It was the name of an online quiz I’d stumbled across late at night in front of my computer.
It made me laugh, and somehow I was curious about what it might be, so I clicked on the link that seemed safe.
I arrived on a website page with a standard personal information form to fill in so that they could make statistics on the results.
I wrote fake informations as usual, except my e-mail address, since they were offering $2.99 off a Subway sandwich at the end, and yes, I was that desperate financially.
The questionnaire was in the form of a MCQ with 10 questions.
Before I started the questions, I had to read a guide entitled “How to survive being buried alive” which the questions were going to be about. I assumed it was this guide that they wanted to perfect with this quiz.
I could only see it for 30 seconds, and the first question appeared with a 5-minute counter to answer the 10 questions. After all, it was a quiz about being buried alive, so adding a little pressure seemed logical.
I answered as best I could, all the while yawning from fatigue.
When I got to the end of the quiz, I expected a correction with a percentage of correct answers. But there was nothing except a page with the words “Thank you for your participation, we’ll get back to you soon!”.
I checked my e-mail address, and I hadn’t received the coupon either.
“What a scam,” I muttered, yawning again. I turned off my computer and went to bed still dressed, too lazy to put on my pyjamas.
Come to think of it, it’s a good thing I kept my clothes on.
I woke up coughing.
The air, for some reason, was nauseatingly heavy.
I tried to turn on my side to go back to sleep, but my legs were blocked by a solid obstacle.
I opened my eyes in surprise and stood up. Immediately my head too hit something solid.
I rubbed my forehead with my hand and started groping around.
It was pitch black, and while my alleyway was regularly surveyed by cars, even very late at night, there was not a single sound, nor any headlight.
I kept touching everything around me with my hands. While I should have been able to move my arms and legs freely, it was impossible for me to raise my torso, my arms or turn on myself.
I began to breathe heavily as I realized that I was definitely no longer in my bed, that I was trapped somewhere. Then, in the back of my mind, an idea flashed through me like a bolt of lightning.
It was just a dream, or rather, a nightmare.
I’d read that stupid questionnaire about being buried alive just before I went to bed, and now I was having a nightmare. I smiled, feeling relieved a little.
I waited.
And waited.
But I wouldn’t wake up.
Still in a state of disbelief I started looking again to see if there was anything around me to give me a clue as to where I was. And finally, on the ground towards my knees, I felt a cold, almost icy surface beneath my fingers.
I grabbed the object and turned it in my hands. The top lifted and I felt a mechanism like a lighter.
I flicked it and a flame appeared. And what I saw definitely removed any hope that I was sleeping.
I was in a human-sized wooden box. Like a coffin. I still had my clothes on, but that was all I could see.
I started shaking, I couldn’t believe what was happening to me.
What the fuck is happening, where am I?
Instinctively, I started banging my palm against the surface in front of me.
“Help ! Someone please! Help me, I’m locked in!” I pounded again and again until my hand said stop.
Not a sound, no one to rescue me. I was on my own.
I definitely started to lose my shit, I started screaming again, crying, punching and kicking. To no avail, except to increase my despair and my feeling of being alone, trapped in a box.
Okay, calm down, breathe calmly
After a few moments, I finally started to calm down a bit and tried to think about the situation.
I was either in the worst nightmare of my life, or locked up somewhere by a crazy person who was standing right outside, probably enjoying hearing me scream and panic.
Or maybe the people who’d created the online questionnaire had wanted to do a “real” test of their guide to see if I’d get away with it. It was impossible, but the more I thought about it, the more obvious it seemed.
I’d always avoided going in elevators ever since I was a kid, because I hated the feeling of being trapped in a confined space, like an iron coffin. And now I found myself in exactly that situation, but probably six feet underground on top of it.
I started searching around again with the light from the lighter that was shaking from my hand.
I could see a tiny slot as if for a tiny key right next to my right knee. I tried to pull at it with one of my fingernails, to no avail.
With each passing minute, I felt as if the air was getting heavier and heavier, and rarer and rarer. I was already starting to get a headache, and the idea of dying asphyxiated in this box made me want to vomit.
I turned my head upwards, and noticed a small iron ring that I could pull out. I quickly did so, and inside a small hidden drawer, I found a music box with a tiny keyboard to play a few notes.
I looked at it from every angle, my fingers burning from the lighter as I kept it lit. There was nothing special about it, except that it seemed extremely solid. I activated it, and it produced a few seconds’ worth of music.
I waited, but nothing else happened. I pressed the little keys on the keyboard at random. I noticed that the sounds were similar.
Do they seriously want me to solve a riddle like I’m playing Resident Evil?
I listened to the music again and tried to play it back. I started again and again. With every minute that passed, my headache got worse, and I couldn’t help taking deep breaths of air because of my claustrophobia.
Finally I managed to reproduce the damn music and something unlocked under the box. A tiny key lay in the palm of my hand.
I turned again, trying to remember where I’d seen the tiny hole in the wood. The light from the lighter was very limited and I was unable to bend myself.
I finally found the lock, and after a few contortions managed to insert the small key and turn it. Once again, a drawer was unlocked, and before my eyes was a heavy iron box with a digital display on which was written “12.9!”
The number changed every second, but there was always an exclamation mark.
I couldn’t figure out what it was, I was getting more and more panicked and I was breathing harder and harder.
Eventually, I noticed that the more I breathed, the more the number increased.
Is this a device that calculates my oxygen consumption?
I closed my eyes and tried to remember what I’d seen on the damn guide in the 30 small seconds they’d left me. I was pretty sure that one of the first steps out of it was something like “Conserve your oxygen”.
I had to give it a try. I extinguished the lighter, put the box on my chest, and concentrated on slowing my breathing. It seemed impossible.
As I closed my eyes, trying desperately to calm down, I began to hear a whisper in my left ear:
“You’re going to die here.”
I immediately turned around and lit the lighter, but there was nothing. Had I imagined that voice? Was I losing my mind?
I slowly put the lighter out again, and tried to concentrate again by closing my eyes.
“You’re going to die buried alive”
I kept my eyes closed.
“It’s like you’re already dead”
I concentrated on my heartbeat.
“You’ll never get out of this box”
One last shaky exhale, and finally, I felt a mechanism in the box go off.
I managed to open the steel lid on top and realized why it was so heavy, there was a hammer inside. My key to freedom.
I became ecstatic, started laughing a little, then laughing maniacally. I couldn’t stop myself, then suddenly I started having another panic attack. I was losing control of myself and my emotions, I had to get out, now.
I positioned the hammer level with my face, so I still had enough room to maneuver it.
I started hitting the wood, and my worst fear came true. Dirt started falling on my face.
I tried to block the dirt with my hands but the hole I’d made in the excitement of the moment was too big, and every second it seemed to widen, and more dirt entered the little space I had here.
Damn it, if I try to dig through it I’ll just choke on the dirt.
I closed my eyes, trying desperately to remember what the guide had said about this. I tried to remember what the man in the drawings was wearing. A shirt or a bag over his head, I think?
Yes, he was wearing a garment over his face to protect himself and allow him to breathe through the earth.
I took a few slow breaths of what little air was left inside. I couldn’t help imagining myself stuck 5 feet up, with no air, in complete darkness, suffocating to death.
I withdrew both hands, letting the earth in, and pulled my sweater up to the top of my head, tying a knot as best I could with the sleeves afterwards.
The dirt was starting to block my arms when I finally succeeded, and started to pull up with my hands, pushing with my legs.
I managed to extricate myself from the coffin, and continued desperately to pull myself towards my hands again and again, digging into the earth with all the strength I had left.
I went on and on, branches and stones scratching my sides and hands. After a while I wondered if I was still digging upwards. Could it be that in the pitch-black I’d changed direction unintentionally? I couldn’t stop, all I had to do was dig, push and pray to reach the surface.
After probably less than a minute, which felt like an hour, my right hand finally reached the emptiness of the surface. And my fingers, like claws, pulled me one last time towards the surface.
I couldn’t believe it, I’d done it.
Most of my torso was still buried, and I hurriedly pulled my sweater away from my face to take a deep breath of fresh air.
And what I saw stopped me in my tracks.
All around me were dozens and dozens, maybe even over a hundred graves. And in front of each of them stood a man dressed in a suit. The light blinded my eyes, and I realized that it wasn’t the sun, but spotlights attached a good distance above. I was in a gigantic hangar.
“Code 12 grave 122,” I heard a man’s voice pronounce beside me.
And before I could scream or say anything, someone knocked me out.
I woke up with a start.
It was dark and I instantly panicked.
No, no, no, they put me back in a box.
But the sound of a motorcycle, and the light of its headlights projecting continuously onto my window and into my room, put an end to my incipient panic.
I was back in ly bed.
It didn’t take me long to figure out if I’d dreamed the whole thing or not. The scratches on my chest, and the dirt still present under my bleeding fingernails, were evidence enough to attest to the reality of that night of horror.
I didn’t sleep that night, or for the next few days for that matter. I became paranoid and refused to sleep alone from that night on. For a while, I moved in with an old friend who, although he found it hard to believe, could see that I wasn’t in my right mind and that something had happened to me.
Time went by, I saw a psychiatrist who helped me and gave me medication to calm my anxiety, and eventually I gradually managed to resume a normal life.
Until this morning, when I received an e-mail from an unknown recipient with the subject line “How to survive being tied up underwater.”
Please help me, I can’t go through this again.