I shook my head. No.
“K? What’s going on?”
I definitely didn’t remember eating red velvet cake or anything else, because The Kingfish Cafe had permanently closed. There were articles about it in The Stranger and The Seattle Times. It was big news at the time for locals—especially for people like me who lived in Capitol Hill.
Chloe came over and sat down beside me on the couch.
“It’s happening again, isn’t it?” she asked.
“It’s not like that,” I snapped.
“Hey, I’m sorry, but if you remember, the last time something like this happened, you almost died.”
I looked across at the television, where our reflections stared back at us from the black screen.
Chloe had her hands on her knees, her back straight and stiff, and she was staring at me, worried.
Looking at my own reflection, I could see why she was concerned. My eyes were wild and my arms were crossed tight, way too high up on my chest.
“I’m fine,” I said as I uncrossed my arms and did my best to look relaxed.
The incident she was referring to happened a few years ago. It was one of the worst days of my life—right up there with my parents’ death and the accident with Annie and Emily Connors.
It was the day I discovered the building with the missing floor.
* * *
—
In 2016, we’d begun hearing rumors that the ninth iteration of the game had finally started, and I immediately became so obsessed with playing that I ignored every other aspect of my life and almost stopped sleeping entirely.
During this period, I experienced severe mental lapses, panic attacks, and inexplicable losses of time. I attributed all of this to months of relentless sleep deprivation, so I made an appointment to see a therapist with experience treating acute insomnia.
I arrived a bit before my appointment and killed time in the lobby drinking tea and listening to a podcast that featured a group of stand-up comedians drinking red wine and talking about the first season of Friday Night Lights.
When it was finally time for my appointment, I walked upstairs to the fifth floor and spent an hour sharing my most intimate thoughts and feelings with a complete stranger. I told her about the loss of my parents and how I’d been arrested in that theater basement after following a series of （what I believed at the time were） connected patterns and signs. We finished up with a discussion about the gray feeling I’d experienced as a child, and the accompanying acute sense of deep pressure that filled up the air, as if there was something dark hiding in the margins of the world, waiting to devour me.
She nodded in all the right places, and I felt a little better after speaking with her, but I wasn’t optimistic. I was pretty sure they didn’t have a section about “gray shadow things in the margins of the world” in the DSM-5.
After my appointment, I went home exhausted and even though it was the middle of the day, I crawled into my bed and fell asleep.
The next week, I returned to the therapist’s office ready to do it all over again, but something was wrong.
I couldn’t really explain what it was as I stared up at the building from across the street, but something just felt off. I walked up the stairs to the same office I’d visited last week, and then it hit me.
There was no fifth floor.
I hurried back downstairs to the lobby and examined the building’s directory. My therapist’s name wasn’t there. A quick online search revealed that her office was located in a different building about a block away.
As I was walking over to the other building, a tingling feeling in the pit of my stomach forced me to stop. My breathing became shallow and forced as a familiar anxious emptiness began to fill me. I couldn’t go any farther.
I turned and looked back at the building I’d just left.
The fifth floor was back.
I started running, determined to make it up to my therapist’s office this time, but something else had changed. The street was darker now, the traffic sounds muted. It was as if somebody had placed a dark filter in front of my eyes and a thick gauzy fabric over my ears. I remember feeling like there was something unnatural about the silence—a sense of impatience.
And then the familiar static and blur of the gray feeling slid into my head, and a creeping darkness shadowed my peripheral vision.
I’m not sure how I knew, but I understood—with one hundred percent certainty—if that darkness somehow managed to reach me, something terrible was going to happen.
I ran back into the building, sprinted through the lobby and hurried up the stairs. I focused all of my attention on looking down and taking one step at a time. I didn’t know what was going to happen if the fifth floor wasn’t there, but I had the feeling it was something extremely bad.