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The clear door to the tube immediately slid open, bottom to top.
I say 'immediately' because that's what it felt like... sort of. One moment I was reaching up for the note taped to the ceiling of the tube, my back to the door; then I heard the door slide shut behind me and instantly blacked out. The very next moment—so it seemed to me—I opened my eyes, I stood upright and facing the door, and the door opened. I felt as though I had been asleep, or unconscious; yet my alertness returned to me all at once with none of the normal gradual awakening process we all experience. I was momentarily disoriented by my lack of disorientation.
Presently I stepped forth from the capsule, and immediately it not only slammed shut behind me, but dove through the floor and vanished so quickly it was already gone before I turned around to see. Not that I paid it much mind; my attention was occupied by my surroundings.
It looked like the same room I stood in just thirty seconds before. It was the same size, it contained the same two doors—the right leading out to the first-floor hallway, left going outside, and the sun still shone—but everything in the room was gone.
I blinked.
I looked around, back and forth, back and forth.
Thirty seconds ago, there were shelves lining these walls, behind me, and on my left. There were at least fourteen boxes of various sizes haphazardly piled about the dusty stone floor. There were fluorescent lights attached to the ceiling.
It was all gone.
Well, not quite all of it. Two boxes remained in the room, but one, just behind me and to my right, had mostly disintegrated, its contents—looked like old blankets—spilled halfway out. The other, along the right wall, was mostly intact, but open and torn on one side. The large, ancient painting of some forgotten or imaginary meadow brook still hung from the wall, but it hung cockeyed now; sixty seconds ago it had hung straight. And, somehow, it looked even more ancient than before.
But the painting was enough. It was the same room.
I must have been unconscious longer than I realized. At least some hours, perhaps days, for the room to have changed so much. But how did it happen—and why had, apparently, no one come looking for me? I was still in the capsule when I woke up. I looked back to where the capsule stood—or had stood. It was now gone without a trace.
I moved toward the door on my right, that led out into the hall.
I stopped cold after three steps. Something was very different.
Not about the room; obviously the room was different. It was about me. As I took those three steps I felt... propelled. Like each step, though heavy and hurried, was causing the earth to spin beneath it, and all the same almost like my feet weren't touching the ground at all, like I was just gliding.
My skin tingled; that was one difference, I realized. Tingled isn't exactly the word for how my skin felt, but it's the closest I can come up with. And I felt unusually... balanced.
But that wasn't something to worry about now. I opened the door, and yet again stopped.
Two minutes ago I'd walked down this wide hallway to the storage room at the end, to retrieve some light bulbs. It was its usual self: well lit, and air conditioned, the walls painted white, the floors carpeted brown. Two days before I'd vacuumed those carpets.
The carpet was mostly torn up. Only a few patches remained here and there, and the floor was littered with broken glass. Where the picture windows had stood, now there were mostly empty holes lined with jagged glass. The sun blazed in, and the whole hallway was hot as the devil's office. At least that hadn't changed; it was late July when I walked into the back room, and if nothing else, it was surely still late July when I walked back out.
But this hallway was desolate and broken. And even allowing that I was hardly a certified appraiser, it sure looked like it had been for quite some time.
Glass crunched under my feet as I ran down the hall. I veered left and ran through the open doorway—a nice, sturdy door stood there three minutes ago—into what we called the cats' rooms. Technically they were lounges, the front room for studying and the back room for games, but they were the favorite spots of the three cats the school kept around.
They, too, lay mostly empty, apparently forgotten.
And more alarming, I had yet to come across a person. I passed two people, one fellow student, one dorm supervisor, in the hallway just four minutes ago, and someone was always in the lounges.
Not now.
Now all that remained in the study lounge was a broken window, a torn up blind beneath it, and two upset bookcases. Most or all of the 24-book Encyclopaedia Brittanica set was strewn about the floor beneath them. Six plush chairs and one sofa were in this room five minutes ago. Now all that remained of them was my favorite chair, the red one with the high back, leaning diagonally on broken legs, its upholstery torn, its stuffing burst loose.
And then, just as my heart had begun to pound fiercely enough to make my eyes pulsate, I spied Midnight sitting on top of the one standing piece of furniture in the room, the file cabinet, danging his front paws over the edge as he always liked to do. Overjoyed to see something still alive here, I walked over to him, frowning as I approached and he didn't move a whit.
“Midnight?”
I reached out to rub the top of his head; that had always been Midnight's favorite spot. As soon as my hand made contact I recoiled in shock, realizing from the familiar feel why Midnight hadn't budged.
He was stuffed.
I put my hands on him and looked down into his fixated marble-eyes. I don't know why. Disbelief, I suppose. But there could be no doubt he'd been to the taxidermist.
I took a step back and nearly staggered, like a man not fully awake, into the game room. Most of the furniture was still there, but all of it—the pool table, the nearby foosball table, the oversized dartboard that six minutes ago hung from the far wall, the entertainment center with its television and closet full of board games—was splintered, destroyed, as if the whole room had been savaged by berserk men wielding sledgehammers. The two six-foot-ball potted plants that seven minutes ago had stood in the corners, the pots were shattered, soil spread about the floor, and brown, long dead leaves moved gently, pushed by the breeze from the hallway behind.
And there on the ruins of the entertainment center, leaning at a strange angle, was Scarface, the tough-as-nails gray stray cat that got his name from an amazing source: he had a long scar on his face, the result of a fight when he was a kitten. The cut had gotten infected and (so the story goes) everyone at the school was sure he was going to die, but somehow he recovered.
He was dead now.
Stuffed, just like Midnight.
