A Hole In The Concrete

March 2nd, 2026

I don’t really know why I’m writing this down. Maybe because it felt too real to just forget about, and I’ve been sitting at my desk for the past hour trying to convince myself it was just a dream. Of course it was just a dream. I’m going to keep telling myself that until it sticks.

It started the way a lot of dreams do, I guess. Mid-action, no preamble. One second I wasn’t anywhere, and then I was. I was lying on a floor. Concrete and cold, the kind of cold that soaks through your clothes before you even realize it’s happening. I sat up and looked around, and that’s when the first wave hit me. That uncomfortable feeling. I don’t have a better word for it than buzzing. Not in my ears, not in my chest; deeper than that. Like something had reached inside me and plucked at whatever’s underneath all the meat and bone, and the vibration just wouldn’t die out. I kept waiting for it to fade the way discomfort usually does when you get used to it, but it never did. It sat there the entire time, humming away in the depths of my consciousness.

The room was small. Maybe twelve feet across, slightly longer than wide, though the corners were uneven like it had been built by someone who didn’t care much for precision. The walls were concrete too, same as the floor, and the mold on them was bad; dark green in some places, black in others, these wide blotchy patches spreading out from the corners. The ceiling was low enough that when I stood, I could press my palm flat against it without fully extending my arm. No windows, no doors, no seams that looked like they could be doors. No light fixtures either, and yet I could see everything clearly, which I didn’t even register as strange until later. In a dream you tend not to question that kind of thing right away.

The only feature in the entire room (if you could call it a feature) was a hole in the wall. Circular, roughly six inches across, sitting at about chest height. I didn’t go near it at first. I spent what felt like a long time just pacing the room, pressing on the walls, knocking on them, getting down on my hands and knees to look at the floor for any kind of seam or hatch. Nothing. At some point I realized, the way you sometimes just know things in dreams, that I wasn’t going to find anything. There was nothing to find. This was the room, and the room was it.

I knew I was dreaming. I figured it out maybe an hour in (or at least what felt like an hour) and thought that would help, the way it usually does. Like, once you clock it, you can sort of loosen your grip on the dream and wake yourself up, or at least stop taking it seriously. But knowing didn’t do anything. The buzzing was still there. The mold was still there. The cold was still seeping up through the floor into my feet. I pinched myself, and all it did was hurt. The room didn’t care that I knew it was a dream.

Eventually I went over to the hole.

Up close, it was darker than it had any right to be. I leaned in and looked into it and couldn’t see anything, just black, the kind that doesn’t seem to have a back to it. And then there was the liquid. It dripped slowly from somewhere inside the hole, one drop every several seconds, collecting in a small dark smear on the wall beneath it and then on the floor. I crouched down and looked at it. Thick. Viscous in the way that motor oil is, the way it holds together and moves reluctantly. Black, or close enough to it. And the smell; diesel, that heavy petroleum smell, though with something else underneath it I couldn’t place. Something almost organic. I didn’t touch it with my bare fingers. I used the edge of my sleeve, just a brief contact, and it clung in a way that felt unnatural.

I still don’t know what made me do it, but later (much later after more pacing, after trying to sleep on the floor and finding that I apparently couldn’t sleep inside a dream) I pushed my arm into the hole up to the elbow. The edges were smooth, almost polished. Cold inside, colder than the room. I pushed my arm in further, past the elbow, until my cheek was pressed against the wall and my shoulder was wedged against the opening, and I still couldn’t feel the end of it. Just cold air and nothing. My fingers found no wall, no debris, no change in surface. I pulled my arm out and the sleeve was damp with that dark liquid and the smell of it stayed on me for the rest of the time I was there.

I don’t know how to describe what eight hours in that room does to a person. After the first couple of hours the pacing stops feeling productive and starts feeling like what it is, which is desperation. I talked to myself for a while. I sat in the corner farthest from the hole and stared at the walls and tried to do math problems in my head to stay focused; I’m an engineering student so I have a decent backlog of those. At some point I started to feel the edges of something I can only describe as a loosening; like the part of me that organizes the world into comprehensible pieces was starting to get tired of the effort. I caught myself just staring at the mold on the opposite wall for what must have been a long time, not thinking, just staring. That scared me more than the room did.

And then I woke up.

It was like breaking the surface of water. My own ceiling, my own room, morning light coming in at the sides of the blinds. I lay there breathing for a while. Relief is the right word for those first few seconds. Genuine, physical relief, the kind that forms in your feet when you lay down after a ten hour standing shift.

But it hasn’t totally left me, that buzzing feeling. It’s quieter now, and maybe I’m imagining it, but sitting here at my desk writing this out, I keep thinking I can still feel the faint edge of it. Like a sound that stopped a few seconds ago and you’re not quite sure if you’re still hearing it or just remembering it.

It was just a dream.

I’ve got a thermodynamics problem set due Thursday and I haven’t started it. I’m going to make coffee and get to work and forget about this. Hopefully writing this all down will set my mind at ease and allow me to focus.

March 3rd, 2026

It happened again.

I told myself yesterday that writing it down would help, that getting it out of my head and onto paper would be the end of it. One strange dream, documented, filed away forever. I almost believed that. I went to bed last night feeling fine, or close enough to fine, and I woke up on that floor again.

Same room. Same cold concrete, same low ceiling, same mold spreading across the walls in those dark ugly patches. Same hole in the wall, same endless dark contained inside it. For a moment I just sat there with my eyes closed and thought, “seriously, you have got to be kidding me”. Because I knew immediately where I was. There was no adjustment period this time, no slow dawning realization. I opened my eyes, knew where I was, and the buzzing started up the same second like it had been patiently waiting for my return.

I noticed the slight differences pretty quickly, once I started looking. The liquid from the hole was moving faster. Not dramatically, it wasn’t flowing, it was still dripping, but where last time I could count several seconds between drops, now they came faster, more insistently, like a faucet that hadn’t been fully shut off. The smell hit me sooner too. That same rank diesel smell filling up the small space.

Except it wasn’t quite as small. That took me longer to notice because there’s no obvious way to measure a room with your eyes, but I walked the perimeter and it felt different. Larger. Not by much; a foot on each side, maybe, possibly less, but enough that when I stood in the center, the walls seemed just slightly further away than they should have been. And the light, whatever sourceless light had let me see everything clearly the first time was dimmer. Still enough to see by, but with a flatness to it that the first dream hadn’t had. Like the difference between an overcast day and the very start of dusk.

I tried to stay calm. I told myself everything I’d told myself the night before. You’re dreaming. This is temporary. You will wake up. I paced. I did the problem set I’d finished yesterday in my head, step by step, checking my own work. I sat down and tried to breathe slowly and evenly.

It didn’t hold. Maybe two hours in, something cracked. I don’t know exactly what triggered it. I was standing near the hole, not doing anything, just standing there, and I looked into the dark inside it and something about the way it had no bottom, no end, no answer to it, just that endless patient black, hit me in a way it hadn’t until then. My chest locked up. My hands started shaking and then my arms, and then my whole body was shaking and I couldn’t pull a full breath in no matter how wide I opened my mouth. I slid down the wall and sat on the floor with my knees up and my head down and tried to find the bottom of the panic, the place where it levels off, but for a long time there wasn’t one.

The buzzing got worse. The only thing I can say about it is that it intensified, the way a sound gets louder when you’re suddenly aware of it. Except this wasn’t sound, it was deeper than that, and it got bad enough that it felt like it was coming from inside my skull, from behind my eyes. Luckily the feeling became strong enough to wake me up.

Not gently this time. Gasping, sitting upright, hands grabbing at the blanket. 4:14 in the morning, according to my phone. My heart was going fast enough that I could feel it in my throat. I sat on the edge of my bed for a while waiting for it to slow down, and then I got up because lying there in the dark didn’t feel like an option.

I went to the kitchen and ate some crackers and peanut butter standing over the sink like some kind of anxious raccoon. I went to the bathroom, washed my face, looked at myself in the mirror for a while. I looked fine. Normal. A little pale, maybe, but fine. I went back to bed to lay on top of the covers and stare at the ceiling, thinking about whether I wanted to go back to sleep. The answer was no. I went back to sleep anyway.

The room was waiting.

Larger again. Not much, but I could tell. The light a shade dimmer than it had been when I’d left, however briefly. The dripping from the hole a little faster still. I don’t know if those changes happened because I’d been gone, or if they would have happened regardless. I don’t know anything about the logic of this place, if logic is even a word that applies.

I made a decision, standing there in the dark of that room at four in the morning (or whatever time it was in the real world). I was not going to have another panic attack. Not because I wasn’t afraid (I was) but because whatever that spike of fear had done to the buzzing, I didn’t want to feel it again. So I picked a wall and I sat down with my back against it and I started talking. Out loud, to myself, in a low steady voice. I narrated what I could remember of my thermodynamics notes from the beginning of the semester. I worked through every problem from my homework I could remember. I described, in as much detail as I could manage, every meal I’d eaten in the last week. I talked about a camping trip my dad took me on when I was twelve, described the drive there, the campsite, the specific way the fire smelled. I kept my eyes away from the hole. I kept my voice even. I don’t know how well I succeeded, but I made it through.

When I woke up this morning I laid in bed for a long time without moving.

I’m going to the doctor. I don’t know what I’m going to say, I haven’t figured out how to describe this without sounding like someone who needs a different kind of help than a general practitioner can offer. But I need to talk to someone who might be able to do something about my sleep. Whether that’s medication or a referral or just someone telling me this is normal and here’s why, I don’t care. I’ll take any of it. I just need a night where when I close my eyes there’s nothing there. Just dark, and then morning. That’s all I want.

March 4th, 2026

The doctor was nice enough. Young for a doctor, probably only a few years older than me, the kind of guy who nods a lot while you’re talking and writes things down with what seems to be genuine attentiveness. I sat on the crinkly paper of the exam table and told him about the dream, keeping it vague, saying it was vivid and distressing and that I was waking up in the middle of the night and having trouble getting back to sleep. I didn’t describe the room in detail. I didn’t mention the hole. I don’t know why; maybe because saying it out loud to a stranger in a clinical setting would have made it either too real or too absurd, and I wasn’t ready for either.

He told me I was experiencing night terrors. He said it with the comfortable confidence of someone recalling a fact they’ve recalled many times before, and I could tell he expected that to land with some weight, the way a diagnosis usually does. It didn’t, particularly. He went through the list of things I should avoid; caffeine, alcohol, marijuana, screens before bed. He talked about meditation while falling asleep, something about giving the brain a neutral focal point so it doesn’t generate its own. He told me that if it continued, he’d refer me to a sleep study where they could monitor my brain activity and potentially identify something more specific. He shook my hand at the end and told me most people see improvement within a couple of weeks with therapy and healthy sleep habits.

I thanked him and left to sit in my car in the parking lot for about ten minutes.

Night terrors. Avoid caffeine. Most people see improvement.

I don’t know what I expected him to say. There isn’t a diagnosis for what I’m describing, not really, and even if there were, it wouldn’t change the fact that tonight I’m going to lie down in my bed and close my eyes and end up back in that room. A name for it doesn’t help with that. A referral to a sleep study doesn’t help with that. I drove home, made dinner, and didn’t drink coffee, which I desperately wanted. I sat on my couch and tried to do the meditation thing using a video I found online. It helped a little. Not nearly enough though.

Getting ready for bed was its own ordeal. I kept slowing down whether intentionally or not. I brushed my teeth for probably fifteen minutes. I found myself standing in the bathroom in the dark after turning the light off, not moving, not particularly thinking, just not going to bed. Eventually I made myself lie down. I stared at the ceiling. I tried the meditation again, focusing on my breathing, counting exhales, all of it. The buzzing started before I was even asleep. Faint, like an early warning system. My whole body wanted to stay awake. I lay there for a long time, maybe an hour, rigid and resistant, and then at some point exhaustion won and I went under.

The room was bigger. I could feel it immediately. The ceiling seemed slightly higher, the walls slightly further, and the light was dull in a way that reminded me of a room lit only by an overcast sky coming through a window. The dripping from the hole was almost a trickle now, not quite but trending in that direction, a steady rhythm of dark liquid running down the wall and pooling at the base of it. The pool was small, but it was a pool. Last time it had just been a smear. I stood in the center of the room and did my rough calculations, the same way I had the night before, and I estimated maybe twenty percent larger than the first time. Twenty percent dimmer. The smell was worse, more present, filling the room fully now rather than just hanging near the hole.

And then I felt it.

I was standing in the middle of the room doing nothing, and I felt that I was not alone.

I turned around. I checked every corner. I walked the perimeter slowly, trailing my hand along the wall, looking at everything carefully. There was nothing there. No person, no shape, no shadow that didn’t belong to me. Nothing near the hole, nothing near the floor, nothing on the ceiling. I was alone in every observable sense. But the feeling didn’t leave. I want to be precise about what I mean when I say feeling, because it wasn’t imagination and it wasn’t paranoia, or if it was, it was the most fully convincing version of either I’ve ever experienced. It was the specific sensation of being observed. Of being the subject of attention. The way you can sometimes tell without looking that someone in a room has turned to look at you, that particular pressure of awareness. Something was watching me. Something was in the room with me in a way that my eyes couldn’t locate or confirm, and it was watching me with what I can only describe as patience. Like it was waiting to see what I would do. Like it had all the time in the world and was in no hurry whatsoever.

I lasted maybe an hour and a half before the panic took over. Same as before; the chest, the shaking, the inability to breathe. The buzzing spiked. I woke up at 2:47 AM with my pillow damp from sweat and my hands balled into fists at my sides.

I did not go back to sleep.

I laid in bed until three, then got up and turned on every light in my apartment and sat at my desk. I worked on a lab report. I watched two episodes of a show I’ve seen before, nothing that required attention, just noise and light and the presence of human faces and speech. I made eggs at six. I showered and got dressed and went to my eight o’clock class.

I sat through two lectures and a lab session today running on no sleep, just the sheer mechanical momentum of a schedule, and I don’t remember much of what was covered. Somewhere between the lab session and walking back to my car I made the decision. I’m going back to the doctor. Today, after classes. I don’t care if he just tells me the same things again. I need to tell him it’s getting worse, and I need him to know that whatever this is, it isn’t responding to not drinking coffee before bed.

I need someone to take this seriously. I’m starting to think that I need to take this more seriously too, because a part of me has been treating these entries like venting, like if I describe it thoroughly enough it will start to seem manageable. It doesn’t seem manageable. Whatever is in that room with me, (something is in that room with me, I know what I felt) it isn’t going anywhere. And neither, apparently, is the room.

March 5th, 2026

The doctor referred me to a sleep assessment. Next Wednesday. I sat across from him and nodded and tried to look like a week was an acceptable amount of time to wait, and then I asked him if there was anything he could give me in the meantime. He didn’t love the question. I could see it in the slight pause, the way he glanced at his notes before answering. But I told him I hadn’t slept a full night in days, that I was falling behind in my classes, that I was exhausted in a way that was starting to affect my ability to function. All of which is true. He typed something, paused, typed again, and then printed a prescription for a low dose benzodiazepine. He told me to take it only as needed, told me not to drink on it, told me to call if anything felt wrong. He said it like he was hoping I wouldn’t need to call.

I filled the prescription on the way home. Took the pill about an hour before bed, sitting at my kitchen table with a glass of water, staring at it in my palm for longer than was probably necessary. It was small. White, oblong, totally ordinary. I swallowed it and felt the edges of myself go soft and far away, which was a relief, honestly. My body relaxed in a way it hadn’t in days. I went to sleep feeling, for the first time in a week, like maybe sleep was going to be okay.

The floor was cold under my cheek. Relief would not find me tonight.

I sat up and looked around. The room had grown again. Not enormous, not cavernous, but noticeably larger than the last time. The light was flat and dim. The liquid from the hole was moving faster, a thin but steady stream now, a dark ribbon running down the wall. I sat there for a moment registering all of this, and then I looked at the floor and saw it.

In the center of the room. A single pill. White, oblong, identical in every visible way to the one I had taken before bed. Sitting on the concrete floor in the middle of the room like it had always been there.

I walked over and crouched down and looked at it without touching it. I looked around the room again. The feeling of being watched was gone — completely, cleanly absent in a way I hadn’t fully appreciated until now, feeling its absence. I was alone. Actually alone, not just visually alone. Whatever presence had been in the room the night before wasn’t there, and the difference was significant enough that the room almost felt safe by comparison. Almost.

I didn’t know what to do with the pill. I thought about leaving it on the floor, about picking it up and putting it somewhere specific, about a lot of things. Eventually I picked it up and put it in the pocket of my jeans, which somehow seemed better than leaving it in the middle of the floor.

I decided to measure the room. It was something to do, which was the primary requirement, and it seemed like useful information to have. I took off one shoe and used it as a unit of measurement, walking the perimeter and counting carefully. Thirty shoe-lengths by forty-eight and a half. I repeated the measurement to verify. Same result. I noted the dimensions the way I’d note data from a lab, trying to think of it clinically, like I was running an experiment and this was just data collection. It helped, a little, to frame it that way.

I tried scratching into the wall with my fingernails. I don’t know what I was hoping to achieve. Marking the wall felt like doing something, which was the point. But the concrete didn’t give at all, not even a pale streak. My fingernails came away intact and the wall was unchanged. I pressed my palm flat against it and pushed as hard as I could, which accomplished nothing. I knocked on various sections hoping for a hollow sound. Nothing.

I paced. I did calculations in my head. I narrated things to myself in a low voice. The hours moved the way they had the first night; slowly, with that quality of not quite passing, time that you have to push through rather than time that carries you. At some point I started going stir crazy in a way that felt different from anxiety, more animal than that, the specific misery of a creature in a too-small space even though the space wasn’t small anymore. After what I estimated was three or four hours I sat down in the corner and put my hands in my pockets and felt the pill between my fingers.

I thought about it for a while. I took it out and looked at it. Then I swallowed it, because I couldn’t think of a good reason not to and I was desperate for something to change.

The headache started within seconds. Not building gradually the way headaches normally do but arriving fully formed and worsening immediately, a pressure behind my eyes that doubled and then doubled again, moving from uncomfortable to painful to the worst pain I’ve ever experienced in my life within the span of maybe two minutes. I got on my hands and knees on the concrete and pressed my forehead against the floor. The cold helped for about thirty seconds and then stopped helping. I puked. Repeatedly, completely, until there was nothing left, and then I dry heaved for a while with my cheek on the concrete floor next to the mess I’d made. The headache kept going, kept building, kept finding new registers of pain I hadn’t known were available. My only thought was that I was in hell.

I woke up at 3:31 AM.

My bed was soaked in vomit. I lay in it for a few seconds too stunned to move, and then I got up and stripped everything and carried it to the bathroom and turned the shower on and sat on the edge of the tub while the sheets rinsed. The headache was gone. Completely gone, not even an echo of it. I cleaned everything as thoroughly as I could at three in the morning, remade the bed with the spare set from the closet, and sat in the kitchen until dawn. I didn’t sleep. I wasn’t going to sleep.

I went to my classes on autopilot, running on bad coffee and the same grim mechanical routine of a schedule that got me through yesterday. I was fine through the first two classes. The third one was afternoon lecture in a warm room, with a professor whose steady unhurried voice felt like a melody-less lullaby. I didn’t make it. I wasn’t even aware of falling asleep. One moment I was looking at the slide on the projector screen and then the next I was on the all too familiar floor.

The room. Dim, larger, the stream of dark liquid running steadily down the wall. I stood up and felt the familiar weight of it all settle over me, and I was calculating how long I’d have to be here before class ended when I heard something.

A voice. Muffled, distant, but recognizable. My professor’s voice, coming from the direction of the hole. I stood still and listened. It was indistinct at first, just the rhythm and cadence of a lecture, and then I walked slowly toward the wall and crouched down next to it to put my ear close to the opening without touching it.

His voice was clearer. The diesel smell was strong at this distance. I could make out words, a sentence about load distribution, another about structural tolerances, and then distinctly, clearly, coming out of that lightless hole in the concrete wall was my name.

I woke up to him saying it out loud in the classroom, standing over my desk with the particular expression of someone who has been patient for long enough. Half the class was looking at me. He told me in a quiet, controlled voice that he expected more from students in this program, that sleeping in lecture was disrespectful and that he hoped it wouldn’t happen again. I said no sir, it won’t. He moved on.

I sat for the rest of the lecture staring at the desk, fingernails digging into my legs. The pain was able to keep me awake.

I don’t know what to do tonight. I can’t take the pill again, obviously. I’m not sure sleep is something I want to do at all, but I can’t keep waking up at three in the morning and going to class on nothing. I have the sleep assessment on Wednesday, which is five days away. I have a lab report due Thursday and an exam the following Monday and a professor who now watches me during lecture to make sure my eyes are open. I have a room in my head that is slowly getting larger and darker, a hole in the wall that apparently carries sound from one world to the other, and no good explanation for any of it.

March 5th, 2026

I thought I had it figured out.

That’s the part that gets me, sitting here at 11:48 at night with my knuckles split open and bleeding onto the edge of my keyboard. I actually felt good about this one. I spent the afternoon building a playlist (eight hours exactly, timed it out to the minute) with all the bands I know well enough that the music would feel like company. The loud kind, the kind that fills a room completely and doesn’t leave space for anything else to live in. I figured if the hole could carry my professor’s voice into the room, it could carry my music as well. Give me something to do in there, something to focus on, something that was mine and from the real world and not from that room. I put my phone on the nightstand with the speaker facing up, the volume high, and I felt, genuinely felt, a loosening of the anxiety that’s been sitting on my chest for a week. A plan. I finally had a plan.

I fell asleep, hit the floor, and the room was silent.

Not quiet, absolutely silent. The absence of the music I knew was playing fifteen feet away on my nightstand was more unsettling than the buzzing feeling. The room was bigger again. Darker. The stream from the hole had widened, dark liquid running steadily down the wall and spreading across the floor in a slow creeping slick that caught what little light there was. And the feeling was back. The being-watched feeling, immediate and total, like walking into a room and knowing without looking that every head has turned toward you. My stomach dropped.

I stood in the middle of the room and breathed and tried to think. The hole. The professor’s voice had come through the hole. I walked over and crouched down and put my ear close to the opening, keeping my face away from the stream of liquid running beneath it, and listened intently.

The music was there. Faint, thin, like hearing something from three rooms away through closed doors, but it was there. I could make out the specific song, which meant something was transmitting, just poorly. Last time the sound had been clearer. Something had changed. I thought about that for a moment and then thought, something is in the way, and before I’d fully decided to do it my arm was going into the hole.

Shoulder against the wall, cheek against the concrete, arm extended as far as it would go. The cold closed around my arm the way it had the first time. I moved my fingers slowly through the dark, feeling nothing, nothing, nothing; and then something.

Soft. The tips of my fingers registered soft before anything else, unexpected enough that I pulled back slightly before pushing forward again. Something was in there, wedged at the very limit of my reach, and I could just barely make contact with the edge of it. I pressed further. The concrete edge of the hole dug into my shoulder. I turned my face harder into the wall and stretched until my fingers found purchase on the thing and I pulled.

It came out slowly, catching on the edges of the hole, and I had to work it loose with careful movements before it came free all at once. I stumbled back a step with it in my hand.

I held it up and looked at it.

A doll. Small, fitting easily in one hand, made of yarn or something like yarn, the crochet uneven and crude like something made by someone who didn’t know how or didn’t care. Button eyes, two of them, mismatched in size, sewn on with dark thread. It was soaked in the black substance, heavy with it, the smell of diesel rising off it in a noxious wave. The yarn itself, under the coating, looked like it might have once been a pale color. Might have. I turned it over in my hands and looked at it from every angle and tried to locate a rational explanation for its presence and came up empty.

I could hear the music now. Clear as the way it had been when I’d heard my professor, coming through the open hole without obstruction. The song that was playing was one I’d put near the front of the playlist.

I carried the doll to the far corner of the room, the one farthest from the hole, and set it down facing the wall. I don’t know why facing the wall. It seemed better than leaving it facing outward.

The music started to change.

Not the song itself, just the quality of it. A warping, stretching of the sound, like a recording being manipulated, pitches bending in ways that didn’t correspond to any of the instruments actually playing. I straightened up from setting the doll down and felt the dread arrive, not gradually but all at once, a wave of it that started in my stomach and moved upward. I turned around.

The doll was standing.

Not fallen over, not propped against the wall. Standing, upright, on its own, in the center of the corner, its mismatched button eyes were oriented toward me with an intentionality that button eyes on a stuffed figure have no business having. The music continued to warp and stretch through the hole. The liquid was moving faster, noticeably faster, the flow from the hole increasing, spreading further across the floor.

I heard the whispers start.

They came from the doll. I don’t know what language, I don’t know if language is even the right word. It was sounds that had the rhythm and cadence of speech without any content I could identify, layered over each other, several voices at different pitches all going at once. I stood against the opposite wall and listened to them for a whole two seconds before something in me gave way.

I hit the wall with my fist. I don’t remember deciding to. My hand just moved, connecting with the concrete hard enough that the pain was immediate and significant, and I hit it again, and then I was hitting it with both hands, not because I thought it would work but because my body had moved past the point of thinking and into something more basic, something that only knew enclosure and threat and the need to get out. I clawed at the concrete. I could feel the skin on my knuckles opening. The whispers were louder. The liquid was spreading fast across the floor, a supernatural cold against my feet. I could hear it in my ears, in my chest, all of it at once, the warping music and the whispers and the buzzing louder than it had ever been and my own voice making sounds I wasn’t choosing to make.

And then I felt the wall move.

Just slightly, just a give, just the faintest sense of something structural yielding under my hands. Instead of stopping I stepped back and threw myself at it with everything I had, shoulder first, the way you’d hit a door you needed to be on the other side of.

It gave.

I went through.

There was no other side. That’s what I understood in the single second I had before I woke. There was no room on the other side, no corridor, no continuation. I was falling. Open air, or what felt like open air, a void that had no visible bottom and no visible edges, just an infinite dark in every direction. I looked up because up was the only direction that had anything in it, and I could see the hole I’d come through. The room, the actual room, a pale rectangle of dim light above me and receding. Behind it, attached to the wall where the hole had been, a structure. Concrete, massive, the same material as the room but scaled up enormously, a brutalist bulk of it extending upward and sideways. The room I’d been trapped in for five days was nothing more than a tiny cell on its exterior. A single pore on something vast.

I woke up from the sensation of falling and hit the mattress.

My phone on the nightstand said 11:48 PM. The playlist was on the fourth song, which meant I’d been asleep for maybe ten minutes.

My hands are bad. I’m looking at them right now as I type, one-handed when I have to. The knuckles on my hands are split on all of the fingers, and the left hand is bruised badly across the back and swollen at the base of the pinky. I should probably ice them. I’ll ice them when I’m done writing this.

I need to get this all down before any detail fades because none of this can afford to fade. The structure. The size of it. The room is just a fraction of something that goes on further than I could see in a second of falling through a void.

I still have the sleep assessment on Wednesday. That feels almost comical right now. What are they going to find? What is any of this?

I need answers that no doctor is going to have, and I think the only place those answers exist is in that room. I know how that sounds. I’m aware of how that sounds. But I’ve been approaching this as something happening to me and I think that’s been the wrong frame. There is more to this than the room, much more, and whatever is in there watching me has the answers I seek.

My nerves need to settle first. I’m going to ice my hands, drink some water, and sit here until the shaking stops. And then I’m going to go back to sleep.

March 6th, 2026

I’m typing this with my voice. The nurse set it up for me about an hour ago, a voice-to-text thing on a tablet they propped up on the tray table. She was kind about it. She didn’t ask why I needed it, just set it up, brought me water and left me alone, which is what I needed. I’ve been lying here trying to figure out where to start and I think the only way is to just go through it in order and not stop, so that’s what I’m going to do.

I went back to sleep.

I said I would, and I did, and the room was how I’d left it. That was the first thing I registered. Almost exactly as I’d left it, except for the increase in size and darkness that came with every entry. The hole I’d broken through was still there, a ragged gap in the concrete on the far wall, cold air coming through it from the void on the other side. The floor was covered in the black liquid, the smell of it overwhelming. My music was still coming through the small hole. And the doll was in the corner facing the wall, exactly where I’d placed it before I’d noticed it had moved. Something had placed it back. Set back the way I’d originally put it, facing the wall, as if the thing was trying to convince me it had never moved at all.

The buzzing was immediate and intense. The watched feeling was instantaneous and total. I stood in the liquid and felt both of those things for only a split second. I want to be honest about my mental state when I say that I mostly didn’t care. Something had happened to me between the falling, the waking, the writing, and the going back under. Some threshold had been crossed. I looked around the room at all of it, the doll and the hole and the liquid and the dim light, and what I felt most strongly was not fear but a kind of furious need to know. The structure I’d seen when falling. The massive concrete thing that the room was just a cell on, extending outwards further than I could see. I needed to get to it. I needed to get through the wall where the hole was. If I could get through it I could get to something other than this damned room, something that might have answers in it.

I started hitting the wall.

I know exactly how this reads. I had already destroyed my hands once against these walls and I went back and started doing it again. I cannot fully explain the state of mind except to say that it wasn’t a rational decision, it was barely a decision at all. The music helped in the worst possible way, filling the room with sound and momentum, and I hit the wall over and over again. The pain was extraordinary but it was also somehow distant, like it was happening to someone nearby rather than to me. I clawed at the concrete. I used the heel of my palm. I used my elbow. I found a chunk of concrete near the broken hole in the far wall and used that, smashing it against the surface until it crumbled in my grip and I was back to using my hands. I screamed at the wall. I told it to open. I don’t remember a lot of the middle hours clearly and I think that might be for the best. I was consumed by pure rage for what felt like an eternity.

The wall didn’t move. Not a single fracture, not a single chip. I could have been hitting it for a year and it wouldn’t have mattered.

I woke up at 2:18 AM.

The pain arrived the way the light arrives after flipping a switch. Not slowly. I looked at my hands in the dark of my bedroom. The dark was actually helpful for a moment because I couldn’t see them clearly. When I turned on the lamp and saw them clearly, I called 911 because there was nothing else to do. I stayed on the phone with the dispatcher and didn’t look at my hands again until the paramedics came.

The two EMTs who came in, I watched their faces when they saw my condition. I’ve been around enough people to know when someone is controlling their expression carefully. They were professional, one of them said something reassuring that I don’t remember. They got me onto the gurney and into the ambulance, and one of them held my arms still the whole ride because I kept involuntarily trying to move my hands. He just kept telling me very calmly; stay still, stay still, don’t move them.

At the hospital they gave me something for the pain through an IV. The relief was fast and made me feel very far away from everything, which was exactly what I wanted. A doctor came and looked at my hands for a long time without speaking and then told me in a direct and serious voice that they needed to operate immediately, that there was significant structural damage, and that the goal was to preserve as much function as possible. He said it the way you say something when you are already preparing the person for the possibility that the goal won’t be achieved.

They wheeled me to the operating room, brought out the anesthesia, and put me under.
I was back in the room before the ceiling of the operating theater finished fading.

Exactly as I’d left it, again. Liquid on the floor. Doll in the corner. The only new thing being a bloody crater in the wall where I’d spent hours destroying my hands; dark and grimy, going nowhere. I stood in the middle of the room and looked at all of it and understood immediately and with complete clarity that I could not be here, that I needed to wake up. I had no thoughts about how whatever was happening to my hands on the operating table required me to be unconscious, cooperative, and still.

I ran at the hole in the far wall and jumped through.

The void, the falling, the stomach-drop of open nothing. And then the operating table. I came back gasping and thrashing about. The voices around me were alarmed and immediate, hands on my shoulders, someone saying his vitals spiked and someone else saying more. The mask pressed more anesthesia into my lungs and I went back under.

I was back in the room.

I ran through the hole. Falling. Table. Voices. Mask.

I don’t know how many times I did this. Each time I broke the surface they pushed me back down and each time I came back to the room the doll was in the corner and the liquid was on the floor and the bloody mark on the wall was there and the buzzing was there and the presence watching me was there. After a while I didn’t run for the hole. I don’t know if I’d run out of the impulse or if some part of me understood that I was making things worse. I just stopped.

I sat down in the middle of the floor in the black liquid and I stayed there.

The doll turned around at some point. I watched it happen, slow and mechanical, pivoting on whatever it uses instead of feet until the button eyes were pointed at me. I looked back at it. The liquid crept up around me where I sat, soaking through my clothes, cold and thick and smelling the way it always smells. The whispers started eventually, layered and directionless, coming from the doll and from the walls and from somewhere that wasn’t a location at all. The buzzing was at a constant high pitch, the presence bearing down on me from everywhere and nowhere. I sat in it, breathed it all in, and sunk into the panic attack fully and completely, letting it flow through me because there was nowhere to go, nothing to do. I cried, screamed, sobbed, sitting in a concrete room covered in black liquid. This must be what hell is like. Incomprehensible suffering.

It felt like much longer than a surgery takes.

I woke up in the recovery room. White ceiling, warm blankets, the specific antiseptic smell of a hospital. A nurse checked on me almost immediately. I asked her how long I’d been under and she said a little over four hours. Four hours. I’ve spent more time in that room than four hours before, I know what it feels like. That was not four hours.

The doctor came and talked to me about the surgery. He used words I’m going to write here exactly as I understood them: significant damage, multiple fractures, tissue loss, two fingers on the right hand could not be saved. He told me my hands would require extensive rehabilitation and that full function was unlikely. He told me it was important that I was honest with him about what had happened. I told him I’d been sleepwalking and hadn’t realized what I was doing until it was too late. He looked at me for a moment, obviously not believing me, and wrote something down before saying “alright then…” and leaving.

I asked the nurse later about the voice keyboard. She set it up without asking questions. I’ve been dictating it for the last forty minutes.

I am not going to sleep. I want to be clear about that, I want to write it here where I can see it later when I’ve forgotten how serious I am right now. I am not going to sleep. I don’t care about the sleep assessment on Wednesday. I don’t care what any doctor says about sleep deprivation or cognitive function or any of it. I know what is waiting for me when I close my eyes; I know what it does and I am done.

I will never see that room again.

I’m not going to sleep.

I will never be in that room again.

I’m not going to sleep.

Fear can keep me awake.

I’m not going to sleep.

I will never sleep.

March 10th, 2026

I don’t know why I’m writing this down. I’m not a journal person. I’ve never kept a diary or a blog or anything of the sort. I’m doing this because something has been sitting in the back of my mind for a few days now and I can’t get it out, and my therapist (who I started seeing after all of this) says that writing things down can help externalize them. So here I am.

This all started when a young man was admitted into the ward I work at. His name was Zachary. I won’t use his last name. I don’t think that’s appropriate, especially with the family’s lawsuit still ongoing. But I’ll call him Zach because that’s what he asked me to call him, and it feels wrong to refer to him as the patient or the young man or any of the clinical distancing language we sometimes fall into in this profession when things get hard.

He came in through emergency in the early hours of the morning with his hands in a condition I’m not going to describe in detail. I’ve been a nurse for eleven years and I had to take a breath before going into his room. He was twenty two years old, an engineering student. Before everything happened to him he was, by all accounts, a perfectly normal young man with decent grades and a full life ahead of him. I want to say that first because by the time most people encountered him in those last couple of days, normal was not the word they would have used.

After the surgery he was moved to a recovery room and then to a standard room on our ward. The plan was to stabilize him, manage his pain, and arrange a transfer to an appropriate facility for psychiatric evaluation. That was the plan. He refused to sleep consistently and completely. We would administer sedatives as prescribed, he would go under, but then within a few minutes he would be awake again, thrashing about and destroying everything around him. We just kept increasing his dose of sedative.

During the rare occasions when he was lucid, he talked. Mostly to me, for whatever reason. I think it was because I was the one who set up his voice keyboard and he associated me with being listened to. He talked like he knew exactly what he was saying, but all that came out was incoherent nonsense. Sometimes I’d catch a glimmer of a half baked thought about a hole, a doll, or some kind of black liquid. None of it really ever made any kind of sense.

The lawsuit. I’m not going to say much about the lawsuit except that the family has grounds and I hope they get what they’re seeking. I’ll leave it at that. What happened with the sedative dosage was not my shift and not my error. I have given a full statement to the relevant parties. Zach was twenty two years old, he was afraid to sleep. He spent his last coherent days fighting as hard as he could to stay awake. And then he wasn’t awake anymore, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

I said I’m writing this because something is sitting in my mind and won’t leave. It’s something he said, one of the times he was lucid and talking, two days before the end. He was looking at the ceiling and he said it almost to himself, not really to me, he said there’s a hole in the wall and I think it goes further than the room. I think whatever’s on the other side has been watching for a long time. He said it quietly, not with the agitation he usually had, almost with a kind of exhausted acceptance. I wrote it down on a notepad I had in my pocket because I didn’t know what else to do with it. I still have the notepad.

A hole in the wall. I had no idea what he meant, but something about it scared me.

Last night I had a strange dream.

I was in a concrete room. The walls were damp, mold spreading across them in dark patches. No windows. No doors. The ceiling was low. There was a single feature in the room. A circular hole in the wall. The dream felt like it lasted an eternity. I have never been more relieved to wake up in my entire life.

I’m sure it’s nothing. The imagery of his final coherent thought embedded itself into my subconscious. My sleeping brain did what sleeping brains do with embedded imagery. That’s all this is. That’s the only thing this is.

I’m sure of it.

Credit: Grant Howard

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