Forget About Me: 9th Floor

This is the chapter where the situation really starts to take hold, and I was amazed, reading over it for posting, how rought it was. I've gone over this piece a few times, and I can't believe how dissatisfied I was with it. I'm tempted to think that I saved an older version over to this machine when I tranferred my files, but I was truly surprised. I want to thank everyone for being a part of this group, and for giving us all (myself especially) a chance to improve upon their work. I think this little exercise of ours is doing wonders for me.

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9th Floor

I was in a brightly lit hallway. This floor was apparently set up more like an office building. The walls were sunshine yellow, with white trim along the floor and ceiling. I was walking on a light beige carpet, and there were banks of lights attached to the ceiling.
This, at the time, did not change the fact that I was being chased by a living, breathing monster. I could go down one of three hallways in front of me and, not thinking anywhere past getting “far away from him,” I went right. I was running so hard at this point that I felt as if my knees would shake apart, that the pure momentum would snap the ligament. I came to a t-bone intersection. I turned left and kept running. It was only after another few hundred yards of running that I realized I couldn’t hear his screaming anymore. I tripped on my own exhausted legs and fell into a wall, softening the fall only by catching it slightly with my injured left hand. The open wound streaked the yellow wall orange with broken scab and blood. I slumped into the wall and held my head back, desperately trying to catch my breath, when I realized that, while totally silent, I was just barely mouthing lyrics through the labored breathing…

Don’t you…. Forget about me…

I forced myself to stop, as it kept me from taking the biggest possible gulps of air, and after a while stood up to head back to the door.
I should have gone straight, I thought to myself, it would have taken me directly across and to the next stairwell. I started walking back, trying to decide which of the hallways now heading out to the right I had come out of. I remember fleetingly thinking the situation was strange. When I decided which way to turn at the t-bone I had thought that the far wall was the exterior wall of the building, so it couldn’t have had a hallway going right. It was there, though. I figured the second stairwell must have been recessed.
I looked at the carpeting, trying to find any kind of tracks in the plush beige under my feet. None were to be seen. I picked the hallway that looked closest to the distance I thought I’d run, and headed down the corridor to the stairwell.
At the stairwell door I turned right and, sure enough, at the end of that hall was the other EXIT door, the letters white to match the surrounding theme, the next staircase clearly visible through its safety window. For a second, I thought it would be nice to work somewhere like this. The atmosphere was a lot better than garbage cans and chicken blood, anyway. Looking back at the stairwell I had emerged from earlier, I smiled and continued on to the next door.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

I turned back to look at the first stairwell door. It was the exact same door I had come through, no different… except for one feature. The window in the upper half of the door, the small rectangular window, no longer showed the blocked staircase. I walked up to it, and opened the door, and felt my knees almost buckle from sheer confusion.

A hallway almost identical to the one I was now standing in lay beyond the door.

Well, maybe… I started to think. But nothing came after that. There was no reasoning. No explanation. It just wasn’t possible. I was even willing to accept a man who’s head swells to the size of the rest of his body, but this just wasn’t possible. I turned and bolted down the hallway to the other EXIT door. I reached it and, without looking, swung it open. Another hallway waited for me there, splitting off in three ways. Another yellow-walled, beige-carpeted, brightly lit passageway. Each way leading to another door. Each door leading to another way.
I noticed then that there were no doors other than the ones marked EXIT, and they only appeared at the ends of hallways. I ran down another passage, and found more halls, this one forking off into two possible choices. I was starting to panic. I frantically burst through EXIT doors. I careened around corners and down hallways, trying to imagine what I could possibly do to get out of this. This was no longer a gangland goodbye. Something was wrong here.

I leaned against the wall, breathing “Don’t You Forget About Me,” again, but not caring enough to stop it this time. Things were becoming too confusing to care about a song stuck in my head, and the pain from the freshly opened abrasion on my hand had me distracted enough to ignore it.
The hand hadn’t bothered me since I’d ran it across the cheerful yellow wall, and I don’t know if it had started to bother me again because I wasn’t concerned with the floor’s impossible layout, or if seeing it now, across the hall, had reminded me. I rose slowly, walked to the other end of hall, and looked closely at the mark on the wall.
Blood is much more complicated than red. In my business, you run across it a lot, and you have to become familiar with it, just to make sure you’re getting the right kind. Saying blood is red is like saying fire is yellow. Its leaving an entire spectrum of description out. The closest I can come to describing the color of superfluous human bleeding was sort of a translucent deep red-orange. It was the streak of color in front of me against the wall’s yellow paint. It was my color.
I looked at my hand. I looked at the mark on the wall. And I turned to the right.
Content not to run this time, I walked down the corridor. At the end of the hall, beyond the EXIT door, five halls splintered off. I went right. At the end of that hall, three halls splintered off. I went right again. Again, the hallway forked, this time into six choices, and again, I went right, figuring third time was a charm. And to think, I was just being morbidly funny.
The streak on the wall stood out as well as if it had been pure black. After the initial shock, this slight imperfection in the immaculate labyrinth of corridors, I tried to put together an idea niggling the back of my mind. First corridor 5… second 3… third 6. My eyes widened, and I continued down the corridor. Three halls. I went left. 5 halls. I went left again, 3halls. I went left, streak of blood on the wall. My streak of blood. I smiled.

“Spiderweb…”

I ran down the corridors now, heading towards… yes… the center.

It’s not neverending. It’s real. The door to enter it just puts you somewhere inside the thing so you can’t get your bearings.

Who knows how far it stretched? I wasn’t in the mood to find out. The different corridor breaks, when I put it together in my head, formed a shape. It wasn’t being random, there was an actual floor of seemingly infinite doorways, but it obeyed laws. Rules of the universe. The fractured spiderweb pattern was easy to figure out, once you had a frame of reference. After four more hallways and four more doors, I was at the center of the maze.
I was inside a room with eight walls, each wall just big enough for a door and a foot of wall space. Standing there, I could almost feel the corridors spidering out from the center. The inception. The impact point.
In the center of the room, a column made of four doors stood. Each one had an exit sign above it, these letters in bright neon red. I circled it once, looking into the window of each door and seeing only the door on the other side and a phone booth-sized area between the four entrances. I finally stepped forward and swung one open.

The stairwell shone with its single fluorescent light, its pale blue-white glow radiating out onto the beige carpet. I looked through the window of the open door into the stairwell and saw only the four by four foot room I had seen before. Shrugging, almost laughing at the thought of getting out of this place, I stepped through the door and, after looking out into the hallway beyond the window (it now forked into only two halls) walked down the staircase.

At the bottom of this staircase, I paused for a moment, letting my eyes adjust. I was no longer taking chances with whatever was in this place, though I still desperately hoped I would be allowed to walk down the rest of the stairs without any other surprises. Once I could see, I tried to continue walking down, against my obvious assumption, and sure enough the next flight down was boarded up tight. I took a deep breath, trying to calm down… trying to convince myself that there was a chance nothing would be on this floor waiting for me.

It didn’t work.

I walked over to the door, trying not to look as scared as I was, and looked into the window. Blackness. Not even the minimal light from the failing bulb in the stairwell seemed to illuminate anything. I opened the door to see if I could shed more light into the floor beyond. The light crept a few inches out from the doorway, but refused to go any further. Reluctant to go any further, I peered out into the darkness, seeing if I could spot an exit sign from across the room. The sign had either gone out, or this was another office floor, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to cross a whole floor of separate rooms and hallways without being able to see where I was going. I let go of the door…

A hand… a claw… something grabbed my shirt and pulled, hard, dragging me out into the darkness.