Waiting For You

The Escape

With no way outside and no windows to help me mark the passage of day or night, I had no idea how much time passed. My cellphone was unreliable – one moment it said 03:00, the next 17:00, and then 11:00. My laptop wasn't much better. It reported linear time, but sometimes a minute stretched endlessly, and sometimes ten hours disappeared in the literal blink of an eye. It didn't help that Mister Wallbanger never stopped trying to find a way in. With his maddeningly persistent knock-knock-knocking and faithfully reporting his lack of progress to Mister Radio, it was almost as if he were stuck in an ever-changing time loop – or trying to drive me to suicide.

To keep from losing my mind, I decided to follow Maybe-Ray's advice to "look for what's the same." Though painfully aware that I might have to face down a killer if I found a way out, I obsessively went through everything in my apartment. I focused on the doors: bedroom, bathroom, closet. Those were the same, and each of those rooms had doors; maybe those doors would open up to an exit?

Of course, that didn't happen. Makes sense since I'd used them all since the front door and windows disappeared; the rooms they led to were all part of the apartment. So I tried the pantry, cupboards, and cabinets – all with the same result. Probably because they were attached to or built into the apartment, and as such were also a part of it.

So, what did I have that had a door and wasn't part of the apartment? My microwave? The oven?

Then it hit me:

The refrigerator.

The refrigerator didn't come with the apartment. I brought it with me when I moved in. It was the same one I'd had at my last apartment. The same!

There was just one problem; I'd opened it frequently since the craziness started to access my dwindling food supply. It was just a fridge. But I had nothing else to go on, so I tried it.

I approached the refrigerator with an almost feverish anticipation, half-believing that my thoughts would be enough to turn my absurd hope into reality.

I opened it up and saw nothing but the same alarmingly empty shelves I'd been facing for what felt like days. Anger surged and overflowed. I started throwing the food and shelves everywhere. Food containers exploded across the floor. Glass jars and bottles burst on impact, strewing their contents where they'd never be of use to anyone, least of all me.

Painfully aware of tears on my face, I braced both arms against the fridge and glared inside at the empty expanse of whiteness. I felt inexplicably betrayed. I'd built the fridge up into my last hope. It was ridiculous, but without it, I was forced to confront a very ugly and fundamentally insane reality:

I was trapped, and like all permanently trapped things I was going to die.

It was easier to stare at the back of the fridge than to contemplate this truth. Luckily, this meant I caught sight of a very odd, visually upsetting flicker on the fridge's back wall. Then it warped and stretched. The smooth white walls and unsettling, artificial light remained, illuminating a corridor that looked endless.

I weighed my options. I didn't know what, if anything, waited at the end of this new, ridiculous fridge-tunnel. Maybe it would spill me out in front of the man who was trying to get into this apartment to kill me. Maybe it went on forever and I was just trading one trap for another.

But if I went inside, I had a chance. If I stayed here, I'd starve.

So, I wedged the refrigerator open with a chair (afraid the impossible tunnel might disappear if it closed) and quickly packed a change of clothes, my wallet, phone, and laptop. I filled the only intact bottle I had with tapwater, then packed it along with my remaining food supplies in my hiking backpack.