The Phobia rooms

The Phobia rooms.

Room 1.

-Trypophobia.

Holes. The holes were everywhere. Turn a corner, make a left, take a right, but she couldn’t escape them. She was trapped in an endless maze filled with the one of the things she most dreaded. Twisted, crooked, deformed spots that ran along the walls of complete nothingness. Her worst nightmare. 

It had been days since she had arrived there, maybe a week. Why had her parents put her up to this? Bribes and wealth for exchange for their child. The conditions had been crystal clear, she’d overheard her captors talking to her parents the night of her taking, ‘She will be put up to traumatic experiments, and I won’t sugarcoat the reality of the conditions. It was made illegal for a reason, a good reason. No authorities should come to know of this exchange, the police will be told she’s dead, car crash.’ But her parents weren’t scared for her, they were happy to be rid of her. She knew she was better off without them, but a part of her still hungered for their love even after the whole ordeal.

The dreaming wasn’t any better than real life. The holes slid off the walls like water off a mirror and covered her entire body head to toe. No matter how much she tried, Thalia couldn’t move nor speak, or wake up from her dreams. Her mind was forced to remain unconscious yet conscious throughout the entirety of the dream. The holes were made of pure darkness, in every shape and size, but worst of all, they hurt. She sat there, writhing in agony and pain. By the first week of torture, Thalia was but the corpse of the girl she had once been, plagued with nightmares so she stayed awake. She was a wraith, a whisper of a child. 

They had promised to let her go. But it was all fake. Humans could be cruel. They were liars. Thalia was once full of life, a good hearted and warm, 13-year-old child, but the torture had turned her stone cold. She couldn’t bear it anymore. The only thought keeping her alive was the thought of reuniting with her beloved dog. 

Day after day, night after night, there was no escape from the truth. She was withering away into nothing but a thought. Her parents had sold her, her dog nowhere in sight, and there she was. Waiting for a slow, painful death. After three weeks of tolerating excruciating trauma and fear, Thalia was sick of it. She screamed and kicked around having the temptation to just claw her eyes out and end it all then and there. She stumbled around blindly, and felt the uneven surface of a button, and tripped, causing it to trigger.

Then, underneath her broken body, there was a sharp sound of a ‘click’.

Room 2.

-Arachnophobia.

Thalia looked around in awe, blinded by the bright lights that shone through the hole in the floor. “Another room.” Thalia thought to herself. “Maybe there’s an escape after all. Maybe, just maybe, 

Thalia slowly took one step forward, then another, then more until she reached the edge of the hole. Now she could see clearly in her room. It was purely white. So was the one below. After checking for any more clues inside the room, and making sure that the next was safe, Thalia dropped down the 10 ft hole into a soft, cushioned bed.

“I mustn’t trust anything,” Thalia thought to herself, “After what I just went through, I don’t think that there’s anything here that I can trust. Suddenly, a projected screen shone on the shiny white walls of the room. A sudden, dark, grimacing voice fills the room. “You have thirty minutes to escape this room. Every second, a non-venomous spider will enter the room. If you don’t make it in time, we’ll release a black widow. To escape, you must answer a riddle, which will appear on the screen along with a timer. Saying the right answer will open the box over there, revealing a lever. Good luck.

Thalia jumped straight into action and read the poem off the screen. “The whisper of doom which traces your steps. Shadows I linger, for courage I test. Flutters in your heart, hesitance I crave. Watching while you run, digging your own grave.”

Thalia thought. Thalia pondered. 15 minutes had passed. Spiders were quickly filling the room, disgusting. A small jumping spider crawled up her leg, and she shrieked. Hurriedly, she shook the spider off and continued thinking. Her mind was blank. She soon started shouting out random answers. ‘“A Nightmare!? Stalker? Footprints? Your enemy!” Thalia was about to give up. After all she had done to get where she was, it was slipping down the drain. After all the fears she had persistently faced. Fears... Fear.

“The answer is fear!” She shouted, then Thalia heard a subtle ‘ding’ of the box opening. Inside was a lever. Confidently, she pulled it. A strange, smoky green gas filled the room. “Oh no.” Thalia said.

Then she fainted.

Room 3.

-Thalassophobia.

Thalia’s memory was faint. The last thing she remembered was pulling the lever and then... A weird gas filled the chamber. “It must’ve been the sleeping gas I’ve read about in books.” She thought, “But I must keep going, for my dog. For Bailey.” 

From what it at least looked like; Thalia was in the ocean. That is, at least, what it seemed. Thalia could see all kinds of sea creatures from outside her small glass box, but the animals that worried her the most... Were the sharks. She was in a small, glass chamber, chained to a cross shaped, wooden board. An ominous speaker then started playing inside the small, glass box. 

“Thalia Meadows, you have 30 minutes to escape before this glass chamber entirely fills up with water and explodes, leaving you to the sharks. Once you grab the key below your feet and turn it into one of the 50 locks in front of you, the roof above you will be opened and you can climb into the next room. The timer is above your head. Good luck.”

15 minutes. That was all she had left, it seemed easy enough, that was if her hands and feet weren’t bound by rope. She kicked, struggled, and flailed around in the ropes for a long period of time, and she was now exhausted. The water was about up to her waist now. She looked up in despair. 14:59. 14:58. 14:57. Time was running out. But, underneath the glowing, red lights of the timer, was a word. ‘Relax.’ “Relax. What the hell does that mean? Relax in this kind of situation? What, do they think I’m just going to chill here and RELAX?!? Well... I mean... I don’t really have much of a choice anymore…”

Thalia, rather reluctantly, started to relax herself. It was incredibly hard ‘relaxing,’ after all the drama and trauma that she had been through, but Thalia pulled through. Once she had reached the 10 minutes left mark, the ropes suddenly loosened around her. “I-I’m free...” She stuttered, relieved and yet somewhat in shock of why she didn’t look up earlier. Hurriedly, Thalia firmly grabbed the key beneath her and started trying every lock. 5 minutes left. 50 locks to try. 

One by one, Thalia tried each key in each hole. 46th, 47th, 48th. 20 seconds left. The water was now levelled with her waist. Finally, the 50th lock was unlatched. 3. 2. 1. The glass around her exploded, and sharks started menacingly swimming around her. “Come on hatch, open up.” She worriedly thought to herself, “It won’t be long till these sharks will take me for their next meal...” In an instance, the latch opened, and the sharks decided to make their move. One dived for Thalia’s leg as she was climbing out. Thalia realized this and quickly dodged. Rather hurriedly, she climbed out of the water and into a small, coffin-sized hallway.

Room 4.

-Claustrophobia.

The hatch under her slowly started to close. It was like this entire experiment was an escape room. The room was a small but human sized metal box, where the door would usually stand was a set of bars like the ones, you’d see for the doors for a prison escape movie. Beyond the barred doors all Thalia could see was a long metal corridor that seemed to at least go on for 50 meters. After solving the code she’d have to go on a long run.  

This time, there was no speech to guide her and what she would have to figure it out for herself. The timer read a meagre 15 minutes, and instructions on one wall read: “The right answer makes the room bigger. The wrong one makes it smaller. Once the timer goes off, the walls will start to close in on you and you’ll have to make your own way to the door. Good luck... Cautiously, Thalia ran her hands against the walls of the metal box to see if she could feel for any clues or hints. Up, down, left, right, but there were only a couple of roman numerals on the walls… There was a dash, I, I, II, III, V, VIII, ?, ?, ? –. 

After thinking for a bit, Being the star student of her math's class, Thalia immediately realized that this was the beginning of the Fibonacci sequence. She started shouting out the easy equations. 13! 21! 34! 55! 89! 

The equations were slowly starting to get harder. 3 digits plus 3-digit equations, that all had to be done in her head. She had already got several incorrect answers on just one addition question, and time was quickly running out minute by minute. Thalia was only up to the 17th number in the sequence when she heard the subtle ‘ring’ of an alarm clock, just like the ones she had used in the mornings. A countdown then started. 3.. 2.. Thalia knew it was time to run. 1.. GO!

Thalia ran fast, faster than ever before. The walls were quickly closing in on her. Seconds felt like hours. The walls were now rubbing against her shoulders. The door was around 50 meters away, but in her mind, it seemed like a mile. Her legs ached like never before, but Thalia knew she had to pick up pace to not get squashed flat by the incoming walls. She dived into the open door in front of her, nearly losing a leg in the process, but she had made it.

Thalia screamed in pain, diving out of the claustrophobic room as soon as it closed and pulled out a large clump of Thalia’s long, brown hair. Thalia was too panicked, afraid, and shocked to feel pain.

Thalia slowly walked into the middle of the newly discovered room. Out of nowhere, the door behind her slammed shut. And she was left in an empty room with no escape.

Final Room.

-Autophobia.

“Welcome to your final room, Thalia Meadows. Your challenge finale is loneliness. After all no one can escape death, I doubt you will.” Thalia was shocked. “After all I’ve been through, all the challenges I’ve faced, all the trauma I’ve suffered, only for it to go down in vain like this?” She thought, “What about all the talk of releasing me? What about my home? My friends? What about… What about Bailey!?” 

Thalia sat there in silence. Absolute. Complete. Silence. To make matters worse, she was all alone. “There’s gotta be a way out.” She murmured to herself, what else could the 60-minute timer on the wall be for! She thought, but Thalia knew that she was just sugar coating the truth. “I mean, loneliness doesn’t mean Death, I mean I've been alone since I was taken from home! And from the looks of it, I’m still alive.” 

Hopelessly, Thalia began to search the pure white room. The room she was in was smaller, much smaller than the one that she had been in before. She ran her hands against the walls of the room, stomped her feet on the floor hoping to trip on another button. Soon she was losing it, she banged her fists on the walls, tore at her hair and screamed until her voice was too hoarse to even cry. Her one hour was up and Thalia stared at the timer hoping for something, anything.

A hidden projector then played a video on one of the walls… It showed her... Dog… “Bailey… Bailey… BAILEY?!?” Bailey was being dragged into her kennel, with a lock placed on the door so she couldn't escape. Bailey’s captors then poured a clear substance over the roof of the kennel, then set it ablaze. 

“BAILEY! No… No. NO PLEASE NO SPARE MY DOG! PLEASE! SHE’S INNOCENT! JUST KILL ME INSTEAD!” 

No matter how much she tried, Thalia couldn’t look away. She watched the gruesome scene of her whining, barking and whimpering, and after a painful 5 minutes, Thalia saw the roof of the kennel collapse and the corpse of her dog engulfed in angry red. “Bailey… I didn’t get to say goodbye. I DIDN’T EVEN GET TO SAY GOODBYE! WHY! SHE WAS JUST AN INNOCENT DOG! SHE DID NOTHING WRONG! WHY!

The next scene she saw wasn’t any better. Thalia’s mum and dad had ropes around their neck and were tied to the towbar of a car by a sturdy rope. “Mum? Dad?” Thalia said in despair. Her heart panged; she knew what would happen next. Some would call it Justice as they had exchanged her for riches, but Thalia; She didn’t want this ending. Even for them.

Her family.

Thalia watched in pain as her parents were dragged across the gravel roads, necks broken and in a painful to watch state. Thalia was speechless. How could they? How could the creators of this inescapable escape room do this to her family? How could they murder an innocent dog? She collapsed on her knees, too weak to cry, too tired to move. The events of the past 3 weeks caught up to her, she felt groggy, and her chest was hollow. She keeled over and threw up the cheese toasties and muesli bars she had been given recently and sat there unable to move.

Thalia couldn’t handle it anymore. “I have nothing left to lose. My dog is dead... My family gone... And my friends... Not like I had many anyways. I’m giving up. Life- life isn’t worth fighting for anymore. I... I want... I want to die.”

As soon as she said this, a rope was lowered from the ceiling. “Go ahead,” said the ominous voice once more, “You said it yourself. You want to die. Death is the only way out...”

She nodded her head, her voice too weak to even croak. “I’m coming Bailey. You won’t be alone forever. I’ll come to you, just... just hold on a bit longer.”

‘Well, I guess, this is the end. It was a nice 13 years of my life. But now, it’s all gone to waste. To think of all the things I could’ve accomplished, everything I wanted to do, but now, I can’t do anything. Her life didn’t flash before her eyes, and she sure hadn’t gotten the heroic ending she’d wanted. Hopefully, in the afterlife, Bailey and I can reunite. Hopefully, I’ll be happy. Goodbye, cruel world.

Thalia grabbed a stool and pulled the noose around her neck to secure before kicking away the stool and dropping down with a sickening snap. Her eyes fluttered shut and she hung like that, unmoving. But in peace to reunite with Bailey, to rest properly up above.

…

[Assistant] “Thalia was one smart cookie, Dr. Murphy. She made it further than anyone else before in this game.”

[Doctor Murphy] “Yes. She did.”

[Assistant] “And… You’re just going to let her die like this?”

[Doctor Murphy] “Yes. Did you know that it can take 15 to 20 minutes for someone to die by hanging? First their neck and spine snaps and their blood pressure drop to nothing in a second along with their consciousness, so they usually don’t feel the rest of it. A pity.”

[Assistant] “...”

[Doctor Murphy] “The point of this game is a traumatic one. The brain waves we have been receiving throughout the course add to our research, and in time it may change the course of human evolution and psychological history as we know it. Thalia has been one of our most resourceful subjects so far.”

[Assistant] “Then, why didn’t you spare Thalia? Couldn’t you have continued to experiment on her?”

[Doctor Murphy] “Would you like to pay a visit to the Phobia Rooms, Clarence?”

[Assistant] “No sir.”

[Doctor Murphy] “Then please, be quiet, and stop questioning your superiors. Though I must admit, Thalia made it far despite her young age.”

[Assistant] “But Sir, why-”

[Doctor Murphy] “...”

[Assistant] “Sorry, Sir.”

[Doctor Murphy] “Make yourself useful and bring along the next kid.”

[Assistant] “Of course, Sir.”