He tried a normal white door, not different in appearance from the previous ones.
Behind it, there was nothing. A completely empty room, without windows, without chairs this time, only white walls and a ceiling slightly lower than the rest of the rooms. He stood at the threshold, waiting for something to happen. Nothing happened.
"Okay," he said, and closed the door. "An empty room. Great, this is very useful."
He tried another door. The hospital waiting room, plastic chairs lined up, old magazines on a glass table, and a television screen hanging showing a program without sound. No one sits in it. He walked inside a few steps, picked up a magazine, opened it, its pages were completely white, no text and no pictures.
He threw the magazine on the table, and left.
A pattern began to repeat before him, doors opening to places empty or incomplete, a theater without actors, a classroom without a teacher, a garden without real trees but gray lines only suggesting their existence. He felt something closer to boredom creeping into him, strange in a place that is supposed to be designed to break him psychologically.
"Have you run out of disturbing memories?" he asked the corridor out loud, sarcastically. "Because I am ready for more if that is the case."
The corridor did not answer, but the next door he opened was different.
It was not a memory, nor an empty place. It was a copy of the uncle’s room in the orphanage, with the same wooden table and non matching chairs. The uncle sat there, but he was not the real uncle, something in his eyes was deeper black than it should be.
"You sat here once," said the illusion uncle, without introduction. "And I told you I will not control your decisions."
"I remember," Loki said, suddenly cautious, because this was not part of his old past, but from this world, and that alone made him doubt the nature of the place more.
"Do you think I said that because I respect your freedom?" the illusion uncle asked, and a thin smile appeared on his face, not resembling any smile he had seen on the real uncle. "Or because I simply do not care enough to stop you?"
Loki did not answer. He had thought about this question himself before, in that real moment, and decided not to care about the answer. Hearing it now, from a mouth resembling the uncle’s mouth, made him feel a discomfort he cannot easily explain.
"Why are you showing me this?" he asked finally, directing the question to the room more than the character in front of him. "This is not even my real past."
The illusion uncle did not answer. He faded slowly, like fog clearing, leaving the chair empty, the table empty, and the room waiting for something that has not yet arrived.
Loki left faster than usual, and closed the door with excess force that made the sound of the impact echo in the corridor.
He sat on the floor, his back to the opposite wall, and his hands trembling slightly without a completely clear reason. It was not fear of the room itself, but of the idea that this place can reach memories that have not yet happened with the same ease with which it reached memories that already happened.
"So you are not only reading my past," he said, directing his speech to the entire corridor. "You are reading everything."
A long silence. Then, without warning, he heard a completely different sound, from a place he did not expect. Not from a door, but from the end of the corridor, from where the empty white wall was previously.
He stood up and walked toward it.
The wall was no longer empty. A new door appeared there, darker than all the previous doors, with a cold iron handle shining differently from the rest of the brass handles.
He recognized it immediately. The room of the three chairs.
He stood in front of it for a long time, neither opening it nor moving away from it.
"I do not have to enter now," he said to himself, trying to convince his voice with confidence he does not feel. "I can try other doors first."
He opened other doors randomly and ran between corridors exploring every corner, trying to escape from the truth of this particular door. He tried to occupy his mind by remembering this world, like studying in the academy or Kaiden’s face, but his feet would return in the end in the same automatic way to the same point.
He stood again in front of the dark door at the end of the corridor, having exhausted his pride and his desire to escape.
He put his hand on the iron handle. Abnormally cold, colder than any other handle he touched in this place.
He opened it.
The three chairs were still there, empty as he left them, arranged in the same shape he saw the first time. But this time, something changed. The room was no longer completely silent. He heard a faint breathing sound, barely audible, coming from somewhere inside the room even though it looks completely empty.
He entered one step, then stopped.
"Who is there?" he asked, in a voice less confident than he wanted.
No one answered, but the three chairs began to move very slowly, not across the floor, but as if something was forming above them from nothing. Shadows first, then faint features, then clearer shapes until they finally settled on images of three people he knows well.
His mother, in the left chair, sitting in an upright posture, her hands in her lap.
His father, in the middle chair, looking forward without looking directly at him.
And his sister, in the right chair, younger than she appeared in the previous doors, at her exact age at the time of the accident.
None of them moved. Their eyes did not speak, and no expressions appeared on them, only still sitting, waiting for something.
"No," Loki said, an instinctive step backward. "No, I will not do this again."
None of them answered. Silence alone was the answer.
He looked at each one of them in turn, trying to find something in their faces, anger, sadness, anything he could deal with, but they remained empty, as if they were masks waiting for him to fill them with some meaning.
He left the room, closing the door behind him with a trembling hand, and sat on the floor directly in front of it, his back to the opposite wall, staring at the cold iron handle.
He tried again to avoid the room through the corridor, opened two more empty doors without even looking inside them, then turned and returned quickly. He knew he was only wasting his time, and that these attempts were nothing but inevitable postponement.
His mind was completely exhausted, and his stomach growled empty, revealing the weight of this struggle.
He stood again in front of the dark door.
"There is no other way," he said, in a voice devoid of any other resistance. "Is there?"
No one answered, but the silence itself was a sufficient answer.
He put his hand on the cold iron handle again, and remained there for a long moment, feeling its coldness seeping through his fingers, before finding himself unable yet to push.