You sit alone in the dark of an ornate theater, front row center. The massive stage sits empty, curtains swung open, adorning the sides of the performance space like a pair of french doors folded into the inside of a well consolidated room.
The folds of the deep red fabric run horizontal, dipping and rising like a valance into nothingness. The unusual arrangement gives the illusion of the stage as a long tunnel, which in the darkness appears infinite.
An earthy, metallic effusion lightly permeates the stale air. It reminds you a bit of how the cellar of your grandmothers old farmhouse always smelled, but lighter here, less overbearing. Occasionally, a whiff of ancient popcorn deftly slices through, or the smell of your own deodorant.
You notice in the stillness the sound of someone breathing, and wonder if it’s you.
Before you have a moment to correlate your insufflation with the noise, a soft, melancholy organ begins to play, a kind of uneasy tone in the depth of its knowing. You search around the theater and see no one, not even in the booth.
The idiopathic music warmly chills you, like a stranger who effortlessly identifies a tender secret you’ve done everything you can to hide, before you’ve even had a chance to stop shaking their hand. It feels, somehow, like family.
You are startled nearly to your core by a loud hissing sound and a splash of movement along the distant edges of the stage. Through the near blackness you make out the soft grey vapor of the theaters’ multiple fog machines crawling across the stage floor, like a sooty, ominous blanket that sees you with no eyes.
You cannot explain why you know, for certain, that it is alive.
You cry delicately from one eye at the sudden memory of your long-deceased uncle’s laughter. In one moment, the sound of him seems to take residence in the height of the massive room, bouncing frantically like a large bird who took a wrong turn and trapped itself there. In the next, the sound, and the emotion, are passed through.
The living soot blanket that sees without eyes has reached the floor. You instinctively raise your shoes to your chair, suddenly feeling as though you were very small again, avoiding the grasp of the monster under your bed. A momentary sense of claustrophobia washes over you as you pull your knees tightly to your chest.
You notice the center of the stage rising, like an excruciatingly slow backsplash from a single drop into a pool of thick black water. The fog wisps down its sides, channeling around the expanding elevation like a trickling stream, anonymously washing the music away. The scent of sulfur flashes by so quickly you can’t tell if it is real or your mind playing a trick on you. Despite your eyes having acclimated somewhat to the dark, you squint, attempting to see better.
The expansion forms into a shadowy torso, which then slowly outstretches its muscular arms, spanning nearly the entire length of the stage. You find you are unable to take in the immenseness without turning your head to look down the length of them, down to its two clenched fists.
You can see its shoulders gently rising and falling as it breathes, and immediately recognize the corresponding sound and being a much louder version of the breath you had heard. The figure partially raises its head, brow lumbering low, bowed in a fierce silence.
Though powerful and masculine, the figure appears to be trapped as part of the stage, its belly and legs snaking endlessly behind him, barely risen above the fog, disappearing down into the red velvet tunnel. You feel certain The Trapped Man’s eyes would be piercing directly through you with their intensity were they open rather than squinched tightly shut.
You feel a tender compassion in the pain of the forms scrunched face, yet find yourself selfishly thankful for that mercy, anxiously weighing the possible cost of being confronted with two open windows into this excruciated soul.
Rage is thick and heavy in the air, swirling tendrils of sickness and misery dripping with tar. It’s filling up the room with heat and foreboding. You realize you’re shaking and at some point have forgotten to breathe.
That constant companion of your increasingly hysterical inner voice now petrifies in stunned silence, the transition as stalling as a room full of humming electronics suddenly losing power. A slightly electric tingle rushes your skin as the enormous figure jerks its head skyward. The Trapped Man opens his massive mouth, fast and counterfeit like a nutcracker, expression twisting further into ferocious suffering.
He lets out the impossibly loud, devastatingly anguished scream of a very small, very terrified child.
You realize now that his eyes are sewn shut.
You squeeze yours closed, unconscious to your mirroring of the tormented screamer, pulling your knees in tighter, suddenly compelled to become as tiny as possible to fight against the weight of the noise.