Imagine you’re sitting in a library, working on learning Morse code. Getting overwhelmed with studying, you close your eyes and everything goes quiet. Nobody is speaking, nobody is moving chairs. Everything is completely silent. Well, not completely silent. You can hear the fan. You can hear the person at the bench across the room breathing. You can hear yourself blinking, the lightbulbs flickering. The person under the floor screaming faintly for help. The mouse in the ceiling eating at the walls. Wait, what? You pause and open your eyes. Because when you open your eyes, everything isn’t so loud. You take a moment to stop what you are doing and lean down. Looking around, you see the librarian staring at you in almost a judgemental way. So you drop a pencil “by accident” and act if you are just picking it up. As you get closer and closer to the ground, the faint screaming comes to a quick stop. You bend down under the table to grab your pencil and put your ear to the vent, waiting for something, anything. Maybe you were imagining it. You sit back up and continue with your work. There are a million eyes staring at you, digging into you, piercing your skin with lasers as hot as the sun. When you look around yourself, nobody is looking at you. In fact, nobody is here, the lights are off and it’s just you. The librarian that was just judging you is gone. The person across the room breathing so loudly is nowhere to be heard or seen. You begin to pack your work up. Grabbing your phone and turning on the flashlight. As you’re about to head out, you hear your name. You whip your head around to see if maybe this is all in your head and as you do, you freeze. There is one light on. Not in the library, but you can see it shining through the vent. There is a person staring back at you, with the same colored-eyes as yourself. Maybe it was this person crying for help. You turn your flashlight off and set it on the table, putting your bag down on the floor. Getting on your hands and knees, you crawl under the table and get closer to the vent. The area under the table is small, so you should already be at the vent. But it keeps getting further and further away. Right now all you can hear is your breaths and the blinking of your eyes. They are the loudest things in the world. The vent keeps getting further and further away from you and it’s also getting smaller. The table was only about three feet long—why is it taking you so long to reach the vent? You stop in your tracks and take a deep breath. “What am I even trying to do here? I haven’t heard the person say anything, nor have I seen them since I crawled under here. I am just going to turn around. This is getting freaky.” Before you can turn around, the light in the vent turns off and you hear something running around in the vent. The vent is getting closer again. You shake your head, deciding that you’re no longer going to try to investigate and are just going to try to get out. You turn around and start crawling away. But it’s pitch black and you left your phone on the table. Panicked, you look around yourself because the benches should be there so you can crawl out. You remember earlier when you dropped your pencil and slid under the table. So there has to be a way out on the side. But there isn’t. It is just all walls. It is just concrete walls. You keep crawling trying to get out but it is so dark nothing is to be seen. You peek back to see if maybe the light in the vent has been turned back on. It has, but it’s flickering erratically. It spells out R-U-N in Morse code. Maybe you read it wrong. There is no way this vent is talking to you. Telling you to run. Doesn’t matter to you anyways, so you keep crawling. This is getting way too crazy. You try to pinch yourself, hoping you’re asleep, but you feel it. It isn’t a dream. You want to cry. You don’t understand where you are, how you got to this, or what is happening. You sit right where you are trying to think this whole situation through logically. It must just be a dream. After a minute of just sitting there you open your eyes. When you do you are confused, you’re back on the bench in the library. You are no longer under the table. Your bag is right next to you and your phone is in your hand. You pick up your head. And see you have a red mark on your arm. Checking your camera, you see there’s a matching red mark on your head. Was it really all just a dream? You turn to your right and see the person that was breathing so loudly, just sitting there reading their book. Behind you, the librarian is back in their chair clicking on their computer. Your heart rate is back to normal and you’re confused. But nevertheless you just want out. You never want to come back here again. Whatever the hell just happened, if it was a dream or not, you just want to be as far away from here as possible. You grab your bag and run out the door you came in. But instead of it leading to the outside world, you’re now in a small room. There are four walls, all of them made from concrete. In the corner is a small cot with a blanket. There is a rock next to the cot with a bunch of tally marks carved into the wall. There are thirty tally marks. You set your bag down and check your phone. No cell service. You turn to the door you just came through—it’s vanished. There’s just a wall. Maybe you never woke up from the dream. Maybe you’ll wake up again. You pace around the small room. You can still only hear your blinking and your breathing. Then suddenly a sharp ear-piercing scraping comes from behind you. Looking over by the cot, you see the rock writing floating by itself and creating another tally mark on the wall. Making thirty-one tally marks. But after everything that has happened, while the rock moving on its own is quite terrifying, it still isn’t the worst thing you’ve been through tonight. You’re exhausted and confused and figure you’re not going to get anything done by just standing here. You try to shout for help. You walk over to the cot and just lay down for a moment. Closing your eyes. When you open your eyes again, there’s something shiny that catches your eye. It’s a vent on the dirt ceiling. You try to scream for help again but nothing happens. You push the cot under the vent and try to stand on it to see if you could possibly escape. You peel through and fall back, startled by what you see. It’s a pencil that has fallen on the floor, and you see yourself, going to pick it up…