What Happened In Paradise?

First Visit: The Foul Room

He tries to talk to her…to it; words fail him. He tries to scream; his voice fails him. He tries to run…his entire body is failing him. His head grows heavier and heavier; the room goes dark and he falls to his face. Or he falls to his face, then the room grows dark. He can’t say the order in which the events occurred; he only knows he’s awake, in a bed. He’s being suffocated by the smell of rotten eggs, it presses down on his face, smothering him.

Maxwell clambers to his feet, using one of the bed’s four posters to help him up. He stumbles once he’s upright, wobbles, falls to the mattress. Maxwell rubs the back of his head, steadies his breathing, and tries again. He walks over to the door, tries to open it; locked. He bangs, kicks, rattles it; it doesn’t budge. He tries the windows; they’re all nailed shut. He doesn’t remember them being nailed shut. How can he be sure they weren’t? This wasn’t his room; he didn’t check.

His head feels light - mush where his brain had been; his mind feels chemically altered. He was drugged. Maxwell stumbles around the room. He crashes into the other side of the bed, the dresser, a wall. The wall opens up, releases him into another room.

There’s an annoying buzzing in his ear; he fans it away; it comes back. He flails his arms about his head, spins, and topples onto a table. There are chairs around the table: two. One is empty, waiting. The other is the seat of all the buzzing. The sound grows the closer he goes to it. The back is to him. He tries rotating the chair; stuck. He moves in front. Oh, he wishes he hadn’t gone in front. His mouth is open, frozen around his strangled scream. His mouth, as wide as the mouth of the corpse in front of him, has many questions. His unuttered words burn his tongue.

Stephanie, how did you get here? The words can’t come out. What happened to you? What does he mean by “What happened to her?” She’s dead, stiff, and eyeless. He can’t look; he has to look. He has to see what has happened to her because of him. He heaves; his vomit adding to the stench in the room. He crashes to the floor. On the ceiling is the head of a goat: also stiff, also eyeless. The room goes dark.