Please Wait
by
Nickolas Whitesides
Kevin’s eyes opened. He blinked them once, twice, then looked at his surroundings. He was standing in a dim hallway no longer than fifteen feet. Past that was darkness. In front of him was a single white door with a brass knob. A sign hung in the center of it which read,
Waiting Room.
Kevin looked down at himself and saw that he was still wearing his business attire. A white short sleeved button up, dark blue slacks, brown leather loafers which were cracked and peeling and a bright red tie he had loosened somewhat.
“Hello?” he called out. But his voice didn’t echo against the walls. It was as though the sound had been swallowed up right as it was made. “Hello?” He said again. No answer. No sound.
He thought about walking through to the other side of the hallway but something about the lack of light gave him an ominous feeling.
“What the hell?” He whispered.
There was nothing wrong with his memory. He could remember his life up to that point as well as any other twenty five year old. His parents. The college he graduated from. First kiss. Even his ex-girlfriend who’d broken up with him a few months ago.
He could even recall getting dressed that morning and hopping on the bus to be at a job interview downtown. He could pinpoint the exact moment his mind went blank, only that sometime between his ride and waking up in the hallway was empty.
The waiting room door glared at him like the unblinking eye of a cyclops from Greek mythology.
“What time is it?” he wondered then stammered in confusion as he lifted his arm only to realize his watch was gone.
Frantically he stuffed his hands in his pockets, feeling for the edge of a smartphone and found only air.
“Hey! Where’s my phone?” He looked up at the ceiling. It was bare. Nothing but stucco and plaster. Same as any other office building. Futily, he spun around a few times, searching for something, anything to communicate with another person or get an idea of where he was.
After an intense minute, he heaved out a sigh and finally locked eyes with the door. All that was left to do was to walk through it.
Grabbing the knob, he held it a moment, took a breath and turned it.
Inside was a 20x20 square foot room with white walls and striped blue wall paper with birds on the pattern. In the corner was a large potted plant. A round clock hung high on the left wall and on the right side of the room was a small coffee table, two cushioned chairs, and a half-empty bookshelf pressed to the wall.
The door closed with a soft thunk as Kevin entered. Across from him was an identical door with another sign. This one read,
We appreciate your patience. Please wait and someone will be with you shortly.
“Is this a joke?” he said to no one. His reverberations were again swallowed up into silence. Glancing at the clock, he noted that the thinnest hand that measured each second was moving but also made no sound.
The time was 12:05PM. Kevin ambled over to one of the chairs and plopped down into it. They were old. The cushions had lost their puffy softness long ago and shriveled up like expired raisins left in the sun.
He swiped one of the magazines on top of the table and opened it up near the middle. What he saw made his breath stop short.
Written in typed letters, filling every page was the same thing over and over again.
Please wait.
He turned the page. It was the same. Turning to the back side, hoping to find a list of persons or maybe the address of the publisher, again he was met with ‘please wait,’ in different font styles as though mimicking the way a real magazine would be formatted.
Kevin stood and tossed the magazine at the wall. It crumpled to the floor, landing on its back so he could see the front title.
Please wait.
“What is this? Are you experimenting on me or something?” He stormed over to the door he came in through and was about to grab the knob but stopped and blinked in confusion.
“Wh-what?” he exclaimed, his throat tightening as he stared at a completely empty wall.
There was no other door.
He turned back and looked at the one with the sign, the same message still there. Panic gripped his heart, forcing it to beat wildly as his hands slid over the spot where the entrance had been.
“No, no, no…” he whispered, trying to convince himself it wasn’t real. “How is this happening? What’s going on?!” His hands became fists that slammed against the plaster, only this time there was no dent.
Nothing.
The room remained pristine. He turned around and pressed up against the wall like a cornered animal, his breathing turning rampant.
Eyeing the unopened door, he ran at it and seized the knob. It clicked open when he turned it and relief deflated his panic…but only until he walked through to the other side.
Once his feet crossed the threshold, the door closed by itself. “This…this isn’t possible.” Kevin said in total disbelief.
He had walked back into the same waiting room as before. Same white walls. Same blue wall paper. Same clock. Same chairs and table. Same potted plant and bookshelf.
It was all the exact same.
Kevin snapped his eyes over at the clock. A scream that desperately wanted to erupt out of him got stuck in his chest while his lungs began to spasm. The time was 12:05PM. Again.
Kevin turned around and once again the door he’d walked through disappeared. Logic was overridden by fear. Kevin rushed over to the book shelf and pulled a random book out.
Title: Please Wait.
He thumbed through it. Just as before with the magazine, the entire thing was filled with nothing but the phrase, ‘please wait,’ over and over and over again with varied spacing and formatting like a normal book would have been.
One wasn’t enough. He grabbed a second book with the same results. Then another. And another. Until a pile of books puddled at his feet, all of them giving the same command.
Please wait.
“I’m not doing this,” he muttered angrily and strode over to the door. He flung it open but didn’t step through. The only thing on the other side was darkness. No sign of the room he was currently trapped in.
He picked up one of the books and tossed it through. There was no thud. No indication that it had landed on the floor, or anything else whatsoever.
Apprehensively, he held up his hand and thrummed his fingers. Then he slowly stretched it forward until he could feel his fingertips touching what could’ve been mistaken for a thin bedsheet hanging up.
Kevin jabbed it lightly with his pointer finger and the material (if he could even call it that) rippled out like he’d poked the bare mattress of a waterbed.
Pressing harder, he managed to push through the resistance of the void, but as he did so, his arm froze in place. No matter how hard he pulled, it wouldn’t budge.
For a moment, he imagined an elevator appearing out of nowhere and dropping down through the void, amputating his arm. After a few minutes of struggling, Kevin had the idea of going further through the opening.
While moving back out of the void was impossible, he felt somewhat relieved to discover that he could still move freely forward until coming back into the waiting room.
The clock still read 12:05PM. Kevin flipped off the door as he walked past it and picked up the clock. Turning it around he saw no batteries. No screws. And no space to wedge his nails in and pry the device apart.
He turned it around again and stared at the face and watched it. He watched it for more than a minute. He was sure of that. But no matter how many times the second’s ticked all the way around, neither the big hand or little hand moved. Not even an inch.
Ten minutes passed. Then thirty. Then an hour. He stood and stared at that clock for an entire hour and not once did the time change.
With an unsettling cry of desperation, Kevin threw the clock to the ground as hard as he possibly could. It bounced once, then rolled into the corner on the other side and fell over with a hollow thump.
Picking it back up, he examined it thoroughly and was astonished. No dent. No scratch. Just as he’d seen with the walls before, the clock remained perfectly in tack.
Kevin occupied his panicked mind by experimenting. He wanted to see if the room would change or react differently based on his actions.
He walked through the door, starting fresh and looked around. No change.
On the next attempt he walked in and immediately smashed the clock (or tried to at least.)
No change.
Ten attempts in, he started at the bookshelf and took the first book on the top right hand side.
No change.
He did the same thing for every book that followed after.
No change.
On attempt one hundred and six he started using phrases he thought might trigger a reaction. After coming up with over thirty different variations, there was again, no change.
Kevin walked through that door again and again and again and again.
There was no action that seemed to grant him any measure of progress. Nothing to do with the clock, the walls, the chairs, the potted plant.
Nothing.
After five hundred attempts, Kevin slumped down against the wall and did exactly as the sign on the door told him to do from the moment he’d first entered.
He waited.
And waited.
And waited.
A week went by. Then a month. Then a year. Kevin stopped walking through the door. He never got hungry or tired. His mind was constantly awake, and constantly, painfully aware of every single second that passed, or didn’t pass, as the thin clock hand tick tocked around silently.
His eyes glazed over. He’d lost count of just how long he’d been waiting now. Was it a decade? A century? There was no way to know. He’d counted every divot and bump across the ceiling. Twice. Just to be sure.
He’d deliberately read through every single book, replacing every ‘please wait,’ with his own dialogue and narration and even found himself enjoying a five book romance series about three scientists in a love triangle he named: Love Is Chemis-three.
The plant became his only company. He ended up calling it George because no other name sounded quite so plant-like. They talked for days on end. Kevin shared every detail of his life with George.
Even commented on how good of a listener he was but that he could open up more. Eventually he and George had a falling out which led to Kevin ignoring him completely, save for a dirty look or two throughout the day.
Kevin had come to know the room intimately well. Even better than he knew himself. There was no speck he hadn’t counted. No crack he had missed. No slant or drift or groove he wasn’t completely and totally aware of.
So you can imagine the profundity of horror that filled his soul when one day, as he lounged on the floor, lazily glancing about the room when he suddenly locked onto the sign on the door.
Something was wrong with it. Different. Crawling on his hands and knees, he stared unblinkingly, that ominous feeling getting stronger the closer he got.
He scanned each letter on the sign and nearly fainted.
The letter ‘T’ from the word wait was too slightly different tones of white. The vertical line was off white like the others, but the short horizontal part was beige. Beige!
Kevin couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it before. As a matter of fact, just below the entire phrase was a strip of blue tape, a slightly darker shade than the rest of the sign.
Excitedly, Kevin thumbed the edge of the tape until enough of it came up for him to grab. He peeled it off with bated breath. Once off completely, a new phrase in whiter lettering grinned back at him.
He didn’t know what to make of it. Tilting his head, he read it aloud once more to himself.
“Good things happen to those in Hell.”
An icy tingle slid up his spine. His hand rose up and reached for the ‘T,’ on the sign. Part of him didn’t want him to. Didn’t want to know. To understand. But he couldn’t stop himself.
The horizontal part of the ‘T,’ was another piece of tape. Kevin peeled it off and whimpered.
Not that of weeping, but the beginning of a laugh. It started low. Throaty. Then moved down into his chest before finally dropping into his stomach where it stayed. He fell on his back, arms tucked under his belly as he rolled with roaring laughter.
He laughed and laughed and laughed until the laughter became a scream. A scream that never seemed to stop. A scream that was endless. Just like the room he was trapped in.
A scream that continues to echo from an unreachable nothingness even at this very moment. A scream of madness brought on by the real message hanging on the door of the waiting room.
PLEASE WAIL. SOMEONE WILL BE WITH YOU SHORTLY.
‘Good things come to those in Hell.’
THE END
