Corridor of Madness
A dizzying web of shadows spun after the ghost as it tore through the corridor, shrieking at a pitch that stabbed the ears, smashing everything in reach until my head throbbed with the chaos.
After a long stretch of unchecked frenzy, the ghost gradually slowed. Not because its rage had cooled — the way it moved made it clear it was hunting for something, anything, on which to pour that fury out.
When the manic thrashing finally passed, the corridor looked as if it had taken a direct hit from an airstrike: gouged, shattered, wrecked end to end.
"Kieeeeeek! Kreeeek! Krek—geeeeeeeek!"
Spitting rage-choked moans, the ghost began to stalk about, clicking its feet in sharp, irritable taps. Then, as if something had suddenly clicked, it fixed on a direction — eyelids still sealed shut, unable to open properly — and started forward with absolute certainty.
In a corridor drowned in perfect silence save for those footsteps, the rope tied at the window frame swayed under its own weight and gave a metallic groan.
Creak… creak…
A tiny sound, yet in the hush it cracked like thunder. The bloody male student and I had made plenty of noise fighting here, which had surely drawn the ghost this far — but after realizing it had been tricked midway, it had come hunting again. That much was certain.
From the stairwell all the way to this spot, the cigarette smell we had laid as a decoy would have saturated every inch of our path. Which meant, just as Choi Ji-hyeon had feared, the ghost would now treat that reek as one of our scents.
But every shirt soaked in cigarette smoke had already been knotted into rope, and the person who reeked of it strongest was the bloody male student — the one who had been chain-smoking nonstop since the stairs. And right now I was covering Choi Ji-hyeon with my own body.
If my guess was right, a ghost that had already been fooled once on the stairs would most likely read my scent as another trap. The easiest way to tell us apart — its eyes — I had just ruined. So where would its footsteps go…?
I tracked the clicking steps with my eyes. Now and then the ghost cocked its head this way and that, sweeping its front legs — black-red with dried blood — like a careful spider, and walked straight toward the window where the rope was tied.
If it could have checked with its eyes, it might have known at once that what hung there was not human. But the blind ghost began to climb down the rope.
The male student, by now a shape of sodden meat, was sliding down the rope and staining it with blood when he saw the ghost and screamed. Pitifully for him, two dress shirts were nowhere near enough rope to reach the ground below. With no way out and nowhere to run, he faced the ghost and let out a scream that bubbled with bloody phlegm.
I took that scream as my signal, seized Choi Ji-hyeon's wrist, and ran.
"Run!"
In the corridor the spider had left behind, the lights flickered as if they might die at any second. We sprinted like mad, hit the stairs, grabbed the railing, and started down.
The scenery whipping past was the measure of how hard our feet were driving. Each flight felt like several floors stacked into one endless descent, and a hollow exhaustion began to set in. In the gloom I could see only five or six steps ahead; I had no idea how many I had already taken, or how far the stairs still ran. All that grew was the frantic rasp of our breathing and the tight, nervous patter of our steps.
Or was it only the tinnitus getting worse? From somewhere far below and far above, a woman's high scream — the kind that raised gooseflesh just to hear — drifted faintly up the shaft.
On those seemingly endless stairs, the mechanical drive of my legs suddenly buckled against a landing that appeared out of nowhere. I swung wide around the hand on the rail, trying to keep my speed and drop to the next flight — and a grip on my collar yanked me back hard.
Clunk.
For a strange floating instant I hung in the air on Choi Ji-hyeon's pull from behind, then our bodies tangled and we crashed across the floor in a noisy tumble.
Crash-thud-thud-thud!
"The floor. Sign. There."
Even sprawled and tangled, her words broke apart for lack of breath. I followed her trembling finger and found the floor marker stuck upside down on the landing.
[2F / 3F]
I stared at it and still could not grasp what was wrong, sitting there blank until Choi Ji-hyeon pulled me up and we started climbing again — and only then did the stair warning from the Survivor's Record surface in my mind.
Our lungs already burned as if someone had poured acid into them; our legs went soft and reeled with every step. Still we forced the stairs and reached the next floor — the second.
"Ueeeegh. Gek."
"Eugh. Uup. Ueeegh."
Hunched over, dry-heaving past our limits, Choi Ji-hyeon and I waited only until our breath showed the faintest sign of recovery, then without a word from either of us we were running the second-floor corridor again.
Speed was the whole of the plan I had made. Fortunately Choi Ji-hyeon had taken it in; she stuck close without a single complaint.
In the dark corridor empty of both the ghost and the bloody male student, countless pockets of darkness waited where the faint light from the windows could not reach. Those scattered darks, flung like blood-spatters down the hall, numbered the same as the dangers crouched inside it.
I forced my scattered mind back together through the ragged breathing, nerves strung tight as I ran.
One. Two.
Every time we passed a stretch the light did not touch, I hauled my slipping tension back up by force. There was no telling what might come from where. Eyes sweeping every direction, I pushed on. A heat like fire climbed my throat; I ran dry-heaving. Sand seemed to scrape the scorched lining of my throat, and through the cough that burst out of me, through the squint of my vision, I saw a pale hand reach from the ominous dark under a window, under a pillar.
I grabbed the strap of the bag on my back with one hand and swung it hard.
Thud.
The heavy bag struck the hand dead-on. The reaching arm snapped aside with a grotesque shriek.
"Kiiiiiiiiii!"
It sounded like some insect screaming out of a nightmare. Choi Ji-hyeon and I ran, and ran again.
As we fled, the long row of classroom windows began to rattle and shake each time we passed. The trembling only grew, as if the glass meant to shatter, then started to bang in earnest.
Bang!
A classroom door burst open without warning and hundreds of sheets of paper came pouring out in a cascade. Gray parental notices, blotched and stained all over with a wet red, stuck to one another and tore free again at random, fluttering down to pile on the corridor floor like rotting leaves.
Something rang sharp inside my skull.
Danger.
"Don't step on them! Jump!"
I shouted with everything I had and vaulted the gray trap. I cleared it by a hair — but Choi Ji-hyeon, whether from exhaustion or a clumsy leap, caught her heel on the notices as she landed.
"Kyaak!"
A single scream, and her foot was sucked under the papers. I clenched the hand I was holding and hauled with everything I had. It was not enough. Sweat of pure tension slicked my grip; she kept slipping. My body moved before the thought finished forming. I laced my fingers through hers, pulled her tight against me, and rolled hard across the floor, spinning with a violence that felt ready to shatter my own ankle.
Choi Ji-hyeon, locked in my arms, was dragged free of the antlion pit of paper by my weight, and we tumbled down the corridor together. How many times we rolled, I could no longer count.
Breathing in and out in violent gasps, stuffing air into a body that had long since passed its limit, I still could not get enough; oxygen never reached my head, and the world spun. Blood seemed to drain from my skull; my vision narrowed; a blackout-throb beat closer and farther, closer and farther. My whole body had gone past pain into a deep, pulsing ache. I wanted to let go of everything, to quit — and each time I started to go slack, some impact sent a current of searing pain through me, and strength leaked back into my limbs from somewhere. The very pain that was breaking me was, ironically, what dragged me conscious again and forced me upright.
Choi Ji-hyeon had left one shoe in the paper heap; she limped forward now. We ran on, shuddering at a corridor that seemed to grow madder by the second.
Just a little more!
Almost there!
Even in the far dark where the eye could not reach, something thrashing and writhing made itself felt. A crawling, insect-under-the-skin revulsion climbed my body; I shuddered and desperately raked the window line with my eyes.
From the far end of the corridor, from a dark so deep nothing inside it could be known, voices burst out — our voices, mine and Choi Ji-hyeon's, mimicking the words we had just shouted, repeating them back in perfect copies that rang down the hall.
I lifted my head toward the source of that sound and stared into the dark. Far off, in a stretch of corridor black as pitch where no light reached, a red glow and a yellow glow were spinning, spinning.
The corridor, packed with horrors, seethed with malice. It was like a landscape of insects writhing over one another; nausea surged up my throat. Things closing in from every side. Body and mind growing tight. Breath endlessly blocked. A smothering pressure. A fainting, airless crush. All of it rushed in at once.
Even so, somehow I held on to consciousness, and before those things steeped in grotesque madness could catch us, we reached the window I had aimed for.
Without room to think, I poured every scrap of the madness and irritation filling my skull straight into my arm and smashed the glass.
Crash!
A clean, ringing shatter — and large and small transparent shards burst outward into the open air. Into the stifling corridor, cold air flooded in, sharp enough to ache in the chest.