I read somewhere
that the people who design theme parks deliberately make them a little bit
confusing so they seem larger than they are. As I wandered through the overly
air conditioned maze of off white corridors, I idly wondered whether the guy
who’d designed this building had been thinking along those lines, or if he had
just been drunk. D100, D102, D157… Where in the heck was D105? The way things
had gone thus far today, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the room turned out
to be in a completely different building.
You’d think that
after a full month in Hymiath College, I’d be able to find my way around
campus, or at least successfully locate my classes. But no, I still got lost,
especially when the professor who taught my math class suddenly decided to move
the lecture to an entirely different section of this rat warren.
I sighed, and, at
the latest intersection, chose a random direction. If it had been any other
class, I would have given up by now, but I liked math, and I liked Professor
Nickleson, who taught it. He was confusing at times, but you could tell he
honestly loved his subject, and enjoyed teaching it. It annoyed me that I was
going to be late.
At least the building was mostly empty in the evening.
Wandering around lost in front of other people would be downright humiliating. I
shivered. Who had set the thermostat in this place, a penguin? In the winter,
cold would be understandable, if annoying, but it still just barely fall.
Suddenly one of my feet connected with something
slippery. I wind milled my arms, trying to keep my balance, before toppling
backwards onto my butt. “Ouch!” I yelped. That was going to leave a few
bruises. Nothing broken though, so I supposed I couldn’t complain.
Whatever had caused my fall was directly underneath me.
I stood, careful not to step on it again, and turned around to get a better
look. It was ice. There was actually a patch of ice on one tile. I shook my
head. It was cold in here, but not that cold.
Except, now that I thought about it, this hall was just
a bit chillier than the rest of the building. Odd. And the cold almost seemed
to be emanating from further along it, as if something in the building was
slowly sucking all the warmth out of the air. An air conditioning malfunction,
maybe?
I continued down the hallway. Soon I could see my breath
as a white mist in the air. Frost rimmed the edges of the windows in the office
doors, then, further down the hall, completely obscured them. Another patch of
ice had formed underneath a leaking water fountain. A chill traveled down my
spine that had nothing to do with the strange temperature. No air conditioner,
malfunctioning or not, could have caused this. Something very strange was going
on.
Or maybe there was nothing odd. Maybe someone had just
left an industrial sized freezer open somewhere. But what was a freezer doing
here? From the look of things, this section of hallway was mostly offices, so
unless some professor was really fond of ice cream…
I pulled my jacket tighter around me, stuck my hands in
my armpits, and started toward what seemed to be the source of the chill.
Curiosity itched inside me. What could be causing this? There had to be some
sort of logical explanation.
The door at the center of this strange chill looked more
or less ordinary. It was made of pale wood, with a window at about head height.
Blinds obscured the portions of the window that weren’t coated with frost. The
nameplate beside it was unreadable through the almost fuzzy white covering, but
the card hung beneath it proclaimed that the professor was in, and students
were welcome, so I supposed it wouldn’t be too rude if I peeked inside.
The frozen doorknob burned into my hand. I jerked it
back, muttering a curse word, and cradled it against my body. The icy metal had
left an imprint in my palm, like a branding iron in butter. “Stupid, stupid,
stupid!” I hissed.
I tucked my other hand into the sleeve of my shirt, and
then pulled the sleeve of my jacket down over it so my hand was protected by
two layers of fabric. Carefully I gripped the doorknob again.
I could still feel the chill through the cloth. The doorknob
turned, but it turned slowly, and it made a crackling noise, like the mechanism
inside was frozen. The door squeaked open reluctantly. Any lubrication on the
hinges had probably frozen into slimy ice.
“Professor Nickleson!” I exclaimed. Whatever I had
expected to see, this wasn’t it. The professor was seated at his desk, with his
back to me, facing the window like he was gazing out at the campus. Except there was no way he could see anything.
The window was covered in frost. He wasn’t even wearing a jacket. I wondered
how he could stand the frozen air. I mean, it was so cold that the cup of coffee
on his desk had frozen over. Even his glasses, resting up on the top of his bald
spot, were coated in white.
He hadn’t turned around, or anything, which was odd,
because there was no way he hadn’t heard me. “Professor? Are you all right?” I
asked. Still no response. Maybe he had fallen asleep, or something. I reached
out to touch his shoulder.
Slowly, ever so slowly, he tipped forward. His head
cracked against the edge of the desk, and then he fell to the floor, shattering
like one of my mother’s little porcelain dolls. A hand here, a leg there, a bit
of his chest off to the side…
I could see now that his skin had a nasty blue tinge to
it. And I could see his face. His lips were purple and swollen, and his tongue
was protruding, just a little, with a few ice crystals whitening the tip. His
light brown eyes stared up at me, wide with fear. There was a bit of red in the
whites where crystallizing blood had burst through capillaries.
There was a hand. On my foot. I could see his wedding
ring through the frost.
That’s about when I started to scream.
“So that’s what happened?” the detective asked me. He’d
told me his name at some point, but I couldn’t remember what it was. I nodded,
and pulled the blanket tighter around myself, shivering. We were outside the
building now, in a parking lot. I couldn’t really remember how I’d gotten
there. Everything between the hand on my foot and being examined by the
paramedics was a little fuzzy.
There were a few cop cars and an ambulance parked
nearby. The cop cars had their lights flashing, and the one that was just
arriving had its siren blaring, but the ambulance was dark and silent. The
paramedics were the ones who’d given me the blanket, after examining me and
before handing me over to the detective so I could tell him what happened.
“You okay, kid?” he asked.
I nodded.
“There’s a counseling center on campus, right? You
should go there, tomorrow, as soon as it’s open. Talk to someone. It’ll make
you feel better,” the detective told me.
“I’m fine,” I protested.
“Of course you are. Could you go anyways? Just in case
you’re not fine later? It’ll give me some peace of mind.”
Before I could answer, one of the cops, a black haired
woman who I thought was the coroner, called his name. “Detective Jackson!”
He patted me on the shoulder. “I’ll be right back, kid.
Don’t go anywhere.”
As he jogged over to join her, I glanced around the
parking lot. There were lots of police officers milling around the parking lot,
doing all the various things the police did after a murder. One near me was
talking to the custodian who’d called 911 after hearing me scream. The
custodian looked as shaken as I felt. Apparently it’d been quite a scream.
Pretty much everyone in the building had heard it. As far as I could tell from
the various conversations around me, that
was the only thing anyone had heard. No one had seen anything odd, either,
aside from the frost and ice, and, of course, the dead body.
The dead body. Professor
Nickleson’s body. I’d been told that there was no way he was alive when I’d
broken him, that the human body couldn’t survive being frozen like that. I knew
that already, of course. I remembered reading somewhere that, when cells are
frozen, they either burst as the liquid inside them freezes, or they are
crushed by the ice forming outside of them, so of course the freezing killed
him. Of course it did. I didn’t have anything to do with his death. And yet…
I couldn’t stop that awful moment from playing again and
again inside my head. He was normal, he was fine, and then I touched him, and he
was in pieces on the floor. I shuddered.
Detective Jackson patted me on the shoulder again. I
jumped, startled. I hadn’t seen him come back.
“I think we’re done,” he told me. “Unless, of course,
you have anything else you’d like to tell me?”
I shook my head.
“Alright,” he said, handing me a piece of paper. “Here’s
my number, in case you think of anything else. That’s my official cell. I’ve
always got it with my when I’m on duty. Do you have a way to get home?”
I nodded. “I live on campus.”
“Good,” he said, then smiled reassuringly and added,
“Don’t worry. We’ll catch whoever did this to your teacher. Now, you go home
and get some sleep, alright?”
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