Before I divulge what I saw in that theater, let’s do a quick mental exercise.
Hell.
What does that word mean to you? More specifically, what do you visualize when you hear it? Put yourself in that environment right now.
Are you walking through scorching flames while demons scream at you? A dark forest with thousands of beady eyes following your every move? Trapped underneath ice with something gnawing at your feet?
Each one of us has an idea of what our own personal hell would look like.
I found out what mine looked like in that theater.
The film opened on a shot of a plain, abandoned city washed in dark blue. It was hard to tell what time of day it was. But the whole place just looked… depressing. After a few seconds, a figure came stumbling into the frame. A man wearing plain clothes with distorted facial features. His movements were desperate, stumbling through the empty streets in an ostensible attempt to evade something. I found out what he was running from only a few seconds later. It was another man, naked this time, with black, oozing sores covering his entire body. There was also a bloody, dirty bag tied around his head.
His limbs twitched and contorted as he ran after the faceless man, letting out an unearthly, croaking scream as he moved.
The faceless man was screaming as well, although his voice sounded all too human. He sounded terrified.
I’m not quite sure how long this sequence lasted. Not sure how long I was watching for. But it felt like hours. At a point, I even gave up on the objective at hand. I wanted to turn away from the screen so badly. However… I couldn’t. My eyes stayed glued on the horrific scene in front of me. I couldn’t move.
I started wondering how Sven was holding up, watching something like this. It was only until later I realized that we weren’t even watching the same thing at all. Personal hells. Everybody’s different.
At a point, I started feeling strange. As if I couldn’t distinguish real life from what was happening on the screen. My attention was fixated on the faceless man. Almost like… I was seeing things through his perspective.
Shit, I thought, before my mind drifted too far off the deep end.
I realized something extremely important at the very last moment.
It’s just a movie. A really disturbing fucking movie.
The revelation came at the optimal time. I was already being sucked into Mr. Blank’s realm. I could feel it. My physical self dissolving into an obscure void. Yet… I was cognizant of this fact. And while I was certainly scared, I was also determined.
My vision went black for an unknown duration. When I opened them back up, my world was washed in a dark blue. I could feel goosebumps popping up on my skin. I was freezing, despite wearing a hoodie and jeans.
There was also something behind me.
I turned around, seeing the man with the bag over his head staggering towards me.
It didn’t take a genius to discern what had happened.
I was now in the movie. Not knowing exactly what to do and fueled by sheer impulse, I began running through the empty streets.
After the initial shock, I tried remembering what Collin had told me. I had to remember that none of this was real, despite how real it felt. But at the same time…
How the hell was this not real?
The cold wind bit at my face. My joints ached against the concrete below. I was even beginning to run out of breath. It felt real as hell. My mind started becoming frenetic. How the hell was this possible? Where the hell was I?
We never feel physical sensations in our dreams. So what was this? I turned around again, noticing that the bag-headed man was getting closer, his inhuman shrieks sending shivers down my spine.
I was starting to lose it. Starting to lose my own sense of reality. The streets ahead of me were endless and unchanging. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide.
I could hear myself beginning to whimper. Utter terror overwhelmed my senses, forcing me to abandon any of my previous thoughts. Any connections that I had to the world I belonged in.
Was this the world I belonged in? How long had I been here? Maybe this was all I knew.
It was a unnerving realization, and one that caused my eyes to begin watering. I was in hell. This was my existence. Cold tears began streaming down my face I as continued to run from the monstrosity behind me. I was beginning to forget where I’d even come from. And I was getting tired. I closed my eyes, preparing to give up entirely. Doing so hurt, as my tears began freezing up.
But wait.
That didn’t make any sense.
I remember reading about this once. About how tears would only freeze at below 40. And it sure as hell that cold.
It was an utterly random fact, and one that I had no reason to keep stored in my brain.
But… remembering it in that moment helped me more than I could ever know.
If that part didn’t make any sense, then what else was off about this situation? What was I doing here?
I opened my eyes again and stared up at the sky. It was empty. No sun. No stars. No moon. No clouds. That wasn’t right either. The buildings that surrounded me… I’d never seen a place like this before.
I didn’t belong here.
This wasn’t my world.
This was Mr. Blank’s world.
And why had I come here?
To save Lacey.
None of this was real.
I stopped in my tracks, catching my breath. I turned around, watching as the man behind me got slower and slower, before stopping only a few feet away from me.
He looked… confused. As if he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t running. Why had I stopped?
Because none of this was real. Why would I fear something that wasn’t real?
“Hey fuckface,” I spoke up. “Where the hell is Lacey?”
The man took a step back.
“Don’t you fucking run,” I said. “Where the fuck is she?”
He started backing up faster. My grin grew wider.
“I’m gonna tear you apart with my bare fucking hands if you don’t tell me.”
Suddenly, I wasn’t so cold anymore. I could feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins
”WHERE THE FUCK IS SHE?”
My own voice was growing primal, my impulses fueled by a culmination of all the fear and frustration I’d been feeling up until that point.
I caught up to the bagged man relatively quickly, tackling and then wrestling him down to the ground. I could feel his sores oozing all over me, which was quite the disgusting sensation, but forced myself to ignore it.
“WHERE IS SHE?” I screamed, as I began strangling him.
However… instead of gasping for air, the man simply began laughing. Of course he would. This was all a farce.
“What the hell?” I screamed. I grabbed the bag and ripped it of his face. What I found was… a blank face staring back at me.
“YOU THINK I’M SCARED OF YOU?”
A booming voice resonated throughout the space, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. Suddenly, the man began dissolving.
Well… dissolving wasn’t exactly the right word. He was morphing into thousands and thousands of insects. Horrified, I jumped back.
I watched as the insects began crawling on top of each other, forming what appeared to be a humanoid torso on top of spider-like legs. And of course… there was a giant, blank face at the very top of the abomination.
“RUN BOY.” The voice boomed again.
Apparently, things weren’t going to be so easy. How the hell was I supposed to win? I could feel the fear rushing back into my system. Mr. Blank had just been fucking with me the entire time. With no other options in sight, I did what he said and began running from the insect monstrosity. I looked over my shoulder every now and then, watching as the grotesque entity crawled towards me, knocking down buildings as it did so.
Surely this thing was faster than me. I thought.
Wait.
Of course it was. He never wanted to catch me. He just wanted me to keep running. Every trick he threw at me was an attempt to push me into a corner of fear I wouldn’t be able to get out from.
Fuck that. I was gonna hit back. As scared as I might have been, I was gonna have to force myself not to be.
I skidded to a stop. I spotted a piece of wood off the street and picked it up, before turning around and chucking it at the creature.
I missed, the but the message was sent. The insect creature, AKA Mr. Blank himself, stopped in its tracks as well, seemingly confused as to what to do next.
I wasn’t scared, and Mr. Blank couldn’t understand why.
What is fear, anyways? There’s a dictionary definition, of course. But what evokes fear in one person won’t necessarily evoke it out of the next.
At this point, Mr. Blank was trying too hard. He transformed again, into an even bigger monster resembling an amalgamation of black sludge, rotting corpses and writhing tendrils.
Was it scary? Maybe to a fourteen year old. After everything that I’d seen, this only made me laugh.
Laughing. Joy. Mockery. Every emotion that contrasted fear and despair. That was the ultimate weapon against him. Suddenly, I remembered the plan.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone, getting the camera ready. Unfortunately, Mr. Blank disappeared before I could start recording.
Nevertheless, the tables had turned. Who was scared now?
I wasn’t exactly sure where to go, so I just picked a random direction and began running. But… something unexpected happened. The environment around me began to change. No more buildings. No longer washed in dark blue. I suddenly found myself standing in an endless field of yellow flowers, with a cloudless sky above.
For a moment, I was absolutely jarred.
What the hell had happened? I thought. Where had I ended up now?
That answer soon became apparent when I looked down at the “flowers.”
They weren’t… right, to say the least. They were blinking back at me. Some had mouths lined with razor-like teeth, vigorously chomping away at the air. Some had their petals replaced with writhing fingers ending in claws.
This was somebody else’s hell. A rather interesting one at that.
Guess I better start running again, I thought. Trying to be as careful as I could, I began stepping over the ghastly flowers. After a few minutes, the environment changed again. This time, it was night, and I was standing in front of a precarious-looking rope bridge hanging over a deep crater.
I was beginning to understand what was going on. I suppose that I’d broken the system, in a sense. My own hell was no longer scary to me, so I was free to roam through everybody else’s.
Everybody who’d been trapped by Mr. Blank.
Light bulbs began going off in my head. I remembered a conversation I once had with Lacey, right after we’d gone through a haunted house one Halloween. It was a conversation about fear. What we were most afraid of.
”What am I most afraid of?” I remember her telling me. “This is a weird one, but… mazes. Yeah. Imagine randomly being trapped in a maze and never being able to find your way out.”
Mazes. I knew what I had to look for now.
I couldn’t tell you how many different hells I ended up traversing. Probably upwards of thirty. Maybe close to forty. They were all unique. All utterly horrifying in their own sense.
But what was even more interesting were the people I met along the way. Out all of the hells I found myself in, I came across fourteen people who were trapped in them. Nine were already catatonic. Two were hysterical and impossible to reason with. As for the other three… well, I don’t want to give myself too much credit here, but I think I saved them. Not that it was easy.
They weren’t so willing to let things go. They truly thought that they were in hell, destined to live that way forever. They’d long forgotten about their past lives. Who they were before. The time that they’d spent in the theater before being transported into Mr. Blank’s world. Trying to convince them otherwise was nothing short of a task, especially given the environment around us.
But… I wasn’t scared. I had to prove it to them. Nothing was going to kill us. Nothing was going to hurt us, if we didn’t let it.
By the time I’d finally found Lacey’s hell, I had a grateful group of 3 by my side. Dash – a 21 year old college kid, Nicole – 25 year old computer programmer and Roman – a 27 year old soldier. We sure as hell had been through a lot together at that point. It started feeling like days had passed since I was in the theater. But my resolve never slipped. I was finding her no matter what.
I nearly dropped to my knees in relief when I found myself standing inside the labyrinth. It had hall paid off in the end. The walls were about 15 feet high, covered in cracks and coated in moss. The ground was also comprised of cracked stone. There were torches set up every few feet or so, illuminating the place, but just barely.
“So I guess splitting up’s probably not the greatest idea.” Dash said.
“I wouldn’t be scared if we do, though,” Roman said, grinning at me. “I’m not scared of a fake place like this.”
I smiled back. When I met him, he’d been petrified. As if he’d given up on any kind of hope. But here he was now, ready to help me take down Mr. Blank. And find Lacey.
“You’re right,” I responded. “Nothing scary about this place. But Dash is also right. Better we stick together.”
Everybody nodded and we began searching. About every ten turns, we’d come across some kind of creature wandering through. They ranged from eyeless little girls to ghoul-looking things. But that wasn’t a problem. We’d seen more frightening things than that. Once it was obvious that we weren’t taking the fear bait, the creatures pretty much ignored us.
I can’t keep track of how many turns we took. Over a hundred at least. It was pretty obvious why Lacey wasn’t exactly a fan of these.
But eventually… we came across something different. A set of stairs, leading down into darkness. Unlike the creatures, this posed a more uncertain threat. It evoked a fear of the unknown, making it exponentially more frightening than any of the corny monsters we’d encountered before.
I could see hesitation rising amongst our group.
But that was to be expected. That’s exactly what Mr. Blank wanted. For that reason, I didn’t even think about it before descending the stairs, using my phone’s flashlight to guide me along. It didn’t matter if nobody followed. All that mattered was that I didn’t let the fear stop me.
To my surprise, I heard 3 sets of footsteps following behind me. I smiled to myself. This was it. The final stretch of all the madness I’d experienced so far. I’m not sure how far we walked. Not that it mattered. I’m sure everything in this world was nothing more than an illusion, even time.
I had to tell myself that, in order to deal with what we came across next. The stairs ended, leading to what appeared to be a bottomless void. Sounds emanated from below. They were obscure ones. Things that I’d never heard before, leading to chills involuntarily crawling down my spine.
Mr. Blank had certainly stepped his game up. No cheap scares here. What was presented in front of me petrified me to the bone. Once again, I could see hesitation amongst our group.
“What do you think’s down there?” Nicole asked.
I paused for a moment, considering the question.
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
I didn’t let another thought cross my mind before jumping down.
For the longest time, it felt like I was floating. If you asked me how long exactly, there’s no way I could’ve told you. There was nothing around me. No sensation at all. I was in the void. Soon enough, I felt solid ground beneath my feet. I picked the direction I was already facing and began walking.
Again, I had no sense of time. My mind began drifting with every step I took. But I never let it get away from me completely. An indiscernible amount of time later, I found myself standing in front of a stone clearing, with everybody else behind me.
We were at the edge of the maze, and I’d found what I was looking for.
I let out a deep exhale. Probably the deepest one of my life.
“Lacey…”
She was right in front of me, curled into a ball with her back against the stone wall. She was wearing what she typically did. Blue jeans and green flannel.
Upon hearing my voice, she looked up at me, her eyes long-red from what had to be a constant stream of tears. She didn’t look happy to see me, but I didn’t expect her to be. She’d probably been given too much false hope in a place like this.
“You’re… not real…” she whimpered, before beginning to cry once again. “Leave me… alone.”
I approached her slowly.
“Lace…”
She looked back up. I was one of the few people who called her that.
“I’m one of the only real things in this entire place.” I said.
I grabbed her hand. She pulled back a bit at first, but I didn’t let her go. I didn’t force it either.
“We shouldn’t be here,” I told her. “Let’s get back to where we belong .”
Her skin was warm. So was mine. I saw a spark of understanding in her eyes. But before I could smile, a familiar presence made an appearance. A large shadow cast itself in the light of the torches. I looked up, seeing a tall, skeletal figure with a blank face leering down at us. Lacey flinched, but I just gripped her hand tighter.
I looked up at Mr. Blank and shot him a self-satisfied grin.
“There’s nothing left for you to do here.”
A moment of silence followed as he continued leering.
“Do you consider this a victory?” He asked.
“No,” I began to respond. “Not really. But you didn’t win either.”
The whole time, my hand had been slowly reaching into my pocket for my phone. I grabbed it and opened the video camera, but it was too late. He disappeared in the blink of an eye.
I grinned to myself.
He was scared. I’d frightened the boogeyman.
I looked back down at Lacey, who looked equally confused and terrified. But… a sense of reality had returned to her expression. Before, it seemed as if she were in a trance. In the process of forgetting where she’d come from.
“S… Seth? Wait,” She shook her head. “How are you…?”
“Looks like she’s back,” Nicole said from behind me. “You’re pretty good at this, aren’t you?”
I suppose I was.
“Who are…” Lacey began, before trailing off.
“There’s a lot I have to explain. But not here.”
“Right,” Roman said. “So how are we getting back?”
I’m not sure how the answer to that question came to me. It was kind of just something I figured out along the way.
“What do you mean?” I responded. “We’ve been back the whole time. We never went anywhere. Don’t you remember?”
It took a second, but Roman began smiling.
“We never left the theater, did we?”
I nodded.
The other two soon followed suit.
“This is some Dorothy type shit, isn’t it?” Dash said, grinning as well. “No fucking place like home.”
I looked back at Lacey. “We were never here. Don’t you remember?”
It took a moment, but she nodded.
“Yeah,” She said, her lips curling into a slight grin. “I think I’m starting to.”
Pretty soon after, I remember my vision going black. Well, I’d be lying if I said that I remember what happened at all. I just remember waking up back in the theater, with the time I spent in Mr. Blank’s world still fresh in my mind.
It didn’t feel like a dream. And it wasn’t one.
I sat up rapidly, feeling a hand on my shoulder as I did so. I turned around, seeing Sven smiling at me.
“You’re finally back. Took you a while.” He said.
“Sven. Did you…”
“I found her,” He said, nodding. “She’s back.”
I looked around the room, but the only other people there were Collin, Jimmy, and a few bewildered-looking police officers.
“Then where is she?” I looked around some more. “Wait. Where’s Lacey?” My heart dropped for a moment.
“Uh… if you will,” one of the cops spoke up. “We might be able to shed some light on that.”
Apparently, the police had found the people who had gone missing in the theater in an abandoned warehouse 3 towns over. When they were first discovered, they were still unconscious, albeit alive.
However… while they were being transported to the nearest hospital, two of them woke up.
Two university students – a male and a female, whose names hadn’t been released. Apparently, a dazed woman had also been found wandering through the woods in a different state as well.
I had a good feeling who they all might be. So did Sven.
And I was right. I hauled ass to the hospital immediately. The cops tried to stop me, but Sven flashed his badge again and got them off my case. He really was a good asset to have around. I looked through the window of the room the recovered students were staying in.
I don’t think my smile’s ever been wider than when I saw Lacey sitting up in her bed, alive and playing with her hands, as she usually did. She looked a bit frail, but there was no doubt about it. She was smiling. She remembered everything.
I left without saying anything to her. All that I needed to know was that she was safe. Our reunion would come later. For now, she needed to rest. On the way back, I’d learn how she ended up in a warehouse so far away to begin with.
Apparently, Mr. Blank’s influence was severe and far-reaching. He had a whole legion of fear-induced slaves doing his bidding in our world. Since he needed his victims to remain alive and undisturbed, he’d order people who he’d petrified into obeying him in the past (like Collin) to storm the theaters, quickly drag the bodies out, and then drive them off to a far, remote location. Once there, they’d keep the physical bodies alive while their frightened minds remained trapped in Mr. Blank’s world. This time, they even took it up a notch. They replaced the video surveillance with looped footage taken when the theater as empty, in order to confuse investigators even more. It sure as hell worked.
A foolproof system, right? Not really. Seven arrests were made that day. It’ll be an interesting trial for sure. Nevertheless, I can’t say that I hate those people. I can’t hate Collin either. There’s only one “person” I can direct my anger towards.
He’s still alive out there, and I feel a lingering responsibility to rectify that.
We’ll see where this goes.
UPDATE:
I got a call from Jimmy a few hours ago. I’d told him about what I saw I in the “other” dimension. About how I wanted to get rid of Mr. Blank once and for all.
“Got something you might be interested in,” he told me. “You see, this varmint’s apparently got a bounty on his head out there in the cosmos. We could make a real killing if we reel him in. I got another buddy who’s interested as well. Name’s Dex. Oh, but he’s a got a weird arm, so don’t freak out when you meet him. A freaky weird arm. Alright, talk to you about the details later. Bye for now.”
Looks like the hunt might be back on.
---
Credits
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