Chapter Text
It was six months ago that Coco moved into Room 302 of Naakiwan Downs Apartment, an apartment building in the mostly quiet city of Naakiwan Downs. Coco was happy and enjoying her new life as a comic book artist.
But one week ago, something strange happened. She began to have a recurring dream each night. One other thing…
She couldn’t leave Room 302. No matter how hard she tried. But that day, a miracle happened. A chance for her to find a way out of her prisonic sanctuary.
***
When I was little, I heard an old poem, the kind that is so ancient, few people must have known about its existence. The poem goes like this:
“Sail sleeping skies,
The stars like silver ships
Till rapt in branches,
Set course for world adrowse
To pass the gift of night to silverwood lips
And sink as fingers in her tousled boughs.”
With each word of that poem that came into my head, replaying like a broken record. The same dream occurred to me once more. Over and over again. Always the same. Never changes. Like an old home video. Frozen in time.
I was standing in a plain field. Unexpectedly freezing for what I believe to be the middle of a hot, scorching summer. It was always dusk; the sun set on the horizon, but not enough that it sank and was engulfed by the darkness. The night approached and crawled up, but never enough that it lingered in the sky and spread the blinking stars across. Everything remained in a stillness utopia. Captured perfectly like a picturesque portrait.
The scenes of my dream occurred exactly in order. Frame by frame. Flowing from panel to panel. It starts the same, it ends the same. My legs moved in synchronized perfection, as if I had gone through hundreds of rehearsals, so that every single detail has been etched into my brain. I was thinking of drawing this into my comic pages, but I never did. I don’t know why.
I counted in my head. When I reached 30, I stopped, as I stood still staring at the ruins of an old, long-forgotten house. A relic of the past. It looked…familiar. Have I ever been here before? That’s weird. I have almost no recollection of it. But I’m sure I’ve seen it before. Somewhere. Every time I tried to remember, my head pounded, as if preventing me from pursuing the answer. The house, old Victorian style, with a hint of countrysideness, always appeared the same. Broken windows, overturned furniture, scattered fabrics, and a wide-open door, as if welcoming my presence.
Every time I step inside, my instinct is to drag myself to the family dining room. There, splayed on the floor, bloodied, lifeless, with their faces contorted in unimaginable horror, are the cold bodies of this poor, poor family. Massacred with cold blood. Left to rot. To be forgotten. What kind of monster would do such a thing?!
And when the poem stopped echoing in my head, a pair of hands appeared from behind, wrapped around my neck, choking me, pulling me back to reality. The feeling is always the same, cold to the touch.
***
Coco shot her eyes wide open. The feeling of frigid cold washed all over her aching body. Familiarity gradually returned to her senses as her eyes recognized the scattered papers, the ink smudges, and her head resting on the warm, hard wooden surface. She recognized this formulaic mess of her drawing space. The papers containing crude sketches were pushed to the corner. Coco fluttered her eyes, feeling a persistent ache in her head, and she clutched her forehead. This stubborn headache refuses to leave her alone.
She jolted quietly when her G-pen slipped from her grip, spilling the ink on the floor. Coco didn’t even bother to pick it up. The strange migraines, coupled with the cramp that had invaded her body for three days, made simple movement feel torturous. She wanted to go to bed and lie there. But for how long? How long will this last? Coco tried to recall something. It has been a week now since she hasn’t left her room. Not that she’s a shut-in, not that she was so preoccupied with her deadlines, but she simply cannot leave her room.
“That dream again…” Coco muttered, her memories reeled back to that fuzzy dream she had. Despite the nightmarish nature of her dream, she began to grow accustomed to it. What a bizarre thing to feel. She pulled herself up and let out a sigh. She stares at her drawing board; she hasn’t even finished any pages. There is only one drawing there, a crude one, drawn with ink; each stroke harbors the mixture between delicateness and chaos. Coco had been thinking of turning her strange dreams into her new comic, but no matter how hard she tried to put her experiences into words and draw them panel by panel, she only managed to draw one thing: a lone ruin of a Victorian house in the middle of nowhere. The same house she saw in her persistent, looping dreams.
“I can’t even draw…” She murmured. “What is wrong with me? Is this some kind of twisted art block?” She continued her rumination, but her train of thought was interrupted by a ringing noise. Coco turned her head to the desk beside her bed. Her eyes widened open when she realized that, perhaps, someone was trying to call her. To reach out to her. Relief washed over her as she hastily went to the side of her bed, nearly tripping after stepping on her pen, and fixed herself next to the telephone.
Her hand slowly reached for it, picking it up. A trembling “Hello?” echoed in the room. But there’s no voice from the other side. Nothing. The warm feeling in her chest dropped, and her face slowly wrinkled in bitter realization. Maybe she had gone crazy. Maybe the phone didn’t ring after all.
Coco winced, panic striking her heart; she kept thinking about her mother in her home, alone, probably trying to reach out to her. But Coco never answered. She can’t. It’s as if she were completely isolated from the outside world, which is ironic. Coco left her small rural hometown to see what the world is all about, but now, in this faraway place, she is cooped up in her small prisonic sanctuary. She used to believe in magic and curses when she was little, but once she was mature enough, those were pushed to the corner. However, she did believe in karma, so she always tried her best to be kind to others. Is this a punishment? Bad karma? From a mistake she didn’t notice?
Coco frantically dials her mother’s number, clinging to a thin hope that somehow the call would reach her mother. Five seconds, ten, fifteen, half a minute, no answer. Only a lingering buzzing noise. “The phone doesn’t work…” she whispered, turning her gaze to the window that, strangely, has been shut off. She can’t even remember if she closed them shut. With a wooden board and nails, of all things. How could she do it if she can’t leave her room? She has a hammer, but the last time she checked, she had no nails or a wooden board. She had been shut off, and the light outside didn’t reach her room. “So hungry…I think I still have some of Mom’s shepherd’s pie.”
She left her bedroom and went to her kitchen. She looked to the side briefly, to the front door. Chained shut from the inside. She rolled her eyes weakly before heading to the fridge. There were still some chunks of pie inside a container. Coco winced; a strange nauseous feeling washed over her stomach. Her appetite suddenly disappeared. Her body had been weird ever since. Perhaps this was the result of being closed off inside for too long. She had always been a social person, but after landing a job as a junior comic book artist and serving as an assistant to a well-known fantasy comic book artist, her schedule had been crazy strict. Now, she couldn’t even imagine what her editor would say to her after not hearing from the young artist for almost a week.
She closed the fridge slowly, and before long, she found herself heading back to the locked front door. Coco had tried everything to pry it open, from picking it with a screwdriver to a more extreme measure, like throwing a wooden chair at the door, but nothing was working. It just won't budge. The door just stayed there, taunting her. There’s a scribble on the door’s surface, as if carved with something sharp. A pocket knife, perhaps.
Don’t go out.
Who in the world carved that? Certainly not her. She knows her handwriting. Coco thought as she frowned in disapproval. Coco found a piece of paper stuck under the crevice of the door. She picked it up, finding crude writing on it. As if it were written by a child.
Mama, are you in there?
Coco can’t take it anymore. She found it interesting to write something vague in stories, but whoever is pulling this mean, tasteless prank needs to be dealt with immediately. Perhaps the culprit is life itself all along. The week has been very, very strange for Coco.
Coco heard something that sounded like a glass breaking outside the room. She moved forward and peeked through the peephole. Outside, she saw a girl around her age with pink, long, curly hair tied in twin pigtails. She is holding a bag of groceries, seems like she is struggling to pick up something on the floor.
“That’s Tetia. My next-door neighbor. I think she’s the one who invited me to a house party in like…a month ago.” Coco started talking to herself aloud, unknowingly, as if she was conversing with another person. Maybe isolation and loneliness really got into her. She heard Tetia sigh disappointedly, “Ugh…I hope my luck changes before the party.” Coco tried to call Tetia, but her voice, strangely, didn’t reach outside.
As she was about to leave, a loud noise came from her bathroom. Coco swore she heard something crushing, brittle rocks, and brick stone falling down to the floor as if someone had hammered through her walls.
The meadow-haired girl rushed to the bathroom. Opening the door slowly out of caution of finding a stranger trying to break in. But she found no one. Only a gaping, perfectly circular hole in the wall of her bathroom. The outer rim of the circle is decorated with what looks like ancient runes out of a fantasy book. The hole destroyed half of her ceramic sink, and the showerhead was thrown across. It looks like a window. A portal. A mode of teleportation that the magician characters in her series use to travel to faraway places. What the hell is she even thinking now? But what a curious coincidence.
There are voices inside the hole, as if calling for her. Inviting her to crawl inside. “No, Coco. This is crazy. Don’t go crawl into a strange, random hole that appears out of nowhere…” She shook her head repeatedly. But she peeked inside anyway; curiosity indeed could kill a cat, in Coco’s case, a grown woman. Maybe there’s a chance that this hole could lead her out. She can’t take it anymore, being caged up like a circus animal with no chance of freedom. She needs to get out of her room.
So, the girl slowly crawled inside. Her knee-length skirt touched the dusty surface as she crawled on all fours, struggling to reach the end. Once inside, her eyes were nearly blinded by a white, illuminating light. She averted her gaze from the blinding light but pushed forward. Maybe that’s it. The exit. Her getaway from this prisonic sanctuary.