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It's not far-fetched to say that this was the only thing you had been looking forward to all month.
Trapped in a society where if you try and steal your soul back from the clutches of monotony, you're scolded and branded a black sheep, where if you try and venture into the unknown reaches, you're met with opposition; a world full of constrictions and a set of rules that barely give you any breathing room. Who knows just how close to breaking through the confines of your sanity you were?
Luckily, not everything about your life outside had been completely stressful and tiring. There was Adler, a good friend of yours, a true 'bro', as modern pop culture calls it, whom stuck with you through thick and thin like dried glue on fingers. Truly, he had been the one who decided that it was high time that you had gone on a break, considering how he was going to be out-of-country for a while, which would leave poor socially-awkward you lonely and depressed.
It had been a small accumulation for a while now, but you're still surprised that someone had actually noticed your current mental state. Although finding you in a dark room with your hair frayed and your breakfast and lunch growing cold on the corner, with ants swarming about... If Adler didn't get that, then he's an idiot.
"Yo, take a chill pill, bruh." Words to keep in your heart forever.
When you had arrived at the airport, it takes you some time to actually find out who was supposed to be waiting for you. Forty-five minutes later, you find the man you're looking for, and irritated, you realise: He spelled my name wrong. You're not going to let that go because dammit, you wasted precious time you could have been out of the crowd, but your voice is only a squeak in the face of such a scary man. What if he was part of the mafia? Maybe I made a mistake in coming here? What if this man was going to be harvesting my organs and that the five-hundred-dollar reward is a scam?!
Then you remember Adler's words and decide not to panic and judge people for their outer appearances. So what if his genes messed up? And the gangster clothes? Maybe they're part of the job description to make them look authentic! You chastise yourself and follow after the man in the suspicious looking black car that may or may not be the ticket to a life of prostitution and/or life of being an organ donor.
When you come back to reality from the comfort of one of the few good naps you've had since coming back, you're faced to a large manor, almost Victorian-like in terms of design, but then again, you don't exactly know how to describe what Victorian is, and that you're just labelling anything remotely old-looking as Victorian. Still, even with your lack of knowledge of architecture, the building doesn't spare you any less feelings of grandiloquence. But you can't help but feel like it's a movie-based haunted house, with its obsidian-coloured facade, and that's a little more than unsettling.
It doesn't seem like a very good idea that you're wilfully entering a territory where you might just be slashed to pieces by either some serial killer or some mad experiment, nor does the fact that you can only carry with you on reliable item into your journey inside the dark wooden monster. It's kinda like the setting of a horror game, but that I don't have a flashlight. Should you bring a flashlight? Well, it's not like this was actually the setting of some mental asylum, right? Just to be safe though...
You rummage through your rucksack, and find out that you did not bring one. Dammit.
On the bright side, you still have your phone in the pocket of your hoodie, at eighty-nine percent battery, so you only take the liberty of taking out your charger and slipping it into your hand. They can't expect you not to bring a charger, can they? With the 'standard procedure' over with, you pass your bags to him, although rather hesitantly, because you still can't find it in yourself to trust such a mysterious and eerie stranger, and wait for the other mysterious stranger, this 'Lucius Macbeth' character.
Wait a minute, what if the reason why my name was misspelled was because that this really isn't my ride?! Again, your panic never fails to strike you at the most inopportune times, where it should have been calling at you since moments ago. "I-I should have done some research on this before joining..." You whine and clutch your head, obviously irritated, and with the tap of shoes against the floor, you jump, because you weren't expecting them to be here so soon, and you can only manage a meagre "hello" and a small timid wave of the hand to indicate that you acknowledged them.
You were honestly surprised that such a nice young woman followed the gruff and frightening encounter you had with the man a few minutes ago, and you immediately soften. If you hadn't been studying psychology, you would have been completely enamoured with her beauty, fawning over her soft bouncy locks of red and those emerald eyes, but instead, you shrink further into your shell. This was a psychological trick, wasn't it, considering that this was supposed to be a social experiment, right? To calm someone considerably after a tense experience. He knows it well, because that was how his friend, Adler, had tricked him into giving the boy a free lunch after a most disturbing event.
"Welcome, Matija Loreto Enns." Who am I kidding? The chances of someone having my name are extremely low! At that, you calm down a bit more, and try to relax yourself, but the two were enigmas that brought upon you shivers rather than serenity.
Despite this growing sense of fear, you decide against running out the door right this instant. There was a chance that the man from before lingered outside, and you're sure as h-ll that you can't outrun such a man! That, and you're also afraid of how whomever was rearing this experiment could manipulate the loopholes on the contract you had signed in your naivety and stress, so you chose to meekly follow after the woman, with your focus on the interesting intricacies of your awesome Converse sneakers, and try to address your hesitance and concern about this when he gets over the fear of bills. Maybe inquire about the chances of terminating the contract without having to pay back an enormous sum, because truthfully, he shouldn't have let the promise of cash (and the very loud bait of freedom) blind him momentarily. It's not like he was pressed for money, but it was true that he was starting to feel suffocated from his situations. Nevertheless, that had been the selfish and greedy side of him talking, the childish husk you had left behind in your earlier years.
Lost in your own mind palace, you fail to take notice of the sudden descent in interior decorating, from the lavish furnishing to simplistic and somewhat unkempt designs, before you're finally brought into your quarters, a dirty and dank cell, likened to a room in a mental hospital.
You could feel a vein pulse loudly in your head, a strong pounding against your skull, and you turn to the woman to voice out your complaints in your irritation, only to find the spot she had been absent, and the door to get out shut behind her.
"There is no way in h-ll that I'm going to be staying here..." You say to yourself hoarsely, a comfort in that there's a chance that you can get out and that you still have the determination to do it. With a vengeance, you march up towards the vault-like entrance, and strike at it hard. It was clearly a futile attempt, from any logical perspective, considering the sheer size and the dull clang, but maybe she would notice and decide hey, let's just let this guy out, he's a pain.
He was truly making a racket in there, but he disturbed something else.
From the center of the room, he could hear the cries of a child, no children. Definitely not a creepy thing to hear in this filthy hovel. Yup.
Like nearly every single horror protagonist ever, you explore around, in hopes that you might find the source of the sound and another way out, because surely they couldn't keep you in here without a back-up door for emergencies, right? Right?
What you discover are a pair of bassinets. It wouldn't have been minded if there currently weren't a baby in each, one softly wailing in their sheets and the other sound asleep, but with the way the other was going, you're sure that it will only be a matter of time before the slumbering infant follows suit.
The only experience you have with children is from working as a baby-sitter during your high-school days for some pocket cash and from having to take care of your sister's own baby whenever she went off to dinner with her husband. Which wasn't much to speak of, considering that they were a bit older than the two before him.
"Okay, um, how does this work again...?" With shaking hands, you reach out for the child, supporting their head and neck as you cradle the soft thing, swaying slowly with a few attempts at comforting the young babe. Anyone who saw you might think that you were about to drop the baby, with how shaky your hands were. The situation still hadn't fully sunk in just yet.
We won't have food after a week? We'll be trapped here? They didn't alert the college? Surely they must have been joking! Such a drastic experiment would need the legalisation of the government, right? Isn't this technically kidnapping? No, um, they made us sign something, so... This was getting more and more ridiculous as he thought about it.
Apparently, those attempts at rationalisation didn't seem to show upon his face, and by the time he noticed it, the young child who had taken a look upon his panic-stricken face had begun crying once more, at an even louder volume.
"A-ah, sorry, sorry... Don't be, uhhh, don't be scared, please.. Uhm, calm down..." The words you had uttered sounded more like a desperate plea to yourself, as a few stray tears make their way down, before you suck it up. Okay, no they wouldn't be able to do that. This is a social experiment, wasn't it? "They just said that to assure us. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a test."
...Yeah, this was just a test. This was a test made by those who were overseeing the results. They were just recording reactions to frightening situations. This wasn't real, their announcement was a fake to see how long it would take to ebb them bit by bit into the alert zones of the average human mind.
Yes, this is a test. They weren't going to starve you, that was a lie. They weren't going to actually trap you here for a whole month with three weeks of no food, they were just trying to see how things work, setting up the controlled environment. There is nothing to fear!
A smile changes your features. Yeah, nothing to fear. Just them setting up the experiment. With that, your mind is put at ease, and you cuddle the snoring babe in your arms, taking a small comfort in the fact that you're not going to be alone for your stay here, (where you'll be well-fed despite the poor living conditions.
Even if they're going to feed us, having to stay here alone is kinda scary.
Once the child finally seems like it's back to their personal dream-world, you set them back in their cradle. You'll get back to them later, maybe name the two and find out their gender. Get to know them and all that jazz.
For now, you deem it best to get a little bit more of the tension out of you by taking a short rest at the nearby bed, laying down, and looking peacefully at the ceiling. You don't feel the pull of slumber just yet, but you can at least take comfort in the fact that maybe some time isolated here would be for the best.
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