The
Boy in the Tunnel
by
11.
Ron Marston pushed a tape
into the TV/VCR combo on the side table and pressed PLAY. The screen flickered
to life and displayed a grainy black and white image. Ron and Julian Washington
watched as Avery Barlow entered the JFK Room and flashed the lamp. Then a hard
cut to the Sluke cupola, where a pale woman with dark
hair flashed her flashlight three times.
“You know who that is, of course,” said Ron.
Julian just nodded, wide-eyed with the thrill of
knowing that something was finally happening around here.
Another hard cut back to the JFK Room. Barlow
flashed the lamp again, paused for a few seconds, then picked up the phone. He
held it to his ear for seven seconds, then replaced
the receiver. He hesitated a moment, then turned off the lamp and left the
room. More cuts as he walked down the hall, then abruptly disappeared.
“The Van Zandt Stairway, I would imagine,” said
Ron.
“Not surprising. What about St. James?”
“She leaves the cupola, but doesn’t reappear on any
of the cameras.”
“She knows about the Pi Floor, then.”
“Clearly.”
Ron sat in his leather desk chair and rubbed his
face. “This is a message.”
“I find it hard to believe that Barlow and St.
James are working together now,” Julian said, though he wanted to believe it so
bad his feet involuntarily moved into textbook pass-blocking position.
“You saw what I saw. Whatever differences their
predecessors had, they’ve obviously learned to work around them. They wanted us
to see this. They’re mocking us.”
Julian could hardly wait to get started on this
delicious new project. “Who else knows?”
“Just you and me. I don’t think the other RLCs
need to know about this yet. For all we know, they could be working with Barlow
and St. James.”
Julian was positively giddy with excitement. Here
was something to fill the time, all right. Something he could get his hands
around.
“What do you want me to do?”
**************
Sluke and Hayes were the rebellious teenagers of the
Family Delmonico, the fraternal twin children of Wintertree and Mary Rutherford. Hayes was a monstrosity,
the kind of thing Joanie’s mother, were
she an architect, might have come up with. The 18th-century dorms
from UNWG’s original campus had been torn down and
reassembled into a Wintertree-esque cube that had,
instead of Wintertree’s imposing solidity, the
weightless impossibility of an Escher drawing. Stairs zigzagged in all
directions on the outside of the amalgamated building, connecting doors of all
shapes and sizes, while columns jutted at haphazard angles, supporting nothing.
It was if a giant toddler had built a playhouse from all construction materials
within reach: Legos, Lincoln Logs, Construx, TinkerToys.
Most Hayes residents lived in mortal fear of their home toppling over in the
night.
Sluke, by contrast, was a replica of Mary Rutherford
made entirely of poured concrete. It was the dream project of Molly Rankerson, a brilliant but most likely insane architect who
wanted to pay homage to undergraduate home. Construction of Sluke
took fifteen years and four separate attempts before it was deemed livable, and
it cost the University a staggeringly obscene sum of money. Sluke
was an entirely unpleasant place to spend the day, much less live, and few
students willingly chose it as their dorm. However, the rent for a room in Sluke was astronomical, as the University had to recoup
their costs somehow. This situation drove UNWG further and further into the red
over the first few years Sluke was open, until Ron Marston hit on a brilliant idea: Sluke
would become the official home of the foreign students who came to UNWG for its
world-class diplomatic training program. These students were invariably the
children of nobility and oil barons and the like, who liked the idea of their
children living in a genuine Rankerson masterpiece
and would pay handsomely for such a privilege, yet would never actually visit
to see what kinds of conditions their darlings were living in. Within five
years, Sluke became the University’s most profitable
operation, and Ron Marston was given carte blanche to
do as he saw fit with DUH.
Sluke Hall was not an exact copy of Mary Rutherford, however.
Rankerson was obsessed with the idea of a secret
floor (though she had not been aware of the very real secret passages in Mary
Rutherford, e.g. the Van Zandt Stairway), because she
thought she had lived on an extradimensional floor in
Miss R. This floor, which she called the Pi Floor, was, according to her
autobiography, “a half-step out of the reality of the third floor, reachable by
entering the bathroom from the north door and exiting from the south door.” The
Pi Floor, Rankerson claimed, was exactly the same as
the third floor, except that she was its only inhabitant. (Women who lived in
Miss R at the same time as Rankerson have said that
she bumped into them quite a bit after exiting the bathroom by the south door.)
Whether or not the Miss R Pi Floor ever existed, the Sluke
Pi Floor was very real; its design and construction constituted one of the true
miracles of 20th-century architecture.
After his meeting with Marston,
Julian headed immediately for the Sluke 3-West
bathroom. A Pakistani student was methodically washing his hands, finger by
finger. Officially, the Pi Floor wasn’t supposed to exist, and Julian didn’t
want to give this kid any evidence to the contrary, so he pretended to use a
stall for five minutes while the kid scrubbed his hands raw.
Once he heard the faucet stop, Julian peered out of
the stall. The bathroom was now empty. Julian exited via the west door and
found himself in a hall just like the one he had entered the bathroom from,
only completely devoid of life. The only sound was that of his Rockports on the concrete floor. Each step echoed complexly
from room to room. The overhead fluorescent bulbs were one, bathing everything
in harsh greenish-white light. The hall looked like a subterranean ice cave,
the kind of thing you stumbled upon after falling through a patch of thin ice
while exploring the Antarctic. Like it was the home of an ancient, possibly
alien, civilization, and though you were afraid, you knew you had to be
objective, you had to take everything in, because you were the first human to
see this, and as such it was your job to record the first human response to it.
Julian was unnerved, as he always was on the Pi
Floor, but he had a mission--he was looking for evidence. He knew that Charlie
St. James had been here, because the Pi Floor was the only way to reach the
stairway to the cupola. But how she had gotten to and from the Pi Floor without
being seen on camera was a mystery. As far as Julian knew, the bathroom trick
was the only way—but Julian also knew that there were many things he did not
know about the Family Delmonico and its secrets. He
was Marston’s most trusted lieutenant, but trust only
got you so far. Eventually you had to find things out for yourself.
Julian had hoped to find feminine footprints in the
dust he assumed would cover the floor in this little-used hall, but the bare
concrete was smooth and spotless. Either the custodians worked the Pi Floor
too, or else he was as crazy as Molly Rankerson.
Julian stepped into a room, as empty and clean as the hall. The desks, chests of drawers and bed
frames were molded out of concrete as well, and looked like blocky stalagmites
rising from the floor. All in all, it looked like the worst place imaginable to
spend the best years of your life.
The bedroom had the same super-bright fluorescent
lights as the hall, buzzing unpleasantly on the ceiling, and between the
incessant noise and the stark grayish-white room, Julian felt like was in a Kubrick film or something. His gung-ho spirit was failing
in this cold, blank setting. There was nothing to focus on, because everything
was the same non-color. All you had here were your memories of what a real
room, a real home, looked like; you had to project it onto the walls and the
floor and the concrete forms like a movie. Julian couldn’t help but draw a
parallel between this place’s effect on him and the way he had lived for the
past five years: projecting the life he wanted on the life he had, fooling
himself into thinking it would be different someday. How? What had he ever done
to make it different?
Julian tried to turn off the lights to stop that
goddamn buzzing, but the switch did nothing. He had to find what he was looking
for and get out of here. Right below Milo Kirby on the Big List of UNWG Urban
Legends, was the story of the girl who accidentally found the Pi Floor, went
insane and jumped out the window. But when you jump out of a window that
doesn’t officially exist, you don’t officially die. Julian knew that was
ridiculous, but Jesus Christ that fucking buzzing
He staggered back out into the hall. It was even
brighter somehow, but the sickly green fluorescent tint was more pronounced.
This was real nightmare territory now. Hospitals, always hospitals in his
dreams, always everything he tried so hard to forget. This hall could be any
hall in any hospital, that room the one he refused to visit his sister in.
Julian ducked into another room—as bad the last room was, the hall was worse.
He tried the light switch in here—broken as well.
He needed a smaller room, somewhere dark, somewhere to gather his senses.
The closet was just big enough to hold him, but at
least it was dark and the door muffled the buzzing. He could just chill out
here for five minutes, then get the fuck out off this
floor. Marston could come up here himself if he
wanted to find anything, which he wouldn’t anyway.
Julian leaned his head back and raised his face to
the ceiling to breathe, to let the air flow straight down to his lungs. He
counted to ten, and felt better.
Then something fell on his face. A
drop of water. He opened his eyes. There was no ceiling in this closet.
© 2005 Gardner Linn