The two men awoke groggily to find themselves inside a small square room with no doors, just a lavatory and a wash basin.

They remembered how to use these things, they knew that a door should be there – all that knowledge we barely think about day-to-day, that are woven into the tapestry of our lives…but everything else was gone.

They scrabbled at the walls in a desperate and increasingly futile effort to find some hidden mechanism to get themselves out.

They kicked the brick work, ignoring the tell-tall crunch of broken toes when these pathetic efforts conclproven useless, snd all they had to show for any of it was smeared blood and nothing more.

Hunger set in fairly quickly. Nothing to be done about that, but at least they had water to sustain them. For now. One of them bit into his own arm, teeth penetrating the skin amd into the thick muscle as he sucked the blood from it.

Still no way out.

The smaller of the two caught on the quickest. He’d suspected for a long time, but kept denying to himself that anyone could do this kind of Saw movie shit just for kicks.

But people DID do those sorts of things. The Toybox Killer did this, and worse. Fred and Rose West, the house horrors. When it came to the twisted depraved invention of the human mind, there were few limits to be found.

If the only way out was death, then he needed a method. He tried drowning himself in the sink. He couldn’t. He begged number two to do it for him, to give him peace at last, to hold him under until he stopped moving. Number two didhas he asked. He freed his cellmate.

What became of number two? Who knows. But he’s dead. After all, the only exit to that room is death. Pray that you never find yourself trapped there.

Author’s Note: some of you will recognise aspects of this story inspired by “Go For a Punch”, the infamous lost deep wep anime. I hope my story had added a new dimension to it. I’ll leave it up to the reader to interpret what I think the room is. My only clue is that it is a very personal subject, one that so often feels like a locked room with only death as the exit

Thanks for reading.

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