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A.S. regrets the words as soon as they leave his mouth.
No amount of regret, however, can take them back, nor can it erase the look that crosses his friend’s face. They look stricken at first, eyes wide with shock and pain, before their face hardens to a cold, subdued anger. When they bid him goodbye, their voice is as controlled and even as a knife’s edge, and they don’t wait for a response before leaving.
He already knows he won’t see them again. The knowledge is as painful as it is unsurprising. His other friends had faded from his life one by one as he fell ever deeper into his research. You can only blow off so many gatherings, he learned, before your social life suffers. He saw less and less of his housekeeper until he was no longer sure he even had one. But his dearest friend had remained, visiting him at home despite the sprawling pages of notebook paper pasted to his walls, growing more and more concerned for his health. Seeing them eaten from the inside by their worry, he couldn’t bring himself to tell them about the voices he’d begun to hear while he worked.
That didn’t matter anymore. Concern left to fester turned to frustration and then anger, mounting in a shouting match. They didn’t understand the scope of his research, didn’t want him to put his research before himself. He asked if they thought themselves smarter than him. They said no, they saw him becoming a hermit and a madman. The words stung. A.S. snapped. And now he is alone with nothing but the whispers for company.
In the end, with what lucidity he has left, A.S. writes them a note. His pride is stretched thin. He fails to keep the remaining bitterness from tainting his words, “you always were the smart one” scrawled with a particular relish. Still, he hopes they come, that bringing them into his research will somehow make up for what he said to them in his insomnia-addled fit of anger that night.
---
It is as though the Null’s maze is lined with barbs that prevent him from moving anywhere but forward. When he tries to backtrack, the barbs dig into him, looping his path back around in circles until he feels he will lose his mind.
As he slogs onward, he thinks of his friend. He no longer hopes they follow the trail he left. He knows them, though, almost as well as he knows himself. They are a true scientist, too clever for their own good, and he is gut-wrenchingly certain that they’ll follow him into this hellish maze. The thought makes him feel sick. He wanted to offer an olive branch, and instead he’s hand-fed them to the Null’s hungry maw.
A.S. still carries his notebook, though it’s become thin and light. He tears pages out and leaves them behind for his friend. It’s a sort of penance. He knows he can’t take back his words, nor can he keep his friend from the Null's thrall, but perhaps he can help from afar.
Even so, the guilt rots him from the inside out. Part of him welcomes it. He feels almost nothing now, no hunger or thirst or need for sleep. He takes out his pocket watch. It still runs, but when he tries to read the time or watch the ticking of the hands, his attention slides off its face. It shifts around, like he’s trying to focus on something in a dream. When he wonders how long he’s been here, the thoughts slide between his fingers and out of his grasp. In fact, everything is slippery, his thoughts too smooth for his mind to catch them and his feelings frustratingly distant. The guilt, though, that remains, and he savors its presence.
---
The room must be some kind of joke. A.S. recognizes it immediately--it’s ripped straight from his memories, down to the smallest detail. He even finds a picture of himself with his friends, taken during the seance they held in this very room. It feels for all the world like the Null is taunting him. He sits down at the table, vaguely nauseous but mostly numb. He has to stop. He may not need sleep, but he is tired. It’s the kind of tired that sinks into his bones and weighs him down.
Surely his friend will catch up to him. They have to. They’re the smartest person he knows, and as jealous as he sometimes found himself he admired them to no end. The thoughts flood him now, more concrete than any he’s had for the past however many days or hours or years he’s been stuck here. His friend is creative and tenacious and kind and he wishes he could have told them that, could have apologized, could have had an actual goodbye and embraced them, could have said everything he packed away to tell them in a future that he knows now may never come.
There is one page left in his notebook. He can feel the barbs drawing him onward, but he grits his teeth and ignores them. He will stay here until his friend finds him or he dies, whichever comes first, and he will not give the Null the satisfaction of dragging him deeper until he fragments into nothing.
Maybe the rooms are real, and maybe not. Maybe his body is truly in this strange copy of the seance room, and maybe he is lying in a mad stupor in his house with his friend trying desperately to wake him from this dream. He doesn’t know. What he does know is that he has to help his friend. He owes them that much. He scrawls the last of his message and tears the page out.
The notebook sits empty. All he can do is wait.