The School

I had a nightmare last night.

You and I were sitting at a bus stop in the middle of a pine forest. It wasn’t much more than an old wooden bench beside a poster backlight by a lonely, flickering light. In front of us ran a silent two-lane road that presumably only the bus ever came down. The sun had sunk below the horizon, but there was enough dusty blue light from the sky to make out some buildings in the forest behind us.

These buildings were 6 or 8 large white mausoleums rising out of rotting forest floor. They were covered in the same dead detritus littering the ground, enough that I could tell the buildings had been abandoned, but not enough that I could say they had been totally forgotten. The walls of these sepulchrous buildings were translucent, membranous, and through them I could make out the vague shapes of boxes and tables, stacked and stored.

I asked you what these strange buildings were. You told me they were part of an old school. When I turned my head after this, I found that I had somehow missed seeing the massive building in an empty clearing a little ways away from us. A cracked pathway led down from this monolith to the graveyard of buildings that had previously caught my attention.

This must have been The School.

It made no sense. It looked as if three city-block-sized cubes had been superimposed inside each other, but each had been slightly skewed: all jutting corners and protruding edges and random angles. Some of the faces were covered by massive, dark windows, hinting at empty atriums, some were just heavily-curtained portholes, and others were smooth beige brick devoid of any other notable features. Looking at the building was like looking at some sort of extradimensional maze. There were infinite places to be watched from, and focusing on any particular feature caused the rest of the building to blur and shift in furtive movements.

A breeze swept up towards The School, its eddies rattling dead forest things along the path. When it reached the twisted building it gently cracked open an old door that had conveniently appeared at its base. I couldn’t see into The School – what little light there was seemed to lose its will as soon as it crossed The Threshold behind the open door. You turned to me and said, blithely:

Let’s go in.

Like you didn’t see the muted shapes moving just out of sight through dark glass, or the curtains being drawn across the windows the instant before you looked at them. You started walking towards the building without a thought. Out of fear of being alone, I silently followed, my heart beating faster and louder with every step we took towards that foreboding door – like it was straining against a smothering force. By the time you put your hand on the old metal door handle my heart was going to beat out of my chest.

You opened The Door, and there was no room behind it. It opened to three thin stairways: one sat on either side of the entrance, and the third extended straight down in front of us. Each stairway was narrow, less than an arms-length wide, and tiled with gritty linoleum. The murky twilight that covered the forest behind us joined us in crossing The Threshold, and with it I could see that each stairway rapidly forked and twisted out of sight. As much of a maze as the outside of The School was.

I took a moment to think, and to calm my uncontrollably thumping heart.

You didn’t.

You were gone before I could say anything – running up The Steps to our left and passing out of site around a corner without a word. I looked down at the twisting path of The Steps in front of me and my heart pounded as I realized I would never find you again. I clutched a hand to my chest as a deep laughter echoed up the stairs.

I woke up in darkness like heavy blanket, my heart thudding at a frenetic pace. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even move to see if you were still next to me.