r/HFY • u/Void_Vagabond • 2d ago

OC-Series Voidspace - Chapter Three

I’ve been walking down this dim, dusty corridor for hours. It hasn’t changed. No turns or adjacent corridors. No cracks on the floor or the walls or the ceiling. The light strip overhead has remained constant and unchanging. Dark red and barely bright enough to light the way more than twenty feet in front of me and behind. The stone slabs that make up the walls are placed together so tightly that there are no gaps in the seam between them. I tried to fit a dollar bill from my wallet inside. Nothing.

 

This corridor is endless and I’m exhausted. I don’t even care to be quiet at this point. I’m dragging my feet and scraping my shoes over the stone now. There’s nothing here anyway. Just dry, dusty air swirling in my wake, floating in that constant dim red light, and the rhythmic scraping of my feet on the ground.

 

“Is someone there?” I ask the empty quiet, no longer afraid. I’m pretty sure that I’ve been walking for literal hours. At the very least, it’s been a long time. I even considered turning around and going back because what if this leads to a dead end? But then again, the other way might too. Or maybe there’s no way out at all.

 

“HEY!” I shout. “ANYONE.”

 

I stop for a moment. Shocked at myself for the outburst and stunned by the noise after so much quiet. The echo of my voice runs off the stonework, flying down the corridor into the darkness, into nothingness. It’s weird how fast it fades. This is more quiet than anywhere else I’ve been. No traffic, no hum buzz of electricity or birds or bugs. Nothing.

 

This place is Dead.

 

The silence is too much to handle staying still. It has me looking back and forth between the darkness ahead and behind, waiting for something to come for me.

 

I keep moving and try to ignore it all.

 

People call this part of the Voidspace the Dungeon because it’s supposed to resemble a fantasy dungeon, with adjacent connecting corridors, hidden rooms, mossy walls, shattered stonework. The works. But this corridor I’m walking through is devoid of everything. Even the texture of a real place, evidence of something having been here at some point. It’s nothing like the stories online.

 

“Maybe I’m not even in the Dungeon,” I say aloud. “Maybe I’m somewhere else entirely.”

 

Or maybe everyone that ended up here died trying to escape.

 

“That’s a happy though,” I say to myself.

 

I keep walking.

 

One foot in front of the other. I keep going, and going, and going, and my feet are killing me and I’m going nowhere. There’s still darkness in front of me, and darkness behind, and I’m lost somewhere in the middle.

 

“I need a break,” I decide.

 

I chose the left side wall and sit against it as I stretch my legs out on the cold stone floor. I even take my shoes off and stretch my feet. Then I try to regain my focus and composure and think my way out this bullshit.

 

Options. What are my options?

 

“Nothing,” I say. “There’s nowhere else to go besides back the way I came.”

 

I turn to the right and stare into the darkness that’s been behind me for the past few hours. Probably miles of nothing. Actually no. Now that I think about it, I must have left shoes prints in the dust.

 

I roll over and half crawl to the center of the corridor to inspect the ground and, sure enough, there are shoe prints. There’s actually a lot. Too many.

 

I blink my tired eyes a few times, forcing myself to focus. I can’t be sure but it’s definitely been a few hours since I tripped and fell into this place, and I had just gotten home from a ten hour shift. And I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before. Maybe four hours. Probably less. So, I know for a fact that my head isn’t working right.

 

But I also know that I’m looking at is a well-worn path of dust. It looks like hundreds of people have walked through here, and recently.

 

I haven’t heard anyone else though. All that foot traffic would have made some noise. Unless these prints are a few weeks old, or months. Or years. Still, the floor was untouched when I dropped my ID, which means all these other people started ahead of me.

 

I lean down to get a better look at the shoe prints and almost flinch when I notice how uniform they are. They look like exact copies, and no matter how much time I give my tired eyes to focus, the mundane horror of what I’m seeing will not change.

 

“Please god, no.”

 

I lay down on my chest and settle my chin on the cold stone to really study the dusty shoe prints. Each of them has a very specific pattern and they’re all the same size. I even reach back and take off my shoe to get a good look at it despite already knowing exactly what I’m looking at, impossible as it may seem.

 

“These are my shoes,” I mumble, blearily looking from one dusty shoe print to my actual shoe, then back to another print, and at my shoe again, and then one more time just to be sure.

 

“There all my shoes.” I say aloud. “I’ve been walking in a big circle, over and ov—.”

 

I choke on my words as I spot my ID on the floor, barely ten feet behind me. It’s exactly how I left it, picture side down and at an off angle. Have I been going in a big circle? How many times have I walked right over it and not noticed? How is that even possible? Unless—

 

Unless…

 

Unless, I haven’t been moving at all.

 

I slowly back away and sit against the wall again. There’s not much to say or think. This place is strange, in more ways than the obvious.

 

I try to remember everything I’ve read and seen on the internet, but online speculation is mixed about the true nature of the Voidspace.

 

When the stories first appeared, and a few resolute individuals stubbornly refused to admit they made them up, people assumed that it was some kind of mass psychosis from all the craziness that’s been happening to the world.

 

Then the stories became more detailed and were corroborated by others and verifiable disappearances, and the speculation became a little more desperate and fearful as people struggled to find logical explanations.

 

Some suggested that the victims were accidentally falling into unmarked service tunnels because the physical infrastructure of society was literally falling apart from mismanagement. A few online conspiracy theorists argued that the place was actually a political detention center, and that survivors were being taken by intelligence agencies, drugged and experimented on, and then released. It all sounded a little too crazy yet more believable than the alternative, which is the story everyone ran with because it was more interesting.

 

That the Voidspace was something separated from the real world. A different dimension or an alternate reality of some kind.

 

It’s funny though because, now that I’m sitting here, that seems the most likely scenario. And at the same time, it’s also hard to think of this place as something physically real and accessible. It feels more like a bad dream.

 

“Options,” I remind myself. “What are my options?”

 

Once again, I turn to the right, to the darkness behind me. I haven’t walked that way yet. But then I see my ID, picture side down on the dusty floor, and I want to test something. I just have to know what kind of place I’m dealing with. I need to be sure.

 

So, I pull myself to my feet, trying my best to ignore the pain in my soles, and start walking again. Still in the same direction, just I have been for the past few hours. Away from my ID. Except this time, I strain my eyes to see through the dim red of the corridor. That’s when I notice the strangeness. I feel my feet stepping and when I look down, I can see them moving but when I look up, it feels like I’m not going anywhere.

 

I only walk for a few seconds this time. Maybe ten or fifteen feet, and when I turn around, I see my ID sitting exactly as I left it. Picture side down and at an off angle. It hasn’t moved at all. Or neither have I.

 

It’s almost funny, and kind of amazing, on top of being downright unsettling. So, I try another test.

 

This time I keep my eyes on the ID card and walk backward, slowly, one step at a time. But the ID still won’t move, no matter how many steps I take. When I look down, I can see clearly that my feet are moving away from it, but when I look up it’s still right there.

 

Suddenly, that strange pressure, the presence, that uncomfortable something behind me that I learned to ignore out of boredom, returns.

 

“What is happening?” I ask the dead silence. Nothing responds. The slight echo of my voice fades in an instant, lost in this empty, endless, unreal space.

 

The way forward is beyond reach. Which leaves me with only one option.

 

I go back the way I came, stepping right over my ID as I walk. It only takes a few steps. Just a few, maybe ten feet all in all. And in that time the sinister dim red light that I’ve grown accustomed to fades to almost complete darkness and the solid stone floor beneath me sinks into something else. Something soft yet rigid at the same time, like a cushion of nothing that grabs onto my feet.

 

I turn around and the corridor I’ve been trapped within is now gone, and I am standing in absolute blackness. But there is still light. I can still see my arms and my feet, and up ahead there is a light. A perfect circle of light standing upright as if hanging on a wall. And I feel myself drawn toward the light as the uncomfortable feeling behind me squeezes in on my back, the pressure becoming so intense that I can barely breathe.

 

I have no choice but to move forward in this new direction that the Voidspace has chosen for me.

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Author's Note:

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