“What did you do? Why did you open this door? I told you a thousand times not to open this door. You have no idea what you have done.”
I knew I was screaming. Even I could feel my voice echoing in the almost empty room. She was standing shaking in front of me. I can’t even look at her without getting the strong feeling of shaking her. Shaking her until she realises what she did.
“The symbol on the door. That’s why I came here. That’s why I opened the door. The infinity symbol.”
She was scared. But she was scared of me. She still hadn’t realised the danger we both were in. If she understood the danger then she would have been scared for a very different reason. I can’t do this right now. I can’t explain what she did. She needs to figure out herself. But what good would that do? She will just stare at the door. Maybe keep opening it again and again like she has been doing for who knows how long. The room looks like she has been at it for several hours already. I don’t know how much time we have left anymore. How many sequences remaining. And the biggest question – If we have any way out of this room left.
“I am sorry. I didn’t realise it would bother you so much.”
She started speaking again. She was still scared and was stumbling with her words. What should I do? Should I comfort her or should I tell her and make her suffer even more? Maybe that’s exactly what I should do.
“So you were curious about the infinity symbol and decide to open the door. Did you see anything interesting when you opened the door? Did your curiosity get satisfied?”
She was looking at me with her big eyes now burning with something I can only describe as contempt. She was scared of me but I was getting a feeling that she hated me more than she was scared.
Good. That is very good. Now I can tell her in great details what her mistake means for both of us. This would be so much fun.
“You opened the door and when you went inside, it brought you back to the same room right?”
She got startled for a moment but she still nodded in agreement. I knew I had her. I just had to keep going.
“So then you opened the door again and again and kept coming back to the same room. But you didn’t notice that every time you opened the door one thing had changed about the door. You kept opening the door and kept going to what is a slightly different copy of the original room.”
This confused her as she frantically started looking all around the room and then suddenly she saw what I saw as soon as I entered this room. She was still not as panicky as I thought she would be once she understood. Maybe she still didn’t understand.
“The last time when you opened the door just as I entered the room from the other door, changed the room with both of us inside it. The room changed and removed the other door.”
She still looked confused. How can someone so clueless create so much trouble? Well, it seems I have to actually explain everything.
“This room had two doors. One with the Infinity Symbol on it which you were not supposed to open. The other door connected this room to the rest of the world. The last change in the room disappeared the door without the Infinity Symbol trapping us both in this room for eternity. You can keep opening the door and it will keep removing something from the room until its just the two of us. Then we will have to see how we stay alive. Cos there is no way out of this room anymore.”
I think I finally got her to understand the situation. She leaned on the door and sat down on the floor with her back towards the door. She sat there for a while repeating the last line I said.
“There is no way out of this room anymore.”
“There is no way out of this room anymore.”
“There is no way out of this room anymore.”
She kept repeating this over and over again. Now it was my turn to get confused. She was acting so weirdly now.
“There is no way out of this room anymore.”
“There is no way out of this room anymore.”
“There is no way out of this room anymore.”
Finally, she got up and looked directly at me. Her smile made me feel a chill run down my spine. With her smile getting bigger she grabbed the pendant she always wore and that’s the first time I saw the design.
It was the same Infinity Symbol as was on the door. That symbol on her pendant and her smile told me that she did not open the door accidentally or just out of curiosity.
It convinced me that I was the stupid one in the room. The clueless one who had no idea what was going to happen next. Cos she was the one with a plan.
This was the coldest I have ever felt in my life.