will wake up in some field, or maybe even in their own bed. At first they will just think they have had a terrible nightmare. They’ll be in for a surprise when they realize that there are days, or even weeks, missing from their lives.”
“Have any of them ever figured out what really happened to them?” she asked.
“No. I imagine it’s just something they try to put behind them. Just some strange thing that happened, the day they never made it home after work, and woke up in an alley or public park a few days or weeks later with nothing but a faint memory of a terrible dream. The Golden Drip even wipes out their memory for the hours before they were picked up by one of our Retrieval Teams, so they don’t even remember the experience of being abducted.”
“How long are they here on average,” the woman asked.
“Average? Maybe four or five days. Our services are expensive. Each day adds to the cost. The guy we just checked on, though; the guy in the never-ending hallways? He’s a special case. He must have really pissed somebody off. He’s scheduled to be under for a full month.”
“My God. Another month of being trapped in that maze?”
“No; we change the scenario once a day. The client picks out a range of scenarios for the Dreamers, and we cycle through them. We also give them periods of rest where they aren’t dreaming at all. We’ve found that these rest periods are beneficial to their long-term well-being after they are discharged.”
He looked over at the woman and could see what she was feeling on her face. He stopped and put a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“Look,” he said, “I know it may all be a little overwhelming at first, but trust me. You’ll get used to it.”
Meanwhile, in another world, the Man was still screaming.