My second tale and an entry to the 2021 NIGHTMAREFEST. It didn't win, but I'm happy with how it turned out. It details a doctor who manages to find his way into an endless hallway. He doesn't find a way out, as it's… well, endless. If I wanted to write something that would have scared myself, I would have made the doctor immortal. Alas, it's pretty difficult to write an infinite amount of pages.
White torture is something that I'm interested in. There are stories out there such as the backrooms that do a good job at portraying the horrors of infinite nothingness; wandering empty hallways for eternity, with no progress being made and all that. What I'm really interested in though is actual nothingness. Of course, it's not so easy to write a story where someone is just stuck in a single place, and nothing happens at all. But, say, someone is given immortality. They heal from all wounds and don't require food, water, oxygen, or any physiological needs. Then, lock this person into a completely empty white cube. Indestructible, and nothing happens for the rest of eternity.
How would this person act, I wonder? How would their mindset compare from day one to day one billion? Would they resort to self-harm in order to introduce some colour to their prison? Would they commit self-cannibalism in order to experience taste? Would they simply become brain-dead after some time?
You can go deeper though. 'Gateway to the Mind' was also an interesting concept to me. Oh god, that has to be the closest thing to experiencing nothing that you can get to. I literally salivate at the thought; blindness, deafness, anosmia, ageusia, and complete, unfaltering numbness. This is something that can happen, at least I believe so. The numbness would be the hardest part to get right. Perhaps someday I'll write a tale based on that.
