Infernal Geometry

The flakes were still falling behind my desk by the time I finished grading the very last term paper.  With a dull thud I slam the final piece of mediocrity into the ‘done’ pile.  My thighs and ankles ache as I flex them, springing out of my undersized chair and turning to look into the final pink rays of sunset.

“Shit.”

Looking down the three stories that fall into the waning daylight outside my office window, I see that the snow has covered half the doorway leading out from the castle annex.  Glancing to the west, I only see the merest hint of an ant-hill mound of snow that might be my car.

“Shit.”

Shadows stretch over the quad and the small lanterns lighting the footpaths wink on one by one, some only rising a foot or two out of the snowbanks.  The lights in the academic buildings and dorms remain dark as the college has recently adjourned for winter break.  

I can’t believe the snow accumulated so quickly; I go to check my phone for a weather forecast, then to place a call home to Cat but both the wifi and cell network are down. I pick up the hardline on my desk but it lacks the signature whine of a dial-tone.

“Shit.”

Feeling rushes back into my limbs as I exit my office and pad down the hallway; the interior of the third floor of Reid Castle transitions from almost nostalgic eighties office to interior decorator made manifest around the same time I leave the humanities offices and pass through admissions.  The rickety carpeted staircase is swallowed by pink marble at the second floor landing and my feet tip tap in a controlled fall as I rush down the final stately staircase into the lobby. 

Nearly five feet of snow rest in a dark heap against the glass double doors.  I spend the next quarter hour searching the ground floor, from the western ballroom to the curving hallway into the soaring chapel but the building is empty but for my procrastinating ass.

I issue another “shit” into the ether before climbing back up to my office, collapsing into the chair, and wondering what in the world I was going to do with myself.

Well, the heat is still on, and the school cafeteria is connected to the castle via an underground tunnel I had used once or twice to avoid a torrential downpour, so food isn’t an issue.  If I’m lucky, the snow will let up soon and plows will be around the following day.  

Two hours later and I have my feet up on my desk, a belly full of chocolate pudding, and I feel like I can hear the cooling fan in the back of my skull whirring down into silence.  Without my internet connection, there is little I can do other than flagellate myself with more errant prose from the pop-anthropology book Jason guilted me into picking up.  The thought of more reading makes sand pour between the folds in my brain so instead I kick myself out of my chair, combat roll over my desk, and land with a smirk of boyish rebellion and painful knees.  

The security cameras are still rolling but I ignore them and try to run along the hallway wall like the prince of persia anyway.  This leads to more painful knees and breathlessness so I think better of it.  I think about how old I’ve gotten and the last time I ran in a flat out sprint.

I try a few more boyish jaunts, walking across desks and sliding down the pink marble stairway bannister, before my body decides I am, in fact, too old for it.  

I am sitting on the floor in the lobby when I remember it, the odd button in the ancient elevator next to the East Room.

Enough light is pouring in through the wide windows in the East Room for me to make out the symmetrical lawn sitting below it and the outline of the athletic fields beyond.  The elevator, some said it was installed with the original castle in the nineteen-teens, trundled down to the first floor in fits and starts.  

Entering, I think that the elevator must be old, the ceiling sags low in a way that modern humans find too short.  There are five buttons on the panel, one for a basement, three for each floor, and another off to the right of the others, blank as a sheet of newly fallen snow.

I press it.

My stomach reacts first, a miniature tower of terror emptiness that precedes nausea.  I feel my feet alternate between pressing into the floor and threatening to disentangle from it.  Every millisecond I think I know I’m going up, I feel weightless and assume I’m dropping back down.  

After but a few moments, the ancient elevator door opens again and I stumble out into the hallway.  Something is wrong.  No, it’s probably just my now upset pudding stomach, I’m in the wide hallway on the first floor which leads to the East Room.  The room itself is darker than before, and the windows look out onto a new landscape.  Snow remains, but now it clings to the branches of October trees, all claws and fangs silhouetted by a predatory orange glow in the black distance.

The hallway itself is also different, where before it was bathed in a mundane fluorescence, now shadows seemed to lean out of alien wooden carvings along every surface.  I take a dozen steps backwards away from this macabre facade and turn rapidly to see the pink marble replaced by rough cut stone, as if someone had replaced a rich man’s summer home with an actual fourteenth century stronghold.  

Now I am sprinting two steps at a time up the stairwell.  Admissions is a lonely parapet naked to the howling night.  The walls and snowfields beyond the castle or barren of life save for the mournful cry of the wind.  Branches buckle and claw at the stone as I pass.  I find another exterior staircase leading up to a series of towers, my breath coming in great gasps.

Where my office should be, I find only a dank prison cell open to the obsidian night.  I want to scream, and maybe I do without hearing it over the torrent of wind.

With a jolt I find myself on the floor, my chair collapsed next to me, its four wheels spinning errantly.  Laughter sputters to an end and Jason grabs my right forearm and hauls me to my feet.

“Must’ve been some dream,” he says, turning over my chair and easing me down into it.

“You OK?” he asks.

I glance down at my desk and see that most of my student’s essays are in the ‘yet to be graded’ pile.

“Shit.”