interrupted-transmission

Lost in the corridors.
Dank, cold corridors extend forever. A never-ending grid of corridoors. Some long and some short. Sometimes it is completely dark, sometimes a bare lightbulb flickers.
Sickly electric light.

Shivering, body stiff and tense, folded in on itself, with shoulders high and drawn together, chin pressed into chest, eyes resting on the floor, the mind enters itself.
The outside becomes the mental landscape. We see, we walk through, we smell, we become lost in, the mental landscape.

Sometimes a shadowy girl walks beside me. She finds it hard to maintain her form and dissolves into the air like smoke rings. We never talk. I know nothing about her save that I feel at peace whenever she is with me.

Jerky, machine gait, shivering, cold gnawing at the bones, like a fox chewing off its own leg to escape a trap.
Shallow, unconvincing breaths. Coughs shake the ribcage apart. Gobbets of phlegm leap from the mouth like hunted hares leap from the long grass.

I am weak.

My organs rot inside my body. My breath smells of rotting meat.

We hear the scurrying of rats within the walls.

The body has almost shut down entirely. The cold inside is worse than the cold outside. Winds blow through the body, the blood freezes.
Intimations of the end. Drowning in a cold river. Swallowed by the dark waters.

‘Does he fight? Does he struggle? Does he let the water engulf him? Does he welcome the water’s embrace?’

The river coughs up his bones.

Corridors with checkered floors. My body has turned to marble.
I am cold and made of white unyielding rock.
I cannot move.
I am trapped in the corridors. Skin, muscle, bone, frozen into marble.
I cannot move.