Chapter Text
WHERE WALLS HUMM
Aerion
Aerion woke to the sound of buzzing.
Not the shrill, living whine of an insect. Not the vibration of his phone against a wooden table, nor the distant electrical sigh of the refrigerator in his flat, nor even the old heating pipes complaining behind the walls when the city turned cold. This was different. Wider. Flatter. A sound without source or mercy, spread evenly through the air like illness.
It sat above him.
Around him.
Inside his skull.
A long fluorescent hum, constant and merciless, too steady to be natural, too dull to be ignored. It had no rhythm, no pause, no breath between one note and the next. It simply existed, filling the dark behind his eyelids until waking became less a return to consciousness and more an intrusion.
Aerion kept his eyes closed.
For a moment, he did not move.
His first thought was that he had fallen asleep at his desk again.
This would explain the stiffness in his neck, perhaps, the stale pressure behind his eyes, the sour taste in his mouth. It would explain why his body felt arranged wrongly beneath him, one arm trapped under his ribs, one knee bent, fingers curled against something that was not bedsheet and not floorboard and not the old rug beneath his coffee table.
But it would not explain the smell.
Damp carpet.
Wet dust.
Old wallpaper paste.
Warm, stale air that had been breathed by no one and yet still felt used.
Aerion opened his eyes.
Yellow.
For several seconds, that was all his mind accepted.
Yellow above him. Yellow around him. Yellow light soaked into yellow walls, the color of nicotine stains, cheap hotel curtains, forgotten waiting rooms, butter left too long in heat. The ceiling was low and paneled with rectangular fluorescent fixtures, some bright, some dimmer, one far away flickering with a small epileptic violence that made the shadows pulse in corners where corners should not have been able to gather.
Aerion lay on his side on damp carpet.
He stared at the wall across from him.
It was covered in wallpaper. Old, ugly wallpaper with a faint, repeating pattern too degraded to be floral and too deliberate to be accidental. The paper had bubbled in places, lifting from the plaster in soft blisters. Darker stains marked the lower edges, as if the walls had been drinking from the floor.
The buzzing continued.
Aerion blinked.
Once.
Twice.
Then, very carefully, he said, “No.” His voice sounded wrong.
Not distorted, not echoed dramatically like some cheap horror trick, but flattened. Swallowed. The room accepted the word and did nothing with it. No city answered beyond a window. No radiator clicked. No neighbor moved overhead. No car passed below. There was only the buzz, his breathing, and the soft, obscene dampness beneath his hand.
He pushed himself upright too quickly and regretted it at once.
The room tilted.
Not because it moved. Because his body expected one world and had been handed another. He braced one palm against the carpet, felt moisture press coldly into his skin, and pulled his hand away with a sharp, disgusted intake of breath.
“Christ.” He looked down at himself.
White cropped shirt. Oversized, loose at the sleeves, riding up slightly where he had twisted in sleep. Black shorts hanging low on his hips, belt still fastened, silver buckle cold against his stomach. Black socks. Heavy black shoes. Rings still on his fingers. Chain at his neck.
His clothes.
Absolutely his clothes.
That was almost worse.
If he had woken in some hospital gown, some unfamiliar costume, some absurd symbolic uniform chosen by a nightmare with theatrical instincts, he might have found a clean line between before and after. But this was what he had worn the previous night. Or close enough. He remembered being exhausted. Remembered coming home. Remembered not undressing properly. Remembered sitting on the edge of his bed and meaning only to rest for a moment before brushing his teeth, because apparently he had become the kind of pathetic, overworked creature who negotiated with sleep as if sleep could be reasoned with.
He did not remember falling asleep.
He did not remember waking.
He did not remember arriving.
Aerion pressed his thumb and forefinger against his eyes until lights bloomed red behind them.
Dream, he thought.
The word came cleanly. Sensibly.
Of course. He was dreaming.
The brain, irritated by recent exposure to internet nonsense, had built him a yellow room out of fatigue, rain, bad coffee, and the architectural equivalent of indigestion. He had seen posters. Trailers. Reflections. Stairwells. He had read too much about liminal horror while pretending to despise it from a rational distance. Now his subconscious, that treacherous little contractor, had thrown up a cheap replica using available materials.
That was all.
Dreams were often stupid. This one had the decency to be thematically consistent.
Aerion inhaled slowly.
The air tasted faintly of mildew.
Too detailed, said some colder part of him.
He ignored it.
He looked around.
The room was not a room, exactly. It was a space pretending to be many rooms. Half-walls, square openings, support columns wrapped in the same yellow wallpaper, shallow alcoves leading into further alcoves. Doorways without doors. Corners that showed more yellow beyond them, and then more beyond that. The carpet stretched everywhere, grayish beige under the yellow light, mottled with stains. In places it appeared freshly damp; in others it was crusted flat as if decades of feet had passed over it, though Aerion could see no footprints but his own.
No furniture.
No windows.
No visible exit.
No people.
He sat very still for a while, because panic, he had learned early, was most dangerous when it disguised itself as movement. Men made poor decisions when they allowed their bodies to vote before their minds had convened.
So he observed. He counted.
Ceiling panels; stained, one missing far down the left passage, revealing a dark cavity above.
Lights; humming, too many to track.
Wall height; perhaps eight feet, maybe less.
Airflow; none that he could feel.
Temperature; unpleasantly warm, not hot, but close and stale.
Smell; damp carpet, old paper, dust, faint sweetness underneath, like something left to rot behind a wall.
Sound; buzzing. Constant. No voices. No traffic. No plumbing. No ventilation.
His pulse; elevated.
His hands: steady enough.
Good.
He stood.
His knees did not immediately trust him. He disliked them for it.
The first step produced a wet, padded sound that made his skin crawl. The carpet yielded beneath his shoe, soft with moisture. He took another step. Then another. He turned slowly, committing the space to memory with the stubborn fury of a man who refused to be intimidated by interior design.
He had woken in a square-ish chamber with three openings: one ahead, one to the right, one behind him. The left wall was unbroken except for a darker stain shaped like an island. The opening ahead led to a longer corridor that bent after perhaps twenty meters. The one to the right opened into a wider room with columns. The one behind him led to more small chambers, all lit, all yellow, all empty.
Aerion put a hand into his pocket.
His phone was there.
Relief went through him so sharply that for a moment it almost felt like pain.
He pulled it out.
The screen lit.
02:17.
No signal.
Battery: 61%.
He stared at the numbers.
02:17 made no sense. It had been after midnight when he had gone to bed, yes, but it should have been morning by now. Or perhaps not. Dreams did not care about time. Neither did unconsciousness. Neither did being drugged, concussed, kidnapped, or trapped in the cheap back hallway of some condemned commercial building.
He unlocked the phone.
No notifications.
No service.
Wi-Fi: none.
He opened messages anyway. Daeron’s last text sat there from earlier, stupid and ordinary.
𝚂𝚞𝚗𝚍𝚊𝚢 𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚗𝚎𝚛𝚜 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚖𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚊𝚝𝚘𝚛𝚢 𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚗 𝚒𝚏 𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚕𝚒𝚝𝚢 𝚌𝚘𝚕𝚕𝚊𝚙𝚜𝚎𝚜, 𝚋𝚢 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚠𝚊𝚢.
Aerion stared at it until the words blurred.
Then he laughed.
It came out wrong. One sharp, ugly sound bitten off too soon.
“Very funny,” he said to no one.
He tried calling Daeron.
The call failed instantly.
He tried again.
Failed.
His mother.
Failed.
Emergency services.
The phone hung on the attempt for five long seconds, then dropped back to the keypad without explanation.
Aerion’s jaw tightened. “Of course.” He turned on the camera and pointed it at the room.
The image appeared exactly as it should.
Yellow walls. Carpet. Fluorescent glare. His own shadow, long and faint beneath him.
He took a photograph.
The phone made the small artificial shutter sound. The photo saved. He opened it. Yellow room. No distortion. No demonic face in the corner. No obvious evidence of dream or hoax or mercy.
He switched to video and recorded ten seconds of the space while turning slowly. His voice, when he spoke, sounded calm enough to please him.
“Aerion Targaryen. Unknown location. Time according to phone: 2:19 a.m. No signal. I appear to have woken in..” He stopped.
He refused to say it.
He absolutely refused.
“In an unidentified interior environment. Fluorescent lighting. Damp carpet. No visible windows or exits. No other people present.”
The buzzing filled the silence after his words.
He stopped recording.
Watched it back.
There he was: pale, sleep-disheveled, sharp-faced, standing in yellow light like a man auditioning for madness and offended by the role. The audio captured the hum too well. Even through the phone speaker it sounded oppressive, flattening everything beneath it.
Not a dream, said the colder part.
Dreams did not usually allow recordings to be replayed with such fidelity. Then again, perhaps he was dreaming the replay.
Aerion closed his eyes.
He pinched the inside of his forearm hard enough to hurt.
Nothing changed.
He pinched harder.
Pain bloomed, immediate and spiteful.
The room remained.
“Fine,” he said.
The word did not mean acceptance. It meant abaolute, utter war.
He checked his pockets properly. Phone. Keys. Wallet. A folded receipt. Lighter, though no cigarettes. One pen, because apparently some habits persisted even in nightmares. No knife. No water. No food. No jacket.
That last absence annoyed him more than it should have. He was dressed for a stupid late-night room, not survival in whatever damp architectural purgatory his subconscious or the universe had vomited him into. His arms were bare. His shirt was thin. His shoes were solid, at least. Good boots. Heavy soles. That mattered.
He looked again at the three exits. Staying in one place was a bad idea. Moving blindly was also a bad idea. Every decision was bad. That, at least, simplified the hierarchy.
He crouched and examined the carpet near where he had woken. No sign of a trapdoor. No seam. No blood. No personal belongings scattered around him. No message carved into the wall by a previous idiot who had found himself in the same situation and decided to be helpful before vanishing. Just carpet, wet enough to darken under pressure.
He took the pen from his pocket and approached the nearest wall.
The wallpaper resisted unpleasantly beneath the ballpoint, waxy and damp. He pressed harder until the tip tore through and left a dark, jagged mark.
A.T.
START
2:22
He stepped back.
Small. Crude. Real.
He wrote an arrow pointing toward the opening ahead.
Then stopped.
Why ahead?
Because it was ahead.
Brilliant.
Aerion looked between the openings.
He needed method. A rule. Any rule would do, so long as it was consistent enough to prevent him from wandering in circles like every doomed fool in every story ever written by someone too lazy to understand navigation.
Right-hand wall rule? Follow the right wall continuously and one could, in a finite maze, eventually find an exit or return to the start.
Finite.
He looked down the yellow corridor. The word felt almost comedic. Still, rules did not need to be perfect to be useful. They only needed to outlast panic.
He turned to the right-hand opening.
“Right,” he said, and hated that his voice sounded smaller than the hum.
He began walking.
The first rooms looked like the first room. That was the immediate problem.
There were differences, of course. Minor shifts. A column slightly off-center. A patch of wallpaper peeling in the shape of a tongue. A darker stain near the baseboard. One light dead, making the far corner bruise-colored. The carpet slightly drier in one patch, wetter in another. But the overall effect was repetition so aggressive it bordered on insult.
Aerion marked his path whenever the pen would take.
Arrows. Numbers. Initials. Occasionally a short note.
ROOM 2 — SAME
ROOM 3 — COLUMN
ROOM 4 — LIGHT OUT
He spoke aloud every few minutes, partly to test the space, partly to stop his own thoughts from becoming too loud. “If this is a dream, the commitment to bad wallpaper is impressive.”
No answer.
“Architecturally incoherent. No visible HVAC. No fire exits. No emergency signage. Illegal by every standard.”
Buzzing.
“Ugly, too. Important to note.”
The walls did not defend themselves.
After perhaps ten minutes, though the phone said only four had passed, he reached a corridor that stretched farther than his flashlight could make sense of. The ceiling lights continued in a long row, some flickering, some steady. The wallpaper pattern repeated with nauseating patience. The corridor bent slightly to the left at the end, but not enough to reveal what lay beyond.
He stopped.
Listened.
Buzzing.
His own breathing.
Somewhere far away, a soft drip.
He lifted the phone and took another video. “Still no visible exit. Environment appears continuous. Repetition suggests either large commercial interior, staged environment, or—” He paused, mouth tightening. “Or impossible spatial arrangement.”
He ended the recording before the word impossible could linger.
The phone battery read 59%.
He lowered brightness.
Turned off Bluetooth.
Closed apps he did not need.
He almost turned the phone off entirely, then decided against it. The light, camera, and time were too valuable. Evidence mattered. If he returned, he would need proof. If he did not, the idea of proof became absurd, but that was not a line of thought worth indulging.
When he walked again, he tried counting steps.
One hundred and twelve to the bend.
Beyond it, another corridor, nearly identical, crossing perpendicular.
He marked the wall.
AT →
112 STEPS
Then he stood at the intersection and considered.
Right-hand rule.
He turned right.
The new corridor narrowed, then opened into a room with low half-walls forming cubicle-like passages without desks. It looked like an office stripped of purpose, a workplace after all human function had been removed and only the grammar of containment remained. He moved through it slowly, trailing fingers along the right wall when possible, careful not to brush too hard against the damp paper.
The buzzing grew louder here.
Not actually louder, perhaps. More concentrated. The ceiling hung lower, the lights closer. One fixture flickered with a tiny metallic tick that burrowed behind his eyes.
He stopped beneath it and looked up.
The plastic panel was filled with dead insects.
Dozens.
Maybe hundreds.
Little black bodies trapped above the light, legs curled, wings turned translucent by heat. They had found their way in and never out.
Aerion stared at them longer than he meant to. “Poor planning,” he said. His voice nearly cracked on the second word.
He moved on.
At 2:41, according to his phone, he found the first sign that someone else had been there.
A shoe.
It sat in the middle of a small room with three columns, alone and absurdly neat, as if placed deliberately. A black sneaker, worn, adult-sized. No blood. No sock. No owner. The laces were still tied.
Aerion did not touch it.
He circled it once.
The room offered no explanation.
He crouched and photographed it. “Single shoe,” he recorded. “No other personal effects visible. Size perhaps forty-two. Condition ordinary. Placement..” He looked around. “Suspiciously theatrical.”
He stood.
His mouth had gone dry.
A shoe meant people. Or props. Or a previous victim. Or a prank. Or a dream borrowing symbols because dreams were lazy and loved abandoned shoes, lost teeth, impossible schools, dead relatives speaking in kitchens.
He tried to decide whether the shoe made him feel better or worse.
People meant he might not be alone.
People also meant one could be alone after people.
He left the shoe behind and marked the wall.
SHOE
DO NOT TOUCH
Ten more rooms.
A hallway. A wide open space where the carpet squelched under every step. An alcove filled with nothing but the smell of wet paper so strong he gagged and backed away.
At 2:56, he found his first mark.
A.T.
START
2:22
Aerion stopped dead.
For a moment he could not understand what he was seeing.
The letters were his. Jagged, slightly slanted, torn through damp wallpaper. The arrow pointed toward the opening ahead. The carpet beneath him bore the faint scuffs of his shoes.
He had returned.
Impossible, no. Annoying, yes. Mazes looped. Buildings looped. He had followed a wall and returned to his origin. That was data. Frustrating data, but useful.
He looked at the phone.
2:56.
Thirty-four minutes.
He had walked a loop in thirty-four minutes.
Good.
Good.
That meant finite local geometry.
He swallowed.
It also meant he had gone nowhere.
Aerion sat down in the starting room because standing suddenly felt like conceding too much to gravity.
The carpet dampened the seat of his shorts almost immediately. “Wonderful,” he said bitterly, and stood again.
Rest was not worth wet clothing.
He leaned against the wall instead, then recoiled from the wallpaper’s clammy softness.
There was nowhere pleasant to exist in this place. That felt intentional.
He opened his notes app and began writing.
𝚄𝚗𝚔𝚗𝚘𝚠𝚗 𝚕𝚘𝚌𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗. 𝙻𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚕?
No. Do not use stupid terminology.
𝚆𝚘𝚔𝚎 2:17.
𝙿𝚑𝚘𝚗𝚎 𝚗𝚘 𝚜𝚒𝚐𝚗𝚊𝚕.
𝙱𝚊𝚝𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚢 61 -> 57.
𝚈𝚎𝚕𝚕𝚘𝚠 𝚛𝚘𝚘𝚖𝚜. 𝙳𝚊𝚖𝚙 𝚌𝚊𝚛𝚙𝚎𝚝. 𝙵𝚕𝚞𝚘𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚌𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚕𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝𝚜. 𝙽𝚘 𝚠𝚒𝚗𝚍𝚘𝚠𝚜. 𝙼𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚍 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚛𝚝. 𝙵𝚘𝚕𝚕𝚘𝚠𝚎𝚍 𝚛𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝 𝚠𝚊𝚕𝚕. 𝚁𝚎𝚝𝚞𝚛𝚗𝚎𝚍 𝚊𝚏𝚝𝚎𝚛 34 𝚖𝚒𝚗. 𝙻𝚘𝚘𝚙.
𝙵𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚍 𝚜𝚑𝚘𝚎.
𝙽𝚘 𝚘𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚙𝚎𝚘𝚙𝚕𝚎. 𝙽𝚘 𝚟𝚘𝚒𝚌𝚎𝚜.
𝙽𝚎𝚎𝚍: 𝚠𝚊𝚝𝚎𝚛, 𝚎𝚡𝚒𝚝, 𝚑𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚐𝚛𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚍? 𝚜𝚑𝚎𝚕𝚝𝚎𝚛? 𝚠𝚎𝚊𝚙𝚘𝚗..
He stared at the word weapon.
Then looked around.
There was nothing loose. No chair. No pipe. No broken trim. Even the baseboards, where they existed, seemed fused to the walls beneath warped paper. The place had been stripped of anything useful, as if designed by someone who understood exactly how desperate men became creative.
His pen.
His keys.
His phone.
His boots.
That was all.
He slid one key between his fingers experimentally, hated himself for the cliché, and put it back.
If something came for him, a key would not save him.
No.
He stopped that thought.
There was no evidence of anything hostile.
Evidence first.
Fear second.
Aerion drew a rough map in the notes app from memory. It looked childish and useless within a minute. He deleted it and started again on a blank page. Then he stopped using the phone and began mapping on the wall beside START, because the wall could not run out of battery.
He used arrows, boxes, step counts, symbols.
START.
Loop A.
Shoe room.
Wet alcove.
Long corridor.
Back.
He had just added a second note when the buzzing changed.
Aerion’s hand froze.
It was small.
So small that anyone else might have missed it.
A dip in the hum. A brief modulation, like electricity passing through a throat. The lights dimmed almost imperceptibly, then steadied.
From somewhere beyond the right-hand opening came a sound.
Not loud. Not close. A soft, dragging scrape.
Aerion did not breathe.
The scrape came again. Then stopped.
The air thickened around him.
His mind, in an act of betrayal dressed as helpfulness, supplied every possible explanation at once. Settling building. Loose ceiling panel. Distant pipe. Carpet shifting from moisture. Animal. Person. Something being dragged. Someone crawling. A shoe moving where no foot remained.
He turned off his phone screen.
The darkness did not arrive, because the lights remained, but without the screen in his hand the world felt less defensible.
He listened.
Buzzing.
Nothing.
More nothing.
Then, far away, perhaps imagined:
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Aerion backed slowly toward the opening opposite the sound.
His heel sank slightly into the carpet. The wet squelch was obscene. He stopped, because the noise seemed enormous.
Nothing answered.
He continued backing away.
At the threshold, pride made one last attempt at command. He almost called out. Almost demanded who was there. Almost armed himself with sarcasm because sarcasm had saved him from many rooms and could surely save him from this one.
He did not.
Some ancient, undignified part of him, older than language and unimpressed by intellect, placed one cold hand over his mouth from inside and said: be quiet.
Aerion obeyed.
He retreated through three rooms before turning.
Then he walked quickly.
Not running.
Running was panic.
Running was prey.
He walked quickly, counting turns poorly, abandoning the right-hand rule because the right-hand rule had returned him to the scrape and he had decided, with scientific confidence, to be elsewhere.
After several minutes, he slowed.
No scrape followed.
No tap.
Only the buzz.
His breathing sounded too loud. “Pathetic,” he whispered. He was unsure whether he meant himself for fleeing or himself for wanting to go back and prove there had been nothing.
He did neither.
The rooms ahead changed subtly.
The walls were still yellow, but the layout opened wider, with longer sightlines and fewer half-walls. The ceiling lights sat farther apart, leaving dimmer spaces between them. The carpet here was drier. Older. It crackled faintly underfoot in places, as if the fibers had stiffened from age.
He liked this area more.
Then immediately distrusted that reaction.
A place could not be safe because it was less disgusting.
At 3:18, he found an outlet.
It sat low on the wall beneath peeling wallpaper, two sockets, beige plate cracked down the middle.
Aerion stared at it with near religious intensity.
Power.
Where there was power, there was infrastructure. Where there was infrastructure, there were systems. Systems had edges, maintenance, sources, failures. Systems could be understood.
He crouched before the outlet and touched the plate.
Warm.
Not hot. Warm.
He did not have a charger. Because of course he did not.
He laughed silently, shoulders shaking once.
The universe, if it had done this to him, possessed a petty sense of humor.
He marked the wall.
OUTLET
NO CHARGER BECAUSE APPARENTLY I AM A FOOL
Then, after a moment, he added:
REMEMBER THIS LOCATION
He moved on.
At 3:27, his phone battery read 53%.
At 3:34, he found a patch of wallpaper where someone had scratched a word with what looked like fingernails or a key.
HELLO
The letters were uneven. Desperate. Old enough that the torn edges had darkened.
Aerion stood before it for a long time.
Then he wrote beneath it:
UNHELPFUL
He capped the pen with unnecessary force.
A minute later he returned and added:
BUT NOTED
The absurdity of it steadied him.
He wondered who had written HELLO.
Whether they had been alone.
Whether they had expected an answer.
Whether they had received one.
He wondered if they had left through some exit he had not yet found, or whether they had died somewhere in these rooms, or whether they were still walking, old now, mad now, writing greetings into walls because there was no one else to speak to.
He did not like the direction of those thoughts. So he turned them, as he always did, into irritation. “If one intends to leave messages in impossible buildings,” he said, “one might try being informative.”
The hum swallowed the remark.
He walked.
Time began to behave poorly.
The phone insisted only minutes passed, but the rooms stretched his perception thin. Without windows, without changing light, without external sound, the mind lost its footholds. He felt he had been walking for hours, then checked and found seven minutes gone. He paused to rest and felt surely twenty minutes pass, then checked and found three.
The fluorescent lights did something to thought. Flattened it. Removed shadow from the wrong places and left it in others. Every color became sick. His skin looked bloodless. His clothes looked unreal. His hands, when he glanced down at them, seemed separate from him: pale fingers, silver rings, pen ink smudged along the side of one thumb.
Once, he thought he saw movement at the edge of his vision.
He turned.
Nothing.
Only a column, half-wrapped in peeling paper.
Once, he heard something like a breath.
He held his own until his lungs hurt.
Nothing.
Once, he passed through a room and realized, with a cold prickle at the back of his neck, that the buzzing had stopped.
Not everywhere.
Just there.
One room of silence.
He froze in the doorway.
Behind him, buzz.
Ahead, buzz.
Inside, silence.
The room was small, square, empty. Its lights were on but made no sound. The carpet looked drier than elsewhere. The wallpaper was almost intact. There was nothing inside.
Aerion did not enter.
He stood there, one hand on the threshold, staring.
Silence should have been relief.
It was not.
The absence of the hum made the room feel occupied.
He backed away and marked the outside wall.
SILENT ROOM
NO
Then he continued until the buzzing returned fully and tried not to feel grateful.
At 4:02, thirst became more than an observation.
His tongue stuck slightly to the roof of his mouth. His lips felt dry. He had drunk coffee and wine and not enough water the previous day, because he was a brilliant man with the survival instincts of decorative glass.
Water became priority.
Not exit.
Water.
One could survive longer without answers than without water. An obvious thought, humiliatingly practical.
He searched for signs of plumbing.
Bathrooms, break rooms, janitor closets, kitchens. Buildings like this, even impossible ones, had needs if they imitated human spaces closely enough. Pipes had to run somewhere. The damp carpet suggested water, though not potable. Ceiling stains. Wall discoloration. Drips.
He followed the sound of dripping when he heard it again.
This required abandoning any pretense of systematic navigation.
The drip came faintly, irregular, always seeming one room farther than he expected. He moved toward it through narrow openings and around columns, marking as he went when he remembered.
DRIP?
DRIP LOUDER
STILL DRIP
The sound led him to a low-ceilinged area where the wallpaper darkened near the floor and the carpet shone wet under the lights. In the far corner, water fell from a ceiling tile into a shallow depression in the carpet.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Aerion crouched at a distance and stared at it.
Water.
Also possibly poison, bacteria, ceiling runoff, chemical contamination, mold infusion, or whatever foulness accumulated above acoustic tiles in a place that should not exist.
He touched the wet carpet near the edge.
Cold.
He smelled his fingers.
Mildew. Dust. Something metallic.
He wiped his hand violently on his shorts. “No,” he said.
Not unless desperate. He was not desperate yet. He hated the yet.
He marked the wall.
WATER FROM CEILING
DO NOT DRINK UNLESS DYING
PROBABLY THEN ALSO DO NOT
He moved on with thirst now sharpened by proximity to refusal. The next significant discovery came by accident.
He had been walking for what felt like another hour and was, according to the phone, fifteen minutes, when he found a wall that did not match the others. It was still yellow, still papered, but the baseboard along the bottom had come loose. Not much. A thin gap showed darkness behind it.
Aerion knelt.
The baseboard was made of cheap composite, swollen from damp. He wedged his fingers under the loosened edge and pulled.
It resisted.
He pulled harder.
A strip snapped free with a crack loud enough to make him flinch. The sound shot through the rooms and vanished.
Aerion held still.
Nothing came.
He looked at the broken strip in his hand.
It was not a weapon, exactly.
It was.. something.
Roughly two feet long, jagged at one end, light but better than his pen. He tested the point against his palm and winced.
Good.
He kept it.
The gap behind the baseboard revealed only wall. No crawlspace. No hidden passage. No useful revelation. But the strip in his hand changed the balance of his body slightly. He felt ridiculous carrying it. He also felt marginally less exposed.
“Behold,” he muttered. “Civilization.”
At 4:31, the phone battery was 47%.
He turned it off.
The screen went black.
The moment it did, loneliness arrived.
Not fear of death. Not exactly. Death still seemed too dramatic for this place, too decisive. What pressed against him was the realization that he had no tether now but memory. No live clock. No messages. No possibility, however absurd, of a call going through if he tried at the right corner, beneath the right light, at the right moment. Turning off the phone was sensible. It was also a small burial.
He slipped it into his pocket.
The buzzing filled the space where the phone had been.
He walked without checking time.
This was worse.
And better.
Worse because minutes lost shape completely. Better because he no longer watched battery percentage bleed away like an hourglass.
His thoughts began to circle despite his efforts.
Daeron would call. No answer.
His mother would be irritated first, then worried.
His father would call the landlord, perhaps. Or perhaps not until god knows when. Aerion was adult, difficult, prone to disappearing into work. People did not panic immediately over men who had trained them to expect absence.
How long until they looked? How long until they entered his flat? What would they find? Bed unmade. Laptop open. Coffee cups. Clothes missing because he was wearing them. Phone gone. Door locked? Had he locked it? He could not remember. If the door was locked from the inside, that mattered. If not, that mattered differently. His keys were in his pocket, which meant he had taken them. Or they had come with him. Or the dream had supplied them because the dream knew props.
No.
Stop.
He struck the wall lightly with the broken baseboard, just to hear something other than himself.
The crack sounded small and satisfying.
He walked.
At some point, he began to speak to Daeron as if his brother walked beside him.
“You would hate this,” he said.
Then, after considering: “No. You would pretend to enjoy it for ten minutes and then make it everyone’s problem.”
A turn.
Another room.
A low archway that should have led somewhere different and did not.
“Mother would attempt politeness for the first hour.”
Another turn.
“She would then find whoever was in charge and make them regret their birth.”
A corridor with a dark stain running along the ceiling.
“Father would say very little, which would somehow lower the temperature.”
He paused beneath a flickering light and looked back.
Empty.
“I,” he said softly, “am apparently narrating to no one. Excellent development.”
He did not stop.
The place rewarded stopping with thought. Movement was better. Movement was a lie of progress, but men had built civilizations on worse.
He passed another outlet. Marked it.
He found a dead light panel fallen on the floor, plastic cracked, revealing no wires, only a dark rectangular wound in the ceiling above. He did not stand beneath it long.
He found a room where the carpet had been torn in a long strip, exposing concrete beneath. The concrete was dry and cold. He stood on it with absurd relief.
He found a corner where someone had arranged small pieces of torn wallpaper into a neat pile.
He did not know why that frightened him so much.
Perhaps because it suggested boredom.
Not panic.
Not attack.
Boredom.
Someone had sat there long enough to peel wallpaper and stack the pieces neatly.
He left quickly.
At length, he reached a hallway that did not hum quite the same way.
The sound here vibrated lower, as if the lights were older or the ceiling above them deeper. The wallpaper darkened gradually along the walls, yellow turning toward ochre, then brownish in patches. The carpet smelled stronger. The air felt warmer.
Aerion slowed.
Every instinct objected.
He considered turning back.
Then laughed, because back was a concept with no legal standing here.
He continued, baseboard strip held low in his right hand.
Halfway down the hall, he saw a shadow move across the far wall.
He stopped.
The shadow was long and thin. It passed once across the wallpaper and vanished around the corner ahead.
Aerion’s grip tightened around the makeshift weapon until the jagged edge bit his palm.
No sound followed.
No footsteps.
No scrape.
The light flickered.
He took one step backward. Then another. Pride did not argue this time. Pride had gone pale and quiet, like the rest of him.
A voice came from beyond the corner.
Very faint.
So faint he might have imagined it.
“Hello?”
Aerion’s entire body locked.
The word was human. Or human-shaped. A woman? A child? Hard to tell through the buzzing and distance. It had risen at the end in question, trembling slightly.
“Hello?” it came again.
Closer? No. Perhaps not.
Aerion did not answer.
A person needed help.
A trap needed bait.
Both facts stood in his mind with equal weight.
He hated himself for hesitating. He hated the place for making hesitation reasonable.
The voice came a third time.
This time it sounded exactly like his mother.
“Aerion?”
Cold moved through him so quickly that his vision sharpened.
No.
No, absolutely not.
His mother was not here. His mother did not know. His mother would not call from around a yellow corner in a place outside sense. His mother would not stand beyond a hallway with a moving shadow and ask for him in that tone, worried and controlled and breaking at the edges.
“Aerion, darling?”
He backed away. The baseboard shook in his hand.
Something shifted beyond the corner.
Not footsteps.
Not dragging.
A soft adjustment, like fabric against wall.
“Aerion?”
He ran.
This time he ran.
No dignity. No measured pace. No philosophical objection. He turned and bolted down the hallway, shoes striking damp carpet with horrible soft thuds, the buzz exploding overhead. He did not look back. Looking back belonged to fools and myths. He cut left through the first opening he saw, then right, then through a low passage into a wider chamber, almost slipped where the carpet soaked through, caught himself against a column, felt wallpaper smear wetly under his palm, kept going.
His breath tore loud in his throat.
Behind him, nothing pursued.
That was worse.
He ran until his lungs burned, until the stitch in his side became sharp enough to force him down to a stagger, until the rooms around him looked no different from the rooms before and he had no idea where he was.
Then he stopped.
Bent over.
One hand on his knee, the other still holding the broken strip.
He listened.
Buzzing.
Only buzzing.
His mother did not call again.
Aerion laughed, then nearly gagged on it.
Sweat cooled on his back beneath the loose white shirt. His bare arms prickled. His hair clung damply to his forehead. He pressed the heel of his free hand to his mouth and stood there, trembling with adrenaline and rage.
Not fear.
Rage.
It had used her voice.
The place, or something in it, or his mind breaking under stress. He did not care which. It had taken one of the few sacred things he possessed and hung it like bait around a corner.
For the first time since waking, Aerion felt something clean.
Hatred.
Good.
He could use hatred.
Fear made the world large. Hatred made it narrow.
He straightened.
“Do that again,” he said, voice low and shaking, “and I will tear out every light in this place.”
The lights buzzed on, unimpressed.
He stood there until his breathing steadied. Then, with hands still not entirely reliable, he turned his phone on.
Battery: 46%.
Time: 4:49.
He had been here two and a half hours.
Only.
The word nearly broke something in him.
Two and a half hours felt like a childhood.
He opened the camera, intending to record what had happened. His face stared back at him for half a second in the black reflection before the camera focused outward. He looked terrible. Pale, furious, eyes too bright, hair disordered, mouth hard.
Good.
Let the record show that he had been angry.
“Audio phenomenon,” he said into the recording. “Human voice. Mimicked—” He stopped. Swallowed. “Mimicked known person. Did not engage. Withdrew.”
He almost said ran.
He did not.
“Potential entity, hallucination, or acoustic distortion. Avoid responding to voices unless visual confirmation is possible.”
A pause.
Then, because honesty had uses even when humiliating, he added, “Especially familiar voices.”
He stopped recording.
The act steadied him again. Documentation as ritual. Evidence as prayer.
He left the phone on this time. He needed its light less than its companionship.
The rooms after that seemed subtly more hostile, though he knew this was projection. Nothing had changed. Same wallpaper. Same carpet. Same lights. But now every corner suggested intention. Every opening became a mouth. Every dark gap above a missing ceiling tile felt watched.
He began marking walls more aggressively.
VOICE — DO NOT FOLLOW
If he found this mark again, good. If someone else found it, better. If the thing found it, let it read, if it can.
He did not know how long he wandered after that.
The phone said time. Time said nothing.
His thirst worsened. Hunger began to stir faintly beneath it, less urgent but present. His legs ached from walking. His socks felt damp. A blister threatened at the back of one heel. The baseboard strip gave him a splinter in his palm, which he removed with his teeth and spat onto the carpet.
At some point, he found another message.
Not scratched.
Written in black marker, large and frantic across a wall:
IF THE LIGHTS GO OUT
GET DOWN
Aerion stared.
The buzzing continued. The lights remained on. He copied the message into his phone.
Then, beneath it, he wrote with his pen:
WHY?
He waited, absurdly, as if the wall might answer.
It did not.
He nearly laughed.
Then the light at the end of the hall flickered out.
Aerion’s laughter died before it began.
One light.
Then another.
Not all at once.
Sequential.
Far end of the hall: dark.
Next panel: flicker, snap, dark.
Next: hum dipping, dark.
The darkness moved toward him one rectangle at a time.
Aerion looked at the message.
IF THE LIGHTS GO OUT
GET DOWN
His body acted before pride could object.
He dropped flat to the carpet.
The damp struck through his shirt instantly. The smell filled his nose, mold and rot and chemical sweetness. He pressed himself low, face turned sideways, baseboard clutched beneath him, phone trapped against his chest to hide its light.
The lights continued dying.
Panel by panel.
Darkness crawled overhead.
The buzz receded with each extinguished fixture until the hall seemed to empty of sound.
One light remained above him.
It flickered.
Aerion did not breathe.
It went out.
Darkness swallowed everything.
Not dimness.
Not shadow.
Total absence.
The kind of dark that pressed against the eyes and made them invent shapes to avoid admitting defeat.
For two seconds, there was silence. Then something moved in the hallway.
Aerion closed his eyes in the dark, useless though that was.
The movement was slow.
Soft.
Close enough that he felt, or imagined he felt, a displacement in the air above him.
Not footsteps.
Not exactly.
A sliding? A careful placement of weight? Something too tall for the corridor bending itself beneath the ceiling? His mind tried to build a body from sound and failed, producing only fragments: limb, cloth, breath, teeth, height.
A smell passed over him.
Warm dust. Old meat. Wet plaster.
The carpet fibers scratched his cheek.
He kept still. Every muscle screamed.
The thing paused. Directly beside him.
Aerion stared into blackness and thought, with astonishing clarity, If I live, I will never mock anyone’s stupid horror story again.
Something exhaled.
Not from a mouth near the floor.
From above.
Far above.
Then the lights came back on.
All at once.
The buzz slammed into the world.
Aerion remained flat on the carpet, eyes open now, staring at the base of the wall inches from his face.
Nothing stood beside him. Nothing occupied the hall. No shadow. No figure. No footprint. No explanation.
Only yellow walls.
Damp carpet.
Fluorescent light.
His own heartbeat trying to break his ribs.
For a long time, Aerion did not move.
When he finally pushed himself up, his arms nearly failed him. His white shirt was stained dark across the front from the wet carpet. His cheek burned where fibers had pressed into the skin. His hand had cramped around the baseboard strip so tightly he had to uncurl each finger.
He looked at the warning on the wall.
Then at his own question beneath it.
WHY?
He laughed.
Quietly at first.
Then harder.
Not because anything was funny. Because the answer had been supplied with admirable efficiency.
He took the pen and, beneath WHY?, wrote:
UNDERSTOOD
His handwriting shook.
He hated that.
He underlined the word until the paper tore.
After that, Aerion changed.
Not dramatically. No grand epiphany, no collapse, no screaming descent into belief. He did not suddenly understand the place. He did not accept it with mystical humility. He did not become brave in any clean, heroic manner.
He became practical.
The mind, cornered hard enough, abandoned elegance.
Rules so far:
Do not trust familiar voices.
If lights go out, get down.
Do not drink ceiling water unless necessary.
Keep phone battery.
Mark everything.
Find water.
Find people only if visibly human.
Do not assume alone means safe.
Do not assume fear means wrong.
The last one offended him.
He kept it though.
He moved again, slower now, more attentive to the lights. Every flicker made his knees loosen unpleasantly. Every steady panel seemed like a temporary contract. He watched the ceiling as much as the walls, and the watching exhausted him.
His clothes clung damply. His skin itched. The air seemed thicker. He wanted water with a physical longing so strong it became almost erotic in its cruelty. He thought of the glass beside his bed at home sometimes half-full in the morning, ignored, wasted. He hated his past self for every casual sip.
At 5:23, he found a vending machine.
It stood alone in an open room beneath three humming lights, bright red and impossible in the yellow monotony.
Aerion stopped so abruptly he almost stumbled.
For a moment, hope struck him stupid.
The vending machine was old, its plastic front scratched, its product labels sun-faded though no sun existed here. Rows of bottled water, soft drinks, candy bars, crisps. Some slots empty. Some occupied. The machine’s internal light flickered faintly.
Aerion approached as one might approach a sleeping animal.
The display read: $0.00
He stared.
Then barked one incredulous laugh. “No.”
He pressed the button for water.
The machine hummed.
Something clunked.
A bottle dropped into the retrieval tray.
Aerion stared at it.
He did not touch it immediately.
He looked around the room. Checked corners. Ceiling. Floor. Behind the machine as much as he could without moving it. No wires besides the plug. No visible trap. No smiling face. No message reading drink and become furniture.
He crouched and pulled out the bottle.
Sealed.
Clear.
Brand unfamiliar, label slightly blurred as if badly printed. ALMOND WATER, it said, in plain blue letters. No other information he could read, though there seemed to be ingredients where ingredients should not be.
Aerion opened it.
The seal cracked.
He smelled it.
Nothing.
He poured a little onto the carpet.
The carpet darkened.
Did not smoke, writhe, scream, or bloom with teeth.
“Scientific,” he muttered.
He wet his lips first.
Water.
Flat. Plastic-tasting. Beautiful.
He drank too quickly, stopped himself, breathed, drank slower.
It was the best thing he had ever tasted.
He hated the place slightly less for thirty seconds. Then more, for making gratitude necessary.
He took three bottles, two candy bars, and a packet of crisps. The machine dispensed each without payment. He considered emptying it, then stopped. Carrying too much would slow him. Others might need supplies. He disliked that this thought came before certainty that others existed.
He wrote on the wall beside it:
VENDING MACHINE
WATER / FOOD
FREE
POSSIBLE SAFE? DO NOT TRUST COMPLETELY
Then, after thinking, he added an arrow back in the direction he had come as best he knew.
He sat on the driest patch of carpet he could find, back against the wall despite the clamminess, and ate half a candy bar with small, careful bites.
His body wanted to devour it.
He refused. Discipline, if nothing else, remained his. The sugar hit his bloodstream like mercy.
For a few minutes, he allowed himself to rest. He reviewed his recordings.
The first video seemed almost childish now, his voice cool and skeptical in the yellow room. The shoe. The HELLO. The warning. His own face after the voice. He did not yet have footage of anything impossible except the place itself, which was the largest impossibility and therefore somehow the easiest to doubt.
He recorded a new entry.
“Supplies found. Water appears drinkable. Food edible, at least initially. Marked location. Experienced lights-out event after finding warning. Something passed close by. No visual confirmation.”
He paused.
His gaze moved to the room around him. “I am no longer operating under the assumption that this is a dream.”
There.
The sentence hung between him and the camera. He looked furious saying it.
Good.
“I am also not accepting any of the internet’s terminology without evidence,” he added, because surrender had limits.
He stopped recording.
Then, after a moment, he opened the notes app and typed one word.
𝙱𝚊𝚌𝚔𝚛𝚘𝚘𝚖𝚜?
He stared at the question mark for a long time.
Then he locked the phone.
The buzzing continued.
Somewhere, far away, there was a sound that might have been a person calling out.
Not familiar this time.
Not his mother.
Just a raw, frightened human shout, cut short.
Aerion rose so quickly the water bottle tipped against his knee.
He stood in the yellow room, candy bar half-wrapped in one hand, broken baseboard in the other, every nerve straining toward the sound.
A person.
Or bait.
He closed his eyes once.
Opened them.
His mouth tightened.
“Damn you,” he whispered.
It was unclear whether he meant the place, the person, or himself.
Then Aerion Targaryen, who had mocked wrong places until one opened beneath him, gathered what little he had, marked the wall once more, and walked toward the scream.