(edit: formatting)
Wesley usually didn’t know where he was when he woke up. The sensation was worse in new places: he’d jerk awake, looking around frantically, all the more panicked not to have the comfort of a familiar room. But even in the bedroom he had occupied in his parent’s attic for the last twenty-two years, he would still awake in terror, thinking for a moment that he saw around him dark red curtains and a silky blood-hued carpet. His mother, always a worrier, had taken him to the hospital as a child when it began. The doctor had referred him to a sleep specialist, who had diagnosed Wesley with a rare form of night terrors. The disorder was rare at his young age, and a kind nurse had asked him a list of questions about potential traumas. As far as Wesley could remember, there had been no such incident. He had just never slept well.
Well, that wasn’t exactly true: Wesley slept deeply, with no dreams, and if he could reach deep sleep he was often good to go until the morning. That was when the maroon furnishings would greet him once again. His mother had tried sleeping drugs, both of the vitamin and heavy-duty variety. She had tried hypnosis, scent therapy, and acupuncture, had even had an expensive reading taken of his brain waves during a nap. Night terrors was the best anyone could do, and the best treatment for those when it came to a child was therapy and time. Wesley had done therapy for ten years. This had mostly entailed more probing questions about inappropriate touching and family dynamics. The waking nightmares had never ceased.
For Wesley’s part, he had found it effective simply not to sleep.
Of course, he had to sleep a certain amount. Usually it was between the fuzzy hours of the early morning and the hot afternoons of the midwest summer. Three or four hours a night, that was enough for him. When he awoke, and wiped the hallucination from his eyes, Wesley would swing immediately out of bed, making for the coffee maker on the counter, or the computer on the desk. Unemployed and too nervous, for reasons that escaped even him, to attend college, he would sit at the computer or stand at the coffee machine until the sun went down and came back up. Sometimes Wesley would talk on the phone, on those increasingly rare occasions when an old school friend remembered he existed. At five-thirty every afternoon, he would go down two flights of stairs to eat dinner in relative silence with his parents. At twenty-two, this was an increasingly awkward affair. After that, Wesley would return to the computer.
It was for this comforting, well-worn seat before his desk that Wesley made for now, feet on the ground before the red curtains and carpet had gone from his sight. By high school he had learned to ignore them, to power through the brief, disorienting moment when he occupied a space ripped from a Stephen King novel. Having a routine helped, monotonous and perhaps gluttonous as that routine was. Not that it made waking up much easier.
Waking up was a particularly violent exercise on this particular day, as, when the drapes the color of a living organ shimmered and vanished, Wesley was in a totally unfamiliar place.
It wasn’t just that the strange, tan room that surrounded him was not his poster-adorned attic room; the windowless space was totally unknown to him. So unknown that Wesley did not, in fact, have any memory of going to sleep there the night before, or any night previous.
He shrieked, and recoiled back into bed.
After sitting for a while, a soft blanket that Wesley was now uncomfortably aware was not his own pulled up to his neck, he opened one eye. He had clenched them both shut when he first saw the ridiculous, sparsely decorated room. This was a futile technique from his youth, an early attempt to dispel the red room by closing his eyes and wishing it was not there. It worked for dreams, or at least had in the hazy childhood when he had still had the colorful and unnerving dreams of children. But the red room was not a dream, and so had always disappeared in its own time. The same was true of the claustrophobic space he now found himself in, occupying a single-mattress bed set in the middle of one wall. Opening and closing his eyes several times, wishing now for the familiar nightmare, Wesley despaired to find he was truly in an entirely new, potentially dangerous location.
Nothing about the room seemed outwardly dangerous. Certainly, the furnishings were strange. Aside from the bed he sat in, there was a low table, and a straight-backed wooden chair. As he had already noted with some discomfort, there were no windows, but a single glossy print was adhered to the wall beside the desk. It was a mock-up of a window, through which an idyllic farm scene was drawn in deep, inky colors. On the desk was a moleskine notebook, a number of sharpened pencils, and a picture frame. The frame was turned away from the bed (indeed, from the entire room, from the world) facing the wall. A small toiletry bag hung from a hook on what was, Wesley’s breathing accelerated to see, a heavy metal door. There was a flap at the bottom, like a doggy door, or else a slot to pass food to prisoners.
Neither comparison was comforting to Wesley.
There was only one other object in the room, and it commanded attention. When he was finally calm enough to do more than dart his eyes around wildly, strains of eerie music floated to Wesley’s ears. The tune was tinny and electronic, what Wesley might have called eight-bit, and a little sluggish, like a distant ice cream truck, or a music box winding down. The source of the music was clear: in the corner of the cramped space, not six feet from the bed, stood a yellow and green arcade cabinet. Dispensing for a moment with how out of place the relic was, it was also a strange specimen of a game. Wesley could see no name on the sides or the top; lights at the head of the cabinet’s frame simply said “FUN and GAMES”.
He got up to examine it further, horrifying predicament at the back of his mind for the moment. The floor was hardwood, and cold on his bare feet. Wesley’s feet had not been bare when he had gone to bed. As a matter of fact, he was wearing no clothes of his own: a simple silk nightshirt with matching pants was draped across his skinny chest. Neither was like anything he had ever owned. Reaching up to touch his earlobe, he found that the small silvery stud that his mother detested was gone, as well. Wesley now remembered going to sleep an indeterminable amount of time before, and there had been nothing unusual about it. In boxers and a ratty t-shirt, as the soft morning sun had begun to light up his walls, Wesley had rolled into bed and fallen asleep quickly. As he drifted off, he had heard his mother get up and begin to putter around downstairs.
That was Wesley’s last memory before awaking in this strange, creme-toned room.
Examining the arcade game now, he saw a simple joystick and three big buttons, each a different color and with soft, rounded edges. One button was labeled “jump”, another “action”, and the third, a dark red that reminded Wesley uncomfortably of his night terrors, read “attack”. The old-fashioned joystick, with a slick black grip at the end like some revolting lollipop, moved very smoothly, Wesley found, now that he was fiddling with it. His interest might have been irrational, seeing as he had found himself imprisoned, but Wesley had a particular affinity for this type of game. Long outdated before he was born, Wesley had still managed to find comfort in them, in imagining dim-lit arcades with that swirly eighties pattern they now put on gas station cups coloring the carpet. Those spaces no longer really existed, and Wesley doubted he would have sought them out if he had. Still, it was a pleasant fantasy.
Wiggling the joystick yielded no change, either to the music (which seemed to have gotten slightly louder) or the screen. The display was that soft, lit-up black that had been the province of disconnected televisions when Wesley was young. A small sprite, roughly rendered but seemingly a black man in a yellow hat, bounced up and down rhythmically below a blinking word: “START”. Wesley jabbed a few buttons experimentally. The attack button did not start the game, but made the yellow-clad man throw a shaky little punch. The jump button, similarly, made the man hop into the air. Wesley was amused to see him land on top of the flashing start sign. Moving the joystick, he found he could now move the man around the black screen, jumping on, off, and over the sole word that served as a platform. After a few seconds of this, he pressed the action button.
The man and the word “start” both disappeared.
In their place was a pixelated number one. Under the digit was the postscript 30s. Pressing the action button again replaced these with a white horizontal line, a few pixels thick. The man in the yellow hat appeared at its far left side, still bobbing up and down like he desperately needed the bathroom. Wesley waited for more objects to appear, but nothing did. The music had definitely gotten louder now, and every time Wesley thought he was on the verge of identifying it, it slipped away from him. Here it sounded like Camptown Races, there like a song his mother had sung to him as a baby, still yet like a theme from the old Pokémon games. A little irritated by it already, Kirk pushed the joystick to the right. The little sprite walked dutifully, unusually slowly and with an uneven gait. When he reached the right side of the line, the screen went black again.
Wesley jumped as a crudely rendered gold star popped to life on the screen, accompanied by heavily compressed audio of applause. Was that all there was? Again, perhaps he should have been addressing his surroundings instead of pondering this strange diversion, but what sort of game was that?
The number two, accompanied by 1m appeared on the screen. Wesley was about to press the action button again when he noticed that the janky music had stopped. Puzzled, but about at the end of the amount of time he could delude himself into not addressing his growing panic, Wesley stepped away from the cabinet. He walked over to the metal door and gave it a few heavy whacks, the sound echoing in the newly quiet room. He didn’t have much hope of a result, but it figured like the sort of thing one should try. Getting down on the ground and pushing up the metal flap, he was dismayed to find that the flap was so small and his vision so limited that using his hand to push it out of place totally obscured his view. He cautiously stuck his hand through, but felt only a continuation of the cool hardwood, and was too nervous to push it past the point of resistance.
Wesley had not even gotten to his feet before the eight-bit music started again, twice as loud as it had been at first. The noise was beginning to give Wesley a headache. He tried to ignore it, moving on from the door to examine the desk and the strange window-poster, but he found himself unable to focus on anything else. Returning to the cabinet, Wesley saw the display just as he had left it. When he pushed the action button, the music returned to its base volume. Glad for that if nothing else, Wesley was amused to see another incredibly simple level design. The white line still stood there, distinct in a black void, and the little black man in his garrish yellow suit wobbled at the left side, dutifully. The only change was a small white protrusion in the middle of the line, a small, spiky obstruction. Walking up to it and pushing the jump button, Wesley had the little man clear it with ease, and continued on to the right side of the line. Again came the star and the sudden applause, and though Wesley was ready for it this time, the noise was a little too loud not to be startling. The number three, and 90s, appeared once again. The music stopped.
Walking over to the desk now, Wesley flipped open the notebook to find at least the first few pages pristine and empty. The pencils were all sharpened to fine points, erasers bright pink and unused. He now saw a pencil sharpener that he had missed before, the small plastic kind. It was blue, and, as far as Wesley could see, could not be opened. He was mystified to see there were already pencil shavings inside. He moved now to the poster, arguably the second strangest object in the room. It was a surprisingly good facsimile of a window, complete with wood graining and simulated glare on the window panes. Wesley found himself peering through it, as if he could get a better view or a different angle, and felt a little silly. The main details of the pastoral were some grazing cows outside a hut, the latter too far away to be seen in detail.
Wesley nearly jumped out of his skin when the music began once again, this time louder than it had any right to be. His temples were pounding. Hurrying over to the machine and mashing the action button, if only to reduce the music to playing volume, he was greeted by the white line, the little yellow-clad man, and two spiky obstacles between him and the far right side. In different circumstances, Wesley might have been amused, wondered if there was some meta-commentary about games unfolding here, but he was beginning to feel claustrophobic. Though he had no idea what lay outside the room, Wesley had the sense that he was deep underground, that there were thousands and thousands of tons of stone bearing down on him.
Finding it hard to breathe, his chest constricting in that familiar way, Wesley was suddenly panicked to find he lacked his inhaler. It wasn’t in the pockets of the thin pajamas, that was certain, and it was not on the table. Senselessly completing the level before he did anything else, running over to the toiletry bag on the door in a desperate Hail Mary as the distorted applause played, Wesley ripped the bag off the hook. Wheezing and sputtering, he unzipped the little black bag, and was incredibly relieved, and just a little less unnerved, to find a pristine white inhaler in one of the mesh pockets. There was also a small travel toothbrush, a packet of what looked like powdered toothpaste, a bottle of powdered shampoo, and a stick of deodorant. A few more items were nestled in the inner pockets.
The inhaler was not his inhaler, but it was the right dosage, and he sucked on it eagerly. Wesley’s lungs opened quickly, and he leaned against the heavy metal door, greedily gulping down air. When the applause subsided and silence fell in the room again, an idea made itself known to Wesley’s oxygen-deprived brain.
He began to count.
As he counted, he tried to think of anyone who would want to hurt him, any reason to lock someone in a windowless room besides blind cruelty. There was an inhaler there; it had to be someone who knew him well. That shortened the list dramatically, and made Wesley’s skin crawl. Could it be his parents, trying to motivate him in some ghoulish last ditch effort? One of those discipline camps, maybe? The kinds out in the desert where they came in the night to take you and teach you to be grateful and helpful and obedient. Wesley knew a few kids who had spent summers in these juvenile camps, and came back totally different beasts. But he had to kick himself, remind himself he had been an adult for quite some time. His parents could not waive his rights anymore, and this seemed beyond either of their abilities. Besides, they loved him, they were just frustrated right now. He didn’t blame them.
Kidnapping, then? Human trafficking, or organs? Wesley smoked a fair amount of pot, and had taken ecstasy on occasion, but he owed no one money, and had no connections. As rough as some parts of town might be, Ohio didn’t seem a likely place for a cartel kidnapping. And besides, this was too bizarre, too psychological, too…
Too tailored.
Eighty-eight Mississippi, eighty-nine Mississippi, ninety Mississ-
Before he had finished, the music returned, so loud now that Wesley could feel it vibrating his ear drums.
Peering up at the display, he saw the level screen again. Number five, 2m.
Two minutes.
Wesley began to laugh.
He laughed and laughed and laughed, sitting against the heavy metal door. He did not bother to knock on it anymore, or to scream, or bang on the walls. If anyone was nearby, they would hear the music. For all Wesley knew, he was the only person left in the whole world.
Wesley laughed and laughed, and eventually had another coughing fit. When that subsided, he sat back down on the floor, and gazed off into space. After a few hours, the music still blaring, his ears numb, he began to laugh again, and found he could not hear himself. An hour after that, the lights shut off.
The music did not.
tbc.