“Please help me grieve and remember you,
Until I find my own time is through,
Do not let me hold back any tears or pain,
I hope that we see each other once again.”
I don’t have long.
They will find me.
Or worse.
But I hold no fear.
My emotions are absent.
Hello. My name is Victor Yeomans. I am 46, blond hair, blue eyes and from a small town with a population of 5, 000.
Over my lifetime, I have experienced loss, as most people have, and the feeling that your very core is being ripped apart by the experience that is…
Grief.
The word in no way does it justice.
It does not make you picture the pure emptiness that one goes through.
I’m here to warn you.
There are no shortcuts to grieving. Though you may seek them out while in it’s clutches and I cannot blame you. I did the same.
If you’re lucky, or unlucky, you may receive a phone call to invite you to The Crying Rooms. You will, more than likely based on our research, accept.
Do not be fooled by the comforting tone on the other end of the line. They have been watching you and have waited until you are deep in the throes of grief, at your most vulnerable state of mind, to make contact. This system is worldwide, they have bases everywhere, but it started here.
There are six stages; introduction, counselling, trial, high, need/desire & special guest.
After agreeing, one day you will wake up there. For a microsecond, you will wonder how you got there as you can’t remember, but then a warm feeling will wash over you and you won’t question it again.
You are first greeted by a counsellor, who will inform you to not talk to anyone else in the next room.
You are then walked into one of the “quiz” rooms. These rooms are identical in design and resemble massive educational exam halls, just as you’d imagine. Desks evenly spaced out as far as the eye can see. The quiz itself is basic, it’s mainly a front.
They don’t care about your answers all that much.
After doing your quiz, you will be asked single or group. This is the type of therapy you will experience. It starts vanilla, just talking. They have dirty little secrets to make sure that every time you visit, you will leave feeling a little better about whatever brought you here, in whatever way they can.
There is a narrow hallway with small rooms with shut doors either side. Hundreds.
These sessions are free for the first two weeks and there’s no limit to how often you come. But please, do not come back after those weeks. PLEASE do not recommend coming here to others, though I realise sometimes you won’t be able to stop yourself.
Just before your free trial is up, they will decrease whichever way they are making you feel better; gas with a special mixture and toxicity, secret injections, music, brainwashing - up to literal gaslighting. I could go on.
It gets more intense the more you come back and, in the end, you won’t care about the method, as long as you feel happy when you leave. Happy, but not able to remember anything about your experience.
It’s like a drug. Obviously, people have their own vices they use to escape depression, or the perceived monotonous drone of their life. This is the same, but more concentrated, more scheming. Darker. Worse.
I’ve only just come to tell you as I didn’t take the pill form of a NDA, that all employees have to take when they leave for the day. It makes you keep the memory of your job skills but not what you saw that shift. The pills we take make us leave with job satisfaction.
I didn’t take one pill and now I remember it all. It horrifies me.
Manipulating people that have prolonged pain that our bullshit system wouldn’t, or couldn’t, help. People with no hope left.
For those we called “deep in need”, code for best sacrifices, they went to special guest rooms.
They never came out.
They were chosen as they were the ones that pretty much lived there. They couldn’t stand to be away from our teat. They didn’t care when they entered their rooms, they just needed more. Needed to be happy.
That became my job. Selection, seduce and sacrifice.
I brainwashed hundreds, if not thousands, of people.
“Just one more session for your pain to go.”
I was one step up from a counsellor and one down from the “scientists” who were the ones who tended to our “special guests”, also called “life members” and who maintained the system as their bosses saw fit.
I only witnessed it once. There was a technical error so I got told to escort a guest to their room and get them started. The woman was in her 40’s. Nicola Roberts. She had lost everything when a driver hit a hole in a road, that was meant to have been repaired, and crashed into her house. The wooden house went up in flames before the car exploded due to leaking fuel catching alight.
It was her twin’s seventh birthday and they were having a party. Her husband, sister, two sets of children’s parents, ten 6/7 year olds, her four month old baby and two dogs were in the house at the time.
She had nipped out to get the surprise present, two hamsters, from her friend’s house. Pulling in the driveway, she told us that she could hear the hellish screaming, apparently they could not exit the building.
None survived.
Nicola got third degree burns trying to break a reinforced window and the following ensuing chaos. The problem being that they had had a robbery next door, so paranoia had set in. They had gotten bars installed that could be turned sideways into curtains if you had the key. Very clever, but in this situation the bars had not been turned. They were scalding hot, so once through the window, Nicola could only watch the hell melt her family and friends.
She said goodbyes and cried along with the victims, reaching desperately until the firefighters pulled her away. The skin on her forearms were stuck and melted to the bars.
You better believe the company jumped right on her while she was recovering in the hospital. She was experiencing suicidal thoughts combined with survivor’s guilt. Her prominent scars being a constant reminder.
You can see why she would be perfect for their motives.
I led her to her room. She was smiling, looking around but not really with any purpose.
I was not sure what this entailed but followed orders and her into the room. I had been given a file and before I opened it, I looked around.
This room was clinical, a contradiction to the comforting decor of the rest of the building.
Nicola was in a hospital gown, a skeletal shell of what she was. No shoes, socks or anything else.
They had shaved her head bald at some point. She was slightly drooling and using her IV stand to lean against. It is an image that sickens and disgusts me to think of.
They had emptied the hallway so that no-one could see Nicola in this state.
Nicola, too high to know what was happening, smiled constantly with bloodshot and engorged eyes, barely able to stand up. She staggered as she walked, slightly dragging her left foot.
The room was very small, narrow and not built for comfort. It was covered in sterile, white tiles all around the room. The door had no window and was a thick steel with a keycard entry.
I closed the door behind me and tried to hide my horror at the only piece of furniture in the room, which Nicola was happily staggering up to.
It was a basic steel chair, the arms were set high so that your arms would be level with your shoulders.
In place of cushions on all surfaces of the chair were nails. Actual…nails. Around six inch. The back, legs, arms and base covered in them.
What the fuck?
Swallowing some vomit, hiding my emotions, I opened the file. It was a basic brown paper file and inside there were two pieces of A4 paper. One told of Nicola’s specifications, not her personality, not her quiz, just her age and basic proportions along with two brief sentences on why she was here.
The other paper merely stated;
FINAL STAGE
DO AS INSTRUCTED
SHUT THE DOOR
Fuck, I thought, my pretence is up.
But, as it turned out, I didn’t need to know.
Because Nicola did.
I put the file down and followed her to the chair. She happily sat down and put her arms up, her bones creaking slightly as she turned her palms to the ceiling. The smile was still fixed on her face, the drool dripping, her pupils incredibly enlarged.
The nails dug into her bare flesh but she didn’t seem to care or notice. She spoke, her pale lips barely moving,
“Ahhh, acupuncture.”
This was when a metallic scraping reverberated around the room, I almost had to cover my ears.
A white helmet with wires and four prongs slid out and clamped itself around her head.
Metal straps emerged from the chair around Nicola’s neck, arms, wrists, ankles, torso and legs.
These straps tightened around her limbs and blood started to drip onto the floor. The nails did not bend as they impaled her body, the straps only stopped moving when the nails were fully inside of her.
This was when I noticed tears falling from her eyes before she spoke once more,
“After this will I see my family again?”
There was a microsecond of a flash of recognition in her eyes and her smile dropped before returning. The recognition never returned.
The helmet’s prongs dug into her head and then Nicola’s pupils seemed to turn a dull green colour. I saw no more life in them.
The smell that accompanied the sight was almost as nauseating.
I stood there for a few minutes before I walked out of the room, shutting the door behind me.
I casually walked to the bathroom, vomited until blood came up and did not eat for the rest of the day.
When I came out, I was told that I had done well by someone I had never seen before or again.
I kept telling myself that she was far too gone to help, anyway. Nicola was the one who wrote that poem from the beginning of this post. I felt it fitting. I have since learnt that they do not die. They are not allowed to.
I swallowed my pill in haste that day and returned to my normal job after that. I’m guessing that whoever made the error didn’t want to bring light to their mistake.
I was one of the first to be hooked on this system, before the special guest program. They hired me because they believed I was so compliant and would do anything for that sweet rush. They weren’t wrong. I won’t dwell on what brought me here.
Looking back, I may have been a Guinea pig to test what works. Maybe it worked too well for me.
Not long after, they invented the new system.
My whistle-blowing rebellion has been triggered by a new discovery during my shift.
My last secret to share…I caught a glimpse of a new type of quiz. I only saw the title, but I fear they are expanding.
“The Angry Rooms.”
My theory is that these will be used for people to hurt, or worse, others. In a controlled manner. Perhaps our “primed” special guests will be cannon fodder.
If they aren’t already.
After all, there are a limited number of guest rooms.
Please remember, it does get better. Think of the most famous person you can. Perhaps you idolise them. They, too, have experienced some form of deep sadness.
I realise by posting this I am confirming my fate. I am unsure on which form it will take. If you believe me or not is irrelevant to them.
But I hope this helps at least one person.
I’ll answer any questions you have until they come for me.
Time is ticking.