All I find during that day are some signs of vandalism: holes in walls, broken lights, some rude phrases scrawled across the bamboo and fleur-de-lis patterned wallpaper. These are few and far between. How many people have been lost in these rooms and how long did they last. Has it been five days without food or a week? I don’t know how long each day is and I don’t want to look. When I turned on the light in Frederick’s darkened room, I didn’t even take note of the date and time.

  Why am I still carrying the leather boots and shoes? I have so little, I hate to part with any resource I’ve gathered. Could I eat the leather? It’s probably too treated with chemicals to do any good. That’s why they don’t decompose. Could I have eaten the mummy? Didn’t English people eat mummies a century ago? I thought I saw a video about that. Even so, that doesn’t mean there were any useful calories. They were doing it for medicine or something. I won’t try it. It would be a temporary remedy anyway. I drop the shoes and boots. They don’t fit and they’re heavy. I’ll come back if I figure out a brilliant use. I go on and on.

  I reach the point where I can’t take another step. I’m no longer keeping reserves. I have no extra energy. I’ve covered less ground today. My strength is slowly failing. I look at my arms and legs to see if they’ve gotten skinnier. I still look like me. People do weeklong water fasts, right? I’m not even to an unreasonable amount of time without eating yet. Do they walk the entire time with miserable sleeping conditions while they’re fasting? With difficulty, I complete my standard sleep preparations. I pull all of my possessions with me into the cocoon.

  I wake up stiff and cold. I’m soaking wet. Heavy drenching wet carpet is weighing down on the length of my body. The open end nearer my head has collapsed under the weight of water, sealing me in. The air is stale. I wriggle forward, slowly sliding my way out of the tube. The sodden clothes that made me warmer when I fell asleep and now hindering my ability to extricate myself from the cocoon. I manage to get my head and shoulders out, then my arms. Now able to push down on the ends of the carpet with both hands, I soon get the my legs out and see what happened. The sprinkler nozzle directly above me dislodged somehow. Water is pouring out at high amplitude.

  Almost nothing is dry. I always set my shoes and socks on the far side of the roll, so I don’t accidently knock them down onto the damp floor when I am climbing in and out of the roll, so they are clear of the openly flowing pipe. I have to climb back into the roll to pull out some items. I take inventory and I have everything. I take off my clothes and wring everything out. I put on my running top and bottoms. They will dry quickly even if I am wearing them. I also put on my socks and shoes. I’m shivering like crazy. It’s so cold. I gather things into two bundles I can carry each arm for balance and start walking in my search pattern again. It takes a long time for the movement to warm me up and my arms are soon numb with carrying their soaking wet loads. Wringing only got so much weight out.

  I decide to prepare my bed early. I can lay things out and just come back to the site when I can’t walk any further. I won’t worry about a repeat of what happened last night. If another sprinkler opens above me, I’ll know it is more than bad luck. Maybe it would be good to learn someone was out to torture me like this. They might want me to live.

  Once everything is spread out on a carpet roll to dry, I continue my switching back and forth course. Is this really my only option? I’ve seen what is above the ceiling tiles. Is there a level above I could break into through the ceiling? Could I break through the floor? I do not have any tools. Perhaps some of the metal pipes for the electrical wires or the sprinkler pipes could be broken off and used to break the concrete ceiling. Then again there might be a thousand feet of rock above the ceiling or worse, a lake.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  If I break something, might I attract a maintenance crew? Maybe that was Frederick’s plan. Maybe he broke the lights and made camp waiting for someone to come repair them. They still haven’t come, and he’s been dead a long time. My stomach is aching. Did he ever find something to eat, or did he starve to death within a few weeks of getting trapped here?

  I don’t know what else to do, so I keep walking. I start leaving my earbud case on the floor every time I return to the center column of my search pattern. My brain is losing focus, and I think I may have miscounted during a few switchbacks. This way I only have to count in one direction and when I return to the case, I can start over counting in the next direction. If I’m off a few, the case will correct me. Hopefully I haven’t gotten so far off that it will be difficult to find my sleep setup. Could I have walked two hundred on one side of the center without realizing it? Or more?

  I’m walking like a zombie, and it almost doesn’t register when I see something unusual. I turn around and look back the way I came from. I return two rooms and look through the opening ahead of me where I can see that there is no opening in the next room to the left. Through the opening on the left of this room, I can see that room has no opening on the right. I go two rooms ahead and look left again. That room has no opening to the left. This is the first room I have found with no openings on three sides. It’s not much, but I decide to have a look. I go into the room to the left, walk two rooms and the smell hits me. It reminds me of Frederick’s room, only worse. I prepare myself to find another body. I turn left and go into the next room where I find something I haven’t seen since I arrived.

  There are double doors with handles that pull towards me. I’m sure the smell of death is coming from inside that room. It is tolerable with the doors closed, but who knows how bad it is on the other side. I guess it will depend on what’s on the other side. Could this be an exit back into my world? There was no smell last time.

  Could it lead to another world? A place of death? Or might they disappear altogether if I let them out of my sight? I wish I had something to keep my nose and mouth covered. What I’m wearing wouldn’t help, but maybe some of the clothing I laid out to dry would. I’ll deal with the smell. I pull open the left door.

  Directly ahead of me, leaning against the wall opposite the doorway is a dead woman with long straight black hair. She is somewhat mummified, but more decomposed than Frederick was. There is a broken glass bottle on the floor beside her. Her arms are at her sides palms up and it is clear from the skin of her wrists, despite the decay, that she killed herself using a piece of broken glass. The floor of this room is not damp, and a flaky brown residue around the corpse is probably what is left of her blood. She is dressed in a white women’s dress blouse and gray jacket and skirt combination, all of which seem to match the size of the body. On her feet are low-heeled business dress shoes. She’s wearing a golden wedding ring, gold ball post earrings are still stuck in her dry ears, and a gold necklace with a pendant hangs around her neck.

  Above the body and running the length of the wall is a yellow counter that is about two feet deep; there is a black handbag resting on it. I walk quickly across the room, trying not to breathe and take the handbag. The door had closed behind me, and I half run out of the room, pushing the panic rod to fling open the door again and flee. I walk away from that room until I find clear air some distance from the smell and breathe deeply. I roll up the carpet from the corner and tear out two long strips of padding. I go back and open the doors, stuffing a roll of carpet pad under each to prop them open so the room can air out, then return to where I set up camp.