Blank Slate

by Integral Archer

Chapter VI

There is no reason the stable dweller should ever come anywhere near the radio room unless she has absolutely made up her mind to do so.

Near the psychiatrist’s office is a long blind hallway, sectioned off from the rest of the stable. A single door grants entry to this hallway. Worn brown letters, which were once red, can still vaguely be made out over the door: Medical Personnel Only.

When the door opens, it’s as if the darkness from the inside flows into the hallway, enveloping the prospective explorer with a strange feeling of dread; many of the lights are broken, and none have bothered to repair them—or, possibly, have not worked up the courage to do so. The hallway itself turns seemingly illogically left and right as one walks down. Disorientation is common, even dizziness, when coming down this corridor. No signs mark directions—there are only two, forward and back. But the plaster does not change throughout its entire length. Thus, if the stable dweller is unfortunate enough to trip and fall, if she closes her eyes out of whim, or if anything happens which should cause her to lose her bearings for just a second, she has no way of knowing what direction leads on and which leads out. She can only guess—perhaps it was this way? She’ll walk, and the longer she doesn’t see the end, the more anxious she gets; until, finally, she decides she was going the wrong way and turns around, retracing her steps. She’ll walk for longer than she had walked before in the other direction, and still she’ll see no end. The panic comes quickly. She’ll forget to check her Pip-Buck’s map.

A child went missing one time in this hallway. They found him three hours later, curled up in a ball a mere ten yards from the exit and sobbing.

If she’s not deterred by her imagination, if she pushes herself through the twists and turns, if she ignores the rush of blood to her legs as her heart screams at her to turn back, the stable dweller will eventually take a left, a right, one more left, and there will be one more stretch of hallway between her and the end, about fifty yards in length.

At the end, there are two doors. They are almost not visible from that distance. She’ll have to walk close to them to see that they are both a steel chrome, almost invisible due to the off-white plaster against which they’re backdropped.

The door on the left opens to a square room, about five meters by five meters by three meters. This room would be unremarkable were it not for three peculiar qualities: First, one might be able to notice that in the cracks of the walls, there are trace amounts of some sort of fluff, or foam. It’s dusty, and it tears away easily. Second, a huge mirror spans the length of the rightmost wall. Third, upon stepping into this room, the stable dweller feels as if all the air have been sucked out of her head. Her skull feels too tiny in this room, her brain too big. It takes her a while to realize: the room is both soundproof and sound-insulated. Quietness can not be equated with the absolute absence of sound, and the stable dweller is not aware how much background noise fills her life, noise that she never notices, until she enters this purged room. Fourthly, she’ll notice the vents on the ceiling that breathe neither heat nor cold. What purpose these serve, she does not know, but how the room retains its soundproofing with these is beyond her. If she is particularly observant, she’ll have noticed similar vents all along the hallway as she had walked down.

The mirror is not a mirror; it is a one-way window on the next room. The door on the right opens to a similar room, a bit smaller than the other room, about three meters by five by three. It has no foam in its walls, and it is not sound-insulated. This room commands a full view of the other through the one-way window.

At the epoch in which this narrative takes place, in the first room can be seen various instruments: long, thin stands bearing microphones; wires snaking this way and that; and a multitude of heavy, metal boxes, each with a hundred different knobs. This is where recordings are made. The other room is from where the radio operator observes, through the window, whomever he happened to have with him that day.

Every inhabitant of Stable 2 knew the layout of the studio, knew of the long, arduous walk it was to get there. But not one ever questioned why that was the case. None ever asked why the radio, a thing merely for entertainment, should be so far removed from the rest of the stable. It seemed not worthy of their attention.

Comments

[Twi-Guy]

The description of the hallway was delightfully creepy. I wonder how I will feel when I start reading more traditional fics again.