Jeremy woke slowly. He didn't remember going to sleep, but here he was waking up. He looked around half hoping, half wishing he would see his room in his apartment. Of course, all he saw was the vintage television. He sat up and walked across the room. The floor probably wasn't the best place for him to have taken his unexpected nap, but it wasn't as though there was a bed to sleep on. Jeremy touched the top dial on the side of the TV. He was almost hoping for a repeat of...How long ago was it? He really couldn't say. Maybe a few hours ago? A few minutes? He looked behind him at the wall the second voice had come from. How in the world could a voice have come from a wall with no speaker?
“Maybe it's built into the wall.” thought Jeremy. “Maybe it's built into the wall and there's someone listening to everything I am saying.”
Jeremy didn't really care about eavesdroppers at the moment. He was more concerned with getting out of the room, both rooms. “What am I missing?” he asked himself. “What small detail am I NOT getting?” He walked to the side of the room where the male voice had come from. He looked at the wall. He looked at the ceiling above the wall. He looked at the floor bellow the wall...and that's when he saw it. There was a crack near the part of the wall that connected with the floor. The crack ran along the base and continued toward the wall that had the now broken mirror. He followed it. He followed it to the wall and then into the room he had started in. Once inside, he noticed that the chair, the bindings, and the blindfold were no longer there. Someone had been in the room while he was asleep. “Hey!” he yelled. “Hey! What is going on here?! I'm tired of the games! Why am I here?! What do you want?!” Jeremy's voice was climbing to a panic at this point. His breathing was beginning to speed up and he could feel his heart begin to race. “WHERE ARE YOU?!” He hollered.
Jeremy got no response.
After a couple of minutes, he was calm. As calm as one could be in a situation such as his. He went back to the wall and the crack he had discovered. The crack seemed to have stopped once it reached the middle of the wall, right about the same spot as where he had heard the first voice, the female voice. Jeremy got down on the floor for a better look. He began to chip the plaster of the crack and as it started to come away, he realized it wasn't done by someone who was trying to do the job correctly. It looked more like and felt more like someone had quickly plastered up the wall. Jeremy began to pull away more and more of the plaster. Underneath he could see wood, solid wood. He continued to pull and pick until he had uncovered an area about his height and width. He stopped and knocked on the wooden wall. To his surprise, it was hollow sounding!
Jeremy was frantic now. He began to pull away larger pieces of plaster from the left...from the right...above his head..until...
There it was. A line. A split between the wood and what seemed to be metal. Jeremy stopped again. He ran his hand across the split and felt a slight coolness coming from it. Not quite a breeze, but a sense of an open area on the other side. Jeremy continued to pull the plaster down along the line to the left until he reached what seemed to be a corner. Once he had pulled all of the plaster off along the line up and around the wall, he stepped back. He was standing in front of a fairly large panel. It spanned almost the entire length of the wall and would have been about a foot above his head. On the right, inside of the panel he had uncovered was a small rectangular metal section...and on that was a set of buttons with numbers resembling a phone keypad. “Are you serious?” he laughed. He looked up at where the voice had come from right above the panel and said, “Are you guys really serious?” Jeremy walked to the keypad and stared. How in the world was he supposed to know what to put in? Even if he did know, who was to say it would open the panel and that it wasn't going to unleash some sort of deadly gas from vents he couldn't see.
“Get a grip J,” he told himself.
He took a closer look at the keypad and noticed an arrow etched into the metal above the keys. It was pointing to the right. He hadn't bothered to peel away the plaster past the line in the wall, so slowly and pensively, he started to peel it away.
There, staring right back at him, were a set of numbers. 1026-81. Jeremy didn't know what to think. Could it really be as simple as that? Did some absent minded guard, employee, or whoever really put the passcode RIGHT next to the keypad?
“That really defeats the purpose of a keypad you know.” he thought out loud.
After some thought, he decided to take his chances. Jeremy put his finger over the keypad and hit the 1. Then he hit the 0. And next, the 2. Then Jeremy stopped.
He turned around slowly to face the noise he just heard and almost fell to the ground. He shook his head slightly hoping it would clear his vision since there was no way he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.
“Mr. Colin,” said the woman with a thick European accent standing in front of him. “ I think you should step away from that panel.”
© 2009 by Laira Reid
