The One Who Never Was

Heart racing against my chest, I made my way through the hallways, my sneakers banging on the floor as time ticked away from the clock. Tick, tick, tick. My forehead dripped in cold sweat, my breathing erratic and a full calamity as I went up the stairs and into the right.

My tongue could not lie anymore; excuses were just another thing Mrs. Callaway would pass by like she had with all the past ones. Excuses were my middle name, and without them . . . I had nothing. Nothing. And this, already in progress quiz, was worth more than I could take losing. Not answering it would have great consequences, like, for example, no Xbox for a whole month.

That was actually bad.

6:27. The clock ticked on, merciless and steady. No time for a break—I had to just make it to the quiz before it ended.

“Fuck,” I hissed under my breath, quickening my steps. My backpack thumped against my back as I pushed forward. Just a few more meters. Almost there!

I burst through the door with a great bang, sending a gust of air through the classroom, everyone’s head turning towards me. And there I stood: the guy drenched in sweat, panting like he’d just run a marathon with a forehead dotted with scattered pimples for the world to see.

“I’m late!” I shouted, shooting some laughs through the classroom that were quickly shut down by Mrs. Callaway’s heavy glare.

She crossed her arms and turned her double chin towards me. Her bulgy frog eyes stared at me with disgust. “Yeah, you are, Mr. Warrington,” she said in her shit-eating bored voice. The one she’d keep with her at all moments. “Now, why don’t you do us the favor of taking a seat and let all of your classmates concentrate on the activity we have due today?”

With a sigh, she sank into her chair, narrowly avoiding what could’ve been classified as a minor grade earthquake.

I slung my backpack beside the lone chair at the far end of the classroom and plopped down. Looking around, I noticed my classmates working on something in Word—not exactly what someone would do on Quiz Day.

“Psst,” I whispered to the girl who was sitting in front of me. Her light brown hair cascaded in curls over her green, oversized “Save the Forest” hoodie. She was called Angela, and I remembered talking to her quite a few times during my freshman year. “Hey, Angela. What are we doing?”

She didn’t turn around, her eyes deep in her computer screen. More words were being added into her word document as her hands flew around the keyboard. I tried again.

“Angela!” I said, touching her shoulder.

She flung around in her seat, shooting me an irritated look. “What?” she snarled.

I cleared my throat. “Do you know what we’re doing?”

She rolled her eyes, clearly irritated by my mere existence, as she turned around to point at the whiteboard where… of course, the instructions read clear as day. Right. Before I could thank her or even catch on to how she was doing it, her eyes were already back on the screen, now with headphones placed over her ears.

I sighed. At least I’d been saved from the quiz. Saved from one month without Xbox and from the scolding my father would give me if they’d found out I’d flunked language—for some, the easiest subject in school, for me, a pain in the ass. And that was… SUPER GREAT! Heck yeah!

The classroom was filled with a mist of silence, only followed by the sound of keys and the occasional grunts of guys who were clearly stressed by the huge workload Mrs. Callaway had put us under. For this class, you must do a two-thousand-word essay on how linguistic functions affect our daily lives.

If writing a toddler’s story had been hard for me, just imagine doing that. Yeah . . . at least we weren’t doing any kind of quiz. Those were probably the only good news I’d get today, if I was lucky.

Just when I was about to get my laptop out of my backpack, a tall, bald man with a snarky face and a big black Santa Claus beard burst through the door, calling for my name. His deep voice rumbled through the classroom, causing some of my classmates to jump out of their seats, banging their knees on the desk.

“Dominick Warrington,” his voice boomed again, his posture demanding presence and dominance. “I need you to please come with me.”

A chill ran through my back, bristling through my skin. He did not look like the typical man you’d find being a kind teacher who’d let you finish your homework past the due date, and that scared me to death. His dark brown eyes turned in my direction.

I gulped down a rock and walked to the front of the classroom, passing through the rows of classmates whose eyes stared at me, probably wondering the same thing I was: “What the hell has Dominick done?” I took a final glance at my scattered desk and hoped that I would come back to pick it up.

The teacher’s dark brown eyes looked down at me, his eyelids tired, as if he hadn’t slept in ages. Ages that could probably translate into insomnia. He patted me on the back, forcing me to walk to the door. “I’ll only take him a few minutes,” he said to Mrs. Callaway, who gave a silent nod of approval, clearly pleased that I was being taken away from the classroom.

She was probably thinking to herself, “Yes, take him away so he won’t complete his activity, and I can grade his activity a zero.” As I left the classroom, I could swear I saw a little smirk on her face. Wicked little witch!

Neither the man nor I spoke a word to each other as we walked through the corridors of the school, lockers filled with stickers lining the walls in a uniform way. I wanted to ask the man where we were going, but something about his aura made me stop—and something about his odor too. He smelled like mushrooms combined with some very mature olives and something which was either orange or lemon. Was he using some kind of Dior? If so, it smelled like absolute shit.

We walked for some more minutes, and I was surprised when he turned right instead of left. My stomach twisted.

Wait . . . the teacher’s lounge was to the left.

Unless . . .

My pace slowed as a dozen possibilities began swirling through my mind. Was he taking me to the principal’s office? Or maybe he was taking me to some secret dungeon where they tortured children with a thousand homeworks? I didn’t want to think about it.

I considered asking where we were going, but something about the way he moved—silent, purposeful—made me swallow the words.

My pulse quickened.

As I followed the man, his heavy footsteps rumbled through the corridors. I kept glancing over my shoulder, maybe hoping that some teacher or student would come to my aid and get me away from this teacher, but it didn’t matter how many times I turned back—nobody would arrive.

We turned another right as he led me into a hallway I’d never seen before in all the years I’d been in high school. It stretched wider and thinner than the others, with no colorful stickers or lockers lining the walls, with the lights on top flickering scarcely—like a horror movie—and no other door but a black one stood at the end of the hallway. Alone and forlorn, the door seemed to wait.

A door I’d never seen before.

The smell seemed to grow inside my nostrils, an earthy and musky smell that made me want to hold my breath. I took smaller steps as the door seemed to get closer, a freezing sensation erupting through my skin. I wanted to get out, I wanted to run.

There was something holding me back.

We came to an abrupt stop a couple of meters from the door, as the teacher turned to me—rapid breathing, heart racing like a Ferrari, and scared like hell. He stared at me, and just then I noticed there was something different about him. The hair on his eyebrows had grown uncontrollably, more pimples dotted his face, and his nose seemed bigger. His eyes locked onto mine with something… far creepier.

“C’mon, Dominick,” he said with a crooked smile, his yellowish teeth too wide for his mouth. Sharper than a knife itself. “You just need to open that door.”

My eyes moved to the black door that stood in front of me. Strange runes lined the corners of it, with its black marble color tinted in every space. Gusts of air brushed against it, making the wooden door creak with time, bringing awe to the atmosphere. There was something on the door, something that seemed to call my name as my steps moved involuntarily towards it. Almost as if the door was . . .

I stopped.

No, there was something wrong about it.

When I turned around, I found out the truth of it. The teacher who I’d been following through the hallways was not a teacher . . . he wasn’t even a human. Green barren skin ran through him. Blue veins snaked up his arms, pulsing beneath the surface, as though they might burst at any moment. His nose was large and flat, like a smashed potato, with thick, flared nostrils that seemed to inhale the very air around us. His rounded yellow eyes gleamed with a predatory focus, possibly dating back to the caveman ages. His shadow probably grew three times bigger than me, with his muscles surpassing the ones of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

That’s when I found out he was really an orc.

Oh fuck, was the last thing I thought when he jumped at me.