Waiting For You

The Instructions

Something is very wrong and it goes beyond missing actors and disappearing internet friends.

First, I haven't been able to leave my apartment. I know it sounds like I went ahead and took a couple more steps up the Delusion Du Jour Ladder, but it's not.

It started last night. I needed to pick up things from the store, so I gathered my coat and prepared to leave. But it was literally impossible, because a flat, nondescript expanse of white wall has replaced my front door.

The windows disappeared, too. Now I have only walls. Nothing but empty walls and no way out.

All of my things are here, and the lights and water work. I suspected I was having a breakdown of some kind. Maybe the exits were invisible to me, I reasoned, but they still had to be there. So I started pushing and banging where the walls and windows used to be. Nothing worked, so I used a hammer. No matter how hard I hit, it just bounced harmlessly without even scuffing the paint.

I tried using my phone, but I had no signal and nothing went through.

After hours of smashing at the walls and yelling my head off, I passed out in front of the place my front door was supposed to be.

I startled awake to a deafening, disorienting boom. I shot up, scrabbling for a door that still didn't exist.

The booming continued.

Someone was banging on the walls.

But in weird places, places people can't reach. The ceiling, the bathroom, the hallway bisecting my apartment – in other words, they were somehow banging on the walls inside my home.

There was a method to the cacophony, though. It wasn't intimidation. They were searching for something, like a blind man stumbling around in a cave, testing random surfaces for a way out.

"Where's the door?" A man's voice, only slightly muffled, emanated from the floor.

The thing is, I live on the ground floor, over a concrete foundation. No one could possibly be down there.

A radio crackled, and a tinny male voice responded: "If you can't find the door, look for the window."

"There's nothing." What sounded like the first voice accompanied another series of inquisitive slaps and bangs, this time from the ceiling. "Nothing's here." The next moment, his voice followed loud footsteps from the wall closest to my head. "There's been a mistake. It's already done." Another barrage of slapping and thudding, this time from the kitchen wall.

I opened my mouth to scream for help, but the radio piped up again: "Something's in there or it wouldn't be hidden. Find a way in and kill it."

I staggered back from the wall that used to hold the front door, expecting them to enter through there. Heavy footsteps sounded from behind me, causing me to whirl around. My clean, Spartan apartment looked empty, but those footsteps – it was madness. First stomping on the other side of the wall I was facing, the walker seemed to teleport across my apartment in a single step to continue on the front door wall to my rear. Another took him to the ceiling, and the one after that, underground. All in a matter of seconds.

"There's no way in. I can't even see it. I don't think there's anything here."

"Yes, there is," Mister Radio insisted. "If it's an animal, it will starve and the problem takes care of itself. If it's human, it has to come out eventually. Again – the problem takes care of itself."

"I can't wait here indefinitely."

"You will do what you need to do."

Following this cryptic pronouncement, the apartment quaked around me. I dived for the coffee table and curled underneath, clenching my jaws so my teeth would stop chattering. I squeezed my eyes shut. After what felt like forever, the quaking tapered off and faded.