Feelers Pt. 7

At first I thought the world was coming back into focus again. I could still feel Grant’s hand clenching mine tightly, and the earth seemed to firm up against my feet. I swayed a bit and I felt Grant stagger and then steady back up. I blinked, and then I blinked again. It didn’t do much good. A dull, dead mist seemed to blur into whiteness whatever I tried to look at. I turned to look at Grant and felt a flood of relief. His features were still solid and full of the color of life. I tried to smile at him, and he tried to smile back at me.

“Okay. That was wicked,” I said, and dropped his hand to brush back the hair from my face. Somehow my pony tail holder had come loose. I looked around. If I kept Grant in my field of vision, I didn’t feel as disoriented as I did at first. The white mist was like a fog, but didn’t move or swirl. It wasn’t especially thicker or thinner in any direction. It was more like a world of nothing that was out of focus.

Grant was groping around, waving his arms.

“What are you doing?” I asked, afraid for his mental state.

“I just thought if the box that brought us here was somehow still here, it could help us get back from wherever it is that we are!”

That sounded reasonable, so we spent the next twenty minutes sliding around, waving our arms like windmills until we gave it up. Once, we got separated enough that it seemed he was sliding out of focus, and I panicked, calling him back. Finally we gave up and just stood there, peering into the fuzz and thinking. I felt a shiver.

“I’m not sure if it’s my imagination or not, but I see some sorts of shapes around me.”

“Yeah, I see something too,” Grant replied. “I think my eyes are getting used to this. It’s almost like I can see the shapes of walls, and moving things, and other objects.”

“You’re right! It’s like people. In fact it’s like people on a sidewalk, but they’re just like dim shadows.

“Andie,” Grant slowly said. “Can you see? It’s just like the corridor at school.”

And then I felt truly scared for the first time. I could even recognize some of the shadowy people that passed in front of, behind, and through me. I waved my hand, and it passed through a dim, shadowy wall object. “Are we ghosts?” I whispered.

For some time after that, we wandered around, recognizing the familiarity of the school, but being somewhere else, somewhere we didn’t know. There didn’t seem to be any substance to our surroundings, but it was real enough, as I felt when I tripped over my undone shoelace and fell on one knee to the ground. It was hard, and I winced at the bruise. Once in a while, I’d see some other shapes, shapes that didn’t match up to anything familiar. In fact, they didn’t look like anything on Earth.

“It’s almost like different scenes going on at once here, and we’re the only ones who can see that,” I said.

“How long have we been here?” Grant suddenly asked.

I looked at my wristwatch. It had stopped at noon. I put my ear to it. There was no ticking.

“I can’t tell,” I said. “A couple hours?”

“We’ve got to figure out what to do next. We can’t just wander around forever! Think!”

I sat down cross-legged, putting my backpack on my lap and my chin in my hands.

“Well, for one thing,” I said, “It’s obvious that this machine was used before, so there has to be some point to it.”

“Unless Mr. Devious made it but was waiting for some guinea pigs to try it out on!”

I frowned. “I’m going to assume this isn’t the first time someone’s gone through. So either they made it back, or they didn’t. If they did, then we can too. If they didn’t, well, we’ll just keep trying!” That was the best I could come up with at the moment. “So, it seems like we are at some strange crossroads, maybe like a meeting place of worlds.”

“Are you sure you haven’t been reading too much science fiction?” Grant asked, sarcastically.

I ignored that. “It’s the only explanation I can think of right now. Unless you have a better one, then keep your mouth shut!” I felt irritated and sulky. Grant crossed his arms and rolled his eyes, saying, “Just give me time, and I’m sure I will!”

And then I heard something off in the distance. It was faint, but distinct. Since everything was dead-quiet around us, the sound was very obvious. It was a scurrying, a pattering, and a snuffling. We both tensed. I made sure the zips were closed on my backpack and hefted it in front of me. It was not much but was the only weapon we had. There was nowhere to run and hide, so we just waited for it, whatever it was.

And then, out of the gloomy whiteness, it appeared and was upon Grant before I could even scream. 

Feelers, Pt 6

“Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!” Grant whispered.

It was strange; I didn’t feel particularly scared or even numb. I felt a little exhilarated. There we were –trapped. I couldn’t do anything about it. What was, was. My feeling was that we could either sit there an moan about it, which I certainly did not intend to do! Or we could just go with it. We could continue to explore and see what else we could find out about what Ol’ Devius was really up to. Carefully and quietly, of course. I felt Grant’s hand close over mine.

“Are you ok?” He asked.

“Of course!” I answered, somewhat impatiently. “Do you hear anything else out there?” We both strained to listen with our ears pressed against the door.

“Nothing. I think he’s left the room.”

“Ok. We have until just after lunch until the next class starts. Devius teaches a math class in the other building until noon, and hopefully, he won’t be back in here until after he eats.

“Unless he comes back in here to eat lunch.”

“We’ll just have to make sure we can be hiding if we hear him start to come in then.” And hope that he didn’t take the time to do a double lock the next time he came in and left! I thought.

“Let’s explore some more!” I said. “Flip on the light.”

“Ok, but we’ll have to be quiet so we can hear him coming in time to switch it off,” Grant said. He flipped the switch back on. The fixture hummed, and the sallow glow returned.

We walked back to the curtain that hid the dark recesses of the long narrow space. I pulled it back a little on its rod, to let some of the light illuminate the way. I stepped through, Grant following close behind. The shelving continued along one side as far as I could see through the gloom. More bottles, jars, boxes cluttered up these shelves also, but they were more dusty, more old and derelict that the artifacts in the front office. The smell was worse too. It smelled a little bit like mushrooms.

“Do you smell that? Sort of like mushrooms?” Grant asked. “I heard that there are fungi out there that live in the dust, and if you breathe them in, they can colonize your lungs. Sort of like filling up your lungs with toadstools.”

“That’s ridiculous!” I said. “Really? Where did you hear that?”

“I read it somewhere,” he said. “Maybe I read it wrong. Maybe they grew in your sinuses!” We laughed, but I noticed we both breathed more shallowly, and when a puff of dust got kicked up, Grant covered his nose with the tail of his shirt.

I was still lugging around my backpack, and it was starting to make my back hurt, but I was afraid to take it off, afraid I might have to leave it somewhere if we had to slip away and hide from our teacher if he surprised us by coming back too soon. I pulled the straps up to put it higher on my back and followed Grant, who was now in the lead, running his fingers along the edges of the wooden shelves.

“You know, I think this pre-dates Devius,” he said, thoughtfully. Some of this stuff looks like it’s been here longer that that. And look at the dates on these papers!” The papers were obviously students’ work, but were thirty years old and had a different teacher’s name on them. “It’s just sort of a mish-mash of old teacher’s stuff. Like an attic that never gets cleaned.”

I could see that the sides of the room looked unused, except for the occasional area of disturbed dust and used paper coffee cups resting on a shelf or two. But it was obvious the central path was well-traveled. It showed footprints and scrapings of black and wheel tracks, like a dolly had moved down the narrow tile floor. We kept walking until I was sure we had reached the very end of the building wing, in our dark, man-made cave.

“Here we are; this is it,” I said, a little disappointed about the mundane surroundings at the dead end.

“Not quite,” Grant said as he reached out to what looked like the end wall. I squinted in the near-darkness. What he touched was soft and moveable. I realized it was a blanket of some sort, and that it covered something. Something big. We both tugged, cautiously. But then, as if gravity took over, the whole covering slid down onto the floor at our feet. No dust arose to choke us and grow mushrooms in our lungs. No, this was a well-used part of the room that had no time to collect dust. A smooth handle projected from the flat surface of some kind of box, like a refrigerator. In fact, that’s what I thought it was at first, even after I opened it because a light came on at that moment. Or perhaps it was on all the time and we just couldn’t see it.

“Oh my gosh!” Grant breathed as he stuck his head in.

I wanted to pull him back. Who knows? Maybe something would happen to a body part that you stuck in there.

“Grant, be careful!”

“No, look! It’s so weird!”

I looked. It was glowing a soft blue inside, sort of like an electrical color. Once, when I was little, I saw a transformer explode near our house. It was night, and the blue glow was scary and pretty both at the same time. But the loud crack! and the thought of all those volts let loose in the air kept me away until they got it fixed. This reminded me of that night. I could hear a very soft hum now that the door was opened.

What was really weird about the inside of the box was that the sides were fuzzy and you couldn’t really see them. In fact, I had to assume they were the sides, just based on the outside dimensions. It looked like a square, box-like opening of the prettiest blue, just hanging there in a pale blue fog.

I picked up a dusty book on a nearby shelf and tossed it inside the square. It dropped to the bottom, acting sort of like I’d tossed it onto a blanket. Grant pulled a wooden stick that looked like an old-fashioned pointer from a pile of stuff and poked it. Nothing happened. He reached a hand inside, carefully. Nothing happened. I had a silly urge to grab him suddenly around the middle and go “Zzzzt!” in his ear, but I stuck my hands in my pockets to keep from doing that. That would not be cool.

“Feel it, Andie!” Grant said. “It’s like threads, soft threads,” as he fluttered his fingers across the fluffy blue interior. It was strange, though. As his hand twined with the blueness, it also became sort of fuzzy-looking and out of focus.

“I don’t like it,” I said. “It makes me feel a little creeped out. I’ve never seen anything like it before.

“I know,” Grant said, wonderingly.

And then we both heard a click, click, click, and my stomach dropped. I’d been so enthralled, I’d forgotten our precarious position. Those were heel taps, knocking their way methodically into the office.

“Quick! Quick! Hide!”

“Where?” Grant snatched his hand out of the box and frantically looked around. There wasn’t much to see. The room was fairly empty back here, and the big box was flat up against the back wall.

“Inside!” I hissed, “Quick!”

We stepped inside and pulled the door gently shut, leaving a small crack just in case it had an automatic latch. I had the disorienting feeling that I was standing on water that had mostly solidified. Firm, but still pliable. My hand reached out to the sides and stroked their softness. Grant was right. It was mesmerizing.

The heel clicks were coming down the room past the curtain. It seemed like he was heading straight for us! And then they stopped right in front of the box. Just when I felt like I was going to break out in gibberish and tears from the tension, I saw the door slowly close that last half-inch, ending in a soft little “snick!” We were locked in!

“Andie, look!”

I realized I could see Grant’s face, bathed in a dim blue glow. The edges of the blue fuzz were now lit up and the light was spreading deeper. I could hear an electric buzz. It got brighter and brighter. I felt dizzy.

“Grant, what’s happening?” I yelped.

“I don’t know! Hang on!” he shot back and grabbed my hand. I shut my eyes against the burning glow. Now it wasn’t just my head that was spinning but my whole body. I held Grant’s hand tightly and we leaned into each other as the out-of-focus blue walls seemed to embrace us and pull us apart at the same time. And then the whole world seemed fuzzy for what seemed a long, long time.