CHOOSE YOUR OWN MINDFUCK: A Night in Eighth Block Tower (A68)
Bedlam Bible fans! Explore the Eighth Block Tower! Choose your fate! New posts every Tuesday and Friday. September '23 through December '23. Don't succumb to the huummmmmmmmm...
You’ve decided to go with Bee…
Bee grabs you by the arm and pulls you up the stairs. You can’t help but notice she’s leaving her bags unattended.
“Aren’t you worried someone will snatch up your stuff?” you ask.
She laughs. “No one wants what’s in those bags. Believe me.”
You’re dying to know what’s packed inside, but decide it’s probably best if you just left it alone. You follow her up the stairs.
She takes you to an apartment on the next floor up, but before she opens the front door, she turns to look you dead in the eye.
“Just remember, he wanted this,” she says.
You nod, preparing your mind for the worst. Why else would she have felt the need for a preface? She stares at you for several seconds, until the tension becomes so uncomfortable you break eye contact.
“You’re sure you want to see this?” she asks, moving back into your line of vision.
“You said it’ll get me outta here, right?”
“Gone. Without a trace,” she says.
“Well, alright then. What are we waiting for?”
She still seems worried.
“Sorry,” she says. “This is the worst part of the job for me. If I don’t know for sure that someone wants what I’m offering, then I become overwhelmed by grief. I can’t have that. I’m too busy for those kinds of feelings.”
You just nod as if you understand exactly what she’s saying. Truth be told, you’re a bit confused.
“Look, I won’t lie to you. Right now, on the other side of this door, there’s a horror show happening,” she says. “I don’t know you or the things you’ve seen in this life, but I can almost guarantee you’ve never seen anything more gruesome than this. It’s important to remember that as hideous and violent as it may appear on the surface, the man behind this door is at peace. For the people who ingest this drug, this moment has been a long time coming. I choose to be happy for them. I choose to feel pride in providing them with that peace. For them… this is happiness. Or as close to it as they’ll ever come, anyway.”
She pauses and takes a deep breath. Finally, she pushes the door open and waves you inside.
“You aren’t coming?” you ask.
“I try not to look any more,” she says. You have a feeling she’s carrying more guilt than she leads on. You nod your head and step inside.
You feel a light tap on your shoulder. It’s Bee. She’s handing you her cell phone.
“The electricity in that apartment has been shut off for months. You’ll have to use this for light.”
You take the phone and toggle the flashlight feature. The room instantly lights up. You wave the phone around the room, looking for the horror show she promised, but it’s nowhere to be found. Just a bunch of broken furniture and debris. It looks like a trap house, like the rest of Eighth Block.
“I’m not seeing anything,” you say, loud enough for Bee to hear you from the doorway.
“In the bedroom,” she shouts. “Down the hall.”
A weird chill runs through you as you suddenly realize the gravity of the situation. You’re about to witness an assisted suicide. Why is this only now registering with me?, you think, but you also know it’s too late to turn back now. Your curiosity’s been piqued. You won’t allow yourself to leave without—at the very least—a quick glance.
You quickly shuffle down the hallway, sure to scan every surface around you, to avoid any unwanted surprises. There are only two doors in this hallway. The one on the left leads into the bathroom, or what used to be the bathroom. The sink appears as if it may still serve a function, but the toilet and the bathtub have both been totally destroyed. Large chunks of crumbled porcelain are littered about the floor. It appears as if someone took a sledgehammer to it all. If ever there was water in this room, it’s not present now.
You continue down the hall.
Once you’re standing at the doorway of the darkened bedroom, your heart stops. You can’t breathe. You become a fixture, unable to move, only observe.
There’s movement over in the corner of the room. It appears to be a man upon first glance, but between the darkness and the condition of his skin, it’s hard to tell for sure. He’s sitting on the floor and dressed in an expensive business suit, which you immediately find odd. Is this not a resident of Eighth Block? Something about the scene disturbs you greatly. It has you thinking all sorts of awful thoughts. Do we all end up here, in the tower? Everyone?, you think. Are we all residents?
While contemplating the answer to these questions, you watch helplessly as the man sitting in the corner dissolves right before your eyes. At first, you only notice the strange pink gel fizzing from his ears, but soon other movement catches your eye. His face appears to be sliding right off his skull, but slowly, like sand being sucked into the hungry tide. Instantly, you suspect Bee has somehow already drugged you, but you quickly realize you’re not hallucinating. This is real. The man is truly dissolving.
Staring at the shifting skin is trippy, almost hypnotic, and you’re only able to break out of this trance the moment the man’s eyeballs burst from his skull, like little water balloons, liquefying and leaking from their sockets. The surprise causes him to lurch forward a bit. His mouth falls open and out come his insides—dissolved internal organs slog out his mouth in some bloody broth. Large chunks of stomach, flesh sheets of lung slip out with every passing second. Phrases like “I’m coming home” and “I see you, God” hauntingly escape his lips between purges.
For a moment, the entire scene reminds you of a Dalí painting, kind of beautiful, in its own morbid way. However, within seconds, every identifiable feature of the man’s face becomes absorbed into some other body part below, and suddenly it doesn’t look so beautiful anymore.
You watch flesh boil and drip from bones for what feels like a full hour, but realistically must’ve been only a few minutes. Once the man’s body is reduced to a puddle of gore and loose bones, you make your way back to Bee.
“Holy shit,” you say, feeling no need to elaborate.
“I warned you. It isn’t pretty. Well, at least not to us,” she says. You hand her her phone and she buries it inside her pocket. “So, what do you think? Fifty bucks and all your problems could be gone forever...”
— To take a tablet of Jubelicide, click here. (coming soon)
— To pass on the offer, click here.