The Never-Ending Class (6)
The grotesque peal of the bell faded, and once again the majority of the students rose from their seats and began forming a line to leave. As before, a handful remained motionless in their chairs. This time, I chose to stay seated as well.
The others moved their legs in perfect unison, like a single organism, and filed out through the rear door. Only the sound of their footsteps lingered as they vanished down the corridor. The bizarre procession was gone, and for a moment an unpleasant, arid silence settled over the classroom — but only for a moment. Soon the remaining students began to gather in twos and threes and drift out through either the front door or the back.
The last one left was a student seated far ahead of me. He reread his notebook with a nervous, almost compulsive intensity, as if checking it one final time, then sprang up and slipped quickly through the front door.
…Now I was the only one left in the room.
I stood at once and strode toward the desk of the student who had lingered longest. After sitting through the entire fourth period, my body protested — muscles and joints creaking so hard I nearly lost my balance and staggered — but I caught myself and kept walking.
Perhaps because dozens of students had been packed so tightly into these seats, the classroom looked unnervingly vast. As I crossed it, my feet snagged on drying dark-red stains painted across the floor, on clotted lumps of milk riddled with small black writhings I had no desire to understand, and on other horrors I refused even to imagine. I ignored the shudders climbing my legs and pressed on.
Even walking that short stretch wrapped my whole body in revulsion. I gagged several times before I finally reached my destination. In reality it could not have taken more than thirty seconds, yet it felt as though I had been walking for minutes.
The instant I arrived, I snatched the notebook from the desk without a second’s hesitation and began flipping through the pages. And there it was. The first few sheets confirmed that my theory had been correct; after that I abandoned any pretense of careful reading and simply riffled the rest of the pages past my eyes. In a matter of seconds I had skimmed every leaf. Purpose fulfilled, I set the notebook back on the desk and started for my own seat.
I was about halfway back when I noticed the full-length mirror hanging at the far rear of the classroom. The figure inside it seemed to be walking toward me even as I walked away from the front of the room — an optical trick that set my nerves on edge. Something about the reflection was so unpleasant that I chose to lower my head and keep walking. Then the nightmare of the floor and the hellish glimpses inside the book bags hanging from the desks forced my eyes forward again.
The me beyond the glass was close enough now that I could make out every shift of expression.
…Something felt wrong. I looked more carefully, and the reason became clear.
My throat was collared in livid bruises, as if I were wearing a scarf of them, and my left eye was painted a raw, arterial red, every vessel on full display. I had already guessed as much from the pain that accompanied each regression, but the constraints were real after all.
Even so, those same constraints yielded information. The mold-like bruises encircling my entire neck — and the dull ache that went with them — had almost certainly been left by the death I suffered the last time I joined the wrong line of students leaving after fourth period. The marks suggested my head had been torn free, or my throat cut clean through. The scarlet web flooding my left eye was the rupture that came from forcing myself to read the Rule Manual. The cause of death the Black-Robed Teacher had given me — that splitting headache — left no visible scar; whatever mark it made was hidden beneath my hair. Even now, faint echoes of those pains flared whenever I moved the damaged places.
…On second thought, this was not something I could discuss so calmly.
Still turning the ideas over, I lifted my left hand toward my throat. In the mirror, the other me raised its right hand toward the same place. I stopped halfway. I looked at my own hand, then at the mirror, then back again.
My hand was empty. The hand in the mirror held a brick.
I leaned in for a closer look; the reflection leaned in as well, studying me with equal care. We stared at each other like two people hunting for the difference in a pair of nearly identical pictures — and that was when I saw it. Unlike me, the figure in the glass was smiling, faintly.
Before the thought could finish forming, a full-body jolt of dread sent me leaping sideways, out of the mirror’s frame. Through the blur of motion I glimpsed the reflection belatedly trying to complete the raise of its arm. I cleared the glass before it could finish. From the other side came a sickening, delayed sound of something being crushed — yet my body remained intact.
Crash!
I tangled with a chair and desk and went down in a clattering heap. The one mercy was that I landed across the chair rather than flat on the filthy floor. Careful not to let my reflection reappear in the glass, I got to my feet and righted the furniture. Every instinct screamed to leave it and race back to my seat, but this classroom seemed like the kind of place where a single wrong action invited death. The compulsion to restore everything exactly as it had been took hold. For all I knew, once lunch ended the students whose desk and chair I had toppled might return, see the mess, and decide to kill me on the spot.
Some unidentifiable sticky fluid had smeared across the wood, forming shapes that made my stomach turn. I clenched my teeth, set the desk and chair back in place, and returned to my own seat. The moment I dropped into it, a long breath escaped me of its own accord.
No students. No teacher. And still, after only a few minutes of moving around, I had nearly been killed by whatever lived inside that mirror.
I steadied my uselessly racing breath and glanced back at the place where I had fallen. The sides of the chair and desk that had touched the floor now trailed long strands of that same nameless liquid, as if spider silk had grown up from the ground and glued itself to the wood.
…It would be fine. It had to be.
Barely a few minutes seemed to have passed, yet the instant I sat down the bell rang through the empty classroom as if it had been waiting for me. Moments later the front and rear doors vomited students back into the room in a sudden flood. Most of them returned painted red — uniforms, bodies, faces, all of it. The rest carried stenches of rot and scorched flesh that were scarcely any better.
(Fortunately, the student whose desk I had knocked over came back as well. Either he noticed nothing amiss or simply did not care; he sat down as if nothing had happened.)
Nearly everyone had filed in when the student whose notebook I had checked appeared through the front door and hurried to his seat. Alone among them, he looked almost clean. He sat and faced forward in the same blank posture as the others, but his shoulders rose and fell hard enough to show he had been running until the last second.
I wanted to watch him longer, but a second bell cut the thought short. The front door opened, and the Black-Robed Teacher walked in.
I was used to it by now. I pulled out my notebook and the Rule Manual at once and prepared to take notes. Then I opened the Manual.
Through a series of private experiments I had discovered several of its functions. If I fixed in my mind the page I wanted and ran a fingertip along the closed edge where the fore-edge met the bottom, a sensation like a nerve being tugged would prick my fingertip at a certain point. Opening the book there brought me exactly to the place I had imagined.
What I wanted now was the section covering the desk I had walked to during the lunch break after fourth period. I watched for a moment as the Manual perfectly described every action I had taken, then turned the page. Because the Rule Manual recorded my every deed, the contents of that student’s notebook were transcribed here in full — even the pages I had only rifled past without truly reading.
Why had I chosen that particular notebook to copy into the Manual? Simple. When I had died mid-reading and every student and the teacher had turned to stare at me, that one student alone had not looked back. His shoulders had only trembled.
And after walking all the way to his desk to confirm it, I knew: the Survivor’s Record of this Neapolitan horror story was that notebook.
Listening to the Black-Robed Teacher’s skull-splitting screech — a sound that still made my head throb no matter how many times I heard it — I began to read the Survivor’s Record.