A quick nightmare sketch, using the image somewhat literally.
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Another corridor, just like the last. Vinyl tiles, painted cinderblock walls, cheap fluorescent lights fastened to the naked concrete deck above. He had to face the fact; he was lost. Not just a little lost, hopelessly lost beyond recovery. It had started off irritating, but fine. Despite his years of experience, he was the new guy here, and the new guy gets to run all the errands. Get coffee. Get toner the printer. Run down to the sub-basement for patch-cords.
He was the new guy. "Room SB-101" sounded easy enough. Just take the elevator to the sub-basement, look around for the room number. Down to where the floors are vinyl tiles and the lightfixtures bare, the soft carpeting and faux-natural lighting something from another world, the world above.
Down to where the doors aren't labelled, where "Room 101" is just nonsense speak. Just babble.
Down to where he's walked for what feels like hours and has turned himself around and can't find the storage room and can't even find the elevator anymore and there's nobody down here there's no doors here just empty corridor after empty corridor.
Did he collapse against a wall and cry? Did he stop walking and start running until the pounding of his heart drowned out the pounding of his feet, determined to go the wrong way faster if he couldn't go the right way? Did he scream for someone, anyone to tell him the way? That this wasn't funny? Did he check his phone again and again and again, finding again no signal, not even wifi, stone-cold nothing?
Did he silently pray this was a nightmare, and that he'd wake up in a cold sweat?
We'll never know.
Eventually, after hours or days or years, he found the doors. Brown painted metal double-doors with round portal-windows. The cheap kind of shatterproof glass with the wires between it. Through the windows... another pair of identical doors, painted white on this side. Between, two gurneys.
Atop the gurneys were white blankets, beneath which could only be a body.
That was crazy. This wasn't a place for bodies. IT was a respectful office, in a respectful glass tower in respectful downtown.. His face flushed, now with anger. This.was.wrong.
He grabbed the blanket from one gurney, yanked it off and it was a body it was him, his face with a grimace of horror his hand at his chest, clutching a handful of patchcords.
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Image presented without
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He (alive) grabbed them, from him (dead), jerking them free from a tightclosed fist and ran.
On the other side of the far door was, of course, the elevator. Did a discrete plaque above the double doors say "Room 101"? He never knew. The elevator arrived almost instantly and he dashed in, never again to return to the sub-basement.
He came back to the office the next day like a condemned man to the gallows, resignation letter in his pocket. In his pocket it stayed; just past nine he was introduced to the new guy. He knew that the next time something needed fetching from the sub-basement, he'd have someone else to send.
I love it as usual.
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