Chapter 4

I wiped my eyes with my sleeve, which was looking pretty grubby right now, and stood up. God, I needed a bath, shower, something. I felt disgusting. I knew I looked disgusting. I could feel the grease in my hair from sweat, and I could see the bloodstains on my dress. My feet were healed, but they looked pretty nasty too. My nails looked bitten down to the cuticle, although I didn’t remember biting them. I’d never bitten my nails before. Blood speckled my hands, making me cringe. If I was inside my own mind, my mind needed cleaning up. I gave my doll one last pat on the head before I made my way to the next door, marked ‘Paranoia’. I knew this one was going to be something I could relate to, because right about now I knew something was watching me. I just didn’t have a clue as to what or whom was doing so. My slow steps toward the door, which was a good few feet in front of me, did well to relax me little by little. The more time I took getting to it, the more I could compose myself enough to face the challenge inside. When I saw the door starting to fade, I panicked. What on earth?
I started sprinting, screaming “Wait!” at the doorway as if it could hear me. The more I ran, the farther it seemed to be! When I thought I couldn’t run anymore, I noticed I was facing the door and it had stopped trying to fade from existence. I panted, my lungs and throat burning from the effort, and I turned the knob to force myself inside.
My senses told me that I was back home, and my eyes were lying to me. I felt the door slam and warp behind me, and I was alone again. I freaking hated being alone. When I looked around, I was facing my bedroom. My bedroom. No one else’s, no monsters, just me and my collection of mutilated toys. I laughed, a strange and evil sound that I’d never heard before. It sounded like something out of a psychotic killer’s horror movie. It made me truly wonder what I was turning into.
When I recovered from my devious laughter, I took a closer look around. I walked toward my dresser, putting on fresh clothes. I felt so much better. The next thing I sought were a pair of shoes, which I found in the closet. A pair of ballet slippers, black and stretchy but tied, were in the far right corner. I slipped them on and tied them to my ankles, knowing it would be a lot easier to walk around in some places now. It wouldn’t work as an effective barrier against acid bathrooms or nails in the floor, but most other terrain it would have to do. I couldn’t wear tennis shoes or boots because they would slow me down when I needed to run, and the dress had been slowing me down enough. I now wore a pair of stretchy pants and a ragged t-shirt, complete with leather gloves and a light jacket. I went over to my night-side table and picked up a scrunchie, tying back my hair into a pony tail. Now my hair was out of my face, I was in lighter clothes and I had shoes on. I just prayed all of this wasn’t a dream, and that I could actually wear this in the other realms. I looked in the mirror, a little more proud of how I looked. The jacket I wore was my favorite one, and I’d always worn it even when I was in the White Room. I was getting uneasy though, even with my favorite jacket on. This was all too easy, and where was the challenge? I ran over to my bedroom door and locked it, nailing boards from the bed onto the wall against it. This realm was familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on whether I’d been here before or not. Probably not, I figured, since I didn’t even know I was paranoid until now. I could feel my heartbeat picking up, and my breathing was becoming shallow. I was freaking out, but I didn’t know why. I just knew, I could feel something was going to pop up out of nowhere. I wrapped my arms around myself in a sort-of-comforting hug and watched the closet door, then watched the window. I dug in my bag and retrieved a real gun this time, which made me grin bigger than a Cheshire cat could. I loaded it with the ammunition I retrieved, which was a grand total of five bullets. I was a terrible shot, I knew, but this was all I had. I would have to make it count.
Then I heard the footsteps again.
I knew it! I was screaming inside as I cocked the pistol, taking aim at the door to my closet. As the footsteps grew closer, I could feel the beads of sweat on my forehead start to go down my face. I clenched my teeth and narrowed my eyes. That son of a street woman was going to feel my bullet, whether he was ready for it or not. I backed into the door that I’d barred, probably a bad idea because as soon as I did, I felt the sharp sting of something breaking the skin in my neck. I winced and tried to move forward, but something was holding me against the door. I kicked, screamed and threw punches, all to no avail. When the invisible force decided to let me go, I fell to my knees on the floor. I felt groggy and I couldn’t see; it was like clouds had gone over my eyes. Booty juice, I thought to myself as I remembered the appropriately named paralyzing vaccine that the doctors used to give to unruly patients at the White Room. I knew the effects because I held the Room record for ‘most booty juice administered in a week’.
I hated that week, kind of like I hated today.
When I turned around to face the door, he was standing there. The now-bloody, very angry, and still-smiling doctor that I hated so very much to see. I aimed my gun at his face as well as I could, but he grabbed my arm and twisted so hard that I dropped it. The force of the gun hitting the floor must have set off the trigger, because it blew a bullet into my very beautifully painted side of the wall that I liked to draw on when I got bored. He seemed sickly calm, almost maniacal in the way he spoke to me, and all I could do was growl at him in rage and spit profanities that I’ll dare not repeat…mainly because I can’t remember them. I couldn’t remember or make out what he was saying, either, but I could feel the world swaying underneath me. I was going to pass out. Crap, I was going to pass out.
Not this time, Dr. Needle-Happy.
I grabbed the syringe he’d dropped on the floor after he’d administered the terrible medication through my veins and stabbed it into his leg, breaking off the needle inside of his muscle. He yelled out in pain and called me a profanity, slapping my face so hard I fell backward. I grabbed my gun and staggered to my feet, getting dangerously close to not being able to function at all. I hope you can hear me, I thought to my doll quietly as I took aim, because I need you right now! I fired one round, which managed to hit him in the other leg right in the kneecap. Another sound came from him, a scream, and he doubled over onto his side. I heard something rip behind me, and my first thought was that the doll’s stitches were coming apart. When I looked behind me to check, the doll was no longer on my back, but standing on its own with a butcher knife in its hand.
Oh, my.
“Follow me!” she said to me, extending her free hand. I took it, having to bend over because of her height, and she led me to the closet. I remembered that my closet was extended and shared space with the next closet, opening up to the next room. I was suddenly thanking my mom for making me share closet space with my big brother. We ran for what seemed like hours, the closet never seeming to end until my doll took a sharp left turn, jerking me along. We went through a void-like doorway, and before I knew it I was in my big brother’s room. His metal band posters and all-black sheets didn’t seem as scary as they used to be. My doll became limp and lifeless, and I picked her up to kiss her head. “Thank you,” I whispered before putting her in my bag, reassuring myself that she wouldn’t get lost that way. She was going to be my greatest treasure once I got out of here.
I heard whispers through pretty much every nook and crack in the room, from the window to under the bed. Some were in his voice, like he was whispering lyrics to one of his ear-splitting songs, and some were in my sister’s voice telling him to turn down the music, ask him where I was and such things. What sort of spooked me though was there was no one in the room but me. I knew that the doctor was in the other room, and I also knew that he was dangerously close to getting what he wanted. He’d cornered me in that room, and the sheer thought that he could do it again just as easy terrified me. I had been too careless, and under no circumstance could I let it happen again.
I realized I’d forgotten my gun and cursed under my breath. I knew I couldn’t go back in there, but I needed that gun. It seemed like the only hope I had to defeating anything here. Then again, I still had the acid bubble gun and the knife-sword-thing. I shrugged, figuring I could use those instead of the pistol I so desperately wanted to hold again. It gave me a weird sense of power, merely because I’d never seen or held one before. What also confused me was the fact that even though I’d never seen or held one, I knew how to load and fire it. TV shows? That was a possibility. Adults will tell you time and time again that you don’t learn anything from watching TV, but just remember that they are so very wrong. I learned how to use a knife by watching cooking shows when I was a kid. Those same shows were the very reason I liked knives so much back then, and probably the reason I ended up destroying things via knife frenzy. When I managed to stop thinking about knives, I returned my thoughts to the slow but steady sound of footsteps approaching. Holy crap, not again. I tried to open my brother’s door to the hall, but it would not budge. Then I remembered I’d nailed it shut like the last one. Not only that, but there was absolutely no hope of getting out through the closet like I did. Holy crap indeed. My heart hammered seemingly through my chest as I fumbled with the lock on the window, only to remember that our mother glued all the windows shut to keep us from opening them and letting dirt into our rooms when it was very windy outside. I’d have to break the glass if I really wanted out that badly, because there were no other doors and no other ways out. I could hide under the bed, but that was usually the first place an attacker would look next to the closet. I could throw a chair at him, but he could probably break it with one punch! I was stumped and with the approaching footsteps getting louder, I knew I would either have to kill or be killed in the end.
Then again, I had a freaky feeling he wouldn’t, and couldn’t, die that easily.
A sick feeling knotted in my stomach as I clenched a fist, then ran to my brother’s desk. The chair was wooden, and just light enough I could pick it up. I was tall for my age, which helped a lot because otherwise that chair would have been bigger than me. I tossed it as hard as I could at the window and to my twisted delight, shards of glass exploded onto the floor. I picked up as many as I could, knocking out more glass with my fist as I tried to make a bigger hole, and just as I heard the closet door open I started throwing glass in that direction. Screams of pain and anger rewarded me with the knowledge that I was an excellent aim with the shards. I clambered out of the window, feeling bits of glass scratch against my back and pierce the skin, and dropped once more into oblivion.
Did I mention that I hated falling into a big black hole that never seems to end? Well, it might be useful information later on, because here I was falling down, down, down into a void that seemed to spiral. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen. Not even the other void I fell down in the Anger Realm came close! It was both awesome and sickening at the same time. I saw so many things pass by me -from newspapers to furniture- that I thought I was the living version of Alice. A copy of our local newspaper was just about to pass by my ear when I grabbed it, reading the headline. It was from 1987, when my mom was 20 or so. The headline was smudged but the last few words were clear enough that I could read them, and the paper itself looked like it had been thrown into a fireplace. The rest of it was black except for part of a picture on the front page underneath the ruined headline. It showed Mom and Dad when they were younger, and it looked like they were together. When I got to reading the headline, at least the part of it I could understand, I was shocked into a state of pretty much just falling there holding the paper. The words ‘Asylum Inmates Escape!’ were the only things that weren’t so smudged you couldn’t read them, and the only words I needed to see. ‘Inmates’ was a bad word, like friends in a prison cell. Was an asylum some sort of jail? I looked closer at the picture again, this time at the background of the room. The small, 70’s style TV on the nightstand table, and the metal bed with blank walls was all I needed to see to confirm my worst nightmare.
My mom and dad had been in the White Room, too. At least, the white room I remembered from the Fear Realm.
My feet finally hit the ground unexpectedly and I crashed to the floor below. I hadn’t been paying attention since I read the newspaper, and I’m kind of glad I wasn’t. When I looked up, I saw the remains of awful twisted bodies and incomprehensible creatures squirming and writhing in midair. I half hoped they wouldn’t come down, but at the same time I wanted to kill something. I was infuriated…no. I was enraged. Why hadn’t they told me what an asylum was? Why didn’t they explain that the White Room was a bad place? More importantly, why did they let the doctors put me there?
Was it possible that they wanted me there? Did they want me to be like them?
I highly doubted it, but still the possibility remained.
I got up onto my feet and felt for my doll and the bag, which were both still on me to my surprise, and started walking down a garden-like pathway. Before long, I hit a dead end and had to retrace my steps. I had figured the reason they called it the Maze Dimension was because there was at least one maze in one of the realms, but lately it seemed like the entire thing was a maze because I was always trying to find the right way out. I figured since this was a real maze, it would be a heck of a lot easier to get out of. I felt around in my bag for a flashlight, digging it out and flicking it on so I could get a better idea of what was in front of me. A giant black widow’s jaws were right in front of my face, making me scream in terror and start running. I hit another dead end as the spider closed in, and I frantically dug in my bag again for some kind of insecticide. I found the acid bubble gun and fired at its jaws and belly, hearing it snarl and watching it writhe in pain, all the while bringing me sadistic pleasure. I loved squishing spiders, but I also hated spiders. I was probably known best for my arachnophobia, a big word that actually makes sense to me being as how it means the fear of spiders.
As soon as I recovered from the attack of the giant arachnid I made my way to the other side of the maze wall, finding what I was looking for which was a way into another area. I’d tried crawling through the wall at some point in time, I really don’t remember when, and had been rewarded with sharp thorns that almost dug in my skin so deeply I couldn’t remove them. As I turned the corner and entered the next area of the maze, I could just barely see a blue light gleaming in the distance. If I made it through, I could find out what it was. My curiosity was killing me at this point, quite literally, but I still went with my idea to find out what it was. As I walked there had to have been at least a thousand giant cobwebs that I passed by and had to burn down with the acid gun, making me more confident that I could get past all of this without any major problems. I weaved and wandered my way past every curve and corner, occasionally hitting a dead end and having to retrace, until I was facing the opening to the center of the maze. What had been glowing was a chest, chained up and enchanted, with at least a dozen sleeping giant spiders surrounding it.
I was screwed if they woke up.
One, I had to get rid of the spiders without totally losing my mind. Then again, I may have already lost my mind by that point. Two, I had to unchain that chest. Three, I didn’t have a clue how I was going to do all of this! I mean, come on! I hate spiders, so now I have to fight them? That had to be the worst irony I’d ever heard of. I crouched down and was just about to dig in my bag again for the acid gun when I found a staff laying at my feet. Knobby, twisted wood that was warped into a foot-long walking stick with a clear ball at the end looked like a pretty good whacking apparatus, so I picked it up. To my delight it wasn’t that heavy, and to further spark my curiosity the ball started to glow a fiery reddish orange. I loved the color because it was so intriguing, but I’m pretty darn sure that was what bothered the spiders. I heard hissing and the gentle thud of their giant legs hitting the ground while they tried to get on all eight, ready to bite, poison and possibly devour whatever had awoken them. Oh jeez, oh jeez, oh jeez, I kept thinking to myself in slight instant panic as I kept looking from them to the staff I now held. It started glowing more by the minute and also began to float, which I both thought was cool and creepy at the same time. When it fired off an extremely long, extremely bright stream of light at one of the spiders, disintegrating it, I knew that this was going to be a very useful weapon. I grabbed hold of it, grinning like a maniac as I kept firing off streams of burning light at the spiders. “COME AND GET IT!” I screamed, laughing as I fired off at the last two unfortunate arachnids, now having killed every enemy in my path. I made my way to the chest, remembering the small shiny thing I’d pulled out of the skull of the creature that had taken over Mrs. Haley. I pulled it out of my bag to examine it, relieved that it was in fact a key. Maybe not the Key itself, but a key nonetheless, and I could use it. I slid the end into the lock on the chest and twisted, hearing a click and watched as the lid popped open. I smiled, overjoyed that the key had fit, and looked inside of the mysteriously glowing object inside…only to nearly barf my lungs out.
When a person says a chest usually means treasure, let me be the first to say that they are very much mistaken. Inside this particular shiny chest was various body parts, all still moving, blinking and writhing. It was like they’d just been removed! Yuck! I was regretting having opened it when I noticed something at the bottom of the pile. I grimaced, not really wanting to dig through someone else’s body parts just for a coin or something. Still, curiosity kills the cat as they say, and I was soon digging through the various tongues, eyeballs and severed heads. I felt around the bottom, my eyes closed and my nose turned upward to avoid the awful smell, and at first I didn’t feel anything. I felt a little closer to the corner, and there it was. I grabbed hold of whatever it was and yanked, pulling it completely out of someone’s fingerless hand. I slammed the chest shut and shuddered in order to help pull myself together and finally looked at the item I held. It was a small piece of a heart, a metal key heart to be exact. I remembered that the key to the first door, the door the Tree-it had led me to, was shaped like a broken heart and the broken piece was missing. Was this the Key? I didn’t figure it was, but still…it looked so familiar I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that I’d found something important. I started walking again until I found the end of the maze, the very end, and the door that was wedged inside of the hedge.
I twisted the doorknob and entered the Hall again, but this time I didn’t go into the very next door. I walked quite a ways for a while, just examining each door. I saw words that I couldn’t pronounce but seemed familiar, and I saw various creatures passing through from door to door. The Hall started to look more like a hallway now, the walls were firm and a beautiful red wallpaper covered them. The floor was wooden, the gentle light from the elegant wall lanterns making the hallway have a sort of hazy glow. It was beautiful down here. I smiled to myself, taking a short stop for a moment to rest and recoup from all of the action of the past few hours…or days. I had no way of knowing how long I was gone because there was almost no sense of time here, but that also meant I could stay here as long as I wanted.
I really enjoyed that thought, but I think it was then that I started missing my family again. I felt myself becoming partial to this world, these realms…but at the same time, I knew I had a life outside of the Maze Dimension. I felt bad for leaving my brother and sister behind because I knew they couldn’t follow me in. They probably wouldn’t want to, either…well, my big brother might. He’s into this creepy stuff, although I personally think he would have received a lot more than he bargained for. I drifted to a state of calm, the hazy, dim glow of the lights above me relaxing and just dim enough that I could fall asleep for just a little while. I adjusted the bag and my doll, hugging her close to me to make sure she couldn’t be taken away, and I drifted off into a void state of sleep. I couldn’t dream, for some reason, but I probably figured if I could that I would dream of this place.