Lisa' Dreams

Lisa's lungs burned as she sprinted through the corridor, footsteps echoing behind and around her. The air was filled with shouts, the frantic rustling of dozens of panicked bodies, and the sharp metallic creaks of the old building beginning to buckle under pressure. Light slashed through dusty windows at sharp angles, illuminating floating specks in the air—frozen moments of dust and dread. Somewhere above, something boomed, like steel being torn apart. A woman screamed. No one looked back. Lisa didn’t know how it had started. One moment she was sitting in a clean, quiet room with warm coffee and a clipboard on her lap. A “compliance check,” they had said. Routine. Just questions. Smiles and clipboards and white coats. The next moment—alarms, lights, voices yelling evacuation protocols in flat, synthesized tones. People who had looked like researchers now sprinted beside her with wild eyes, no uniforms, just fear. Something had gone wrong. Very wrong. She didn’t know what the building was. It had no nameplate. Just a code on the door she now barely remembered: IN-47B. Institutional, gray, three stories tall. No one had said what kind of institution it was. Research, maybe. Something to do with memory, she’d thought at first. But now, in the stampede of the panicked, she realized no one really knew. The crowd surged down staircases, trampling caution signs and shoving chairs aside. She gripped the handrails as people jostled around her, some falling, some rising again. The air was hot, like breath held too long. They were on the ground floor now. She could see sunlight pouring in through the large glass doors just ahead. Trees. Sky. It looked like freedom. Safety. Her heart rose. Then she saw it. The Sign. It was carved into the lintel above the last staircase, just before the final steps descended to the lobby where the doors waited. The words weren’t lit or highlighted. There was no sound or alarm calling attention to them. But they were there, etched into the pale concrete, uneven and deep: “STAY ON THE LAST STAIRS.” Lisa blinked. Her forward motion slowed instinctively. The crowd surged around her, brushing past on both sides, like a river splitting against a rock. Some shoved her shoulder roughly. “Move!” one man barked. “Keep going!” shouted someone else. But she didn’t. Something about the sign—it didn’t feel like a warning. It felt like a command. Quiet, precise. She put her hand on the railing and stayed on the last stair. The others flowed past her, boots thudding on tile, gasping and weeping as they rushed toward the shining daylight just steps away. Lisa watched as the first people burst through the glass doors. They blinked in the light, stumbled into the open. But then—something shifted. Something outside. A flicker. A strange ripple in the air. Like the world beyond the doors was a film stretched too tight, beginning to tear. The sunlight pulsed. Then the people who had gone out began to disappear. Not in bursts. Not in blood or fire. Just—gone. Like a cut in a reel. One step, two—gone. No sound. No cry. Just nothing. Lisa gasped. Her hands clenched the railing tighter. The doors still stood open, but now there was no one standing beyond them. Only grass and wind. Or what looked like grass and wind. But the ripple was still there, like a curtain fluttering at the edges. Others didn’t notice. Or didn’t want to. They rushed ahead, blinded by the promise of daylight. More vanished. And then—something else happened. The stairs beneath her moved. At first, it was subtle. A low vibration, a shift in pressure, like standing on an elevator that had just begun to descend. Lisa looked down. The steps beneath her were gliding downward, away from the crowd. No one else noticed. They were too busy screaming, running. She stood motionless, breath held, as the staircase detached. It descended like a platform into a shaft that hadn’t existed before—hidden beneath the tile, seamlessly disguised. The stairwell walls folded inward like origami, revealing an opening behind her, veiled with vines and age-worn bricks. Green weeds hung over a metal gate, rusted and ancient. The gate groaned open as the stair settled into place. It wasn’t a hallway. It wasn’t another level. It was something else. Lisa's breath caught in her throat as she stared at the gate. Twisting vines dangled from its edges, thick and tangled, pulsing ever so faintly as though alive. The smell of moss and damp stone wafted out from the dark beyond, earthy and old. The walls around it were carved with patterns she couldn’t recognize—symbols, maybe. Or warnings. The rest of the building above was still chaos, but that world felt distant now. Irrelevant. Gone. And the gate stood before her—waiting.