The October Music - Day 31 and Final Day

The Sound of Silence
There is a room that actually exists called an anechoic chamber located in a laboratory in Minneapolis. In this room, there is no sound due to the way the room is constructed. When a person sits in the room, the door is shut and the timer begins to see how long they can last. In the room, a person will become unsettled then discomfited then paranoid. The person will begin to hallucinate sounds and even sights. The absence of sound is so uncomfortable that the brain will manifest something – anything – to break the quiet. The longest someone has ever spent in this room is 45 minutes.

The longest they will talk about, that is.

See, there was a research assistant in the early days of the chamber, when it was first constructed. One night, he was working late and testing out the walls to make sure they were solid. He had only been in the room for a couple minutes and, by all accounts, was uncomfortable about being in there at all. Something about it spooked him and his colleagues would tease him mercilessly. Anyway, nobody knows exactly what happened or how, but he ended up trapped in the room.

Overnight.

When the scientists got there the next morning, they noticed the door was shut and locked, which ran counter to the safety protocols in place. Upon prying open the door, they immediately called the police. The only reports made listed what happened as simply an accident and were buried under paperwork. Too much money had been invested in the labs to allow a mistake to derail what they were doing.

However, one scientist wrote down what she had seen and the imagery is horrific. She described the room being painted with blood from where the man had bitten open his own veins. Words and words and words all over. He had written about how he could hear the blood moving through him and how it needed to get out. He had written about how he was seeing things lurking in the corners of the room and hearing their scratching at our world. One particularly awful passage described what these creatures were saying to him. Dark thoughts. Terrible thoughts. Thoughts that had been buried within his memory with the intent never to return. They knew them all and made him write them down using his own blood.

The scientist described how the man had torn apart his own face and ears in an attempt to, ironically, quiet the voices. By the time they found him, he was essentially in pieces. The poor man had been quite insane by the end.

Some things don’t make sense, though. How did he get trapped? The door opened and locked from the inside. He should have been able to leave any time he wanted, but he didn’t. He was apparently in Hell, but he didn’t leave, which begs one question:
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What is out in our world that is worse than what he was experiencing?