1
Sudden sounds pulled the young boy’s consciousness up from the depths like the hand of God tearing into the ocean, reaching downward through the depths to feel his existence before tightening to an iron grip. The sound of metal grinding caught the boy’s attention immediately. If it wasn’t that then it certainly was the sudden cold his body felt as it lie against bare metal. It tore his consciousness awake and with sudden clarity he realized he didn’t know where he was. In the back of his mind the grinding echoed across the innards of his skull causing him to double over. It wasn’t anything like how the movies portrayed it. They used artificial sounds created in a booth miles away from where the action happens. The grinding couldn’t be fully understood unless it was experienced in person. It must shake everything to the core; the bending, the folding, the creaking, the reverberations that bounced off of the walls, the noises that echo through hallways—blurred realities of monsters that waited in the dark.
That same sound wailed through the derelict halls of an unknown building. It was a slight hum that grew in intensity to an almost wailing sort of siren. It hurt the boy’s head, but he felt that he had heard it before. It wasn’t clicking just why it had sounded so familiar. The ceiling hung low and offered little light; it painted dim red coats across the walls. The boy could only make out papers tacked up to the wall to his right. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to them, almost like they were playing a makeshift game of darts. The boy squinted and tried to focus on what they showed, but they seemed to have subjects that flew over his head. They seemed to be blueprints of some kind of machine. Both of the documents were signed near the lower edge by a "0". There must have been some meaning between the two and others up on the wall, but that meaning had been lost on the boy who had woken up inside the circular room, unaware of his surroundings. This was—at least in part—the story of that unfortunate boy.
His head had throbbed terribly with the echoes that pulsed through the darkness. His back had clung to his shirt with a wet, sticky mess. He yanked at it to try and alleviate the pressure in front of his skull, but it didn’t seem to help. He took in a breath so deep in any other circumstance he could fool himself into believing he was about to go diving. His heart was jumping and all at once he was alive, truly alive! Blood was pumping and air returned to his lungs. He wasn’t sure if there was a point when he wasn’t alive...strange. That should come as something simple. Then again, he was most likely just unconscious for however long, but it wasn’t like he could disprove the alternative. His head pounded something awful, that he could prove—it was hard to see anything not directly in front of his face.
The boy had no idea where he was...or who he was to be frank (and he wasn't even certain if he could be frank). His spine stiffened as if a rod were jammed against it. It forced his head right and it was there he saw there was a large iron door set just beside a narrow hallway. It didn’t look like it would open to anything short of a nuclear bomb. There was a keypad on the right hand side of the door, but he hadn’t the foggiest of what combination would be accepted.
His hand then brushed past something small and almost wiry—it had been the spine of a notebook lying at his side. With a shaking hand he reached out and grabbed it closer toward him—starting to open to the front page—struggling and stumbling at the front cover. He saw a single paragraph written on the first sheet:
"You are LUCAS Gray—the WHITE. You are tied down. This experiment is to teach you why and by whom. The pendulum swings heavy above the small of your shell. The intention is not to confuse, but to reveal. The RED sits idly by—your enemy is bathed in shame. The WHITE sits clad in metal, constantly threatened by the flame. The only respite you shall find is through the BLUE. Water shall douse your fire, and you shall become the sword that you were always meant to be. The pendulum swings faster—an axe at to your throat, blood almost to the sunset. What is your choice?"
Lucas Gray...? The name rang familiar, but could it have been mine? He didn’t know for sure and trusting it to its word was something he wasn’t sure he was capable of at the moment. It was strange that it had been there if he didn’t bring the notebook in with him. I mean, maybe I’m just prone to consistent amnesia attacks and I brought the notebook to remind myself of my name when one of my episodes comes along? He reasoned it out, but concluded it wasn’t that likely a scenario in the end. After all, why would he write his name with such a cryptic passage? Something about being under a pendulum with these sorts of colors? Didn’t seem to be the case...almost everything was black or red here. He didn’t remember any family, phone numbers, nothing. He didn’t have a phone either, he realized; his pockets were cleaned of even the lint. He would have to trust that he didn’t bring the notebook in with him—that he was meant to find it. It would also seem plausible that whoever had brought him here would know of his memory loss; they wouldn’t have written in the notebook otherwise.
These were two things that he held onto as he moved to stand to his feet. He quietly repeated them in his mind as if the words themselves would keep his balance. He decided then as he made his way up that he would keep the moniker given to him by the notebook—Luke would work just fine as something to call himself until he had the information to determine if it was correct or not.
There was only one path for him to take from the room he had woken up in. He had begun to walk—falling short and having to catch himself against the wall as the room around him had begun to spin. If he had anything to eat he’s sure it would have been waiting for him to come back up. Instead, his stomach only burned from the insides. It took a moment longer for the room to right itself and for Luke to re-find his balance. He stood back straight and took a hesitant step toward the hallway. It led down to a hook headed left. By the time he reached it he had lost all sense sense of direction as the lights had begun to fade even darker than they were before. Then it was pitch black. Where would he go at the end of the pathway? Would there be a dead end to greet him? Would it be his dead end? The questions do not end. It wasn't until he bumped into the knob of a door that he stopped. It sent a flash of pain to his abdomen—just above his crotch. He jolted back as it strung pain all throughout his body. He took in a deep breath as he searched the darkness for the handle that he’d been so foolish to run into. He found it quick enough and grasped the cold metal with his hand. It took more effort than he would have originally thought it would...but it opened.
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2
Luke walked out to a large expansive bubble of a room. Behind him the door closed shut and seemed to lock. Out in front of him it looked like someone had inserted a large industrial straw to the innards of the room and began to blow from the outside until it was about to burst. All told it had probably been the size of a football field. It all seemed so strange...but was it really? Simple logic had told him that a room shaped like a sphere was different to the norm, but then again was the logic he used to come to that conclusion something to trust? He felt that he knew certain things for a fact; rooms should not look as this one had. This certainly seemed like one of those things. It seemed he was overreacting, but it brought out a larger problem that he couldn’t bring himself to simply sweep under the mental rug.
He didn’t know anything.
He couldn’t have known anything from his situation except for what the notebook had written. He took in a deep breath and tried to focus. He needed a reference point. My name is Lucas Gray. He repeated it again, twice, then thrice until nothing else filled his mind. Repeating his mantra became the new norm; it became the new him. Even if it wasn’t factually true, he wouldn’t worry about it anymore. He was Lucas Gray, and that was all that mattered at the moment.
He took a deep breath and scouted the room around him with a new light. The exterior of the room was rimmed with metal plates fastened with large bolts that run the perimeter straight through. It prevented any light from the outside from creeping in—the room had been fully lit from some pretty serious lights strung up from the top of the room shining down. They looked like tiny suns from where he was standing. He felt an immense pressure as they beamed down on him. Conversely, anything above the lights was shrouded in a thick coat of back—impenetrable to his eyes.
The room had several doors lined throughout on each side; it looked like there was six of them in total—excluding the one that he had just left from. Down in the center there was a circular platform with six seats placed around in a ring. To Luke it looked like some satanic circle that he wanted absolutely no part of. That was of course when the smell reached him. It took only one second for it to almost double him over completely. It smelled of the stuff he could only imagine would populate in the innards of a sewer. There was no apparent source of the stench, but he was sure it was holed up somewhere, rotting away. He didn’t want a part of any of this. Not the smell, not this weird round room, and definitely not the cult-like chairs. He shook as his head away from them—he would look at anything else. Turning, he set off toward the door farthest from where he entered.
It took him a few moments to cross the distance, but on closer inspection it turned out that the door had been exactly like the one he’d came in through. There wasn’t any handle for him to grab, and it didn’t seem to respond to any sort of force he put on it. Aside from how sturdy it looked there was nothing more he could do with it. If he hadn’t come from one personally he almost wouldn’t have guessed it was a door at all, just an inset wall. Traveling around the circumference of the room told him that each of the doors was exactly the same.
When finally he came to the end of his investigation of the doors he had no choice but to return to the center of the room. The chairs were still ominous to him and certainly made the hairs on the nape of his neck stand on end. His breath began to shorten and he almost fell over on himself. His vision waned...he could tell he wasn’t in the greatest of conditions...but it felt like everything was coming back all at once—the exhaustion, the heavy breathing. He could tell even his vision wasn’t the best. He might need glasses...no, not at that point, yet. He did his best to run toward the center of the room, but his body must have been out of commission for quite some time. Running hurt. Jogging hurt. Limping hurt. It all hurt until he slowed to a walk at last. It came over him in a stinging sensation that erupted in his legs. He sputtered as he regained his balance—taking the stroll now nice and slow.
By the time he finally reached the chairs he was coughing a red sputter out onto the ground. It came up with phlegm and a hoarseness that scraped against his throat. He could taste the muck in his mouth and it only made him want to spit out the rest. Finally it began to slow and finally stop, but he made sure to stay put until he was more than sure he could move without causing whatever was wrong with him in the first place to flare up again.
He was Lucas Gray...but there was no telling just what was wrong with Lucas Gray. Maybe an asthmatic of a severe degree? Maybe he had some sort of cancer that was killing him slower than anything else here would? His mind was desperate for answers. They clawed at his insides while the nameless sickness inside him clawed for his outsides.
He sat up, nearly falling over as the room began to spin—slowly, not too fast—but just enough to make the feelings return. He stumbled into the center of the circle. A large rumbling sensation sent him off of his feet face first onto the metal paneling below. It almost looked as if the panel could open up—it was divided into two panes closed tightly together. He waited for a moment as the frozen metal kept his face stuck—he was waiting for an aftershock. It seemed the rumbling came within him—there was a terrible pounding that echoed in his ears. It turned out it was his heartbeat...he was hearing his heart. It sounded almost fifty times louder than normal, filling all else in the room with the thudding and banging. He pulled himself up to his feet once more and made his way to one of the chairs—ornate in design with no armrest. It and its identical siblings all glanced at him ominously as if bidding him to sit down. Come with us, Lucas. Sit down and enjoy yourself. Come and take a seat and rest those weary bones of yours. Against all conscience and any thought in his mind—sitting down sounded like both the worst and best ideas that had ever entered his brain.
He limped to the chair nearest to him and slowly worked his way down, finally planting his butt on the chair and leaning back, taking a moment to let the dizziness subside. He let out a single breath before he felt his body yanked back by cords that wrapped around him like snakes. One went straight across his throat and yanked all air out of his system. A second snapped his torso tight to the spine of the chair. He tried with everything that was left inside him to yank the cords off of him, but they seemed to be of a thick steel that wouldn’t come undone by his hands alone.
A pair of silver eyes illuminated the darkness above him. A voice like smoke drifted down to him as the dizziness came back in full force. "WALTZ. EMERGE. REDUCTION. ONTARIO. ZOMBIES. UMBRA. MOMENTUM. If you are ready you will know what to do." A stinging pain sent shots of color flowing at a million miles a minute through his eyes. It burned at his neck and before he could scream it looks as if the world is melting around him. How foolish was he to sit down—surely whoever had kidnapped him had some sort of torture fetish going on. Make people believe that they’re all alone and terrify the living daylights out of them before finally ending it. He tried as hard as he could to fight it, but whatever stung him had been stronger than he was. He felt his head start to lower and his eyelids felt as if they were each supporting a thousand pounds each. The darkness overtook the colors and he lost feeling in both of his feet, then his legs, and then soon all of him was gone to the darkness.