Chapter 38: Alone and Insane

An unnatural force pushed me into the room at the bottom of the stairs. A padded door shuts behind me with no way to open it. I wish I could have as I wanted to rest and redress the ‘bandage’ that was on my foot.

I look around the small room I find myself in. I see the exit door nearby, tantalizingly close, but as I try to open it, it doesn’t budge, and I begin to hear the ticking of a clock. On the wall to my left there is a large monitor displaying an eight-digit number that was counting down once every second.

Thirty-one million, five-hundred and thirty-five thousand, and nine-hundred and ninety-six. Ninety-five. It was slowly counting down. Doing the math quickly in my head… this was one year… in seconds.

Me, what I had on me and the monitor. That’s all I had to wait out this timer. I wanted to believe that maybe I had to escape within this time, but as I suddenly saw a small book in the corner of the room, my heart sank.

‘Welcome to floor thirty-eight, Logan.

I am not The Author, in fact, you’ve never met me, and you might not ever if you don’t make it through here. We are alike in more ways than you and I will ever admit, but that is something to discuss once you meet me.

This floor needs a little explaining, as I don’t want you to die unfairly after all. You won’t need to eat or drink while on this floor, as preparing the resources necessary for you to survive is harder than just doing this.

You cannot escape, don’t even bother trying. There are two ways out of here, either you wait out the timer, or you kill yourself. See you at the bottom, I’m looking forward to meeting you face to face.

P.S. this is our first interaction.’

Well. I made it this far, I guess now was a good time to kick back and take it slow. With nothing to really do, I decided the first thing I was going to do was catch up on my sleep. I took off my bag and relaxed.

If this floor was some sort of trap, then so be it. I’m tired and have been too stressed over the last few months. It was time to take a proper rest and maybe sleep for a good amount of time rather than just closing my eyes and resting without actually sleeping.

Days passed and nothing happened. I slept through the days doing very little in the way of anything. I would wake up, hear the clock sound and fall back asleep. I woke up after four days had passed and felt actually well rested.

The fifth day I tried to exercise a little, but there wasn’t much I could do with my foot the way it was. It was actually starting to heal up nicely now. I would cycle bandages on and off. The scabs were doing what they were supposed to and the charred and melted flesh from cauterizing was starting to flake away.

I actually felt like my mind was starting to heal a little bit, giving me time to just think and relax. The tenth day was boring, but I was still having fun. I would mostly just sleep the days away as the stress left my body.

On the fifteenth day I though about how long I’ve actually been down here. Nearing a year and a half, but it will be two and a half after I get through this floor. It feels like a bit of a waste considering how fast I had gone through everything so far. Not like I can really do anything against it though.

However, I have noticed that some of the floors throughout this place weren’t really an essence of something and felt more manufactured, designed even. I guess I could ask about that once I made it to the bottom of these floors.

Day thirty I started to realize how daunting waiting in this room for a year was actually going to be. Hopefully I would manage to stay sane if I just tried to sleep through most of it but sleeping like this was only going to do me for so long until my body requested that I do something other than just light exercise and sleep.

Day fifty and I’m starting to lose my mind. I have absolutely nothing to do. I have limited resources, so I can’t waste them on just wasting time. I very well could, but I think it would be dumb, considering I still have one floor left before the bottom. Who even knows what the final floor is going to be like.

It could be super simple with just the demon controlling this place there in a single room, or it could be some sort of boss rush, I had to be ready. I was going to be ready for anything this place could throw at me. No matter what.

Day seventy rolled up faster than I expected it would. A lot of sleeping, but I was losing a slight amount of muscle definition. I started to exercise a bit more rigorously. My foot was mostly healed by this point. A layer of pink skin had grown over the wound. Some of the bone was still partially visible, but it only hurt slightly to the touch and seemed to be healing alright otherwise.

Day one hundred came around and I was falling into a routine of workout and sleep. I was bored, but it didn’t seem all that bad so far. I was kind of expecting to go insane after fifty days, let alone being relatively sane after a hundred days.

To be fair, I’ve been alone down here for so long, with people lying and deceiving me. Being alone isn’t so bad in the end. Even if my thoughts try to intrude in my mind, I can still at least hold them back.

Day one hundred and fifty. I was starting to feel slight tinges of insanity as I was starting to hallucinate. It had been five days since I last slept. I didn’t feel tired anymore and was just staring at the timer. I wasn’t even halfway through yet.

Day two hundred. I was sleeping less and less, and the hallucinations were getting worse and worse. It had been two weeks since I last slept, and even then, I think it was only an hour. I’m starting to see my parents and old friends, but their faces are contorted in inhuman emotions.

Two hundred and fifty. It’s getting harder and harder to distinguish reality from the hallucinations. They feel so real, they talk to me, keep me entertained. I have conversations with them as I lay on the ground unable to do anything as my mind suffers from the lack of sleep.

Finally at day two hundred and seventy-five, I slept. I slept for five days. My mind was still hazy, but for the most part, the hallucinations stopped. I felt relieved, as despite the days going by quickly, they were hell. Nothing made sense to me in those days, however, one thing I was sure of kept me sane.

I will not kill myself.

I have made it this far. One year in an isolation room is nothing. There isn’t even anything trying to actively kill me, so surviving is the easiest thing to do in this place. Not eating or drinking felt weird at first, but I quickly got used to it. The feeling of hunger should remind me to eat, and the feeling of thirst will remind me to drink once I get out of here.

Day three hundred, I had fallen back into a routine. I workout, sleep then I count in my head. I don’t count the same numbers on the monitor as the clock ticking goes off. Instead, I make it a game. How high can I count without losing track of the number.

I remembered that it was something I would do when I was younger. My parents would take me for long drives sometimes and I would get very bored, but I could distract myself by counting. I remember the largest number I made it to when I was you was around four thousand.

I smashed that number and then some in the following days. I made it to twenty thousand before I even realized it, but it was helping me stay sane. It was the mental strain I needed to help let me sleep at the end of each day.

Days blended together for the next while, and before I even knew it, I only had ten days left before the exit door unlocked, and I could travel down to floor thirty-nine. It was the last floor before I would meet the demon. The demon that put me in this hell.

Why.

Why did this demon bring me here?

I want to ask, I want to know, even if the answer is mundane. I think even if the answer is something as simple as they felt like it, I’ll be satisfied. I just want to know if its all been for something. Have I suffered here for a reason, or will it all be for nothing?

Anxiety begins to attack my thoughts as it registers the possibility that I’ve gone through all of this for no reason. I’ll escape this hell, only to be returned to the normal world. Could I force myself to fit back into society?

I won’t be able to work a normal job with only a single arm. Walking a lot is out of the question now too, with my foot being the way it is. I mean, I can walk almost normally, but it is hard for me to walk in straight lines. To say nothing of the pain every time I step. I wonder if it healed properly at all.

Looking at my foot, I can easily say that probably not as some of the bone could be seen under a thin layer of skin that had grown over the top. Maybe once I get back to the real world, they can properly fix up the wound there, so it doesn’t hurt to walk.

I watch the monitor on the wall as it counts down through the final hundred seconds.

I felt waves of stress leave me, more than even the stress during the first few days. I had created a different kind of stress for myself down here in this small room. I prepped myself in front of the door as the last ten seconds counts down.

As the timer hits zero, the ticking stops, and the exit door opens on its own. The concrete stairwell greeting me as I waste no time in walking down the steps to the last floor before the end.

One floor remains.