Deadtime Stories

The Stairs and the Doorway

I don't feel like I'm a nosy person. No more nosy than the next guy. I just have what my Ma would call an unhealthy amount of curiosity. I was the kid who climbed to the top of the big oak in the back yard, just to see what was in the crows' nest. I was the kid who dug a hole in the back yard so deep that I hit groundwater because I was convinced there was a cave under our house, and I wanted to see it. To see.

My folks aren't dirt poor, but they're pretty close. They're part of that missing middle of America, the people who work forty hours a week until they die, with no savings to speak of. I got my first job at a horse stable when I was fourteen. It didn't last very long. I knew I needed to get a job, because I knew we needed the money, so I bounced around for the next few years, washing dishes, waiting tables, until I graduated high school.

Pop was really tough on me about college. He never went -- nobody in his family had -- so there were a few fights about where I would go after school. It was a huge shock to me when, just after graduation, he drove me down to the Uni. He'd been classmates with the Dean and they'd come up with an arrangement where I'd get a full scholarship, provided I made good grades and worked for the University.

I never felt like a scholar. In high school, I kept my head down and did enough to get by, pulling off B's and a few C's. I wasn't interested in learning, because learning wasn't interesting. Uni was different. I took mainly core classes, math-English-history-science, but they were fascinating. For one thing, nobody cared if I showed up or not. It was entirely up to me to succeed, so I did.

In exchange for my education, I worked security and did some light maintenance duties. Maintenance was a no-brainer. I've always been handy, and most of the fix-it jobs were the type that could be solved with a liberal application of WD-40, or elbow grease, or both. Security was a different story. Security gave me super powers.

The job itself was pretty easy. I got a uniform, a badge, a flashlight, and Ma gave me some keychain mace for my birthday. No, I didn't get a gun -- they weren't allowed on campus anyway. I worked mostly nights and weekends, and doubles during long holiday breaks. I was to walk around the full campus twice in a night, checking the labs, computer center, and library. The rest of my time was pretty much my own.

There were two other guards, Jake and Al, but they worked different shifts from me. We had "overlap nights" on Wednesday nights, where we'd get together for about an hour to discuss any major events or changes. There might have been some beer at those meetings, but I'm underage, and you can't prove anything.

Jake worked mostly dayshift, and Al worked swings and some overnights during the week. Jake was a younger guy, training to be on the local police force, so he took his job pretty seriously. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure Al mostly slept during his shifts. Al was two years older than dirt, so he deserved his rest.

Remember that bit about super powers? My first night on the job, Al gave me a huge keychain with about a thousand keys on it. It weighed nearly five pounds, and was secured to my belt with a heavy-duty metal chain. “Don’t lose that keychain, kid,” Al said. “You got the keys to the kingdom right there. Any door that don’t open, you don’t want to go in it.”

My work hobby, the thing that kept me awake on those long cold winter break nights, was exploring. I made it a point, every night, to open some door that I'd never opened before. I started in the new section, where the library and computer center were, opening each room, each closet, making a map in my head of where everything was. Some nights I might explore two or three rooms. Some nights I might not have time for anything more than an odd, out of the way broom closet.

The Uni is actually a pretty large campus, for having a full student body of only twelve or thirteen hundred. It was built as a Methodist college in 1896, and became state-owned in the thirties. There were three main sections. The 'Old School' housed the Administration offices and a few unlucky classrooms —unlucky due to the lack of central heat and air, and the three-story building had no elevators. The 'Labs' were a Brutalist horror of poured concrete slabs and tiny windows, built back in the 70s when buildings that looked like Soviet radiators were in style. The "New Library" was steadily losing its "new", built in the late 90s boom, and made in that unique red-brick-and-glass style like everything else during those years.