White Rooms

The room is unfamiliar. I don't know how I got here.

To my left and right, I see smooth, concrete walls painted an ivory white. In front of me, there is a silver-tinted mirror stretching the length of the wall horizontally. Oddly enough, I feel as if I should be panicking, but I'm not. There is a soft buzzing in my heart that keeps me from thinking too hard about my situation, and my whole body feels warm as if I have some sort of whole body fever. In front of me, there is a stainless steel table taking up most of the room. It is smooth, and does not have any scratches. Across from it, there is a chair made of the same material. A small, suppressed voice inside me whispers, "It's an interrogation room."

I had been in an interrogation room once, when I was 19. My roommate was dealing small amounts of cocaine from our dorm room to the frat parties on Sundays. A freshman snitched to the higher-ups, and lo and behold, I nearly got kicked out of college.

My mind started jogging. Wait a damn minute, where the hell am I? My blood started to pump again. I tried to turn my head but my head was stiff like a corpse, my muscles were taut and stretched. I tried to stand up, but my knees were locked to the legs of the chair. They still felt like jelly, and my bones felt as if I couldn't put any pressure on them. My arms hung loosely from their sockets, and as I thought about it more I could feel the blood rushing down to my hands and it began to hurt like hell. My voice was dead, and I could only take deep, deep breaths. I could still blink my eyes however, and I started blinking excessively, I suppose to just move something so that I could be sure I wasn't just a body.

In the blur between blinks, I saw someone appear in the seat in front of me. My still groggy mind couldn't process it fast enough but when I did, my heart leapt into my chest. Again, I tried to speak but I could not. My eyes refocused and I could see the features of who sat in front of me. The individual seemed to be a tall, lanky man, perhaps around six feet tall. He wore a buttoned black blazer with a white dress shirt underneath, and had jet-black sunglasses on with no discernible brand. He had a military style buzz cut, and had a black hair, which could be dark brown. Without that suit he'd look like a shrink-wrapped skeleton I thought, and I was right. Upon closer inspection, the diameter of his arm seemed to be three inches, and he was almost cartoonishly proportioned. His closer facial features were almost indescribable. His face had a blank expression, and I could not tell how old he was or where he was from. It was pale, and I felt as if there was no blood coursing through his face.

Suddenly, the blood rushed back in. The expression on his face turned from dead serious to jovial and beaming. "Hello Mr. Garcia, how are you doing on this fine day?" I was speechless. He looked at me for a second, then realized his mistake. "My apologies man, I forget your situation. Force of habit, am I right?" I was still speechless. "Cat got your tongue? I'm just kidding around. If you're wondering where you are right now, which you probably are, don't worry about it. It might be a silly reassurance, given we've picked you up and taken you to this, uh, wherever this is, but you are in no danger here. It's just you and me in here." My tongue unfroze. I tried to speak, but all that came out was a garbled mess of letters. "Do not attempt to talk, we've just unfroze your speech box. You'll eventually be able to speak again, this isn't permanent, but your mind needs to relearn how to talk like us normal folk." Screw you, I thought.

Thoughts of why I was here and what happened to me and why the hell I can't move subsided, and all I could think about was how this man got inside this room. "Howssa, hows yous in heree," I muttered out. "Not one for taking advice I see." Is he mad at me? His voice had a sharp bite to it, and for a second I realized that this man might be dangerous. "I got in here same as anyone else. The door." There was no door in front of me, and I doubted that it was hidden inside the mirror. He had just, appeared, somehow.

"You, Mr. Garcia, are here to test a little something." "You were picked up at a bar in Miami. You were incredibly inebriated, and I was told that you tried to assault one of our officers. No matter, you're here now." "You have been selected as a participant in an experiment run by, well, I'll let you guess."

I felt my tongue move again. "M-man, I don't who you are but I don't wanna be part of your freaky experiment, I don't consent yeah? So, so you can't do it. Just let me go, I got people who will know if I go missing, they'll get the goddamned cops on you and you'l-" "You don't have any family Mr. Garcia. Your mother passed from cardiac arrest five years ago. Your father left when you were thirteen. Your brother died in a car crash last month, which is why you were numbing yourself with ten shots of whiskey when we found you. Your now ex-girlfriend moved to Atlanta five months ago, and is currently dating a Starbucks barista. You're a drifter, a nobody, no one knows you exist, you're not part of any organizations, no friends, no colleagues, nada." He leaned forward, close to my face. His breath was mint cold, and his expression was cold and uncaring once a gain. "You have nothing, which is why you were selected for this experiment." He sat back. "But hey, you're here now! You can finally make something of yourself, by serving a greater purpose."

I was scared. Scared out of my mind. "What do you want from me man? I'll do whatever, just don't hurt me alright? I don't want any trouble with you and whoever the hell you work with." "That's good. Smart. You're already doing so great, Mr. Garcia." He rolled up his sleeve to look at what seemed to be... nothing? He was looking at his wrist as if there was a watch, or bracelet. This guy is crazy.

"Alright, so here's the deal. I'm going to say a word, and then I want you to tell me what you see. The word can be anything, but I just want you to tell me exactly what you see in front of you. Tell me everything, exactly, to the most minute detail, and do not stop talking." His tone ended on a low point, and it was clear this was important. "Do you understand?" "Yes." "Good."

He cleared his throat. "Cipher one. Pyramids." I looked around. My head could move once again, and I took my time observing the room. "I don't see anything different, it's uh, just a white room, table in front of me, weird-ass guy in front of me, tall with glasses and a suit, there's a bright light above me and a mirror behind you that I'm pretty sure is one wa-" "Stop." I stopped talking. "Cipher two. Dangerous." The lights turned off. For a few moments, I couldn't see anything, but my eyes adjusted. "The room is dark now, but uh, nothing's changed, still have the guy in front of me and-" I stopped. I didn't mean to, I remembered that he told me not to stop, but I couldn't keep going. The man was taller. His head now nearly grazed the ceiling, yet he didn't seem to notice anything. While I looked at his head, he growled, "Keep talking." His kind and friendly demeanor was gone once more. I stumbled over my words, "S-sorry, my bad, it's just you got taller, like before you were six feet tall but now you look like you're touching the roof of the damn house, what the hell did you give to me-" " Stop." I stopped, yet I was freaked. People don't just do that, Isaac. You know that.

"Cipher three. Meringue." The walls began to ripple like if you threw a pebble at a water balloon. "The walls are moving, they have little ripples in them." I started to feel nauseous just looking at it, "I feel kinda sick now but uh, whatever." In the corner of my eye, something started to move. "Something's moving, it's not you. It's black, it's to my left, kinda big, God that is- what the hell is that?" The moving thing stopped in its place, yet it did not disappear. "It has a point, like a triangle, it looks sharp or something." "Stop." I kept my eyes on that thing in the corner. It's fake, just one of those apparitions like they talk about on TV with those white-coats that talk about the dangers of doing drugs. Still, I bit my cheek.

"Cipher three. Lamp." The thing in the corner pulled back, and I was relieved. "The shape is gone." I looked at the man again. He still looked the same, if not abnormally tall- wait a second. "Did you take off your glasses? They're gone. You have some freaky eyes man, you should get that checked out." They were red, like he'd been crying, a sharp contrast to his current demeanor. "Something's moving behind you again." The two triangles appeared once more, and they seemed to be attached to, a person? "It's a guy, I think. I can't see too much, but he has those sharp looking triangle things before, look real straight and proper." "Stop." The figure stopped once more.

The suit across from me smiled. "Last one Isaac. You ready?" He sounded like he was underwater, muffled in a way. "Sure man, whatever gets me outta here the quickest." "Alright. Cipher four. Body." The black thing behind him rose up from behind him smoothly, and I could see its face now. "What the hell is that thing, oh my god-" "Keep talking." "I-its a-" "Keep talking." "I am-" "Keep talking. Shut up. You aren't leaving here, you know that?" "What?" "You're an idiot." I stuttered to make a response but that thing kept moving. It climbed over the man's shoulders, digging into his chest and causing him to bleed all over his suit, though he had no reaction. It had talons like an eagle, and had hands like a man. It had no eyes, and had only smooth black skin pulled over large sockets in its skull. "Stop this shit now man I'm telling you this is enough I won't go any farther I'm done I'm-" "Cipher five. Monster. Do you have monsters under your bed Isaac? Cipher ten. Dead. You're gonna be dead soon. Cipher eight hundred and twelve. Pigeon. Cipher seventeen. McDonalds." The man was clearly no longer making sense, and the figure behind him began to crawl across the table. It had sharp, serrated teeth like a tiger shark that fit in a mouth wide open. It made no sound, and if it did I could not hear it over the suit man's endless chanting of ciphers. "Cipher one thousand five hundred and sixty. Guitar scale house apartment stand teacup elementary rose tissue." The table seemed to stretch out in front of me as the thing drew closer, scrambling and climbing and dragging out its chase of me. Move move move move you need to move if you do not move you will die that thing is gonna kill you right now right now MOVEMOVEMOVEMOVE. I couldn't move, my body still was frozen like a damn statue, and that monster kept moving towards me, first crawling now galloping like a horse. The man in the suit seemed light years away, still talking to me as if I was still there. "Oh my god oh my god oh MY GOD OH MY GOD-" The monster was in my face. I could hear it scream, it screamed like a thousand men crying out for death, it screamed like if every dog who had ever been run over was alive again, and my heart began to hurt. The monster lurched towards me and I felt a sharp pain in my heart, my last breath caught in my throat.

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Notes: Subject became erratic after cipher three. Suffered heart attack approximately five seconds after. Request retesting.