The Yellow Room — BY CASS Carvajal

You find yourself in a yellow room.

The air is close, musty. It tastes like an attic. It feels like an attic, too, though there are no windows or ladders or hatches on the floor to suggest that it is one. It just feels… above. The floor is old wood, gray and warped, but everything else, the walls, the ceiling, is yellow. Plain, patternless, pale pale yellow.

It’s vile. Yellow ought to be cheery and bright, but there’s no resemblance in this sickening color to creamy butter or dappled sunlight or the soft fluffy down of spring ducklings. This is the yellow of phlegm, of mold, of bone. It is the putrid, diseased color of a calcified heart. It is an unfriendly, hostile color, and it is all around you.

You are beginning to think about the door.

There are only two apparent means of escaping this place and its jaundiced glare: at one end of the room, a flight of stairs, at the other, the door.

It’s plain. Wooden, like the floor, and just as old. Small, though, so much so that any grown adult would struggle to fit through. You think you could make it through, though, if you really wanted to.

You don’t want to.

You can’t fully explain why. The door is plain and unassuming, and utterly horrible. Its plainness is a trick, somehow. You know it. It must be because even as it sits there, closed and unremarkable, you can feel it watching. It watches, and it waits, and somehow you just know that it is hungry.

It is far worse than the yellow room. But you are beginning to think about it.

You try the stairs first, of course. It’s the only path that didn’t seem to radiate malice. So you edge backward—some instinct warns you not to turn your back on the door, not to take your eyes off it while it can still see you—until you fumble your way to the staircase. Even when you reach the steps, you don’t turn, don’t dare to look away. You half-stumble backward up the steps, not taking your eyes away from the hungry door until finally, it’s out of sight.

Free from the door’s predatory gaze, you climb the stairs. The passage is narrow, a crooked, winding way that rises up and up in a spiral. There’s no way to tell as you climb how many floors you ascend. There are no landings, no windows, no markers of any sort. You might have climbed ten stories, or one hundred, or one thousand. You trail your fingers along the walls and keep your footing sure and climb, and climb, and climb. There’s no way to tell how long. You didn’t think to count your steps when you started the ascent, too focused on escaping the door and that awful yellow room. But eventually, finally, you reach the top of the stairs.

Nothing.

You don’t know what you expected. Another door, maybe. A friendlier door, if you were lucky. The same door, if you weren’t. Now that you’re here, you realize a part of you had feared the staircase would lead you straight back to that awful room with its awful door, that the staircase was some impossible circle leading back to where it started, but no. There’s nothing. The stairs simply ended, the way ahead of the same smooth wood-paneled wall you’d traced your fingers along all the way up.

You pry at the wall. You kick it, listen to it, scream at it. Nothing. There is no opening, no hidden door, not even a hollow sound to indicate a room just beyond of your reach, no voice from beyond to tell you you’re anything but alone.

You are beginning to think about the door.

You make your way back down the stairs slowly, looking keenly for anything different, any clue as to some means of escape. Your fingers no longer trail the walls but scramble and scratch, hammer and pull. At one point, you get down on your knees and try to pry up one of the stairs, pulling and kicking and trying to lift up the wood and see what’s beneath.

No use. The stairs won’t budge. They’re as impenetrable as the walls. So, you descend. And then, finding yourself back at the yellow room, suffering once again the glare of the walls and the hungry gaze of the door, you resolve to climb again.

You count seven hundred and thirty-two steps the second time. You count again the third time, more for something to do than because you think it will be different. And yet—forty-seven. Then, six hundred and twenty-eight. Three hundred and eighty-three, then five thousand even.

You are beginning to think about the door.

You’ve tried to sleep but can’t. You don’t even tire, despite climbing hundreds of thousands of steps. Or so you think, anyway. It may be less. It may be more. You can only keep track in your mind. No matter how you scratch or bite, you can’t leave marks on the wood of the staircase. The walls of the yellow room reject your bloody fingers and any attempt to smear a tally. It won’t take the red. You wonder if it would like you if you were yellow. If you bled yellow.

By all rights, you should have died by now of hunger or thirst or lack of sleep, but none of that can touch you here. You wish it could. You think you would like to waste away.

You are beginning to think about the door.

There’s really nothing else left to do, is there? It’s the only thing you haven’t tried. You climbed and climbed and climbed the stair, and all you have to show for it is a mad jumble of five hundred-seventeen, twenty-three thousand and forty, nine seven one eight four four four—

And the room, the yellow, yellow room— it wants you gone. You can feel it. It is as repulsed by you as you are by it. It wants to heave and cough you up like the phlegm it so resembles.

You think maybe it would be better if you were yellow. You try to peel the color off the walls with your fingernails, and when that fails, you rub against the hateful walls. It doesn’t work. The walls won’t take your blood, and they won’t let their vile color rub off on you.

You are beginning to think about the door.

You hurl yourself down the stairs. It hurts, but you’re fine. You’re always fine. No matter how you bite and tear at walls and stairs and skin and hair, you always seem to be fine.

Are you fine?

You’re alive, at any rate. No matter how many times you throw yourself down those endless fucking stairs.

You are beginning to think about the door.

It’s the only thing that seems to want you. It’s an ugly, ravenous want, but that scares you less and less now. At least it wants you. And it has to lead somewhere, doesn’t it?

Doesn’t it?

There are sixteen hundred stairs. There are twenty thousand. There are seven. It is difficult to remember. You have knocked your head against them so many times.

You are beginning to think about the door.

It’s been waiting for you, all this time. And you are becoming so tired of climbing up the stairs. There’s nothing for you up there. There’s nothing for you here. Nothing around but yellow, yellow—

You are beginning to think about the door.

AUTHOR BIO:

Cass Carvajal is a writer of horror, dark fantasy, and the weird. Her work has previously been published in They Walk Among Us: A Collection of Utah Horror.