CHAPTER 1: ALONE
“Activation.”
As soon as this word left his mouth, spoken in a magical language never been heard before, the entire enclosed space began to shake violently. The only light source was the flashlight from his phone, which flickered resplendently as a torrent of dust rained down from the ceiling.
“It seems magic truly exists in this world”, Hermes spoke to himself in solitude as he felt the weight of his body increase. He was able to glean that saying the word that was written on the walls with exotic symbols created an effect on his environment; in this case, the entire room he was trapped in was slowly lifted.
As the room shifted upwards, the sound of gears cranking and shafts turning echoed from beyond the stone-mottled walls. Hermes sighed to himself, it had been thirty minutes since his awakening, but he had still not fully understood where he was.
His eyes shifted back to the ominous murals behind him. Their depictions etched fear into his heart. No matter how he thought about it, He refused to believe the contents displayed within were real.
Every aspect of his being wanted to deny their existence; a hoax that was meant to confuse him. But his experiences with the magical language he had just been introduced to told him otherwise; it was now obvious to him that there seemed to be a deeper layer of reality that he had grown up oblivious to.
Not once during his 25 years of life did he believe an experience like this would ever find its way to him. It was now a matter of waiting for the contraption to take him wherever it was designed.
It all started roughly half an hour ago. Hermes woke up from his eternal slumber, enveloped within an infinite void. In the encompassing darkness surrounding his vision, the only thing he could hear was his own heartbeat. To make matters worse, every inch of his body throbbed with a dull, persistent ache, akin to a neglected marionette whose joints had long forgotten the touch of oil.
Bones protested with every subtle shift, muscles rebelled against even the slightest command, and his head felt burdened as if filled with lead. He remained tethered to lucidity in the encompassing darkness, unsure of where he was; the only thing he could feel was the rough texture supporting his sleeping body.
‘Fuck! Why can’t I move my body?! Where the hell am I?!’ His eyes shifted around in the cold, desolate darkness as panic started to set in. His brain raced to find a solution to his current predicament, but he could not find anything in his memory bank that could shed some light on how he ended up in such a situation.
‘Why can’t I remember how I got here, ugh! Was I not heading home from work? I remember I clocked out at 11:00 PM after the team leader told me to finish up the initial stages of the paper we are publishing soon… The Kennedy Space Center isn’t that far from where I live, what the hell happened to me?!’
“HELP! HELP!” he screamed out with all the air inside his lungs, but no one answered him back.
No matter how he thought about it, he couldn’t figure out a clear explanation of where he was. He even began to question whether someone had abducted him and administered drugs to him forcefully. His heart began to beat even faster as sweat trickled down his face.
It was only fifteen minutes later that he began to feel that a subtle sensation returned to his arms. From there, his body began to yield in small doses, shedding its rigid grip. He had never felt this happy in his life to get out of bed. Touching his surroundings made his joyful expression fade away quickly, however.
The supposed uncomfortable bed he had been sleeping in was, in reality, a closed-off chamber. Even with his senses returned to him, he realized that he couldn’t move freely in any direction.
It did not take long for claustrophobia to kick into high gear. In his panic, he began fiddling with the walls that encompassed his mortal flesh.
‘Fuck! I can’t stay like this, I need to get out immediately!’ He thought to himself as his adrenaline began to seep into all of his muscles. Suddenly, he felt a gap between the edges of the walls: the top of the enclosed chamber was a latch!
Using all his muscle strength, he lifted it up as the sound of stone grinding against stone was heard. ‘Freedom!’ He thought, only to be met with even more darkness. It was as if he was trapped inside the bottom layer of a Matryoshka doll.
“Shit, why the hell does life like to present problems to me? I just bought a house two days ago. The renovations haven’t even been completed yet…” His thoughts churned to his fiancée waiting for him at home.
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‘Instead of a married life, there is going to be a segment in the local newspaper titled something like ‘25-year-old researcher mysteriously disappears!’ He began to lampoon about his situation internally.
Getting out of the ‘coffin’, Hermes took out his cell phone and began to examine it; he wanted to use the built-in flashlight to understand his surroundings. Turning it on, waves of light crashed against his retinas as he squinted his eyes. He was pleased to find that its battery had not died. These emotions did not last long, however.
After examining the time and date, Hermes was left in a state of utter confusion. He spoke his puzzlement out as the sound of his voice echoed inside the closed-off room.
“September 25th, 2023, 11:28 PM… What the hell?” The reason for his confusion was fairly simple; the date denoted that not even a single day had passed since his return trip from work. In fact, he remembers checking his phone at around 11:23 PM. He was still in the middle of driving back home at the time.
‘Maybe the phone malfunctioned.’ He thought to himself. But somewhere deep within his heart, Hermes knew something felt off about his current circumstances. Checking his battery percentage, his gut dropped at what he believed to be the biggest confirmation of a hypothesis he refused to believe.
During his ride back home, he had already taken note of what his battery percentage was at that time and it reflected the same exact digit as it did now. This means that during his entire time asleep inside the coffin, not even an ounce of energy inside the battery was lost.
This was clearly an impossibility; even he knew how quickly his phone’s battery emptied out. He was complaining to his fiancée, Ariana, about it only a few days ago, and he even voiced his desire to purchase a new one.
‘Did… Did time freeze? No, what the hell am I saying right now?!’ He truly wanted to deny it, but all evidence pointed to such a conclusion. Throughout this entire debacle, he felt like there was an abnormal, or even paranormal, answer to his current dilemma.
At one point, he even thought that maybe this whole thing was some kind of messed up prank show and that a camera crew was going to burst in at any moment to record his reaction. Scenarios of him confronting the bastards played out in his head constantly, but now, he knew the chances were pretty low for such an explanation to work.
Hermes Wilson took a deep breath to calm his thoughts. He knew that he shouldn’t loiter around in the darkness like this for long. Flicking open the flashlight on his phone, the sudden burst of light made his eyes shutter.
After a slow period of adjusting to the newly found luminescence, Hermes began to observe his surroundings. The current room he was stuck inside was roughly ten meters across from wall to wall.
At the center rested the coffin he had been sleeping inside all along. Its stone texture mirrored the rest of the walls, as they all had a rough and grungy gray color to them. Everything within the enclosed space was made from the same material, as if it was all carved out of the same stone.
Shifting his flashlight to the wall in front of the coffin, Hermes noticed a certain peculiarity: it housed an assortment of colors! A mural that took up the entire wall’s surface area appeared.
Drawing his gaze nearer, he was filled with a sense of dread as he admired the artwork. The scene being depicted was something so utterly horrifying, he could do nothing but stand there frozen in fear.
What reflected in his eyes were skyscrapers lit ablaze, with seven stars shimmering high above the cataclysmic scene. Inside each of the windows of the burning buildings, faces were shown. There was despair, anxiety, fear, hopelessness, and other negative feelings; it was as if the faces were calling out to him to end their misery.
At the bottom of the 8-10 story buildings, humans were lynched off of street lamps with shadowy figures surrounding them. They had no faces, only silhouettes, but just from that, Hermes could tell that their body proportions did not resemble that of a human at all.
They had four arms, two on each side, and their body length was horrifyingly exaggerated. Even the tallest of basketball players would have had to tilt their necks upward to peer at their heads.
‘Wh-what am I looking at right now… Is this a scene of the future or the past? Damn it, if only I was an archaeologist and not an astronomer right now!’
His thoughts churned to the non-human entities surrounding the miserable wretches hanging from the street-light poles.
‘I wonder if those beings are responsible for this catastrophe. Is this confirmation that aliens exist? Heh, if I take a picture of this and post it online, I wonder how many nut jobs on all those conspiracy forums will believe it?’
Even as he cracked light hearted jokes to himself to ease his worries, he couldn’t help but swell with anxiety.
‘Too bad I don’t have any cell service right now, or else I would have been able to call 911, let alone expose some alien murals…’ Hermes couldn’t help but lampoon.
He couldn’t help but think that everything he had learned in life was nothing but a lie. Every experience and pillar was being shattered before his eyes.
As soon as he reeled in his thoughts, he cast his gaze underneath the harrowing murals. A string of symbols of an unknown language formed a sentence. Even though he had never seen any of these symbols before, he could read them somewhat fluently, as if it were his native tongue.
He was able to easily grasp the syllables and form the sentence in his head:
“Death was the only salvation. September 25th, 2030.”
Hermes’ body froze on the spot. He couldn’t help but feel like an alternate dimension had pulled him in, where time and space intertwined and mixed like strands of noodles in a bowl of spaghetti.
The “elevator” continued to speed upwards to an unknown destination as Hermes began to recall all of these events. On the opposite side of the murals was another set of symbols that activated the elevator mechanism when spoken out loud.
The sound of stones grinding violently against each other continued to echo from beyond the walls of the enclosed space as his thoughts wandered to his family. By now, he had firmly understood that he was somewhere very far from home.
He feared that he would never see them again. His fiancée, Ariana Mirren, was still waiting for him at their temporary apartment. With uncertainty in his heart and the sounds of eroding stones revolving and echoing around him, he truly felt alone.
End of Chapter