Pass/Fail (2012)

by David Wellington

  Without a word she led him deep inside the school. They passed the room where he’d taken the galvanometer test and turned a corner—then stopped. Jake remembered Cody saying that when he’d chased the Proctor after that test, the Proctor had turned around this corner and just vanished. Now Jake understood why. There had to be a secret door here—a way for the Proctors to come and go without being seen by any students other than the Pass/Fail candidates.

  Jake’s “mom” stepped up to a row of lockers and started turning the dials of their combination locks. She worked quickly and he tried to see what numbers she set the dials to but couldn’t, not in the gloomy hallway. When she was done four lockers slid forward silently, then shifted over to one side, revealing a very normal-looking door set into the wall behind.

  A sign on the door read: ATTENTION PASS/FAIL STUDENTS: OPENING THIS DOOR WILL RESULT IN AN AUTOMATIC FAILURE CONDITION.

  Chapter Forty-One

  “You see?” she asked. “I told you this wouldn’t get you anywhere. If you open that door it means certain death.”

  Jake considered that. “That’s why you’re opening it,” he told her. “Cheating is permitted.”

  She grumbled a little but he took a step toward her and then she shrugged. “Alright,” she told him. “Just let me put my mask on.” She took it out of her purse and slipped it over her face. Once again she was a Proctor, indistinguishable from the rest. Without hesitation she turned the knob to the right. The door didn’t open immediately. Instead a tiny hatch set into the O in AUTOMATIC flipped open and a puff of yellowish gas spurted out. It sprayed across the Proctor’s mask.

  Jake breathed through his sleeve as the gas dissipated around him. It stung his eyes and made the back of his throat burn. Maybe it was poisonous, or maybe it was just meant to put him to sleep until a Proctor could come and finish him off. He held his breath as long as he could, either way.

  “Okay,” he said, when he had to breathe in again. He didn’t pass out or die so he thought he would be alright. “Okay. Open it, now.”

  The Proctor hadn’t died either. Apparently there was some kind of air filter built into the mask. She turned the knob to the left and it swung open. Beyond lay a flight of stairs leading down toward a well-lighted corridor.

  The Proctor started to walk through the door but Jake grabbed her arm and pulled her back. “Oh, no,” he said. “There’s no way I’m going to let you go down there first. No chance for you to warn them I’m coming. In fact—you’re staying here. I’ll find my own way in.”

  The Proctor said nothing. She just stepped to one side to let him pass.

  Jake hurried down the stairs. They went down farther than he expected—maybe two floors down, maybe three, until he was below the level of the school’s basement. Behind him the door swung shut and clicked as if it were being locked behind him. This didn’t surprise him.

  The corridor he found himself in was carpeted so his feet made no sound as he headed forward. It was long enough he couldn’t see where it ended. On either side, wide doorways led off the main hall, but they had neither doorknobs nor signs describing what lay beyond them.

  The telephone buzzed in Jake’s pocket. He’d forgotten he still had it. He considered smashing it against the wall or just leaving it behind him but he supposed that would be a bad way to impress the Youth Steering Committee. He had to show them he was a mature, intelligent person worth listening to. He kind of wished he’d had a chance to shower.

  Ahead of him the corridor was coming to an end. He’d been walking quite a while, though he had no good way of measuring how far he’d traveled. He thought he’d passed at least twenty of the featureless doors but he wasn’t about to go back and check.

  When he reached the end of the hall with no sign of a secret meeting place of the YSC, he sighed and wondered if he’d been tricked. He would hardly put it past the woman who’d claimed to be his mother—she was a Proctor after all. Tricks and lies were their stock in trade. He turned around, intending to try the various doors he’d passed, without a lot of hope. Then he noticed that one of them had turned red. It hadn’t been red before—it must have changed while his back was turned. He approached it and saw that a row of red lights had lit up all along its frame, making it look as if it had changed color. Jake touched the door and the red lights went out again, but the door also slid open, disappearing into the wall, and a breath of cold air washed over him. The room beyond was completely dark so he couldn’t see what, if anything, it contained.

  Maybe—maybe it hadn’t been a trick. Maybe this was where the YSC met, after all. Maybe if he stepped inside the lights would come on and he would be surrounded by men and women sitting around a horseshoe-shaped table. Maybe they would be wearing masks like Proctors, but gold instead of silver. Maybe they would ask him why he’d come, and he would tell them, and—

  Jake frowned. He didn’t understand where any of that came from. Whenever he’d imagined the YSC before, he’d thought of them as a glorified and far more homicidal version of the PTA. The image of the gold masks had been so vivid, though. Was it something he’d dreamed?

  He took a step into the room. The temperature dropped instantly and a cold, damp breeze blew through his hair. He took another step and—

  —he was falling, dropping through empty space, nothing below him, nothing he could see on any side—

  His hands caught the edge of a sharp drop-off and his body slammed against a wall. He looked up and saw the door he’d passed through as a rectangle of light in a back abyss. Below him—he couldn’t say. There had to be a floor down there somewhere, but how far down? A few feet, or hundreds? It was as if he’d walked into an empty elevator shaft.

  The door started to slide closed again. It would crush his fingers and make him fall. Jake pulled himself up and rolled back into the well-lighted hallway just as the door slammed shut behind him.

  The phone in his pocket started buzzing once more. Jake caught his breath, then flipped it open and held it to his ear.

  “Hello, Jake,” Mr. Zuraw said. “Are you ready for your next test?”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Jake sat down hard on the carpeted floor of the underground hallway. This wasn’t fair, he thought. He’d been so close. He’d been on his way to see the Youth Steering Committee, the people directly responsible for his messed-up life. The people who had ordered him to be cloned eight times, and each time tested until he failed and was put down. He was going to convince them, after so long, to stop.

  Instead—as he supposed he should have guessed—it was just one more test.

  “Jake?” Mr. Zuraw said, his voice sounding very small and far away. “Are you there?”

  Jake had dropped the phone. He picked it up and placed it against his ear. “I’m here,” he said. He didn’t want to talk to Mr. Zuraw. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. But he had no options left. He had to pass this test, if he wanted to live. That meant he needed to pay close attention to what Mr. Zuraw said next, and do exactly as he was told. He got up and started back the way he’d come, intending to climb the stairs and force his way through the secret door. When he arrived at the end of the corridor, however, where the stairs had been, he found only a dead end—a wall that looked like it had always been there.

  “The way you came in is sealed off now,” Mr. Zuraw told Jake. “You’ll have to find another way out of this maze.”

  Jake scowled at the phone. “What is this place?” he demanded. “I thought—”

  “You really thought the YSC met in some underground cave?” Mr. Zuraw asked, with a laugh. “Jake, they’re some of the most important men and women in the country. They can meet anywhere they like. Why would they choose that? No, this maze is something I cooked up myself, a while back. Whenever a Pass/Fail student threatens a Proctor and demands to be taken somewhere, this is where they bring him. It cost us an enormous amount of money to dig these corridors under the school but it’s proved to be a very wise investment. Two of your predecessors
died here. Tell me, what do you see?”

  “I see a hallways, with a lot of doors,” Jake told him. “They’re all the same. White. No doorknobs.”

  “Yes, and now?”

  Jake looked up. Two of the doors had lit up, one with yellow lights and one with blue. Jake told Mr. Zuraw what he saw.

  “Behind one of those doors,” Mr. Zuraw said, “is a vat full of sulphuric acid. You won’t see it until the floor opens and drops you into it. Behind the other door is your next objective. If you choose the correct door you’ll be one step closer to getting out of here.”

  “How am I supposed to choose?” Jake asked. He knew the tests were never arbitrary. You never had to resort to just guessing between two options. At least, not if you figured out the trick.

  “Oh, this one’s going to be easy,” Mr. Zuraw promised. “You’re going to have help. I have a student here, one of your classmates, who can see what’s behind the doors. They’ll tell you which way to go. Here. Let me put them on the line.”

  Who would it be? Cody, who Jake had just fought with? Megan, who thought he was a jerk? He could still trust them, he thought. They wouldn’t let him die.

  He didn’t recognize the voice he heard, though. At least not immediately. “Hey, dude,” a boy said. “Weird. I can see you on this TV. Say something.”

  “Who is this?” Jake asked, with as friendly a tone as he could manage.

  “Dude, you know me. I caught you in the janitor’s closet the other day. And remember when I caught you jerking off in class that one time?”

  “I wasn’t jerking off,” Jake said. “I was sweaty and out of breath because a guy with a gun had just chased me halfway across the school.” He knew exactly who he was talking to, then. It was the fat kid who always wore a black t-shirt. The one who had made fun of him at every turn, who had always been around at exactly the wrong moment. “What’s your name?” Jake asked.

  “You never even bothered to learn my name?” the kid asked. “Man, that’s just rude. I know you’re Jake something.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jake said. “You’re absolutely right. I should have been more friendly. Do you think we can start over?”

  “I guess. It’s Brent Scovy. Okay? Don’t forget it. So what’s going on, here? You’re in some kind of trouble, Mr. Zuraw told me so. He says you need my help. I told him you were a dickhead and as far as I cared you could just die down there.”

  “I don’t think you meant that literally,” Jake said. “Did you? Because it turns out, that’s a definite possibility. I need you to tell me what’s behind the blue and yellow doors. If you don’t tell me, I could get hurt.”

  “Yeah, I can see two rooms. There’s three TVs in here. How awesome would that be, to have three TVs? You could watch three different channels at once. Like, football on one channel, and that one show about the supermodels, and—”

  “Brent? I need you to focus,” Jake said. “I really need you to focus. I have to get out of here.”

  “Cool,” Brent told him. “That’s cool. Except—what’s in it for me?”

  “What?” Jake asked. “You get to save somebody from getting killed. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Sure. Except it seems to me, I can get something more, too. I want you to do all my homework for the rest of the year. Zuraw says you’re really smart.”

  “Fine. Of course. I’ll be happy to.”

  Brent’s voice grew sly. “And I want five hundred dollars.”

  Jake didn’t have that kind of money but he said, “You’ve got it. Now. Do I want the blue door or the yellow door?”

  “The blue one,” Brent said, sounding happy. “Yeah.”

  Jake walked over to the blue door and touched it. It opened effortlessly, sliding back into the wall.

  “It’s totally cool back there,” Brent said, as Jake started through the door into the room beyond. A buzzing red EXIT sign hung over a door at the far end of the room. “There’s like a collapsing floor in there, and an acid pit.”

  Jake froze in place, one foot still out in the hallway. He’d been about to step fully inside the room and let the door close behind him.

  “Dude, I totally got you,” Brent said. “You actually want the yellow door.”

  “Good one,” Jake said.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Behind the yellow door was another corridor, lined again with featureless white doors. As Jake stepped inside, the door behind him slammed shut with little warning. Two doors in the new corridor lit up, one yellow and one blue.

  Brent told Jake over the phone that there were whirling saw blades behind the yellow door. Jake went immediately to the blue door and touched it. It opened effortlessly, revealing a third, identical corridor lined with white doors.

  This time the yellow door hid a room full of poison gas. Jake stopped and asked, “How can you tell what’s back there? Can you see the gas?”

  “No, dude. There’s writing on the screen that says ‘poison gas’. They’re all like that. The blue door leads to an empty room.”

  Jake thought about that. “What can you actually see? Can you see me, like on video?”

  “That’s the middle screen. The other two are just like, a map. It’s all green lines and the writing.”

  Jake thought about that. He’d thought the test was to learn to trust Brent and surrender his own natural impulses, which were to find his way out with no help. But what if this test measured something else? What if it measured his ability to find shortcuts through pointless tasks? “So for all you know there’s no gas in there at all. It could be completely empty.”

  “You’re the one who has to open the door, man.”

  Jake supposed Brent had a point.

  The next corridor had only a blue door. Jake asked Brent if it was safe, and he said yes. Before he went to the blue door, however, Jake tried touching some of the white doors. Most of them didn’t respond at all, but two of them slid open. Behind one was a room full of cardboard boxes. He opened one experimentally and found it contained hundreds of pale blue envelopes. No PASSes or FAILs, however. It couldn’t be that easy. The other door opened onto a small office, with no furniture except a desk and a chair. There were no decorations on the wall, nor was there a telephone on the desk. There was a thin plastic box—a computer, Jake thought, like the one in Mr. Zuraw’s office. He tried logging into it but the userid and password he’d used before didn’t work.

  “Hey, guy, where are you? You’re off my maps and stuff,” Brent said. “Did you sneak off to go to the bathroom?”

  “Something like that,” Jake told him. He’d never lowered the portable phone from his ear. His arm was starting to cramp up but he didn’t dare lose contact with Brent.

  He stepped back out into the hall and touched the blue door. It led, as expected, to another white corridor lined with white doors. When the door had closed behind Jake, two doors lit up, one blue, one yellow.

  “This one just has an empty shaft,” Brent told him.

  “Which one?” Jake asked. “Blue or yellow?” While he was asking he walked down the hall touching white doors.

  “You know, I’m getting bored. Maybe I’ll tell you the wrong one,” Brent told him. “Just to see what happens.”

  “Please don’t do that, Brent,” Jake begged.

  “I was just kidding. Hey. You’re with that Megan Gottschalk chick, right?”

  Jake frowned. Then he touched another white door. Nothing. “I was,” he said.

  “What’s she like?”

  “She’s—” Jake thought about it. “She’s very honest. And extremely smart.”

  “What does she look like naked? Are they big? Are they firm?”

  Jake fought back what he wanted to say, which was “none of your goddamned business.” He was totally reliant on Brent—without him he could be dead the next time he opened a door. “I never got to find out,” he said, instead. He controlled himself, fighting down his anger, then touched another white door. It slid open.

 
; “So you two aren’t together any more? Is that what you said?”

  Jake stepped inside a room barely larger than a closet. It turned out, in fact, to be a closet. “That’s right,” he said, barely paying attention. The closet was full of double-breasted navy blue suits on coat hangers. A box to one side held pairs of black leather gloves. There was a shelf at the back of the closet, just above eye height. Jake stood up on tiptoes to see what was there. He had an idea.

  “Would you be totally freaked out if I made a play for her?” Brent asked.

  Jake nearly fell over. Instead he said, “If you think she’d be interested, be my guest.” He grabbed the shelf and chinned himself on it, and found himself looking at his own reflection. There were half a dozen mirrored masks sitting on the shelf.

  It had occurred to Jake that there might be no end to the corridors. That Brent might, through no fault of his own, be leading Jake in endless circles. It had also occurred to him that Mr. Zuraw might want him dead. He had seen too much—made too much trouble. What better way to eliminate a nuisance like Jake than to send him into a pointless death maze, and claim later that he’d just made a mistake?

  He also remembered that the first trap room he’d seen, the one with the acid pit, had contained an exit door.

  “Okay,” Jake said, stepping back out into the hall. He had a mask in his free hand. He hadn’t bothered with the suits or the gloves. “Yellow or blue?”

  “Blue,” Brent said.

  Jake touched the blue door. It opened. He stepped through, into another white corridor.

  In that corridor, the blue door led to a set of whirling saw blades. Jake took the yellow door. In the next corridor the blue door led to an empty shaft with spikes at the bottom. In the corridor after that, Brent told him that the yellow door hid a room full of poison gas.