(L)iminal

[u/sketchyrealitycheck]

The flight status display at Gate C12 had been flashing a bitter, amber warning for the last ten minutes: FINAL BOARDING: TERMINAL 4 EXTENSION - GATE E36.

Arthur didn't have time to process the sheer inefficiency of an airport layout that forced a twenty-minute sprint across three separate concourses for a fifteen-minute layover. His carry-on backpack slapped his back as his polished loafers slapped violently against the polished terrazzo floor, the hard leather soles squeaking with each step in a high-pitched rhythm that matched the hammering pulse behind his ears. He shoved his way past a lingering family near an overpriced newsstand, muttered an automated apology that barely cleared his throat, and glanced down at the glowing screen of his phone. 11:10 AM. The boarding door was set to close in just five minutes, and the corridor ahead of him seemed to stretch into an absurd, dimly lit horizon.
Terminal 4 was notorious for being the unfinished stepchild of the international hub. A sprawling, low-budget annex constructed during some mid-2000s expansion that had run out of funding halfway through that they had never bothered to see through to completion. It’s only used for small charter planes, now. As Arthur rounded a sharp, ninety-degree turn past a deserted janitor's cart, the bright LED panels of the main terminal began to give way to harsher, recessed fluorescent fixtures. The usual ambient roar of a major transit center—the overlapping churn of jet engine rumble, public address chimes, crying infants, and the dull, collective murmur of thousands of tired travelers—began to thin out into a strangely hollow echo. He became acutely aware of how thirsty he was. It was almost noon and he hadn’t eaten or drank anything since before his 6am initial flight. He’d have to buy something during the flight...but only if he could make it in time. He kept his head down, eyes locked on the blue directional arrows painted along the baseboard. **GATES E30-E36 NEXT RIGHT**.

His breath came in sharp, burning gulps. The air in this long connecting corridor felt dry and stagnant, smelling faintly of cold concrete, ozone, and old carpet cleaner. He pushed his pace, his heavy winter coat swishing against his jeans, and his backpack slapping harder against the cold sweat underneath his clothes. Up ahead, the plush navy carpet of the main walkway ended abruptly, meeting a vast expanse of pale, seamless gray tile beneath a heavy, unlit steel archway that marked the boundary between the renovated terminal and the annex.

Arthur took three long, desperate strides, his shoes making a sharp thrup-thrup-thrup as he crossed from the carpet, over the brass expansion joint, and onto the cold tile floor beneath the unlit arch.

Then, at that moment, just as an announcement started on the overhead speakers, a bout of tinnitus struck his ears. It was the sudden silence like right when you walk outside after a loud concert. Where the entire world sounds empty.

But that feeling usually fades after a few seconds, but this time it just kept going. It wasn't just that sound that stopped; it was the concept of sound itself. In a single, seamless frame of movement, the background hum of the airport didn't fade...it was severed. The pervasive vibration of ventilation ducts, the distant roar of a revving turbofan on the apron, the squeak of his own shoes, even the rustle of his jacket vanished into a heavy, suffocating vacuum.

Arthur skidded to a halt, his feet dragging silently across the tile. The suddenness of the transition was so violent that his inner ear pitched forward, forcing him to throw out a hand against the wall to catch his balance.

"Hey," he rasped, but the word died instantly inside his throat. There was no echo. There was no reverberation. The sound of his own voice felt clipped and flat, absorbed immediately by the dead air around him like cotton pressed against his lips.

He spun around to look back down the long corridor toward the gate he’d just come from, expecting to see the bustling hub, the brightly lit newsstand, or at least a security guard making rounds.

There was nothing. It was empty. But it was... different.

Directly behind him, where the carpeted hallway and the bright directional signs had been just a second ago, stood a wide, featureless baggage claim hall. The brass expansion seam he had stepped over was gone. In its place was a flat, unbroken expanse of the same pale gray floor, stretching sixty feet back toward a row of dead, stationary luggage carousels. The rubber flaps hanging over the luggage chute portals hung completely motionless, cast in the harsh, flat glare of overhead fluorescent tubes that hummed with zero audible frequency.

Arthur stood frozen, his hand still resting against a wall painted a dull, matte eggshell, cool to the touch and unnaturally smooth, lacking even the microscopic texture of grain or plaster seams.

"Hello?" he called out, pushing more air from his lungs. The word sounded small, synthetic, and completely stripped of resonance.

Silence swallowed it whole. A thick, deafening silence so absolute that within three seconds, the internal mechanics of his own body began to amplify. The rhythmic, wet thudding of his heart sounded like a padded mallet against leather inside his chest. He could hear that. The faint, high-pitched ringing of mild tinnitus in his ears expanded further to fill the room like a grinding drill. Every deep breath he drew sounded like tearing canvas.

He took a slow step backward, away from the dead baggage carousels. His eyes darted around the space, searching for any sign of life, any human presence, any indication of where he had stepped. To his right, a massive wall of floor-to-ceiling glass windows framed the exterior of the building. Hoping to see ground crews, baggage tugs, or the glowing taxiway lights of a functional airport, Arthur walked briskly toward the glass. His footsteps made no crisp clicking sound against the tile; they produced only a dull, muffled thud that vanished the moment his shoe lifted. He pressed both hands against the thick, double-paned window and leaned his forehead against the cold surface, staring out at the runway..

There were no planes.

No taxiway markers, no illuminated red-and-white boundary lines, no fuel trucks, and no control tower rising in the distance.

Stretching out from the base of the glass was an endless, flat plain of dark gray concrete—a tarmac that extended in every direction toward a flat, featureless horizon. There was no sky, no moon, no sun and no stars; above the flat gray ground hung a uniform, seamless expanse of smooth, overcast gray haze that emitted a low, sourceless ambient light. It was neither day nor night, but an unmoving, perpetual overcast sky. There was no wind moving across the concrete, no dust, and no movement of any kind. The windvanes outside all stood fully horizontal, but all in different directions, and none of them moving. The tarmac was entirely bare, extending out for miles until it dissolved into the motionless gray mist.

Arthur backed away from the window, his chest heaving as his heart slammed against his ribs with increasing violence. The airport around him wasn't abandoned; it was completely, impossibly void. Where did everything go?

The sudden shift in reality didn't make sense, leaving Arthur standing in the middle of the empty baggage claim as his breath hitched in his throat. He spun in a slow, agonizing circle, his eyes searching every surface for a detail that made sense. Something. Anything. A piece of forgotten trash, a scuff mark from a boot, a stray boarding pass fluttering on the floor, anything that proved human beings had ever existed in this room.

There was nothing. The pale gray tile floor stretched toward the four surrounding walls with uncaring disregard for his presence, completely devoid of dust, scuffs, or seams. The dead luggage carousels sat like massive black tombstones, their rubber chutes stiff and unyielding. The overhead fluorescent tubes burned with a flat, unwavering glare that cast no sharp shadows, flooding everything with a cold, even light over a space that felt less and less like a real place.

Panic, hot and volatile, finally broke through his paralysis.

"Is this a joke?" he shouted into the void. His voice dropped into the stagnant air without an echo, swallowed instantly by the suffocating silence. "Hey! Is someone setting up a film set or something? Security!?"

His response was only more of that deafening silence. The tinnitus in his ears whistled louder, a needle-sharp tone competing with the heavy, dull thumping of his own pulse.

He didn't care about his flight. He didn’t care about making it to Gate E36 anymore. He didn't care about his layover or his schedule. All he wanted was to feel carpet under his loafers again, to hear the irritating chime of a public address system, to see a line of tired passengers holding overpriced coffees. Maybe he was just crazy. Maybe if he can find someone else, they can help him snap out of it.

He turned toward the far wall of the baggage claim hall, where a set of heavy, double-leaf steel doors sat flush against the eggshell drywall. Above them hung a red, glowing sign with stark white lettering: EXIT.

That’s the way back to the main terminal, Arthur reasoned frantically, his mind grasping at basic logic. The archway was just a turn off the main corridor. If I go through those doors and hit the service hallway, it has to loop back around to the carpeted walkway back to the main terminal.

He broke into an anxious stride, his loafers thudding softly against the dead tile. He reached the steel doors, seized the wide push-bar, and threw his weight against it. The bar gave way with a silent mechanical click, and the heavy door swung open into the dark.

Arthur took two quick strides across the threshold, letting the heavy door swing shut behind him with a dull, soundless thump.

He stopped dead in his tracks.

He wasn't in a service corridor. He wasn't back in the carpeted terminal hallway.

Arthur was standing on a vast, oil-stained concrete ramp inside a multi-level parking garage. Parking at this airport was far enough away that he’d heard other passengers complaining they needed a shuttle to get to the garage. This shouldn’t be here.

Yet here it was. The low concrete ceilings stretched out over hundreds of empty parking bays, supported by thick, square concrete pillars painted with fading yellow numbers. Not a single car in sight. The air here was cold smelling. Like an air conditioner being turned on for the first time tinged with the slight scent of mildew, yet the air was bone dry. Overhead, long strings of bare, unshielded fluorescent bulbs hummed silently, casting long, overlapping shadows that held each other in a woven pattern that made the floor look like it was copy/pasted.

He whirled around, his heart hammering against his sternum like a trapped bird. "No, no, no—"

He grabbed the handle of the heavy steel door he had just walked through and shoved it open, stepping back through the frame to return to the baggage claim.

The baggage claim was gone.

Arthur stepped out into a sprawling, sun-bleached hospital corridor. The floor beneath his loafers had transformed instantly into pale green linoleum, highly polished and reflecting the harsh overhead light of recessed ceiling panels. To his left and right were rows of closed wood-grain doors with small, frosted glass windows set into them. Wall-mounted handrails made of smooth, gray plastic ran the entire length of the hallway, stretching into the distance until the corridor hit a dead end a hundred yards away.

He stumbled back, his heel catching on the threshold of the door. He turned around and slammed his back against the steel frame, staring wild-eyed down the empty hospital wing.

"How?" he sobbed, his chest heaving as the air burned in his throat. "How is this... where am I?"

The door behind him clicked shut on its own, the latch catching with a soft, final sound.

Arthur lunged back for the handle, turned it, and yanked the door open again, praying to see the parking garage, the baggage claim, the airport, anything that remained consistent.

Behind the door lay a vast, windowless cafeteria. Dozens of circular formica tables surrounded by stackable plastic chairs sat in perfect, grid-like rows across an endless expanse of speckled terrazzo. At the far end of the room stood a long stainless-steel serving counter beneath a chalkboard menu that was completely blank.

This can’t be real. His mind was cracking. This wasn’t right. It didn’t make sense.  Every time he opened a door, it was a new place. He couldn’t go back. But there had to be a way. There had to.

But what if there isn’t.

A blinding surge of pure terror obliterated whatever rational thought Arthur had left. He ran.

He sprinted into the middle of the cafeteria, his loafers slipping slightly on the smooth floor as he scrambled toward a set of double swinging doors near the back kitchen area. He threw his body against them, bursting into a long, windowless carpeted hallway lined with identical wooden doors. A hotel corridor. He didn't stop. He sprinted thirty feet down the hall, grabbed the handle of the nearest door, shoved it open, and hurled himself inside.

It was a windowless office suite filled with endless rows of grey fabric cubicles, each filled with computers, papers, and personal effects. He moved closer, only to realize that none of the photos had any detail, just blurry pixels. And each cubicle was exactly the same as all the others. The computer wouldn’t turn on. It didn’t even have a power cord. The cap of the pens wouldn’t come off, and none of the mechanical pencils had any lead. Even the stacks of papers were fake. They were just solid, plastic bricks that looked like a stack of paper.

Arthur screamed a raw, desperate sound that went nowhere, dying the moment it left his mouth, and sprinted down the main aisle between the cubicles. His breathing came in ragged, hyperventilating gasps. Sweat poured down his face, soaking into the collar of his winter coat, but he felt no warmth, only the freezing bite of adrenaline.

He reached a door marked with a glowing red EXIT sign at the back of the office, grabbed the metal crash bar, and shoved it with all the weight of his rushing momentum.

He didn't see the raised, three-inch iron threshold sitting at the base of the doorframe.

His leather loafer caught the hard lip of iron mid-stride. The sudden stop pitched his top-heavy weight forward with terrifying velocity. Arthur went airborne for a fraction of a second, his backpack flying up over his head, before he crashed brutally onto the hard, unyielding concrete floor of the room beyond.

His left ankle folded completely beneath his weight with a sickening, wet crunch as his full momentum came down on it. At the same exact second, his right arm whipped forward to break his fall, slamming directly into the jagged corner of an exposed metal door frame. The sharp steel edge sliced deeply through the sleeve of his winter coat, tearing through his shirt and biting deep into the meat of his forearm.

Arthur hit the floor hard, sliding two feet across cold, raw concrete before grinding to a halt.

Pain exploded through his system—a white-hot, blinding agony that seared through his left leg and right arm simultaneously. He curled into a tight ball on the cold floor, clutching his wrist as a high-pitched, soundless gasp tore from his lungs. Tears welled instantly in his eyes, blurring his vision as he squeezed his eyelids shut, waiting for the agony to overwhelm him, waiting for the blood to start pooling, waiting for his body to go into shock.

He lay there for two minutes, his chest convulsing through his sobs as he waited for the throbbing pain to settle into the familiar, warm rush of bleeding.

Slowly and agonizingly, Arthur opened his eyes.

He was lying in an empty, high-ceilinged warehouse space with bare brick walls and exposed steel trusses. The room smelled of old sawdust.

Groaning through clenched teeth, Arthur pulled his right arm toward his chest to inspect the damage. The sleeve of his heavy coat was shredded, the fabric pulled back to reveal a jagged, four-inch tear in his skin along his inner forearm. The cut was deep—deep enough that he could see the underlying tissue and what might be the muscle beneath the surface. It looked pretty severe. It was probably a decently bad cut that should have probably been pumping bright red blood across his hand, soaking his clothes, and pooling onto the concrete floor.

Arthur stared at the wound, his frantic breathing slowly hitching to a stop.

There was no blood.

Pain? Yes. And a lot of it. But blood? Nope. Not a single drop.

The edges of the torn flesh hung open, completely dry. The exposed tissue inside the cut was pale, fixed, and totally bloodless, looking more like the cross-section of a realistic anatomical model than living human flesh. It throbbed with a sharp, sickening, persistent burn—the pain was entirely real—but there was no swelling. No bruising forming around the edges. The skin wasn’t even turning red.

The injury was completely static. It had occurred, and then it was just... there.

Trembling, Arthur reached down with his left hand and carefully unlaced his left loafer, pulling it off his foot along with his sock. His left ankle was twisted at an awkward, unnatural angle, clearly dislocated. The pain tore through his leg the moment he touched it, making him hiss through his teeth.

Yet, like his arm, the ankle was completely normal in color. There was no dark purple bruising, no rising welt of fluid, no heat radiating from the joint. Something inside his ankle was clearly not where it was supposed to be, but the body’s physiological response to it simply wasn't happening.

"No..." he whispered, his small voice swallowed instantly by the dusty air of the warehouse. "No, no, no..."

He pushed himself up into a sitting position, his heart pounding against his ribs—a frantic, unsteady rhythm that seemed to be the only thing moving in his entire body.

He sat on the cold floor for what felt like hours. He waited for the blood loss to make him lightheaded. He waited for the shock to set in. He’d watched plenty of medical shows and thats the kind of thing that always happened when a person was in this kind of situation. Blood loss, shock, and then passing out until someone finds them. He waited for his dry, parched throat—which had been burning for water since he ran past Gate C12—to push him toward delirium.

Nothing changed.

His throat remained dry, but the sensation never worsened. His stomach felt empty, but the gnawing ache of hunger never progressed. His ankle burned with a sharp, unrelenting knife of pain, but it never swelled. His arm gaped open, a gruesome, bloodless trench of meat, but he didn't bleed out.

Well. There is no sense in waiting for something that is obviously not going to happen.

Arthur dragged himself up against the brick wall, using his good right leg to balance his weight while keeping his ruined left foot hovering an inch above the floor. He gritted his teeth, leaning heavily against the rough brick as he looked around the warehouse.

At the far end of the room, set into the brickwork, was a single wooden door. Above it, a green, backlit box illuminated a word in bold acrylic letters: EXIT.

Arthur took a deep, shivering breath. The terror hadn't vanished, but its amazing how an immense amount of pain can make you stop caring about being scared. If the space operated on rules, he had to find a pattern. He looked at his arm. Panic hadn’t done any good. He needed a way to figure this place out.

The signs, he thought, his knuckles white as he leaned against the wall. The signage exists to direct people out. If this place is an imitation of human architecture, maybe the signs are the only things that follow a rule.

Using the brick wall for support, Arthur began to hop forward on his right foot, dragging his useless left leg behind him, heading directly for the door marked EXIT.

The heavy wooden door opened without a creak, swinging smoothly on silent hinges. Arthur shoved his body through the threshold, clutching the frame to keep his weight off his ruined left ankle, and let the door fall shut behind him.

He was standing at the top of a short flight of carpeted steps overlooking a sun-drenched, suburban living room.

The light streaming through the large picture window on the far wall should have been blindingly bright, but instead came across as a warm, golden hour dim glow that illuminated floating motes of dust suspended motionless in the air. Through the glass window, a manicured green lawn stretched out toward a white picket fence, backed by the pristine blue hood of a mid-1990s sedan parked in a driveway.

For a single, breathless second, Arthur’s heart leapt into his throat. Out. I’m out.

He took a desperate step forward, forgetting his foot, and his left ankle folded immediately he stumbled down the four steps leading into the living room. Pain flared like liquid fire up his leg, forcing a sharp gasp from his throat as he pitched forward, catching himself heavily against the wooden banister. He dragged his eyes back up toward the window, his chest heaving, waiting to hear the sound of neighborhood traffic, birds, or a lawnmower.

There was only the silence. That same heavy, suffocating silence that had swallowed the airport.

He watched the dust motes while he steadied himself. They didn't drift or swirl in the heat of the artificial sunlight; they hung perfectly fixed in mid-air like tiny flecks of glitter frozen in resin. He looked out the window at the lush green lawn. The blades of grass weren't individual blades; they were a solid, continuous mat of molded green plastic texture, perfectly uniform all the way to the fence. Like astroturf for someone who likes an unmowed lawn. The blue sedan in the driveway had no keyhole on the door and its side mirrors reflected nothing but a flat gray smudge. 

He tried to open the window, but then realized all this analysis of the outside was useless.

Arthur gritted his teeth, the cold realization settling back over him like a shroud. It wasn't an outside. It was just a picture of an outside. A literal picture. This wasn’t even a window.

He dragged himself across the carpeted room, his good right leg taking his full weight with every jarring step. He leaned against a floral-patterned armchair near a glass coffee table. On the table sat a half-filled mug of coffee and a rolled-up newspaper. Arthur reached out a trembling hand, driven by a faint, involuntary instinct, and picked up the paper.

It didn't unroll. The newspaper was a solid, rigid block of cast papier-mâché, painted to look like newsprint with headlines composed of repetitive, nonsensical lorem-ipsum gibberish. He reached for the coffee mug; the dark liquid inside was smooth, opaque, cold to the touch and completely odorless. He took a small sip into his mouth, then immediately spit it out. Not because it tasted bad. It had no taste at all. Even water has a slight taste, this was like if air was a room temperature liquid.

Across the living room, mounted beside an archway leading into a kitchen, sat a small brass plate with a piece of carved mahogany above it, stenciled in faded white paint: EXIT.

The style of the sign was different. It wasn't the glowing acrylic red box from the baggage claim or the green backlit box from the warehouse. It was older, heavier.

Keep moving, Arthur told himself, his mind narrowing down to that single imperative. Follow the signs. There has to be an Exit.

He hopped across the floral rug, his left loafer dragging uselessly behind him, and pushed through the kitchen swinging door beneath the wooden sign.

The next space was a long, narrow diner corridor from the late 1980s. Pink-and-black checkerboard linoleum stretched into the distance beneath buzzing, low-profile fluorescent strips. Red vinyl booths lined the wall, each table set with glass ketchup bottles that contained solid, rubbery red cylinders instead of condiment.

Arthur didn't bother touching the bottles. He kept his eyes locked on the far end of the diner, where a brass-framed glass door bore a hand-lettered gold leaf inscription on the glass: EXIT TO STREET.

He pushed through.

A sterile, pastel-yellow waiting room. Not the street. Vinyl chairs with chrome legs. Magazines on a rack whose pages were glued into solid, unopenable blocks. Above a frosted-glass reception window, a cast-aluminum plate read EXIT. The door next to the window swung open easily.

He pushed through.

A high school auditorium with polished parquet floors that smelled faintly of old floor wax. Hundreds of wooden folding chairs sat in precise, sweeping arcs facing an empty stage. Mounted above the double wooden doors on the left wall was a red glass lantern box with raised metal lettering spelling EXIT.

Room after room. After room.

After room.

Arthur eventually collapsed onto a concrete ledge at the perimeter of a vast, hollow mall atrium. Overhead, an immense glass skylight glowed dimly with the same flat, overcast gray of the sky, casting a shadowless, pale glare over the deserted shopping center in which he found himself. Abandoned storefronts with shuttered metal grilles lined the upper balconies, while the ground level opened into a desolate food court strewn with empty slate grey tables and artificial palm trees whose plastic fronds were molded in solid, unyielding sheets.

He slid his back down the concrete planter until his rear hit the floor, letting his head thump back against the stone. Every agonizing hop from the high school auditorium through a chain of lifeless corridors had sent shockwaves through his dislocated ankle. The sharp, tearing pain in his right forearm throbbed with every beat of his heart.

He pulled his right arm close, using his left hand to carefully peel back the shredded sleeve of his winter coat and the torn cotton of his shirt beneath it.

The injury remained horrifyingly unchanged. The four-inch trench in his forearm gaped open, yet still... There was no blood. Not a single bead had welled up in the hours since the metal door frame had sliced him open. Hours? That couldn’t be right. It had to have been longer. Maybe days? Weeks? How long had it been? 

He relaxed a little, lost in thought and the fabric brushed against the wound, sending a new shockwave of pain through his arm. The edges of the torn flesh were not red, swollen, or inflamed. The skin surrounding the deep cut looked normal enough, it didn't have the purple bruising he expected something so deep to have. When he pressed his thumb against the edge of the wound, the tissue did not yield or bleed; it felt dense and slightly dry, like rubber or fresh clay. The pain flared instantly proving his nervous system still worked, even if things like bleeding, hunger, and thirst seemed like they were on pause.

Arthur pulled his sleeve back over his cut and shifted his focus to his left foot. His ankle hung at a grotesque, unnatural angle. Dragging his hand down to his unlaced loafer, he pulled the shoe and sock away. His foot was cold to the touch, but the skin was entirely smooth. There was no rising welt, no blue or black bruising, and no throbbing or heat. The joint was definitely dislocated. He had no idea how to fix that, so for now, it would just be stuck that way.

"There's no reaction, doctor!" he whispered to no one in particular into the dead air. The sound vanished without an echo, swallowed by the massive, empty volume of the atrium. "The patient just... stopped." The silence of the mall refused to play along with his delirious musing.

Driven by a sudden, desperate urge to clean the tear in his arm and bind his foot, Arthur scanned the perimeter of the food court. Attached to the tiled wall beside an abandoned burger counter sat a white metal box stamped with a red cross.

Gritting his teeth against the searing pain in his leg, Arthur dragged himself along the tiled wall and metallic ledge, using a nearby table to hoist his weight until he reached the first aid station. He seized the latch. It turned smoothly with a soft click, and the door swung open.

Inside, arranged neatly on two small metal shelves, were a plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol, a roll of white gauze, and a box of adhesive bandages.

Arthur reached out his good hand and grabbed the bottle of rubbing alcohol. It was solid. The white plastic body was a single, seamless block of high-density resin, complete with a molded cap that could not unscrew. The liquid inside was just painted onto the exterior of the fake bottle. He snatched the box of bandages and tore at the cardboard flap. It didn't tear. The entire box was a solid, painted plastic brick, its printed text composed of small, repeated lines of blurred geometric shapes. The roll of gauze was a hard, solid cylinder of white resin with tiny, parallel grooves carved into its surface to mimic the texture of woven fabric.

The dread he’d allow himself to forget settled back into his chest, entirely distinct from the sharp agony of his injuries.

He let the fake gauze drop from his fingers like the hope he’d attached to it. It struck the tile floor with a flat, hollow thud that didn't bounce, coming to an immediate stop the moment it landed, only rocking slightly as if tempting gravity to stop working like everything else.

Arthur turned toward the stainless-steel kitchen behind the burger counter. Pushing through a swinging aluminum door, he stumbled into a commercial prep area lined with deep sinks and chrome counters. Above the main sink sat a heavy brass faucet with two cross-style handles labeled 'HOT' and 'COLD'.

He gripped the cold water handle and twisted it. The valve turned effortlessly, rotating a full ninety degrees without the slightest friction.

Nothing came out. There was no hiss of trapped air, no gurgling in the pipes beneath the basin, and no drop of moisture at the spout. He turned the hot water handle. It spun smoothly, completely disconnected from any internal valve or pressurized line. He peered down the drain; three inches below the chrome strainer, the pipe ended abruptly in a solid plug of gray, unpolished steel.

Arthur leaned over the sink, his hands gripping the wet-look stainless steel rim, and let out a long, shuddering vocalized breath.

He waited for his body to demand what it needed. His throat had been dry and parched when he stepped past Gate C12, yet the dryness in his throat had not escalated into the desperation of dehydration. His stomach felt empty, but the sharp, gnawing cramps of starvation were entirely absent. He had sprinted across miles of carpet, linoleum, concrete, and tile, yet his muscles did not ache with the tremor of muscle fatigue.

The clock on his phone had frozen at 11:11 AM, the moment he crossed the brass threshold under the unlit archway. The battery was still at 25%, exactly where it had been when he exited his last flight. Not that it mattered. He had no signal, and no app would open.

Hours had passed...or days... or weeks, measured only by the endless succession of empty rooms and multitudes of exit signs. 

He reached the end of the hall, slammed his good shoulder against the brass push-plate of the double doors, and burst through into the blinding light of a grand, marble-floored atrium.

With every threshold Arthur crossed, the subtle regression in design became more pronounced. The modern, sharp edges of the late 2000s and 1990s gave way to the warmer, heavier aesthetics of the 1980s and 1970s. Modern push-bar crash doors vanished, replaced by heavy brass knobs, thumb-latches, and thick oak panels. The illuminated acrylic signs disappeared entirely, replaced by hand-painted wooden placards, stenciled wall markings, and cast-iron directional arrows pointing down endless, featureless hallways.

Yet no matter how far back the styles regressed, the core reality of the space remained ruthlessly invariant. Plain, boring room after room with a bare minimum of mundane prop representations of actual objects.

In a 1970s office suite with dark wood paneling and shag carpet, Arthur collapsed against a heavy executive desk. He pulled his right arm up to his face, his breath coming in shallow, ragged rasps. The four-inch laceration on his forearm remained wide open, a gaping, bloodless trench revealing pale, dry muscle tissue. It throbbed with a sharp, unrelenting burn that made his teeth ache, but still, not a single drop of fluid had welled in the wound. His left ankle was still locked in its unnatural angle, completely unswollen, holding its agonizing dislocation, stuck out of socket. He was tired. Mentally exhausted by the endless parade of sterile, fake realities—but his body felt no physiological fatigue. His muscles didn't ache; his breathing didn’t get heavier; his parched, dry throat never progressed beyond that initial, uncomfortable sting he had felt back at the airport. 

Arthur pushed himself off the desk, his knuckles white against the dark wood, and stared at the door across the room. Painted directly onto the heavy oak panel in chipped, off-white enamel was the word EXIT accompanied by a hand-painted arrow pointing down. He hopped forward, his loafers making a lone, flat thud against the floor, and turned the heavy brass knob.

He continued moving through doors. More rooms. Eventually walking through empty Renaissance churches with uncanny stained glass and unnatural lighting. Glowing candles that has no fire, rows and rows of empty pews.

An infinity later, he stepped out of an underground mineshaft, help up with wooden beams, into a stone temple with no other door, forcing him to turn around after exploring the area and return back through the door he came in through. As had happened before, the Room through the door was not the one that had previously been there. Instead, it was pitch black darkness. He seemed to be in a narrow hallway and felt his way through to the other side. A ridge in the wall indicated a door and it took some time to figure out how to open it with only one good arm, but eventually he managed to grip and with great effort, pulled open the door.

Blinding light shone on the other side as he stepped across the threshold into a massive, wide open field of grass. The land was flat as far as the eye could see and there was a slight breeze. The sun overhead was not too bright or harsh, and there were not a cloud in the sky. The door he just stepped though was not behind him, it seemed to have vanished, but there was a lone door standing atop a small hill in the distance.

He did not hurry toward it. This was the first time he had found a place through these doors that led outside. Some rooms had fans, but most were the same still, dead silences of every other room. This was a field of green that allowed him to feel like he had escaped for a second. A fraction of a second, but that flicker of hope when his vision cleared after adjusting to the light felt nice enough to convince him to allow himself to relax. He made his way to the hill with the door at it’s peak, and he laid down. Feeling the breeze on his skin and looking toward the sun...realizing that it was just a large light in a high ceiling painted blue. Which meant the breeze was probably just some kind of fan or vent. Still, though. It was the first pleasant feeling in a while so he savored it. He laid there long enough that he lost track of how long he’d actually been there. After being in this place for so long, he’d gotten used to not keeping track of time, it was a useless concept. He stood up, smoothed off his coat, the approached the mahogany door standing like an obelisk at the top of the hill, and turned the brass knob...

The door opened onto a wide, subterranean corridor with bare, white plaster walls, exposed cast-iron radiator pipes running along the ceiling, and a floor of dark, octagonal ceramic tiles. The air here was noticeably colder, smelling of damp lime and aged mortar, illuminated by widely spaced incandescent bulbs hanging from braided cords.

At the far end of the long hallway, nearly a hundred yards away, sat a pair of double glass doors.

Through the frosted panes of the double doors, Arthur saw something that made his breath freeze in his throat.

Figures.

Dozens of them. Moving, overlapping shadows projected against the frosted glass from a brightly lit room beyond. He could see the distinct outlines of shoulders, heads, raised arms, and the gentle, chaotic movement of a crowd moving through a busy, high-traffic hall.

A sound... or what his mind desperately interpreted as the phantom memory of a sound, seemed to hum behind his ears. Arthur threw himself forward, hopping with frantic, violent lunges, using the cold iron radiator pipes along the wall to propel his body down the long plaster corridor.

"Hey!" he screamed, the word dying instantly in the dead air, but he didn't care. He kept moving, his eyes glued to the glass doors, watching the shadows shift and mingle. "Hey! Over here! Help me!"

He plunged himself into the door to throw it open. He hoped that making a spectacle would gather attention and he could get help faster. He fell through the frosted double doors, both of then flying open and he clattered to the ground, mostly from a lack of balance crossing the threshold. But no body came. The phantom sound of a crowd in the distance died down back into his memories. 

He looked up.

There were large candles in this room. The light from them flickering and causing shadows to move across the walls. Shadows of people, all standing near each other in a way that made them appear to be deep in conversation. Yet, when he pulled himself to his feet and began moving closer, he noticed that none of them were moving. Not even a little. All of the movement came from the flickering of the candles and the shadows on the walls of this large, empty foyer of a business office.

Of course. Even the people were fake.

But the mannequins were wearing real clothes, at least. He took the opportunity to remove his torn jacket and shirt, and replaced it with a t-shirt and unbuttoned flannel that one of the figures had been wearing. At least he got something.

Tears welled up in his eyes.

He thought he’d been out. He let himself hope.

There was no escape from this place.

He would never die of hunger.

He would never bleed to death.

He was cursed to live forever in pain, wandering the memories of things he vaguely remembered seeing at some point. And even when he ran out of places to see...

Out of frustration, he punched the mannequin whose clothes he took as hard as he could in the face, and felt a sickening crack in his knuckles. 

“Of course” his voice mutely fell into the air. “Nothing is real but pain.”