Forget About Me: 8th Floor
So the last chapter was the 9th floor, and he descended to this chapter, the 8th floor.
Just want to make sure that's all clear.
8th Floor
In my line of work, you think about death a lot. Thinking about death, you end up thinking about hell a lot, Catholic school having ingrained an almost synonymous meaning for both into the heads of “devilish little boys” like me. I’ve thought a lot about what hell would be like, because it’s not fire and brimstone like people have been preaching for two thousand years now. The bible says hell is being removed from the light of God. Obviously, not something most people easily relate to.
I figure, hell is more like this: You can’t see anything, you can’t hear anything, you can’t feel, smell, or taste anything. You exist only in your own thoughts, and you sit there in the never-ending dark wondering if you’re alive, if you’re dead, or if you even exist anymore.
This was the closest I had ever come to hell.
I immediately spun around after being dragged into the dark, making a mad claw for the door behind me. I found nothing, stumbled forward a few steps, then crashed to my knees. I got up and spun around, looking for whatever it was that had grabbed me. I saw nothing. Literally, nothing.
I could see only black. And not darkroom black. Bottom-of-a-coal-mine black. I held my hand in front of my face and could only imagine an image there as my mind struggled to understand the concept of my hand definitely being in front of me, but my eyes not being able to see it. In my head, I saw faint outlines of my hand… a hand, rather, in fuzzy silhouettes of green and purple and red, but I knew there was nothing for me to see. Total darkness. Total black.
My ears felt as if they were plugged with cotton. I tried in vain to clean them of whatever had become lodged in the canal, but it didn’t seem to help. I took a few steps. Nothing. I stomped on the ground. Nothing. I let out a yell, a god-awful bellow at the top of my lungs and still… nothing. I couldn’t hear anything.
I could feel the ground beneath my feet, and I could taste the plaque on the back of me teeth, so my mind told me I wasn’t quite in hell yet, but my current blindness and deafness didn’t do anything to help my morale. I stretched my arms out in front of me to keep from running into anything, and started walking back the way I had been dragged, veering slightly to the side in hopes of avoiding whatever had dragged me out there.
I could feel the small vibrations of the wood floor creaking with each of my steps. I straightened up and tried to walk as quickly as possible without careening over anything that might be in my path. My extended arm bumped into what felt like a sheet draped over something moist and moldy. The grittiness of whatever I had touched clung to my arm when I pulled it away. I brushed it off as best I could, then felt my way around the hulk, stopping to wipe my hands of the grit every few steps.
After clearing the mound, hoping I was still headed in the right direction, I stepped out into the nothing. I started walking, and almost immediately regretted leaving the hulk. No matter what it had been, it was at least a constant here, in this place. Something I could hold on to. The only other thing I could be assured of its existence was the floor and…
Whatever was following me.
My footsteps had been making their quick, muffled vibrations under my feet, and in the dark my thoughts had been completely occupied with the hulk I had just abandoned. So much so, I had failed to realize that with every vibration I felt from my own step, another vibration met it. Sometimes just before, sometimes just after, often on the exact same beat, but definitely different, and definitely coming from behind.
I held perfectly still, trying desperately to listen to whatever was there, but even if anything had been making noise, I wouldn’t have been able to hear it. Regardless, I kept trying to listen, trying to peer out into the darkness, not trusting my own senses to tell me whether or not they could still function. I tried another step. Nothing. Another… nothing.
No sight, no sound, your senses can play tricks on you. My mind had convinced itself something was following me. I kept walking.
I got to five whole steps before it started again.
I was sure something was following me. I could feel it. I spun around and lashed my leg out, hoping to deliver a good, square kick to whatever was behind me. My knee gave a little twinge of pain as my leg slightly over-extended, meeting nothing but the darkness in its path. I recoiled, thinking it may be farther behind me, thinking maybe I was imagining it. Thinking, maybe, it could see me. I couldn’t know what it was. I froze there, flinching at nothing, stuck to the spot.
Something low and scaly scuttled past me, bumping into my leg as it went. I screamed, heard nothing, screamed again and ran. Ran away from whatever it was I couldn’t see. I had just thrown my arms up when a wall smashed into my face. Mold and wet stuck to my face, and I wiped it away from my mouth as I frantically ran along the wall, grateful for another constant in the dark. My leg met something soft yet solid on the ground with a thud that I couldn’t hear. I fell unhindered to the ground, not being able to know where the floor was to break my fall, and took a great blow to my shoulder and my right temple. I may have blacked out. I’ll never know.
I got up and kept searching the wall, not even realizing what I was looking for until I found it. My hand ran across the cool steel of an EXIT door bar-handle. I pushed it open and fell through the door, tripping on the door jam. I rolled over and looked out into the darkness as the door closed itself. I thought I saw something move away from the light, into the darkness but, just as easily, it could have been nothing at all.
The door closed. I stood up. The grit still stuck to my hands, and I tried to wipe off some of it on the wall of the stairwell. I stopped. I looked down at my hands after seeing the red-black streak they had left on the wall. The smell I experienced then meant that I must have temporarily lost that sense too while I was in the hall… room… whatever it was. The stink of rot flooded over me, on my hands, my shirt, my leg and face from where I hit the ground. I’d never know what the floor contained, but it was almost comforting to take away something real from it. To at least know it couldn’t all have been in my head.
My hands shone wet from the blood, black curdles running through it like beached eels suffocating for water. The dried grit from old, thin blood collected in little rough patches in between my fingers and on my clothes. I stared at my hands for a long time, almost wishing I could more easily lose my mind, so I could stop consciously having to deal with what was happening around me. Impossible. It was all impossible.
I would have loved to laugh my head off. To stop caring about the things that were now above and below me. To not even care anymore whether I lived or died. I wished I could have laughed. I stared at my hands, soaked in rotting blood, for a long time, seeming to prepare myself for something I couldn’t know was waiting for me. I eventually stopped, dropped my hands to my sides and let my head hang for a moment. I pulled myself together and looked around.
Apparently, while I was trying not to go nuts staring down at my hands, I had walked down the next flight of stairs, and now stood facing the door to the next floor down. I looked through the window, expecting nothing but blackness again, or some monster looming just out of the light, or anything other than the sight that awaited me.
A man sat in a rocking chair wearing a woven straw farmer’s hat and half-fastened overalls that did nothing to hide his enormous gut. He rocked back and forth calmly, picking his nails with a pocketknife, looking as contented as anyone I had ever seen. It was another studio floor, lit brightly with a kind of indoor gazebo he rocked in, the four posts of it a good fifteen feet from each other. A gate of lattice pieces spanned around the entire floor, giving it a nice, almost homey feel.
As I looked, he raised his head and looked at me, spat into a spittoon that rested near his feet and kicked his legs up onto a footstool nearby. He smiled at me. He waved me in with his knife.
Well, my mama didn’t raise her son to refuse an invitation.
Just want to make sure that's all clear.
8th Floor
In my line of work, you think about death a lot. Thinking about death, you end up thinking about hell a lot, Catholic school having ingrained an almost synonymous meaning for both into the heads of “devilish little boys” like me. I’ve thought a lot about what hell would be like, because it’s not fire and brimstone like people have been preaching for two thousand years now. The bible says hell is being removed from the light of God. Obviously, not something most people easily relate to.
I figure, hell is more like this: You can’t see anything, you can’t hear anything, you can’t feel, smell, or taste anything. You exist only in your own thoughts, and you sit there in the never-ending dark wondering if you’re alive, if you’re dead, or if you even exist anymore.
This was the closest I had ever come to hell.
I immediately spun around after being dragged into the dark, making a mad claw for the door behind me. I found nothing, stumbled forward a few steps, then crashed to my knees. I got up and spun around, looking for whatever it was that had grabbed me. I saw nothing. Literally, nothing.
I could see only black. And not darkroom black. Bottom-of-a-coal-mine black. I held my hand in front of my face and could only imagine an image there as my mind struggled to understand the concept of my hand definitely being in front of me, but my eyes not being able to see it. In my head, I saw faint outlines of my hand… a hand, rather, in fuzzy silhouettes of green and purple and red, but I knew there was nothing for me to see. Total darkness. Total black.
My ears felt as if they were plugged with cotton. I tried in vain to clean them of whatever had become lodged in the canal, but it didn’t seem to help. I took a few steps. Nothing. I stomped on the ground. Nothing. I let out a yell, a god-awful bellow at the top of my lungs and still… nothing. I couldn’t hear anything.
I could feel the ground beneath my feet, and I could taste the plaque on the back of me teeth, so my mind told me I wasn’t quite in hell yet, but my current blindness and deafness didn’t do anything to help my morale. I stretched my arms out in front of me to keep from running into anything, and started walking back the way I had been dragged, veering slightly to the side in hopes of avoiding whatever had dragged me out there.
I could feel the small vibrations of the wood floor creaking with each of my steps. I straightened up and tried to walk as quickly as possible without careening over anything that might be in my path. My extended arm bumped into what felt like a sheet draped over something moist and moldy. The grittiness of whatever I had touched clung to my arm when I pulled it away. I brushed it off as best I could, then felt my way around the hulk, stopping to wipe my hands of the grit every few steps.
After clearing the mound, hoping I was still headed in the right direction, I stepped out into the nothing. I started walking, and almost immediately regretted leaving the hulk. No matter what it had been, it was at least a constant here, in this place. Something I could hold on to. The only other thing I could be assured of its existence was the floor and…
Whatever was following me.
My footsteps had been making their quick, muffled vibrations under my feet, and in the dark my thoughts had been completely occupied with the hulk I had just abandoned. So much so, I had failed to realize that with every vibration I felt from my own step, another vibration met it. Sometimes just before, sometimes just after, often on the exact same beat, but definitely different, and definitely coming from behind.
I held perfectly still, trying desperately to listen to whatever was there, but even if anything had been making noise, I wouldn’t have been able to hear it. Regardless, I kept trying to listen, trying to peer out into the darkness, not trusting my own senses to tell me whether or not they could still function. I tried another step. Nothing. Another… nothing.
No sight, no sound, your senses can play tricks on you. My mind had convinced itself something was following me. I kept walking.
I got to five whole steps before it started again.
I was sure something was following me. I could feel it. I spun around and lashed my leg out, hoping to deliver a good, square kick to whatever was behind me. My knee gave a little twinge of pain as my leg slightly over-extended, meeting nothing but the darkness in its path. I recoiled, thinking it may be farther behind me, thinking maybe I was imagining it. Thinking, maybe, it could see me. I couldn’t know what it was. I froze there, flinching at nothing, stuck to the spot.
Something low and scaly scuttled past me, bumping into my leg as it went. I screamed, heard nothing, screamed again and ran. Ran away from whatever it was I couldn’t see. I had just thrown my arms up when a wall smashed into my face. Mold and wet stuck to my face, and I wiped it away from my mouth as I frantically ran along the wall, grateful for another constant in the dark. My leg met something soft yet solid on the ground with a thud that I couldn’t hear. I fell unhindered to the ground, not being able to know where the floor was to break my fall, and took a great blow to my shoulder and my right temple. I may have blacked out. I’ll never know.
I got up and kept searching the wall, not even realizing what I was looking for until I found it. My hand ran across the cool steel of an EXIT door bar-handle. I pushed it open and fell through the door, tripping on the door jam. I rolled over and looked out into the darkness as the door closed itself. I thought I saw something move away from the light, into the darkness but, just as easily, it could have been nothing at all.
The door closed. I stood up. The grit still stuck to my hands, and I tried to wipe off some of it on the wall of the stairwell. I stopped. I looked down at my hands after seeing the red-black streak they had left on the wall. The smell I experienced then meant that I must have temporarily lost that sense too while I was in the hall… room… whatever it was. The stink of rot flooded over me, on my hands, my shirt, my leg and face from where I hit the ground. I’d never know what the floor contained, but it was almost comforting to take away something real from it. To at least know it couldn’t all have been in my head.
My hands shone wet from the blood, black curdles running through it like beached eels suffocating for water. The dried grit from old, thin blood collected in little rough patches in between my fingers and on my clothes. I stared at my hands for a long time, almost wishing I could more easily lose my mind, so I could stop consciously having to deal with what was happening around me. Impossible. It was all impossible.
I would have loved to laugh my head off. To stop caring about the things that were now above and below me. To not even care anymore whether I lived or died. I wished I could have laughed. I stared at my hands, soaked in rotting blood, for a long time, seeming to prepare myself for something I couldn’t know was waiting for me. I eventually stopped, dropped my hands to my sides and let my head hang for a moment. I pulled myself together and looked around.
Apparently, while I was trying not to go nuts staring down at my hands, I had walked down the next flight of stairs, and now stood facing the door to the next floor down. I looked through the window, expecting nothing but blackness again, or some monster looming just out of the light, or anything other than the sight that awaited me.
A man sat in a rocking chair wearing a woven straw farmer’s hat and half-fastened overalls that did nothing to hide his enormous gut. He rocked back and forth calmly, picking his nails with a pocketknife, looking as contented as anyone I had ever seen. It was another studio floor, lit brightly with a kind of indoor gazebo he rocked in, the four posts of it a good fifteen feet from each other. A gate of lattice pieces spanned around the entire floor, giving it a nice, almost homey feel.
As I looked, he raised his head and looked at me, spat into a spittoon that rested near his feet and kicked his legs up onto a footstool nearby. He smiled at me. He waved me in with his knife.
Well, my mama didn’t raise her son to refuse an invitation.
Submitted by DeadLanguage at 7:07 PM
4 Comments:
The concept of hell put forth at the beginning of this chapter is something I've always contemplated when I think of the afterlife, and it's always scared me. I think I could deal with most things, but the idea of absolute nothingness, of sensory deprivation and darkness for all eternity, while retaining your awareness in its entirety--that's scary.
As I continued reading, I realized this is something you've woven into the story really well, the oft-unspoken notions of fear that tug at the backs of the minds of so many people. You're dealing in a particularly effective form of terror here. Not the overt, cheap "scares" that plague so many horror movies nowadays, but the subtle little things that we'd all find a lot scarier if we dared to stop and think about them.
Isolation, disorientation, darkness, the feeling of being a prey animal and not knowing what's hunting you. And that bit about all the invisible horrors, the things he encountered, physically *touched* on this floor, and will never be able to put a name to...that was devious and underhanded. And I salute you for it.
I love the terror, and this story just keeps on delivering. This chapter was terrifying in its simplicity. A journey through ultimate blackness and silence, with nothing but mold and grit to feel. I'm still loving it as I loved those DOOM novels.
There was one place I felt it broke down a little, in the middle when he feels something following him. It was very cool, but your wording got a little technical, and you seemed to say the same things several times. That is to say, it wasn't as chillingly and beautifully rendered as the rest of the chapter.
I guess in light of the character's thoughts about hell, I have to cede that I was wrong in my earlier judgement of him. He seems fairly intelligent after all. Tell him I'm sorry, if he's still alive after all this.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ARRRRRGHGGLE!
So, I kind of responded to what was being said, but I felt like what I said may have colored your readings. I hope once you've read the whole thing you'll still have these questions, and that we can talk about them... but for now I'm going to try and restrain myself.
Oh... man.... it's.... tough.
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