With the last vote, I gave you the option to select where the story takes place, allowing you significant control over the type of story you would get (i.e. - the spaceship would be heavily science fiction, the dragon topped mountain would lean more toward fantasy, etc.). We actually ended up with a 3-way tie between said mountain, said spaceship, and a strange and sterile house filled with strangers who move as one. This last option was actually the option that was least developed in my mind and most difficult to describe in the poll, so I was very surprised that it did so well. It's also - to my mind, at least - the only option that has somewhat of a horror story bent. For all of these reasons, this option would have been the most challenging for me to take up - but also the most interesting. So I, acting as tie-breaker, selected the creepy house option.
It was a lot of fun to write. I hope you enjoy reading it! Also, if you'd like to start Meila's Story from the beginning, just click on the link on the right side of this page.
Sincerely,
Lillian
With shaking hands, she
pressed the top button on the panel. At once, a searing white light flooded the
room. She cried out as the bright of it scorched her eyes and then put a hand
over her mouth to stifle the sound. In the time it took her vision to adjust, a
dozen possibilities skittered through her mind as to what she might find here,
each of them worse than the last. But slowly, the room revealed itself to her,
and she could see that it was nothing she’d imagined.
Just a small, simple space,
with walls and floor of black glass. A bed against the opposite wall, no
windows, no decorations. Nothing else, in fact, save for the panel with the two
buttons.
And the big metal door
that boasted no handle of any sort.
Breath beginning to
come in shudders that shook her whole body, Meila looked slowly back at the
panel. She tried frantically to think of all the options available to her, but
she could see only one that was viable in any way. She wiped suddenly damp
palms on the pants she’d fallen asleep in the night before, and then she
pressed the second button. That giant door slid slowly open, one solid hunk of
metal that grated against the floor, sending a cloud of pulverized glass to
puff gently at her feet.
And then Meila saw what
lay beyond that door, and her heart lurched once at the sight.
Blog Entry #2 – 06/18/13
It was a room, large,
sterile, unfamiliar. But not empty. There were people, not ten feet from where
she stood. At least fifteen strangers that she could see, each sitting on
utilitarian furniture in utter silence. They were all facing the same direction
– something to Meila’s right. She glanced over automatically, but she saw only
a stretch of wall marked with three steel, handleless doors. A chill rose up
her spine as she looked back at those people, with their inhuman stillness and
their lack of noise. She got the inexplicable and undeniable sense that they were
waiting for something, and then she had a horrifying thought.
Perhaps they were
waiting for her.
She braced, sure they
would turn toward her, but they didn’t. They just sat there, staring at that
wall in that strange, mindless way that made her stomach clench. She started to
back up, into the room that a moment before had felt like a prison and now
beckoned with the promise of sanctuary, but she stopped herself. Something
about their stillness suggested that any movement, no matter how slight, might
attract their attention. The fact that the door hadn’t already distracted them
seemed a miracle, and not one to be wasted. So she stood as still as they,
willed her heart to stop racing in her chest, and tried to figure out where she
was.
She’d never seen the
room before; that much was certain. She’d have remembered a room like this,
although it seemed oddly designed for the opposite. There was nothing
remarkable about this room other than its sterility. The walls were blank, the
furniture so plain as to be indescribable and perfectly symmetric, so that a
person wouldn’t know what end of the room they stood on if they’d entered the
room a hundred times. There were no windows, no outside view to provide a sense
of direction or location. And everything was colorless. Not white, not grey, not
beige, but a strange no-color that refused to be labeled. Even the people
seemed colorless, their pale skin almost blending in with their drab clothing,
so that in their motionlessness, they were almost perfectly camouflaged with
the rest of the room.
The only exception to
this no-color was the fireplace. It rose up from the center of the room, a
great, shining monstrosity that seemed to be made of the same black glass that
walled the room she still occupied. It blocked the sight of whatever lay beyond
it, but she suspected that, where she to somehow see through it, she would see
only more of the same.
She wondered briefly if
Alec’s family had something to do with this, but she rejected the idea almost
immediately. They hated her, of that there was no question. But theirs was a
passionate hate, a red hate, the kind that came at you head-on and left no
doubt as to who drove the attack. There was no room for such fury in this
colorless room.
But there was certainly
danger. She had to find a way out – preferably without all of these strange
automatons noticing she was ever here in the first place.
But even as she had the
thought, a low pitched tone rang out behind her. She jumped and turned before
she could stop herself, but even if she’d kept perfectly still, it wouldn’t
have mattered. The tone rang again, and then the door, that massive steel thing
which had moved so laboriously before, swung quickly shut, pushing her out into
the room.
The second her bare
foot hit the cold, colorless floor, each person in the room turned their heads
toward her with one eerily singular movement.
Instinctively, she
tried to step back, but of course, there was only steel behind her.
The strangers stood,
perfectly synchronized, as if they were not several individuals but one person
occupying several bodies. They took one step toward her, each of them moving
without hesitation, some of them having to step onto furniture to perpetuate
the forward motion.
The movement seemed
designed to terrify. Telling herself she was done with that – no way she was
going to let these people intimidate her – Meila straightened her back, fisted
her hands at her sides.
You
are not a victim, she told herself. You will never be a victim again.
And she asked, her tone
hard and unyielding, “Where am I?”
They took another step,
silent, staring at her as intently as they’d previously stared at the wall. And
they took another step, and another.
“Hey! HEY!” She yelled
it, loud and sharp as she could, and they stopped. For a second, she thought
she saw something flicker in the eyes of some of them, but it was gone before
she could even be sure it was there.
Still, it gave her the
impression that she’d gained their attention. “Where am I?” she repeated.
This time, they
answered. They spoke in a chorus, their movements identical even down to the
rise and fall of their tongues.
“The Joining Room.”
She frowned, chilled
for reasons beyond what she could consciously process. “The joining room?
What-”
“Join Us.”
They took another step.
She glanced around the room, searching for a way out, even as her hands ran
over the wall next to the door at her back. She found what she was looking for:
a panel with one raised button. She hoped like hell that it did what she
thought it would.
“Who are you?” she
asked, her finger poised over the button.
“We are The Collective.
Come join Us.” And they moved forward again, stretching their arms toward her
as if they meant to caress her – or to grab her.
She pressed the button
under her fingers, and she heard with sweeping relief the sound of the door
opening slowly behind her. She pressed her back against it, trying to hurry it
along, willing it to move faster. The
moment it was open enough for her to slip through the crack, she did so – even
as a part of her wondered why they didn’t seem concerned about her escape.
As soon as she was
through the door, she bodily pushed it shut, not bothering to find the button
on this side of the wall. Then, for a moment, she just stood there, eyes
closed, heart racing, forehead against the cool metal, and wondered what the
hell she would do now. Of course, the obvious answer was that she needed a
weapon. And the only thing in this room that might provide that was the bed. If
she could somehow take it apart…
A shuffle sounded
behind her, a low, widespread whisper of movement like the sound of a tarp
being spread across grass. She stiffened, suddenly sure of what she would find
when she turned around, even though her fears were impossible. She opened her
eyes, and she turned.
And she was back where
she started.
She was in the sterile
room, the Joining Room. The strangers were there, watching her as if mildly
curious to see what she would do next, their arms still outstretched. Their
faces, their clothing, everything about them was so similar, so nondescript,
that she couldn’t tell if these were the same people she’d just escaped.
But it didn’t matter,
because she hadn’t actually escaped.
Her back to the door,
she found the button beside it again, her fingers moving with an instinctive
sort of terror that the rest of her wanted desperately to ignore. But the
button wouldn’t help. Much as she wished to believe otherwise, she didn’t have
the time for such self-indulgence. What seemed impossible had happened. She’d
stepped through the door but gone nowhere.
A horrible sense of whiteness descended on her. Not the
no-color of the room, but a blank, pristine, frozen sense of inevitability. For
a moment, as she watched those people watch her, she could actually feel the
rest of the world slipping away. Her home, melting, and she thought that if she
stayed her long enough, she wouldn’t even remember it anymore. Alec’s family,
the bridge, the bloodied rug that she’d burned the moment she was allowed – all
gone. Even the room she’d left minutes before, the glass-walled room with the
bed. None of it existed, and there was only this room. These horrible,
bloodless strangers with their mysterious purpose.
The Collective.
They moved toward her
again, and she almost couldn’t run. But suddenly, a bright, hot panic flooded
her, burning away the white, and her limbs broke their paralysis. She didn’t
try to return to the glass room – she understood that to do so would be futile.
This time she moved to the right. There were doors on each wall, three of them.
Though her heart didn’t believe they’d take her anywhere but exactly where she
didn’t want to be, she had to try.
One of the strangers
grazed her arm with their fingers as she passed, but she shook off the hand,
not bothering to see if it belonged to a man or a woman. She whimpered in the
back of her throat, a sound of disgust more than fear, and her legs pumped furiously.
She opened the middle
door. It had a button, just like the others, and when she pressed it, the door
slid slowly away from her. Just like the other had. But this time, she didn’t
step through. The strangers were moving toward her now, with their slow, eerie
steps and their grasping, outstretched hands, but she wasn’t about to run into
something unknown. Not again.
Only, when the door
opened, she realized that it wasn’t unknown. At least, not in the way that
she’d expected.
The door opened from
the Joining Room – to the Joining
room.
She saw, on the other
side of the threshold, the room she stood in now. The symmetrical furnishings
were there, the huge fireplace, the colorless people. They faced away from her
in that room, toward the opposite wall. She couldn’t see what they stared at;
the fireplace was in the way. But she knew, suddenly she knew with a horrible
finality exactly what they saw.
They saw her, standing
in front of an open door, staring at the same scene she watched now.
She could see it as if
she stood above the room, an entity with the curse of omniscience. It was
almost like a room lined with mirrors. The kind that made it so that when you
looked at one wall, all you saw was a repeated reflection of the room itself,
so that it seemed to stretch forward into infinity.
Only with this, nothing
reflected back at her. If she stepped through this door, she would end up
behind herself. She could, theoretically, run forward forever, from this door
to the one opposite it, and never go anywhere at all.
The thought reminded
her of her dream. Of Alec, falling away from her into unending darkness, but
never, somehow, getting any further from her than just out of her reach.
Oddly, the memory
comforted even as it twisted her heart. It anchored her, reminded her that
there was a still world beyond this room. The insanity of the last few minutes
was not the true reality of her life, and these people, this impossible
situation – none of it could really make the rest of the world melt away. The
knowledge of that, the relief of it, gave her the strength to turn, to confront
the group that watched her still.
And when they attacked,
it gave her the strength to fight back.
They rushed forward
with shocking speed, so fast that it took her a moment to realize only the four
people in front had moved. For the first time, the Collective was not moving
entirely as one.
The four, two men and
two women, came at her with the flat, expressionless faces of the dead. One of
the men reached her first. He swung the blade of his hand at her neck with
vicious force, and he almost made contact before her training kicked in.
She ducked the blow,
and on her way up, she rammed her fist into his solar plexus. As the breath
wooshed out of his lungs, she kicked his instep with the heel of her bare foot
and then thrust her elbow up against his nose. Finally, she brought one knee
up, hard, into his groin.
He dropped, a wheezing,
bleeding mess, suddenly completely separate from the hive. And she thought, Thank God for self-defense classes.
The other three came at
her then, and she found herself acting on instinct she hadn’t even known she’d
possessed. She’d taken a few kickboxing classes, some krav maga, one lonely,
long-ago karate class when she was twelve. And, of course, the barrage of therapist
recommended self-defense classes for women. SING, hard-goes-to-bone, anything
is a weapon. Don’t lose your head. The litany of advice she’d gleaned from
those once resented nighttime classes seemed now to pull together every bit of
training – however meager – that she’d ever had. She was able to call it forth
now in one cohesive, although admittedly less than graceful, form of attack
that at least kept these robots from doing any real damage.
As she fought, time
lost all meaning, so that when the onslaught suddenly stopped, she couldn’t
quite get her bearings at first. Four of them – four!! – lay on the floor around her, incapacitated in one way or
another.
And she was still
standing. Bleeding, hurting, but miraculously still standing.
She looked out at the
others, that now smaller group of strangers who still watched her,
expressionless. She had no sense from the looks on their faces whether or not
they’d anticipated her successful defense. There was nothing in them to
indicate what they intended to do now: no intent, no surprise.
Except…
There. A man near the
fireplace. Standing with the others, but slack-jawed. Staring at her not with
flat nothingness, but with disbelief. When she met his eyes, she felt a jolt,
as if some part of her recognized him. She later realized that what she
recognized was another sentient being.
Another non-member of
this savagely apathetic Collective.
As four more members of
the group broke away and began to make their way toward her, the man glanced at
them and then back at her. He seemed to consider for a moment, and then, as the
new four took another step toward her, he nodded once, a sharp, decisive
movement.
He said, “This way!”
And he slid, feet
first, toward the fireplace.
She watched, stunned,
as his feet disappeared into the black hole at the bottom of that four-sided
pillar.
And then his legs.
And then his torso.
And then his head, and
he was gone.
She’d expected him to
come flying out the other side, to slide through
the thing instead of somehow into it, just as she’d done with the door. But
he didn’t. And she realized that it wasn’t a fireplace at all, but a portal of
some sort, an entrance, a doorway.
The only one that
mattered in this room.
Some of the people
who’d stood near him seemed momentarily distracted by his break-from-the-group
movements, but the moment he’d disappeared down the fireplace, they turned back
to her. She was reminded of how they hadn’t noticed her at all until the moment
her feet had touched this floor, and she wondered if their odd and singular
attention was limited to only the contents of this room. And in almost the same
moment, she realized that she didn’t care.
He’d shown her how to
escape, and she was damn well going to follow him.
There was a lamp in
each corner of the room, colorless, somehow shapeless, sitting on utterly
interchangeable side tables. She dove for the nearest one, reaching it just as
the new four changed direction toward her. She swung the thing into her new
attackers, relishing in the crack! of
metal on flesh, cherishing the sing of the impact up her arms.
The blow was enough to
knock the first two down, but she’d lost the momentum with the second two. She
switched the lamp around in her hands, so that the heavy glass base would make
contact next, and then she jabbed it into the stomach of the nearest attacker,
and then up into his jaw. He crumpled into the legs of the fourth man, and she
seized the moment of his distraction.
With every ounce of
strength she had, she dug her feet into the ground, propelled herself with
strong thighs and stronger will through the thinning throng.
And she slid into the
fireplace.
