Peri

Chapter 12: The Red Room-Part One

Not long after I fell asleep that first night, I found myself back in my house. I was standing in the middle of my room, initially confused and disoriented. Being back within those wall that dripped and oozed when they should have been dry was deeply unsettling. In the low light, the downward crawl of the blood gave the impression that the walls themselves were liquifying and would fall away at any moment. The first thing I did was stand on my sopping wet bed and do my best to clean off the light fixture with my sleeve. Though I was a bit hesitant about getting blood on myself thanks to the still fresh memory of waking up encased in scabs, I was ultimately forced to admit two things: in an environment like that, getting dirty was a matter of if, not when, and I wanted the light more than a spotless shirtsleeve. I instantly regretted that decision. All the gruesome details of my surroundings were suddenly illuminated with perfect clarity. The depth of the stains, the hunks of hardened blood clinging to edges of the scattered furniture, and the rust-colored flakes drifting through the air had all been hidden in the shadows, but the light forced me to become intimately and painfully aware of their existence. Just knowing that there was so much blood in the air made me gag. Quickly bringing my unstained sleeve up to my face in an attempt to block the particles from entering my nose and mouth, I hopped off of the bed in the direction of my door. Unfortunately, it wasn't there. I thought that it might have been lost beneath the blood, so I looked around for something to wipe it away with. The best I could come up with was a sopping pillow that instantly left my hands drenched when I picked it up. To my dismay, there was no door hidden beneath the steady flow, and I had once again pointlessly made myself dirtier. I soon found that the window was gone as well. Wishing I could return to the blissful ignorance that the dimness had provided, I felt around for the light switch. However, it too had vanished. Besides reshuffling the nasty furniture, it seemed that there was no way for me to change my environment.

Looking around my room again left me with quite a hopeless feeling. The facts that the past was over, the present was empty, and the future was bleak at best became painfully concrete. Where I had previously felt an object-less source of rage, I was now overcome with a source-less, immobilizing feeling of listlessness.

That's when I noticed repeating patterns in the horizontal movement of the blood that gave a deliberate, wallpaper-like quality to the once seemingly random motions of droplets and globs slipping past one another, consuming each other, and splitting unevenly. But the pattern was constantly changing; every time I began to pin down where the design started and ended, it would morph into something completely different, and I would have to restart. Then, the color began to wobble, began to subtly oscillate between shades of red in great patches, all blending sludgily into one another so that only looking at the centers of two blotches betrayed the fact that they weren't the same. Yet, because of the indiscriminate blending, the patches, like the patterns, were constantly shifting, folding in on themselves, and being reborn entirely new.

My head began to throb from the strain of trying to take it all in, my eyes burning from maintaining an unblinking stare for such a prolonged period of time. My ability to focus began to wane, causing me to strain even harder in a futile attempt to cling to and understand all of the intricacies of the kaleidoscopic wall before me. Finally, I allowed myself to blink, giving up on digesting the massive volume of information I was being bombarded with. I pressed my eyelids shut, reveling in the sting of fresh tears on dry eyes, but some intrusive compulsion urged me to look once more. I began to see features like noses and brows of all shapes and sizes buried withing the patterns. Then eyes, initially static, began to blink at me as blood drops mulled over top of one another. After those came pairs of lips mouthing gibberish until my walls were a massive, churning stew of miscellaneous, malformed facial features. Slowly, these body parts began to line up with one another to produce melty, half-baked faces that drifted apart as fast as they came together. As time passed, these ephemeral visages began to persist for longer and longer until faces were forming at the wall's junction with the ceiling and not losing their shape until reaching the wall's junction with the floor. It was as if the blood was digging up faint memories of extras I saw in movies or strangers I passed in public, the faces only growing more and more familiar until my entire room was coated in images of my brother, mother, and Aunt Vicky screaming, laughing, weeping, their expressions becoming so vivid that I wanted to reach out and touch them. But as I approached, their features became more jagged, their faces displaying extreme caricatures of rage and disgust. Terrified, I stumbled backward. From my position on the floor I begged for forgiveness, made unkeepable promises, and verbally flagellated myself. With a trembling hand, I reached out to them, tears staining my cheeks, but their fury did not waver. In my desperation, I trust myself toward the wall, attempting to pull the person from behind the blood. I was met with nothing but damp wall. Blood oozing over my hands and down the lengths of my arms, I clawed and clawed as the faces slipped around me, avoiding my touch, all in the hopes of breaking beyond the confines of this uninhabitable room. It was pointless. I knew that there was no use, that there was no way for me to leave, but that didn't make me want out any less. I began to bang my head against the wall out of sheer frustration.