Room 66
The scribble of the pencil could be heard in the cold darkness of the room. A little candle flickered in a corner, right next to which the huge frame of the person responsible for the sound was seated. It was a strange darkness; heavy, foreboding, depressing but strangely calm. It was dark not because of the absence of light but because of its presence. Without that flickering candle it would have been pitch black, dark as a coal mine and silent like the desert. The darkness was in the shadows which danced all around. The air was heavy because of the presence of the figure. The sound of the pencil against the paper pierced through the thickness of the silence like a surgical knife opening up a patient. The room had a life, how dull it may be. The room had a purpose, no matter how sinister it might be.
The fear of the dark multiplies itself many folds when the darkness stimulates your sense. A blind man’s days are as dark as the night, he knows nothing but pitch black, yet he is not terrorized. Fear grows not from what we cant see, but from what we think we cant see. It grows within us and evolves to enslave us. It dictates our senses and they are triggered not by what is not there, not what we are oblivious of, but by what might be there.
The room stimulates exactly these senses. To whom does that shadow belong to? What was that I saw in the flicker? Why this sudden draught of freezing wind? Did I just see a claw? You don’t realize it but it doesn’t matter what the air is like, you will find it difficult to breath and you will hear another question; why is the air so heavy? You mind starts recollecting everything you hate, everything you ever despised and all of your hidden demons. Once the senses are clicked into motion they turn everything around you into your most terrorizing nightmare. You honestly wish you would wake up, sweating under your sheets and find solace in this one time you actually did wake up from hell.
The man with the pencil continues writing at a painfully slow scribble. His speed is the cause of both serenity and infuriating curiosity. Absence of the slightest of noise will make the silence too loud and the gentle drag of lead against paper is far more comforting than the deafening emptiness of quiet. The scratching of the pencil is infuriating because of exactly the same reason it is pacifying. Its pace is filling the entire atmosphere with a sense of incompleteness and languidness. It is like an imperative decision which you have to take, which has put everything on hold but can’t be taken because its consequences can unleash hell.
Everything which constitutes Room 66 is essential though. Even the slightest gust of wind from an unseen crack is something without the presence of which everything will fall apart. Every fragment is designed to hail the existence of control and the man sitting next to the candle writes out its fate, for the room is only one 6 short of the terror which until now only enslaves your senses.
Forsaken
I don’t know what I said, I don’t even remember what I said. Everyone was standing here laughing with me and then suddenly all I could hear was the echo of my own laughter as the crowd became silent and started to walk away. Must have been something I said, but I can’t even remember my own name let alone what I said five minutes ago. How do I even remember what was happening? Maybe it actually was me laughing at myself and there was no one else to share it with me. They all seem so real though, “Are you for real, are you actually here?” He runs his fingers through his long and dirty hair, an action which has become a ritual for his perpetually confused mind.
Who knows, maybe all of those faces were a fragment of my imagination, an old memory bought back to life. Thing with not having a sense of time, of the present, of memories and sanity is that you don’t know what is now and what was then anymore. My mind is like a VCR, which playback my life and then suddenly jerks back to the present. It’s like waking up from a daydream and finding yourself in the same wreck you were when you had closed your eyes. Who am I kidding, it’s nothing like that, you in your perfect car and designer suit don’t have the aesthetic sense to even imagine what hallucinating a reality lived feels like.
I ache for the day when it stops making sense to me. I see friends around me and then the horror of reality. I know I hallucinate otherwise they would have talked to me. Tell me what is wrong and maybe I can be liberated, or take away my reason and the I can’t judge myself. This here is purgatory, let me be a sinner and burn in eternal fire, make me feel a pain which robs the senses. Reality realized is terror personified, demons displeased are nightmares achieved.
“Hello my friends where had you been? Lately your sight seems to bury a terror in me…”
