Descent

10 - "I just got lost"

The assembly was big news. It was mentioned in the morning announcements and again, randomly, halfway through first period. The fact it was mandatory was heavily emphasized, which Tommy thought was super annoying, and he said as much to Arjun between classes.

"It's so the high school kids don't skip it." Arjun said as they walked through one of the many identical, cavernous hallways of the school.

"Skip it?" Tommy asked, his voice echoing through the hall which was somehow empty, even though all the junior and high school students were changing classes at the same time.

"Yeah," Arjun said, "You know: smoking under the bleachers, sexing, talking about cars."

Tommy was shocked, "People actually do that?"

Arjun nodded sagely, "All the time buddy..."

Arjun didn't have much of an accent but he did elongate his 'y' sounds, so 'buddy' sounded like 'buddee.'

A fire door slammed shut somewhere in the distance and Tommy saw they were completely alone in the hallway. The school's hallways were ridiculously wide, at least twenty feet across, and they had been walking right down the middle. The lockers on either side of the hallway were battered, rusted, and bolted closed, their public-works-puce paint jobs chipped and flaking. Above the lockers were murals of wild buffalo running on one side, a cattle drive on the other. As he scanned the dark hallway, little dust motes rose in the shafts of sunlight cast into the hall from the abandoned classrooms. He thought the dust motes might be flakes of paint from the lockers, but he couldn't be sure.

"Where is everyone?" Arjun asked. The empty hallway swallowed up the sound of his voice so it sounded like they were underwater.

"We're gonna miss the assembly..." Tommy said, absently, but he was growing concerned they would miss the rest of their lives, due to their impending deaths in this spooky hallway.

They started marching with purpose down the hall, but the lockers and locked-up classroom doors just kept streaming by them with no end in sight. In the distance, Tommy could see the green glow of a sign indicating a stairway, the little man beckoning them to safety, but the sign never seemed to get any closer. Tommy would blink, or look away, and the sign would be back where it had always been--out of reach.

"The fuck?" Arjun seemed to have noticed, too, and he ran to the nearest classroom door to tug on the handle.

Tommy did the same to the door on the opposite side of the hall. Together they raced down opposite sides of the hallway, pulling on doors that, based on the posters still hanging inside the rooms, hadn't been opened in decades.

"They're all locked!" Arjun called after a fourth attempt, but Tommy could barely hear him.

Though they were across the hall from each other, they seemed to be miles apart. Tommy was having trouble seeing clearly--like the sun was in his eyes even though it was oppressively dark. He squeezed his eyes shut and, when he opened them, Arjun was gone. Tommy looked to his left, and just saw his friend's backpack and it vanished around a corner that definitely hadn't been there moments ago.

Tommy took off after Arjun, but the corner his friend had taken was quickly lost in the repetitive blur of lockers and doors. He started to get a stitch in his side, and began wheezing, and soon the sound of his own breathing and the blood in his ears was all he could hear, along with the occasional squeak of his sneakers on the linoleum floor.

He finally did reach a corner and he took it at full speed, his sneakers skidding on the floor as he ran, but he was greeted with yet another seemingly infinite hallway--too dark, with lines and lines of lockers that, he was sure now, were peeling paint into the air. He found another corner, to the left again, and took that one too, then another, and another--always to the left, which he knew should be impossible, like the penrose steps, but he kept going anyway.

He had no idea what had happened to Arjun. He almost called out, but some part of him knew that it was against the rules to yell in the school hallway, so he kept quiet. He rounded the final corner and the hall stretched out before him in a line, but it seemed to Tommy that the hall was tilting down somehow, and as he ran the tilt became more and more pronounced until he felt as if he were running down a hill. He started to pinwheel his arms to keep balance. Something out of the corner of his eye made him look to the left: in the window to a classroom was Clara, her face wrinkled and dessicated, her eyes all white, mouth torn open at the corners. Tommy tripped and now he was sliding, falling, down the hallway, a straight drop towards a closed pair of fire doors with big heavy crossbars to open them. He did scream, just as he crashed into the doors and...

Fell face-first into the gymnasium, where the assembly was in full-swing. He stayed down on his hands and knees, half to catch his breath, and half to keep from accepting the terror of what he knew was facing him: the entire school, staring at him. It was completely silent, only the sound of his breath and heartbeat, until he felt a hand on his arm and back.

"You okay son?" Tommy looked into the face of a teacher he didn't know, then noticed the rest of the room.

It was packed, definitely the whole school was there, and even though the school was way under capacity, 600 kids staring at you was still 600 kids staring at you. At the front of the gym was a modest stage, where the Principal was standing with a microphone next to two uniformed cops.

"Everything okay Mr. Bell?" The principal asked, his amplified voice barely filling the massive gym.

"Come on, let's get you up." The teacher, whose name must have been Mr. Bell, was trying to pull him onto his feet.

"I just got lost." Tommy said as he stood up, but he couldn't hear very well over the sound of the blood in his ears.

Mr. Bell, was looking at him with wide eyes, and Tommy realized he must have shouted what he'd just said. The room erupted with laughter. Permanently embarrassed, Tommy tried to shrink behind Mr. Bell as the teacher led him to a chair at the side of the gym. The Principal took a few moments to get the kids under control, then:

"So, one last time," He said, "Go straight home after school, or after your extracurriculars. No going anywhere without an adult. Report anyone you don't recognize to a policeman and absolutely, positively, do not go into any buildings you're not familiar with."

Tommy, exhausted and mortified, didn't hear a word of it.