The Panel
4-20-2003
I'm a small child in a dark basement with three other people -- an older man, a little girl, and a slightly older boy. I find an old copper coin on the floor and hold it high, as if it's some treasure that I'll find use for later. The other three decide to explore elsewhere and quickly run from the basement. I wonder why they left, because there's so much to do down here. I kick one of two practically flat soccer balls against a wall.
I enter a side room with a wooden panel in the wall. There's a sign on it that says "NEVER OPEN" followed by someone's name. Naturally, I open it, and inside is a fat man's head sitting next to a fat woman's head. I hear a voice coming from somewhere. The more it talks, the more it seems the world becomes less real. The two heads mutate, melt, and fizzle. Their eyeballs loll out of their sockets and their flesh drips down their faces. I'm find myself holding them on a stick, a big clump of hair protecting the man's head from a beam of sunlight that's breaking through into the cellar. I feel like I'm cursed to have this image in my head the rest of my life if I don't do something about it.
I shut the wooden panel. All returns to normal. I'm also myself again, a grown man.
Later, a construction crew comes down. The head of the crew is the man who put the sign on that panel. We're going to lay a new foundation for this building. He warns everyone not to open that box. I reinforce his warning. We chip away at the floor and such, lifting up huge pieces of concrete to replace. I find myself calling him out about the heads in the panel, saying they reek and have been there for seven years. Unsure what to do at first, the foreman decides the best thing to do is to kill everyone there by hanging them from some wire and melting them, starting with my son.
My son seems eager, and he jumps onto a cable as if he's going to ride it. Everyone cheers him on, and nothing bad happens.
The foreman gets a better plan to go to the campsite above and kill all the children there first by suffocating them. He finds many women to help him with this, by convincing both them and the children that it's all just a game, though a lethal one. He has them simply suffocate all the babies while they run around and slap some sticky substance on all the children. I make a break for my building, knowing that my children are temporarily safe for some reason. I wondered what kind of sicko would put that abomination in that panel, and then try to kill anyone who might find out about it.
posted by Phlegm at 11/26/2003
