The line between the real and the unreal had begun to fray.
Alex's shuffle through the endless yellow was no longer a conscious act of will, but a mechanical, autonomic process. Left foot, right foot. Don't fall. Don't stop. The commands came from a primal, reptilian part of his brain that refused to surrender, even as the higher functions began to corrupt and decay. His entire being was a machine running on fumes, its internal sensors screaming critical failure warnings that he was too weak to heed.
The thirst was a constant, a dull roar of pain beneath the hum-buzz. It was the new baseline of his existence. But now, other, stranger signals were breaking through the static. His senses, starved of genuine input and ravaged by dehydration, had begun to create their own.
It started with the shadows.
In the merciless, uniform glare of the fluorescent lights, there should have been no true shadows, only the soft, fuzzy edges of the partitions. Yet, Alex began to see them. Quick, dark shapes that darted in the far corners of his vision. A flicker of movement in a corridor far down the line. A sudden, fleeting silhouette that vanished the moment he tried to focus on it.
At first, he dismissed it as a symptom. Retinal fatigue, his logical mind supplied, a ghost of his former self. Cellular debris floating in the vitreous humor. Your eyes are tired. Your brain is starved. He tried to ignore it, to focus on the squelch of his boots and the desperate need to keep moving. But the phantoms grew more persistent, more defined.
He stumbled into a larger, more open room, a vast expanse of stained ceiling tiles and damp, yellow carpet. As he scanned the empty space, a shadow detached itself from the base of a partition a hundred feet away. It wasn't a brief flicker. It was a solid, man-shaped silhouette that stood for a full second before dissolving back into the wall as if it had never been there.
Alex froze, his heart hammering a dry, painful rhythm against his ribs. That was not debris in his eye. That was not a trick of the light. It had form. It had presence. He stared at the spot, his breath held tight in his chest, but there was nothing. Just the empty, humming space.
The question, cold and sharp, cut through the fog of his thirst: Am I alone?
Until now, the crushing loneliness had been one of the primary instruments of his torture. The sheer, absolute solitude of the place was a weight on his soul. But the sudden, terrifying possibility that he was not alone was infinitely worse. The devil you know is better than the devil you don't. He knew loneliness. He did not know what kind of being cast a fleeting, silent shadow in a world without sun.
Then came the whispers.
They were faint, so faint they were almost indistinguishable from the high-frequency buzz of the lights. They were the auditory equivalent of the peripheral shadows, scraps of sound heard on the very edge of perception. At first, it was just sibilant, hissing noises, like the wind through dry leaves—a sound that had no right to exist in this stagnant, sealed environment.
He'd stop, cock his head, and strain to hear it again. But the moment he focused, the sound would be gone, swallowed by the monolithic hum.
But like the shadows, the whispers grew bolder. They started to sound less like wind and more like voices. A soft, incoherent murmuring, as if from a crowd in a distant room. He'd spin around, his weak legs protesting, searching for the source. But there was never anything there. Just more yellow. More walls. More humming lights.
Was it his mind, finally fracturing under the strain? Was he manufacturing companionship out of sheer, desperate need? Or was he tuning into another frequency of this place, a layer of reality he hadn't been able to perceive before?
He was leaning against a wall, trying to catch his breath, when he heard it clearly for the first time. It was a single, distinct word, whispered directly behind his ear.
"…lost…"
The voice was dry, a rustling, papery sound. Alex yelped, a pathetic, strangled noise, and threw himself away from the wall, stumbling and falling to the wet carpet. He scrambled backward, crab-walking away, his eyes wide with terror, scanning the empty space around him.
Nothing. He was alone. The hum-buzz was the only sound.
He stayed on the floor, trembling, his body drenched in a cold sweat that did nothing to quench his internal fire. His mind was a battlefield. One side, the rationalist, the technician, insisted it was a hallucination, a product of extreme physical and psychological distress. The other side, the terrified animal, knew what it had heard.
He was being watched. He was being followed.
The nature of his journey changed. It was no longer a desperate search for water. It was a flight. Every shadow in his periphery was now a potential pursuer. Every phantom whisper was a predator closing in. The yellow hallways were no longer just empty; they were hiding places. The hum-buzz was no longer just a sound; it was a cloak, masking the approach of something unseen.
His shuffle became more frantic, more paranoid. He'd peer around corners before proceeding. He'd glance over his shoulder every few steps. The crushing loneliness was gone, replaced by the electric, hair-raising terror of being hunted.
He didn't know which was a worse fate: to die of thirst, alone in this endless maze, or to be found by whatever else called it home.
He was stumbling down a long, narrow corridor when the whispers came again, clearer this time, seeming to emanate from the walls themselves, a chorus of dry, rustling voices.
"…another one…"
"…so dry…so thirsty…"
"…came through the crack…the wrong way…"
Alex clapped his hands over his ears, squeezing his eyes shut. "No," he croaked. "You're not real. You're not real."
But he could still hear them, the words seeping through his fingers, through his skull, as if they were being broadcast directly into his brain. He pushed himself off the wall and ran, a clumsy, lurching sprint fueled by the last dregs of his adrenaline. He didn't care about direction. He didn't care about the pain in his throat or the fire in his lungs. He just had to get away from the voices.
He ran, and as he ran, he had the distinct, horrifying sensation of a cold breath on the back of his neck. He didn't dare look back. He just ran, deeper and deeper into the yellow sickness, fleeing from the phantoms in the periphery, unsure if he was running from the monsters in the maze, or the monsters in his own mind. In this place, he was beginning to realize, there was no difference at all.