Daily Dreaming

The lift was taking a long time to arrive. A few feet away from the double doors, I stood tapping my feet impatiently as the floor numbers slowly ticked up. My two companions, slick looking men in business attire, waited either side of me in silence. I watched from the balcony as the elevator slowly approached, visible through the sheer glass walls reaching down to the ground floor below.

At last it arrived, and with a ding the doors slid open. We entered and I pressed the button for the lowest level. After another long wait, we were delivered to the main foyer of the building. A chequered black and white floor reflected the yellow glow of the cheap bulbs hanging from the walls. Two large doors ahead led out into the night, but we were not leaving.

In fact, I wasn’t quite sure what we were here for.

—

The two men took the lead, heading down a corridor to the left of the main desk. After some time, we reached another door that opened into a dark, unlit stairwell descending downwards. Without flinching, my companions started heading down the stairs. A litle less confident, I paused but soon decided that it would be better to stick with them. I didn’t want to end up alone in this place. Their pace was fast, and within a few minutes I was lagging behind. My eyes had adjusted to the dark and I could still faintly make out one of the two men a couple of flights below me.

I tried to call out, but then all of a sudden it hit me. In an instant a horrifying ghoulish face was directly in my field of view, shivering with a twisted smile. Everything sense was overloaded by this horrifying visage, and stunned I fell backwards with the creature on top of me. Everything went blurry, but the haunting image stuck with me until I was fully unconscious.

I recognised the face that I had seen – it was the demonic entity Lisa from the infamous P.T. video game. Why she was haunting me I wasn’t sure.

—

I came to on a cold damp floor, but this wasn’t the stairwell that I had collapsed in. Instead I was lying in a dimly lit cavern with uneven, jagged walls. I sat up, feeling that I wasn’t alone in the cave. Instead of the two men from before, there were four others in the room with me. One of them was a man who I had know from school; the other three, two women and another man, were strangers. They all seemed to be searching the walls, looking for something, so I rose and made myself known with an apprehensive hello.

The group turned and greeted me. One of the women came over and explained that we were trapped in this small cave unless we could solve some kind of puzzle. There were some small, irregularly shaped rocks on the floor and one of these supposedly fit into a gap near on the right wall. Finding this would allow us to leave. As she seemed to be in the know, I accepted this bizarre new situation and joined the search for this odd key.

We slowly tried every rock we could find. With some patience, eventually one of the men happened upon the right one. Fitting in with a click, the rock sat flush inside the hole and a segment of the wall next to it slowly shifted away, revealing a way into another room.

This new area was more ominous than the last, filled with cages and chains that suggested it had once been a dungeon of some kind. I was very confused as to how I had come to be here, but the others were unfazed by their new environment and immediately began heading towards a metal plaque on one of the walls. This provided details of the next puzzle that we would have to solve.

On the walls all around were carved letters, and we split up to find all of these so that they could be carved into a space on the plaque. Then it came down to a process of rearranging letters until we found the correct answer. I can’t remember now what was spelt, but there was another click and a new doorway appeared.

Following the others, I was the last to cross the threshold of the next room. No sooner had I done so than my vision was once again obscured by the horrifying face that had surprised me on the stairwell. The same sensation pierced me as I fell backwards. If the others knew of my plight, they made no effort to help. I was left to face the same fate I had experienced once before.

—

Coming to again, I was surprised to find myself back in the first cavern. Not only that, it was as if time had looped. The same people were in the same place that they had been when I last woke up. However, I was no longer actually present within the room – it was as if I was now watching my companions from a top-down perspective. I couldn’t call out and interact with them, and was left to watch as events played out.

The group slowly trialed each rock until they once again completed the first puzzle. As they entered the second room, I spotted the creature that had jumped me lurking in the shadows behind one of the cages. It didn’t move, waiting for the team to complete the second puzzle on the metal plaque. Once this was done, it started slowly following the person bringing up the rear. This time, however, the whole group made it through the door before the spectre could reach them. As soon as the last person was through, she halted and disappeared again.

Just as she disappeared, my vision flashed and I was now in the new room with the others. I seemed to have earned another chance at escaping this nightmare, and my sudden reappearance didn’t seem to faze anyone. This room was a shade of murky pink, with circular designs made from rope all over the walls that resembled fairy circles. It seemed that the objective was to shift the shapes into new patterns that matched.

As before, we made short work of the challenge presented to us and there was the usual click signifying the next door had opened. Almost as soon as this happened, a feeling of dread washed over me and I realised the creature was approaching. Dashing ahead this time, I exited through the door before anyone else and turned to try and see what was coming. Instead, the door slammed shut and in an instant I was back at the entrance to the lift, looking down as it rose slowly to greet me.

As the mechanism slowly approached my floor, I felt the feeling of dread building again. Looking around, I realised that the two suited men were nowhere to be seen. I wanted to turn and run, but couldn’t. Each second brought a stronger feeling of horror, and I felt certain that this was it. I closed my eyes and waited for the final ding of the elevator, prepared for the creature to appear.

It didn’t arrive. I was saved by daylight and the promise of a new day in reality, away from whatever it was that was haunting my dream.