Okay. So, Troy was supposed to have died in a car accident. No one he left behind, not his dad or his brothers or his teachers at school knew he was still alive. Saved by the Corridor, to run this impossible gauntlet.
Unbelievable.
“Why?” he whispered, wiping tears away. “Why would the Corridor do that?”
“I wish I knew,” said Victoria. “And I’m not holding back. I really don’t know. The Corridor won’t tell me.”
It was insanity. Who in this world or any other would construct something so big and powerful, just to steal people away at the moment of their death?
“There’s something else,” Victoria said slowly, “if you want to hear it.”
He honestly wasn’t sure he did. Did she know who had brought them both here, after all? Was she about to tell him they were on an alien world? What else could possibly make this situation any crazier?
“Okay,” he said at last.
“The Corridor has the ability to pull people here. From wherever you were, to wherever it’s located. In the blink of an eye.”
“I suspected,” he replied. It was impressive technology, but not exactly earth-shattering news.
“I’m not finished,” she said. “I told you earlier, when I was first brought here, I was fifteen years old. What I didn’t tell you—what I wasn’t allowed to say—was that one of the last things I remember is my father selling his farm. The Depression hit us hard, and he had no choice.”
The word jumped out at him like a fist hammering into his head. Troy’s skin tingled, turning clammy.
“The…Depression?” he repeated.
“I was born in nineteen sixteen.”
He couldn’t think. Couldn’t breathe. Somehow he was flat on his back again, staring up at the underside of the stairs that wound ever upward.
When he finally found his voice, he asked, “So, the Corridor, it also pulls you—”
“Through time,” confirmed Victoria.
Too much. Too many thoughts. Couldn’t make words…
“That’s why you don’t remember it very well, or the minutes leading up to it,” she went on. “You were pulled through time, and that messes with your head a bit. The same thing happened to me, and to the others.”
But if… If he was pulled through time…
The technology required to make something of this size and complexity; was there anyone alive who was capable of this? He couldn’t think of anyone.
Which meant one of two things. He was somewhere else in time. Or he was no longer on Earth. Neither of these possibilities was appealing.
Was this the future? The distant past? Another world? He could be anywhere in the universe, at any time!
“Troy—calm—!” Victoria’s voice was cut off by bursts of static.
Hyperventilating. Couldn’t stop.
The walls of the Purple Room contracted, pulling tighter around him until he knew the air had been sucked from the room. Was this happening? Was any of it real?
He passed out long before he could learn the answers.
There was no dramatic awaking when he came to. He merely sat back up. Dying of thirst.
The memories were vivid now. His tiny blue Beetle. Justin, the reigning bully at school. That kid was pure evil, through and through, Troy’s dad always said. Justin had snuck out of the cafeteria at lunch and let a little air out of Troy’s tires. But Troy hadn’t noticed until he was driving home that night, when he was on his way to the surprise birthday party he wasn’t supposed to know about.
The air had seeped so slowly out of the few tiny cuts that he was halfway home when the rims started scraping the road. Troy pulled over a few yards past the railroad tracks, out on Route 12 near the corn fields, but well out of range of any oncoming trains.
He was standing outside the car, having just discovered the holes in his tires. He’d pulled out his phone to call his dad when he saw it. The gleaming, red, brand new pickup truck that Justin drove to school every day. Headed straight towards him. Justin had no doubt planned this entire prank, following him after school with the intention of scaring the life out of him.
It happened so fast. Troy had been gob-founded, glued to the spot as he looked up into the headlights of the truck. One person was supposed to flinch when playing chicken, but this time the unthinkable happened. Justin, whether he had expected Troy to dive out of the way, or he lost control of his vehicle due to the road’s sharp drop-off, barreled straight at him.
Then he’d woken up here. In the Corridor.
The Corridor snatched him away the half-second before Justin’s pickup truck would have flattened him. This monolithic structure had pulled him through space and time to save his life. To make him fight for it.
But why?
Victoria said nothing. No doubt she’d been aware of his panic attack and subsequent fainting, but she had the grace not to speak of it. She merely waited for him to gather his thoughts.
“You don’t talk like you’re from the nineteen thirties,” he said.
“I don’t?” she asked. “How so?”
“You sound more like someone from my time. I mean, you don’t follow my cultural references, for sure. But you say things that are more common where I come from.”
“Huh,” she replied. “I’ve been here a long while, you know. I guess I’ve picked up some stuff from the other Runners.”
“So…” He tried to piece everything she’d told him together. “I can leave the Corridor if I want to? Right now?”
As if in answer, a metal door directly across the way on a higher segment of the spiral stairs lit up. Its outline shined white, seemingly awaiting his decision. Otherwise, it looked no different than all the other doors, with their circular tree symbols, except that this symbol was now glowing red. “Yes. It’s that door, if you intend to use it.”
Troy sat up straighter, staring intently at the door. It was so enticing, the thought of ending it. It could all be over, right now. No more struggling. No more Running.
“What happens if I do?”
“You’ll be returned to the exact moment in time you were pulled out of. Events will unfold as they would have, as though you’d never left.”
“You mean I’ll die. Like I was supposed to.”
Victoria didn’t reply. She didn’t have to.
“Or,” he concluded, “I can keep going. Keep Running. Run to live?”
“I told you earlier,” she said slowly, “that Running the Corridor is about how much you want it—how much you want to live.”
The glowing door was quickly losing its appeal. What good was it to leave the Corridor behind this way if there was no hope of escaping certain death? At least if he Ran, he had a chance. It wasn’t much of a chance; he’d survived on luck and Victoria’s advice up to now. But it was something.
“How many choose to leave?” he asked, doubting she’d have an answer.
“Three of my Runners did.”
She’d said earlier that she’d been connected to a total of six Runners before Troy. So three out of those six gave up. And at least one other didn’t survive his Run. Had any of Victoria’s other Runners made it to the end?
“I’m allowed to tell you one more thing,” said Victoria, speaking slowly.
Troy knew it wasn’t going to be good news. “What?”
“It gets harder. If you choose to stay and try to make it to the end…it gets harder from here.”
Harder? How much harder could it get? He’d already broken his wrist and suffered severe burns.
“But there is an end, right?” he asked. “The Corridor doesn’t just go on forever?”
“It ends,” she replied.
There was no denying that leaving was tempting, even knowing what it meant. He was exhausted. The pain was terrible. He was suffering. And nobody wants to suffer. Nobody. Maybe it would be easier to let go, to leave this life behind and move on to the next.
Even as these thoughts passed through his mind, he knew they were n
othing more than an intellectual exercise. To leave now and go back to death felt too much like suicide.
It was unacceptable. Impossible.
“I won’t fault you for leaving, if that’s what you choose.” He heard the sincerity in her voice. But he picked up a trace of something else, as well.
Disappointment.
He couldn’t articulate why, but the thought of disappointing her pained him almost as much as his physical injuries.
“The only way I’m leaving,” he announced with more confidence than he felt, “is when I get to the end.”
Troy decided he would rest for one more day before going on. He needed as much of his strength to return as possible if he was to have any chance at survival. He’d have to find the right Exit door, of course. But that could wait. For now, he was content to sit, and heal, and think.
There was nothing to eat here, but remarkably, he found that he never became hungry. Maybe it was that water.
Victoria’s words about the Rooms getting harder haunted his every waking moment, as well as his dreams, which were filled with terrifying wildfires and blinding lights and alien rooms that shifted position as though they were alive.
“What do you look like?” he asked Victoria.
Long ago, Troy had decided that he disliked talking. It was tedious, often meaningless, and frequently got in the way of doing. But that was then. This was here and now, in this strange place, so far from home and family and everything he knew. He still had a few hours to go of his self-imposed physical rest, and there was nothing to do in this Purple Room.
Nothing but talk to Victoria. So they talked.
She sighed. “I—I’m ordinary. Average. Couple times, I heard the other girls call me a ‘plain Jane,’ so I guess that means I’m not all that pretty. But my older sister Meredith—she’s beautiful. She’s got light brown hair, red lips, high cheek bones, soft blue eyes... Everybody loves Meredith as soon as they meet her. Nobody really notices me. How could they, with her around?”
He said the only thing that came to mind. “What’s on the outside doesn’t matter.” The words made him wince.
She laughed with a touch of bitterness. “Said the boy who didn’t want to be seen with his shirt off.”
“Still don’t.”
“So what do you look like?”
“A nerd,” said Troy. “I look like a nerd.”
“I don’t know what that means,” said Victoria.
“I’m…bookish. You know, a brainy type. I know a lot about a lot of different stuff, but I’m a pale weakling with antisocial tendencies.”
Victoria laughed.
“That wasn’t actually meant to be funny,” said Troy, verging on indignant.
“You’re not antisocial,” she replied, “and from what I’ve seen of you so far, you’re anything but a weakling. You’ve made it farther than guys a lot bigger than you.”
Troy had a hard time believing that. He wasn’t anything special. Just an average, nerdy teenager from an average American widowed father. He made good grades, but didn’t belong to any clubs or subscribe to any particular social circles. He kept mostly to himself, and since no one ever went out of their way to be his friend, he’d decided years ago that he didn’t need friends. He could get along just fine without them.
He stood. “Probably time I get moving before that magic water wears off and I dehydrate.” He did feel somewhat refreshed, even if his wrist still throbbed and his back was excruciatingly painful to the touch. After a while, he’d gotten so used to the sensations that they became easier to ignore.
“Oh right,” she replied, “we haven’t even talked about the Purple Room yet. It’s a sort of puzzle where you have to find the right—”
“It’s okay. I figured it out already.”
“You what? When did you figure it out?”
“Yesterday,” he said. “The answer’s kind of obvious when you think about it.”
He walked to the inner edge of the landing, which opened up to the empty shaft with no railing, when he stopped and turned back to the spot on the ground where he’d rested for the last two days.
“Almost forgot. Something I have to do…” He unlooped his belt and knelt down to the ground.
“What are you doing?” asked Victoria.
“I know what this is now,” he said.
Using the buckle, he scratched at the ground, scrawling numbers and letters to add to the collection already there.
“They’re names and birth dates, right?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Victoria softly. “Left by other Runners.”
There were dozens of them, and that was only here on this landing. He’d ventured up and down the steps a bit earlier in the day and discovered that every landing on the staircase—and even some of the stairs—was filled with these names and dates.
“I get it,” he said as he etched his date of birth into the stone beneath his name.
It was a record. The last written record that would ever exist of those who’d been brought to the Corridor. A way of leaving some piece of themselves behind, in case they didn’t make it, so that someone, sometime in the future, would find this place and know that they were here.
Satisfied with his addition to the floor, he put his belt back on and walked up to the edge of the landing. He leaned out a hair and looked down, as far down as his eyes would go. The stairs spiraled away and disappeared into the thick blackness some fifty or sixty feet beneath where he stood.
Troy froze. There! In the distance, that same sound he’d heard near the Orange Room’s Exit. It was faint, but it was definitely there. What was that? It faded nearly as fast as it began.
“Are you sure you know what—” Victoria began.
Without answering, he stepped off the ledge and fell straight down the center of the shaft, into the black.
TROY LANDED, NOT WITH a thud or a crack on hard ground, but with an enormous splash. He heard the announcement as he returned to the surface to tread water.
“Congratulations, Runner thirty-seven thirty-five. You have escaped the Purple Room.”
The water was cold, sending chills across his skin.
“Blue Room?” he asked between gasps of air.
“Yup,” said Victoria.
The fall had been a long one—longer than he’d expected. Soon after he hit the part of the spiral stairs that was cloaked in murky blackness, he’d spotted the Exit shining like a beacon, just a few dozen feet straight down. He waved his arm frantically so that his bracelet would activate the door before he slammed into it. Thankfully, this door opened in a bright flash, unlike the others, and he plunged straight through the opening. Another fifty feet or so of free-falling, and he was in the water.
Troy kicked with his feet to tread, but swimming was not one of his strengths.
“Any advice?” he asked, kicking like mad and holding his face as high above the water as he could manage.
“Don’t drown.”
“Did you forget the part,” he gasped, “about not being athletic?”
“Look around,” Victoria said. “There should be something there.”
Something like what? Couldn’t she be more specific? What was he supposed to find in a big, empty—
Troy spotted it. A thin sheet of plywood drifted in the water about ten feet to his right. He turned and paddled toward it as best he could. When he reached it, getting himself on top of the thing proved difficult. It looked so easy in the movies; he should’ve been able to just crawl up onto it.
Its thinness made the wood incredibly lightweight, so as soon as he grabbed the edge of it, his own weight pulled it down into the water.
“You’re going to have to do this very slowly and deliberately,” said Victoria. Then she added, “I warned you it would get harder.”
It took a good ten minutes of wrestling with the infuriating piece of driftwood, but he conquered it at last by lying exactly in the center of the board, holding it by both edges with his arms outstretched
. Unfortunately, his weight pushed the whole thing under the water by a few inches, so there was no way he could stay completely above the water. His soaked jeans added pounds to his thin frame, so he took them off and tossed them away to better his chances of floating—over Victoria’s objections. He argued that they were freezing his legs anyway, saturated as they were with the chilly water. Normally, he’d have been horrified to be out of the house in nothing but a pair of boxer briefs and socks, but bashfulness had lost its meaning in a place that was purely about survival.
He swallowed a few gulps of the water and found it fresh, clean, and ice cold. When his monstrous thirst was satisfied at last, he raised his head to look around at the huge body of water he’d been deposited onto.
“Whoa. I know this is just a Room, but seriously…whoa.”
How the Corridor was pulling this one off, he couldn’t imagine. Troy was drifting alone in what for all intents and purposes appeared to be a frigid ocean, stretching out into infinity in all directions. He knew the walls and the ceiling had to be there somewhere, but they were disguised somehow to help further the illusion that there was no land—or anything else—in sight. There was nothing save the water and the baby blue sky. Which of course was not the sky at all, but the Corridor’s ceiling.
Troy had never felt so small.
“What now?” His teeth chattered. “I don’t see an Exit.”
“Wait,” said Victoria.
It was amazing how easily he could read the worry in her voice. She wanted to say more, but wasn’t allowed. And she feared what was to come. He knew these two facts without having to ask.
Troy noticed his own breath condensing in the cold air as he exhaled. Had it been doing that the whole time?
“I hope it’s not under the water,” he said, trying to get her talking again. “I’m terrible at holding my breath.”
A silence that spoke loudly was his only response. Either it was an underwater challenge, or she couldn’t answer the question without giving too much away. Probably the latter, which he found even more troubling than the notion of swimming and diving.
It wasn’t until his shivering turned violent that he began to understand. It was far colder than it had been in the White Room. It was below freezing—maybe way below.
Corridor (A MythWorks Novel) Page 7