Five Matches

by Suvajeet Duttagupta

Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:

The first sensation was dust. Thick, dry dust that coated his tongue and scratched the back of his throat. Then came the darkness. Absolute, suffocating darkness. He coughed, a rasping sound that seemed to swallow itself in the oppressive silence. Where was he? He pushed himself up, his hands finding rough, gritty floorboards. Feeling around, his fingers trailed along a cold, unyielding wall, then rough, splintered wood.

His fingers brushed against something small, made of paper. He fumbled for it, his heart giving a small, hopeful thump. A matchbox. He shook it gently; the faint rattle of sticks inside was the sweetest sound he’d heard. He counted them, his thumb running over the heads: five. Five chances, perhaps, to see.

He pulled one out, the slender wooden stick feeling impossibly fragile in his trembling fingers. With a quick, decisive strike against the box, a tiny sun exploded into existence. The flame sputtered, then held, casting dancing shadows. The room was as he’d imagined: empty. No, not entirely. Faint outlines of what might be old, broken furniture huddled in the corners. The air hung still and heavy, thick with the scent of decay and something else… something metallic and stale, like old blood. He strained to see more, to find a door, a window, anything. But the matchstick was a cruel master, its light already fading, shrinking. As the flame licked dangerously close to his skin, a sharp, searing pain made him yelp. He dropped the match, plunging the room back into darkness.

The pain, coupled with the sudden black, was a sledgehammer to his senses. His vision swam, the echoes of the tiny flame burning behind the eyelids he squeezed shut. The world tilted, spun, and vanished. His eyes snapped open, he gasped, and the room felt altered, the silence now laced with an almost tangible weight, as if the air had thickened. The memory of the match, the fleeting vision of the dusty room, was startlingly clear, as was the phantom throb on his fingertip. He fumbled for the matchbox again, his resolve hardening. He needed more. He needed to see.

He struck another match, the hiss-fizz of ignition loud in the silence. The flame flared, brighter this time, or perhaps his eyes were more accustomed to the shift. He held it up, expecting to see the same empty room, the same dusty corners.

But it wasn’t the same.

The shadows were deeper, the outlines of the forgotten furniture more distinct, more solid. And his hand, bathed in the flickering orange glow, looked different. Thinner. The skin appeared papery, criss-crossed with lines he didn’t recognise. Older. A jolt of icy fear shot through him. He spun, agitated, the match held high. On the far wall, shrouded in deeper gloom, something caught the light. A glint. A mirror. He lunged towards it, his heart pounding a wild rhythm against his ribs. He had to see. He had to understand. But the match, like the last, betrayed him. The flame guttered, shivered, and died, plunging him into darkness just before his fingers could brush the cool glass. The world dissolved again.

The third awakening was sharper, fuelled by a terrifying urgency. He still felt the phantom ache of the fire on his finger, but a more profound dread gnawed at him. He needed the matchbox. He remembered dropping it near where he’d tried to reach the mirror. He moved cautiously, his bare feet whispering over the floorboards. As he crept, a new sound pierced the silence. Faint, muffled, but undeniable. Voices. Two men. They were outside.

He froze, straining to listen. The voices were low, gravelly, indistinct. But a phrase cut through the static, chilling him to the bone.

“… burning through… life…”

A second voice, closer, almost a whisper. “…ecades, at least.”

Dust and silence swallowed the rest, leaving only those echoes. Decades? He looked at his hand, still thin and papery, criss-crossed with lines he didn’t recognise. Older! His mind reeled, connecting the phantom ache of the fire on his finger, the glimpse of his aged hand in the mirror, and these fragmented words. A horrifying possibility began to coalesce.

Was each match worth ten years? Was he down two decades?

Panic, cold and nauseating, twisted his gut. If that were true… he had three matches left. Three more decades dissolving into nothingness. He couldn’t use them. But how else could he see? How else could he escape this suffocating tomb? The question clawed at his mind with a desperate rhythm.

He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to pierce the blackness of his own mind. What was he doing before? Before the dust, before the dark? A blur. Always moving, always chasing, never quite seeing. He lived in shadows illuminated by fleeting, desperate flares. He winced. The irony was bitter.

He opened his eyes to the impenetrable blackness of the room. The first match. What had he seen? An empty room, he’d thought. Just shadows. But what else? His mind replayed the fleeting image, struggling to find detail amidst the terror and confusion. Old furniture, yes. And that scent… decay and something metallic. A chill ran down his spine. The second match. His older hand. The mirror. He hadn’t reached it, but he had seen its glint. What was around it? What did the room look like in that second glimpse? The furniture again, more distinct. Were shapes on the wall? Markings? His memory was a frustrating blur, refusing to yield anything concrete.

He ran his hands over the rough floorboards again, then along the cold, unyielding wall. He felt the texture, the slight dampness in places, the gritty dust. His fingers brushed against something, a slight indentation. A crack? No, too uniform. A line. He traced it, his heart quickening. Another line. And another. He felt a pattern, faint yet deliberate, beneath the layer of grime. It was too dark to see, but his fingertips registered the subtle shift. Something was etched into the wall.

If only he could see. The matches were out. Or were they? He still had three. But using them meant paying a terrible price. A desperate, almost absurd idea formed. He brought the matchbox close, feeling the three remaining sticks. A half-forgotten lesson from a childhood camping trip flickered in his mind: fire needs fuel. To control the burn…he had to starve it. But he had no water.

He pulled one out, his heart hammering. If he could keep the flame from burning the wood too quickly… He brought the matchstick to his mouth, wetting the lower half with his saliva, coating the wood with a thin film. It felt ridiculous, a child’s trick. But what choice could he have?

With trembling hands, he struck the third match.

The hiss and fizz were agonisingly loud, a prelude to his potential demise. The flame blossomed, small but vibrant. The light was steady, clearer than before. And it lasted. It really lasted. A fraction longer, enough to matter. Enough to see.

He searched the wall, frantic for the etched lines his fingers had found. The light, though sustained by his desperate innovation, was still a meagre beacon in the vast darkness. But there—not just lines. Symbols. Faint through the dust, carved into the stone. They weren’t words he recognised but a sequence of abstract shapes. His gaze darted, trying to piece them together, his mind racing. They seemed to form a map, or perhaps a diagram. He followed the lines, traced them with his eyes, then his finger, until they led to a specific point on the wall. A section that looked slightly… off. A seam.

This was it. This was what he had missed while bereft of light. He leaned in closer, studying the variations in the wall, running his hands over the symbols, feeling their contours. He had been so focused on what the matches showed him, he hadn’t considered what they allowed him to ignore. The darkness hadn’t been an enemy; it had been a veil. Now, seeing beyond the obvious, truly seeing, was his only hope.

He pressed against the section the symbols indicated. The stone was cold, unyielding. He pushed, pulled, his muscles screaming with the effort, but it held fast. Desperation clawed at him, but he forced himself to focus, to remember the feeling of something metallic and stale, like old blood. Was that a clue? His mind raced, replaying the sliver of time the first match had granted him. The empty room. The outlines of old, broken furniture. And the scent… decay and metallic staleness. It wasn’t a general smell; it was very specific.

He ran his hands over the stone again, focusing not only on what he felt, but on what he remembered, what he could infer. His gaze fell back to the faint, lingering glow of the match held precariously in his wet fingers. It was dimming despite his efforts. But his focus wasn’t on the flame itself but on the tiny, almost invisible shadows it cast. They danced and writhed, shifting with every tremor of his hand. The symbols, the seam… they led to a slight depression, almost imperceptible to the touch. He pressed harder, his fingers probing the rough surface. There, a small, cold knob, flush with the wall. Not a handle, not a lever. Just a knob, like a small, smooth stone embedded in the larger one.

The match was almost out, a final, defiant flicker. He inhaled deeply, drawing on a clarity he hadn’t possessed before. He pressed the knob gently, then released it. He pressed it again, holding for a beat, then released. A faint, almost imperceptible click echoed in the silence. He tried a different rhythm, guided by the shapes he had committed to memory, the rise and fall of their curves, the sharp angles.

A soft thunk reverberated through the stone. A section of the wall, where the symbols culminated began to retract inward, revealing a sliver of inky blackness beyond. Not a door with hinges, but a flush panel sliding into itself, revealing an opening no wider than his own shoulders.

The last ember of the match died in his hand, leaving him in absolute darkness once more. This time, the darkness was different. It wasn’t oppressive; it was an invitation. He had found the way out, not by brighter light but by seeing deeper into the shadows, by trusting senses beyond sight.

He crawled through the narrow opening, the rough stone scraping his skin. He squeezed, the rock biting into his shoulders, his hips, tearing at his clothes. Every inch was a battle, a desperate grind against the unyielding stone. The air on the other side was cool, fresh, carrying the faint scent of rain and damp earth. He was outside.

He pushed himself to his feet and looked up. A vast, star-strewn night sky stretched above him, a breathtaking canvas of pinpricks of light in an endless darkness. A wave of profound fatigue settled deep in his bones, the weight of the two decades he had lost now a physical ache in his joints. He was free. But as the ground began to vibrate with a low rumble, a single bright star began to shiver and race across the sky. It was burning, streaking across the vastness before winking out. He watched, transfixed by its brief, frantic life, as dozens more began to follow.

And then the stars began to fall. Not as meteorites do, but as small, burning fragments of wood, tearing downwards and sizzling out on the stony floor. The stars were not stars. The sky was not a sky. The vast but now starless dome of darkness was the ceiling of a cavern of impossible size, and the lights were the fleeting flares of others, all in their own tombs, all using their own matches, burning through their own lives. He heard them now, not as whispers from outside, but as a low, constant murmur from within this terrible space. And the air, which he had thought to be cool and fresh, was a lie. The scent of damp earth was the smell of the damp, stony floor, and the metallic tang was not old blood, but fresh. He had escaped into a shared prison, a ghost among others, all of them trapped.

He looked down at the burnt-out fragment of wood on the floor beside him. It was a matchstick, its head a black, sooty ruin. And next to it, a small, worn matchbox, identical to the one he had just left behind. His mind reeled, a shocking new truth snapping into place with sickening clarity. He looked at his hands. They were younger, the lines gone, the skin firm again. He felt the weight of his old body vanish, replaced by a terrible lightness. He hadn’t aged at all. The price wasn’t a loss of years, but a loss of self. A complete and utter reboot. He was back to zero, a new person in a new tomb, with a new matchbox in his hand.

He bent down, a rasping cough escaping him, and picked up the matchbox, the first sensation a familiar, gritty dust. Inside the box, his thumb running over the heads: five. Five chances, perhaps, to see.

The game, he realised, had begun again.

SPECIAL EXHIBIT FIVE: Return to “No Exceptions”

Begin Gallery Three: Revealing with “More Downstairs →”