Robert fell down, and down, and down, until ‘down’ was no more. When movement degraded to the verge of illusion, direction became meaningless.

  In a state of half-anesthesia, Robert watched the world crack and bend. Countless pieces and versions of the universe passed him by. Once, a beautiful sky lit with dazzling stars and vibrant planets—another, a broken emptiness, ravaged by cosmic storms of godly might.

  And more and more of these scenes that he wasn’t ever meant to perceive—it was the best and the worst a human could ever see.

  And Robert wanted to see it all.

  He craved to fully open his senses. He wanted to consciously appreciate the grandeur, the magnificence of the world in its truest entirety.

  …yet he could not.

  No matter how much he screamed. No matter how hard he raged inside his mind—his body refused to obey. His eyes were unmoving. His muscles were loose like cut wires. His voice was trapped inside him. And most scary of all, even his mind didn’t fully work, full of gaps and unknowns.

  There was something. Maybe a higher power, or even just a deep, primal instinct that prevented his brain from dwelling on these forbidden glimpses of the world. He didn’t remember.

  The last clear thing in his memories was that confession. Rob had invited that cute girl to a nice restaurant. They had a delicious dinner, a lovely conversation, a sweet dessert, another lovely conversation, and then Rob had nothing more to continue delaying. So he just blurted out what he came to say, and waited.

  …Then, he was mercilessly rejected.

  Then, he wished for the ground to open up and swallow him, as she abruptly ran away, laughing.

  For his fortune or maybe lack of, the gods were listening and his wish came true. One moment Rob was sitting in his chair, hurt and indignant by the unkind rejection, another he was falling through emptiness. eating and laughing people blurred like thick cotton and heavy glass building between him and them. Chairs, tables and even the dishes with or without food started twisting and coiling, then the world shattered.

  Thankfully, this torturous journey wasn’t endless, and a second or maybe an eternity later—no way to know—Rob had arrived at the final destination.

  How did he know?

  Well… first, the otherworldly sceneries had completely come to an abrupt end, instantly replaced with a vast expanse of white. Second, Rob finally lost the sense of directionlessness and sensed a celestial body getting hold of him and violently pulling his small mass toward it.

  And then…

  He and the world switched roles. The universe, which had been spinning at impossible speed, suddenly froze. And his immobile body which had appeared frozen, accelerated, reaching a velocity that should have atomized him in moments. Soon, however, his brain could no longer process the inhuman speed, and he blacked out.

  When awareness came back, it didn’t come alone. A headache no one had ever experienced—and lived to tell the tale—raged inside his head. Every thought of opening his eyes or making the slightest action was rudely rejected with a sharp throb of pain.

  His brain decided it wasn’t time to work yet, Rob was forced back into unconsciousness. When he finally awoke, he still felt as if he’d just been run over by a truck. This time, however, things were less devastating, and he found himself gradually regaining control.

  [35]

  …

  First, his ears popped. Then, he slowly unsealed his blurry eyes. A plain white room greeted him, with a small circle in the corner, counting down.

  [31]

  …

  As he shifted his neck, trying to get more features of this eerie place, Rob noticed the little circle shifting with him.

  Having a crazy unbelievable hunch, Rob lifted his right hand, hearing a clang as something he hadn’t realized he was holding fell to the ground.

  Ignoring that for now, he put his hand in front of his eyes, exactly in the way of the small circle, only to still find it counting down, as if his hand wasn’t there at all.

  [29]

  …

  [27]

  “Goddammit! I have a freaking timer in my head,” Rob rasped with a dry throat, his words punctuated with a few dry coughs.

  Lowering his hand, he blinked a few times, fascinated. He wondered with silly images how this timer had gotten into his head. Then his eyes widened in panic.

  Rob jumped to his feet, nearly falling on his face when his legs almost gave out.

  He was a fool. Shouldn’t he try to figure out how he’d gotten here? And, more importantly… how to get out?

  It didn’t matter if there was a timer in his head. What mattered was what would happen when it reached zero.

  “Is it a bomb?” Rob couldn’t help but voice the obvious.

  Of course, he got no answer, except for the little stream of horrible images created by his imaginative mind.

  His head exploding outwards like a red flower, or the whole room turning into an inferno of hell in an instant, completely removing him from existence, not even his ash remaining afterward.

  “maybe… it’s a fight to the death?”

  Rob ran in circles; looking up, he pictured a hatch opening in the ceiling, a ghostly creature dropping down to feast on his flesh and crunch on his bones.

  “ you moron. What nonsense,” Rob scolded himself. “It is just some silly prank. An escape room of sorts, or something stupid like that.”

  Rob reasoned and rationalized the situation in his mind. Yet he had spun around, examining the walls for clues, shuddering as he imagined them closing in to crush him into a bloody pulp.

  “Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god,” Rob shouted in horror, “the fucking walls are moving.”

  He had to go and say it.

  “Damn me and my noisy little mouth,” Rob said through gritted teeth. Then his head snapped up to the ceiling, undisguised anger flashing in his eyes.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “You, there,” he shouted to what he hoped to be a hidden camera. “this is no fun, man. I do

  ‘not’

  Consent to any of this.

  [15]

  The walls kept coming, and the timer kept ticking.

  And Rob knew he better do something.

  “I swear, if one of you little losers was behind this, the next thing you would be eating isn’t just the grass ,” screaming half-curses, half-nonsense, Rob panicked, searching for a way out. Because, as it turned out, a one-dimensional image of Rob smeared across the white walls wasn’t that far-fetched after all.

  He knocked on the floor, “no lower exit, ---wait what’s that?”

  Rob picked up a... fork. “So that’s what fell from my hand,” he realized, pocketing it and a knife he hadn’t noticed in his other hand before. He ran from side to side, searching for a hidden passage or any hint of a door, but found nothing.

  Thankfully, the evil timer didn’t seem to be counting down seconds, because if it was, it would be already over. Stopping in the center of the shrinking room, Rob realized that what he was doing is just a waste of the few precious moments he had. Knowing that he just needed to think, he tried to look for any clues.

  He once again eyed the colorless chamber, noticing first the increased momentum of the closing walls.

  [13]

  “It ought to be a way. It had to be a way.”

  He just had to find it, and find it fast. Because while the remaining time was likely more than ten seconds, it definitely wouldn’t be more than a few minutes.

  “There!” Rob exclaimed, dashing toward a suspiciously unmoving section of wall. It was as wide as two people and completely still, while the rest of the walls closed in like a half-circle. And there, clear as day, were...

  Grips.

  [12]

  For what? Climbing of course.

  Internally envisioning a wiser Rob slapping around the stupid, brainless, sightless version of himself for not noticing such an obvious mark sooner, Rob reached the top in no time. With a lean, fit body, Rob was very athletic. He had almost been a professional football player after all.

  “I swear I will sue the hell out of whoever put me to this madness.”

  [11]

  Meanwhile, the doom timer mercilessly and continuously ate the numbers like a hungry wolf, eager to declare the miserable end of poor squishy Rob.

  “Now what?”

  Rob didn’t have time to finish the question, for as soon as his head touched the ceiling, an exit for him to emerge opened immediately.

  “That easy?” he couldn’t believe it. He’d imagined being stuck in front of an unsolvable puzzle until the bitter end.

  Shaking his head, he quickly flooded his mind with black ink, decisively and brutally murdering the hateful image in its infancy, fearing that even one more second of thought would bring it to life.

  [10]

  So, void of thought and hoping for the best, he pushed his body upwards, fully leaving the gloomy grave-like room. Taking a greedy breath of the fresh air, he felt like he had been drowning in mud. A tremendously heavy … feeling, presence, he didn’t know, ...released him, and Rob felt as light as a feather.

  And then he heard the terrified screams.

  He wasn’t ready for the assault of sensory overload that slammed into his empty mind on the other side: The sound of crying children mixed with the sound of wailing adults, the stench of fear seeping into the air like the smell of rotten meat, and the most common of all, the shouts of help and despair, each sound and smell fusing into a single, suffocating wave of chaos and confusion....

  [9]

  And the timer hadn’t stopped yet, hinting that the room wasn’t what it was counting down for... or at least, there was something else.

  He felt agitated, he never did well in noisy places. And this wasn’t just noise … it was panicked, unadulterated noise.

  As a result, he needed more than a few seconds to get his bearings.

  Once he felt somewhat acclimated, Rob forced himself to focus. Letting the disorderly racket fade out in his mind, he relied only on his eyes to take in his new surroundings.

  This time, what he received was far more comprehensible, at least compared to the chaos before. The first thing that struck him was an immense, seemingly infinite structure of white. Rob struggled to describe it. The closest comparison he could manage was a wall, a mind-bogglingly massive wall. But even that felt like an insult to language. Calling it a 'wall' was the kind of desperate stretching that twisted the word into something unrecognizable to the level of inventing a new term would be more appropriate.

  The thing rose higher than the sky, wider than the world; a vast perpetuity of vertical mass and unknowable matter.

  “By the name of God, where the actual hell have I gone?” Rob hissed, awe and dread in his voice.

  He averted his gaze, lowering his strained neck and shifting his eyes to the sides, seeing the visual aspect of the earlier noise.

  No matter where he looked, people were scrambling, desperately trying to escape from halls just like the one he’d emerged from. Many had already made it out and now stood like him, wide-eyed, staring in awe at the world-sized wall. Others weren’t so fortunate, still struggling to squeeze themselves or their companions out of what Rob believed by now should be an incredibly narrow chamber.

  What was even more horrific was witnessing some people suddenly go down again after clearly reaching the exit, their strength had failed them at the last moment, or they were just ill-fated to be shoved and kicked by some sick psycho. Especially that whatever twisted entity brought them here didn’t appear to be very selective, not differentiating between old and young, healthy and ill or—for once—between poor and rich.

  Rob saw people in hospital gowns, elderly who had to be well into their sixties, children no older than seven or eight, and even a man in a luxurious suit that practically reeked of money.

  And those were the ones who managed to get out. Rob didn’t want to imagine what still remained inside, but his cursed mind refused him the bliss of ignorance. It fed him vivid images of oblivious toddlers, helpless and unmoving; patients too frail to stand; elders for whom movement had long become a liability. He saw them trapped, miserable and defenseless, watching death creep toward them inch by inch with no will, no power, and no means to save themselves.

  “Dammit, stop,” he blurted out, trying to halt the cruel stream of torture-like images flooding his mind.

  He clutched his tightening stomach, leaning to the side as a bitter, vile taste bubbled up his throat.

  Beneath him, the room that wanted to be his grave kept shrinking, revealing emptiness that extended in every direction except for the wall to his side.

  He was about to spit out the foul, acidic aftertaste still clinging to his tongue when he noticed the floor opening beside him.

  Swallowing his discomfort, Rob looked down, dreading what he might find.

  …

  [6]

  Thankfully, his fears didn’t come true. He had readied himself for a very appalling sight. for example, a struggling, frail figure doomed by short, undeveloped limbs or a powerless, aging body. IN stead, he saw a perfectly ordinary young man, probably in his late teens, about the same age as Rob.

  “What is this foolish guy doing?” Rob murmured, frowning in confusion.

  Because while the young man could have easily climbed the short distance in a matter of seconds, he wasn’t doing so. Strangely, he kept darting from corner to corner, clearly searching for another exit, as if the one above wasn’t good enough for him.

  [5]

  After a moment, Rob lost his patience and shouted sharply, “You fool. What are you waiting for? Hurry up and move your arss. Climb now!”

  As if the idiot needed Rob to tell him the obvious, the boy finally ceased his pointless pacing, folded something and tucked it in his belt, and started climbing laboriously toward him.

  [4]

  The timer was ticking, and the time was almost over. Rob doubted for a moment if the boy would be able to make it in time. Anxiety and anxiousness mounted in Rob’s heart as his fears edged closer to reality. He watched with anticipation, then concern, then alarm as the deadly walls tightened around the ascending boy, who was now squirming and slithering his way up the final third of the passage.

  [3]

  Rob braced himself. He fully prepared to turn away at any moment, unwilling to witness the boy’s agonizing end.

  In the end, he didn’t have to, thank God.

  Grumbling in anger about some people’s amazingly endless stupidity, Rob reached down and hauled the poor boy up the final stretch.

  [2]

  "You moron," Rob began, his voice furious. "I thought it was game over. Do you really need someone to spell out the obvious for you?"

  Rob didn’t wait for a response, and he didn’t stop there. He was livid, and he wouldn’t be the only one feeling that way.

  "Did you want to die or something?" he went on, giving the freshly-survived boy a small piece of his mind. "I just want to know one thing. What was going through that airhead of yours when you—"

  Rob's words slowed, trailing off until his mouth finally shut. A wave of déjà vu hit him hard as he silently wished the ground would open up and swallow him for the second time.

  Ashamed, he stared—dumbfounded—at the young man… then stared again. The young, somewhat handsome teenager, with black glasses and a white cane resting at his waist, who stood unfazed, the only one not even slightly impressed by the galactic wall looming before them.

  “Oh, fuck.”

  In his mind, Rob once again summoned the dumbest version of himself and gave it a well-deserved kick to the balls.

  The boy was blind. Plain and simple. Why didn’t he climb when the exit was right there?

  Because he didn’t see it.

  He wasn’t waiting to die, nor did he think that an opening in the ceiling is beneath him.

  [1]

  “Um, s-sorry,” the boy said hesitantly.

  "Look... I mean, listen, just forget it. I didn’ —" Rob began to apologize, but the words caught in his throat as something unbelievable happened.

  [0]

  The instant the counter finally hit 0, The Great Wall, the one the size of a world, was… shaking.