My last breath

They say that when you’re about to die, your entire life flashes before your eyes. I used to scoff at that. I believed in cold facts, not poetic tales spun by dying minds. But now, lying here, with blood trickling from the corner of my mouth and darkness closing in from the edges of my vision, I realize—they were right. Memories flicker through me like lightning behind closed eyelids. My name is Marcus Elijah Quinn. And these... are my last words. It all started the day I received the letter. I was sitting at my old wooden desk in my dimly lit apartment on the east side of Newark. The clock on the wall ticked loud against the silence, each beat a countdown to a truth I wasn’t ready to face. Rain tapped the windowpane like a desperate ghost, the storm outside echoing the turmoil inside my chest. The envelope was cream-colored, thick, and sealed with a red wax insignia I didn’t recognize. There was no return address, only my full name written in elegant black ink. MARCUS ELIJAH QUINN. No one called me by my full name. Not since my mother died. She used to say it with a kind of gravity that made me feel like I was someone important—someone meant for more than small-town obscurity and bad coffee. I turned the envelope over in my hands before tearing the seal. Inside, a single sheet of parchment. > *“Mr. Quinn, You have been selected for the final reckoning. Come to Room 917 of the Whitmore Hotel by midnight tonight. Come alone.”* No signature. No explanation. My first instinct was to toss it in the trash. It smelled of pranks and desperation. But something about it—maybe the cold elegance of its words or the eerie precision of the timing—pulled at me. And so, against all common sense, I went. My Last Words Part 2: The Door Behind the Door --- The Whitmore Hotel sat like a fossilized relic in the center of the city. Once a palace of the elite, it now stood forgotten, tucked between two steel skyscrapers like a memory wedged between the pages of a book no one reads anymore. I arrived at 11:52 PM. Eight minutes early. The doorman didn’t look up as I entered. In fact, there was no doorman. The lobby was vacant, covered in dust, and lit only by a single flickering chandelier hanging like a dying star. No one at the front desk. No guests. No sounds. Only me, my footsteps, and the weight of the unknown. The elevator creaked as I pressed the button. It groaned, as if dragging itself up from the depths of some underground catacomb, and finally arrived with a metallic sigh. I stepped inside. The panel had no floor numbers, only a keypad. Room 917. I typed it in. The elevator began to ascend, but not in any normal way. There were no floor ticks, no hums of machinery—just silence and a slow, vertical pull that made my stomach shift. Then, a ding. The doors opened. I stepped into a hallway that didn’t belong in any hotel. Dim crimson lights lined the walls. The carpet was a rich maroon, clean but impossibly old. And at the end of the corridor—Room 917. The door was already slightly open. Pushing it, I stepped in. The room was circular. In the center sat a round table with a single chair. On the table: a tape recorder, a sealed envelope, and a glass of water. Nothing else. I approached, hesitated, and opened the envelope. Inside, another note. > *“Tell your story. From the beginning. Leave nothing out. The recorder will capture your words. When you're done, we’ll know what to do with you.”* I stared at the recorder. Something about this room made time feel unreal, as if I had stepped out of my life and into someone else's memory. I pressed RECORD. And I began to speak. --- “I was nine years old the first time I saw a man die,” I said into the recorder. “And I think that’s where everything began. The lies, the shadows, the silence. That day shattered me—and reshaped me into the man I am now. Or… was.” - --- My Last Words Part 3: The First Death I Saw --- “I was nine years old the first time I saw a man die.” The words echoed through the room. The recorder’s red light blinked steadily, like a heartbeat. “It was summer. July 19th. I remember because my birthday was the day before. We were living in Harriston then, a tiny town surrounded by pine forests and rust. My mom worked double shifts at the hospital. My father…” I paused, my throat tightening. “My father had already left by then. Said he was going to ‘find himself.’ I remember asking my mom how someone could lose himself when he hadn’t even lost his keys. She didn’t laugh.” I took a sip from the glass of water. It was ice-cold. Too cold. Like it hadn’t been sitting there long at all. “Anyway, it was one of those days when the air stuck to your skin like syrup. My friend, Jamie Moore, dared me to sneak into the old train yard with him. It was off-limits—had been closed since the derailment the year before—but that just made it irresistible.” I leaned forward as I spoke, the memory vivid even now. “We climbed through a break in the chain-link fence. Everything was rusted. Silent. But beautiful, in a decaying kind of way. We found a boxcar still upright and open. It smelled like oil and rot. We climbed inside.” I closed my eyes. “And that’s when we heard it. The coughing. Wet. Ragged. Like someone was drowning in their own lungs. Jamie and I looked at each other. I wanted to run. But he was already walking toward the sound.” The room around me seemed to grow colder as I spoke, like the memory was drawing heat from my body. “There was a man. Slumped against the wall in the corner of the boxcar. His clothes were torn, stained with something dark. He looked… eaten. Not by animals. By time. Or pain. He was dying. We could see it. Smell it.” I swallowed hard. “He looked at us. Right into our eyes. I remember that. Because his eyes weren’t full of fear. Or anger. They were full of… relief.” I paused again. The recorder clicked softly, waiting. “He said one thing. Just one.” I inhaled deeply. > “‘They made me forget. But I remembered. I remembered everything.’” I stared at the blinking light. “Then he died.” --- That moment had haunted me all my life. But I never told anyone—not my mother, not Jamie again, not the police when they found his body days later after Jamie left an anonymous tip. They thought it was an overdose. Case closed. But I knew better. Because those words—“They made me forget. But I remembered.”—they weren’t the last time I’d hear them. --- After that day, something shifted in me. I became obsessed with memory. With secrets. With the idea that people could be made to forget truth like erasing chalk from a blackboard. I buried myself in books. Psychology, neuroscience, old conspiracy files I downloaded from the deep web. My classmates thought I was strange. My teachers said I was gifted. My mom said I was looking for something my father never gave me. Maybe they were all right. But it didn’t matter. Because when I turned seventeen, I found the symbol. Part 4 The symbol in the silence To be continued.............