The Black Class (2)
I sat down and looked around. Every student filling the classroom sat facing forward in identical postures, without so much as a hair's difference among them.
Packed desk to desk, they looked almost like mannequins.
From my seat I stole glances at their backs — eyes flicking, bodies otherwise still as the dead. The pale necks and wrists visible above their uniforms had frozen as if they'd forgotten how to move.
It felt as though I alone were sitting in a classroom full of corpses.
I was trapped in that grotesque atmosphere, unable to so much as twitch, eyes rolling uselessly in my head, when the front door of the classroom opened and a figure the size of an adult man walked in.
It appeared to be dressed entirely in black, but the moment I tried to look more closely a stabbing pain lanced through my skull, and my gaze climbed toward its head.
...A mistake.
Pain hit at once, as if a needle had been driven straight into my brain.
The shape of the face before my eyes was dark — darker than dark. Darkness that seemed to spin and whirl in every direction made it impossible to look away.
Black vortices of every kind, with no origin I could name, moved from the left of the face past the right, from the inside out, from below to some other below — motion that exceeded understanding and recognition itself.
Nausea-inducing vertigo crashed over me, yet I could not turn my eyes away.
With a head that would not turn, I shifted only my pupils — and only then did I confront the dark-crimson hole fixed at the center of that black face.
At the same instant, from within that lightless, narrow abyss whose depth could not be known, that seemed ready to drop forever, countless dark-red lines unfolded in layer upon layer and contracted again in endless repetition, and something poured into my skull — thoughts I could not comprehend, thrashing and carving through my mind like a butcher's blade.
That day I learned that knowledge itself could take the form of violence.
In an instant my head began to throb.
Inside my skull every thought ran wild, as if dozens of imps were stomping and flying about in a frenzy.
My eyelids trembled violently.
...Wait. Eyelids?
Through the storm of overloaded thoughts whipping past and threatening to burst, one idea flashed sharp and sudden.
Leaving my frozen head and eyes alone, I closed my eyelids.
.
.
.
.
.
Silence arrived in an instant.
Like everything flung in every direction by a raging storm freezing midair as time itself stopped, the thoughts that had been exploding to the point of rupture went rigid.
The grotesque, incomprehensible thoughts that had been forced into me without cease had stopped — yet the throbbing in my head showed no sign of easing.
We hadn't even looked at each other. A one-sided glance from me alone had been enough to bring me to this.
I couldn't see it, but from the front of the classroom came the ugly scrape of a chair dragging across the floor, and the sound of something rising.
Then a bizarre noise, as if someone were working old, worn rubber this way and that to produce a voice in place of a throat.
"Attention. Salute the teacher."
At that strange voice my body finally moved again.
I could see nothing, but the moment I heard those words a cold sensation wrapped around the back of my neck.
Sensing my body was free to move, I bowed my head at once with my eyes still shut — and the sensation at my nape vanished. In its place, wet phlegmy sounds rose from every corner of the classroom.
In that state I opened my eyes again, and felt the countless thoughts that had hardened begin to settle, slowly.
Staring down at the cracked, aged wooden desk, I waited until a measure of calm returned, then carefully lifted my head.
The students still packed the classroom in their seats exactly as before — yet from places throughout the room came the sound of something dripping, drop by drop.
Unmoved by those chilling noises, the Black-Robed Teacher began to spit out grotesque syllables of screeching that no one could understand.
As the sound filled the classroom, the students all at once drew books from their desk drawers and opened them.
Textbooks?
I hurried to reach into my own drawer and rummage. The texture of a book cover met my fingertips.
I swept my hand across the bottom of the drawer and caught something long — a perfectly ordinary ballpoint pen.
I set the pen on the desk, reached back into the drawer, and felt around again. There seemed to be only the one book, so I pulled it out and placed it on the desk.
A completely ordinary black notebook.
When I opened it, the first page was packed dense with writing. At a glance it looked fine — but it was not writing meant to be read. Looking closer, each individual character was writhing and squirming on its own.
I flipped rapidly through the pages and found that from about the middle onward, empty space stretched on and on.
Keeping my head down, I used my peripheral vision to carefully survey the room. The students had all opened their notebooks and sat facing forward with pens in hand, so I assumed the same posture.
Then the Black-Robed Teacher standing before the lectern began the lesson, scraping the chalkboard and mixing in occasional one-syllable screeches.
The classroom filled with the sharp noise of chalk dragging across the board, and as if in answer the students began to scratch notes into their notebooks.
Until now the students had moved as one body, like twins, perfectly identical — but now each began to write in their own way.
The motion of raising and lowering their heads between board and notebook remained the same, yet some scrawled as if they meant to tear the paper apart, while others wrote with extreme slowness.
Their bodies all moved in lockstep, but from the wrists down they differed — and the sound of pens racing across paper in every different manner rose in a noisy clamor.
I too hurried to start writing, bringing my pen to the paper — but I had no idea what I was supposed to note down.
I tried glancing sideways and forward to see what the others were writing, but each time I did, it felt as though piercing gazes were multiplying from somewhere, one by one, and I quickly stopped.
Incomprehensible shapes and languages continued to appear on the board. The scratching of pens rose from every direction like a chorus. My head still throbbed.
As I sat there still writing nothing, the Black-Robed Teacher at the front began looking my way more and more often between stretches of the lesson.
I decided I had to put something down and began scribbling whatever came to mind.
First... the situation I was in.
This was clearly related to the Contract.
I couldn't remember every action I'd taken during the Escape Room, but I retained most of the content from the first run, and I held fragmented memories of the second runs as well, however sparse and broken.
Things I normally refused to recall — things that, for reasons I couldn't name, made me anxious and uneasy the moment I started to dredge them up, so I had buried them deep — I began to dig up one by one and set them down in writing.
The moment I started putting something on the page, the Black-Robed Teacher who had been watching this side seemed to lower its guard, and resumed the lesson while looking around the classroom.
As I wrote out everything I had experienced, a rough, hazy sense of it began to take shape.
For one thing... this classroom of unknown nature was probably a space of the same kind as those listed among the rooms I'd seen during the Escape Room.
Like the 666 Village I had escaped from.
If so, then a method of escape must exist here as well — and something might be present to guide me toward that method. That much I could reach.
I had just finished that thin chain of speculation when a bizarre bell sound suddenly burst from the dust-choked, discolored speaker mounted on the ceiling.
A hideous noise, as if every kind of sound had been mixed and forced out in a single instant, filled the classroom — then vanished just as suddenly. The Black-Robed Teacher standing at the front set down its chalk, strode to the front door, opened it, and disappeared.
Once the Teacher was gone, several students shot to their feet, opened the back door, and vanished.
The many who remained in their seats seemed content to stay put, so I continued filling in the half-remembered fragments that surfaced into the middle of what I'd written, trying to organize my thoughts — when noise began to rise from all over the classroom.
I lifted my head, and beheld a scene of madness so nauseating it defied description.
Each student acted as though they were simply doing what one naturally does, so at a glance it almost looked ordinary — but look closer and it was a tableau dragged straight out of hell and spread across the room.
The student sitting up front walked to the rear of the classroom and opened one of the lockers lined up in endless rows. He shoved both arms deep inside, pulled out dozens of small milk cartons, and carried them back to his seat with both arms full. He set them on the desk, then began peeling them open one by one and gulping them down.
When he had passed beside me with those cartons stacked in his arms, every single one of them was swollen and bloated, mottled with black spots, and within the sloshing that came with each step something inside the packs was knocking against the walls.
All of it was revolting — but more than that, even though every carton was still sealed shut, the terrible smell that hit me as he went by made it instantly clear that this was something that must never, under any circumstances, be consumed.
If that had been all, could I have managed to keep a straight face?
Another student calmly lifted a ballpoint pen and began working it over something laid on the desk. But it was not the scratch of pen on paper — it was a grotesque sound of leather tearing — and only then did I realize that what lay on the desk was not a book. It was the student's own arm.
Continuing as if nothing were wrong, the student seemed to find it insufficient and began shifting the pen farther up the arm.
No matter which way I turned my head, the classroom was filled to overflowing with acts of madness that only grew worse, never less.
It felt as though I had stepped into the very heart of hell. I forced my gaze back down onto the notebook on my desk — but the disgusting sounds stabbing into my ears I had no choice but to hear.
As the horrific noises kept coming, I found myself raising my hands and clutching my ears as if I meant to tear them off — and once more sound erupted from the speaker.