Corridor (A MythWorks Novel)

by Robin Parrish

  The last thing he needed was her freaking out, filling his ears with awkward chatter about how sorry she was he had to go through this, and all that.

  Was there stuff flying around in all directions throughout this entire Room? He felt certain it was. But the fog obscured his view of it, and with the whole Room on “mute,” he had nothing left to go on. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He had his senses of touch and smell. Smell was of no use here, but what if his sense of touch compensated for his losses by taking note of the movement or displacement of air around him, or the rumbling of the ground beneath his feet?

  “Let’s see, where was I...Merrick—he tried attaching his arm wire thing to one of the Exit doors, but it gave him an electrical shock. A strong one. Merrick was the one I gave too much information to about what was to come, so the Corridor cut off our ability to talk to each other. But I was still his Conduit. I had to watch as he tried to Run the Corridor alone…. It was terrible. He got as far as the fire maze in the Orange Room, but...he couldn’t find the way out.”

  Victoria didn’t have to say anymore. He remembered the fire maze and its growing flame walls all too well. If this Merrick didn’t find the solution to the maze in time, then the walls must have consumed him, burning him alive.

  Troy’s thoughts turned again to Victoria. How awful it must have been for her to watch this young man catch on fire and burn to cinders. No wonder she hadn’t wanted to get to know Troy back in the White Room. There’s only so many times a person can watch people die before being numbed by it.

  Something brushed by his good arm, making him drop the water canister. But he picked it back up and kept moving.

  “My third Runner was Jack. He was from 2003, and he said he was an actor. But he was only sixteen, so I had a hard time believing that. His moment of death was due to taking too many pills at one time. Why anyone would do that, I don’t know.”

  Troy knew why. Teen suicide was all too common in his day and age.

  “Anyway, the drugs were still in his system when he arrived here, so he didn’t make it very far. Jack thought of himself as very smart and funny, but I didn’t get most of his jokes. He was likeable, though. Charming. Easy to talk to, even though all he ever talked about was himself—at least for the few minutes that I knew him. He fell from one of the platforms in the White Room.”

  Again, Troy wondered what the point of the Corridor was. What was the pattern lurking underneath? Something was there, some key piece of the puzzle that would make it all fit.

  He stopped to gag for a moment, spitting up brown silt and sludge. It looked like the watery sock covering his mouth and nose wasn’t offering as much protection as he’d hoped. He blinked back the painful sensation from his eyes and kept walking.

  “My fourth Runner, Preston, was a soldier from 1944 who’d been drafted into the Army. He talked about a great war that involved most of the world, centered around some madman in Germany. He’d wanted to do his part in the war effort, but he just wasn’t very good at soldiering. His moment of death came on the battlefield—on a beach in France—just minutes after he arrived there.

  “Preston tried his best to survive the Corridor, but he was terribly uncoordinated. He actually made it to the Purple Room, but not before suffering horribly. You don’t need to hear the details just now. My heart really went out to him, I wanted so badly to help him. But he agonized for days in the Purple Room, and finally decided there was no way he could make it to the end of the Corridor. He went back to die on that beach.”

  Troy was awestruck. It was incredible, and incredibly tragic. Preston was a war hero, and he’d died in battle not once, as history recorded, but twice. This was gruesome stuff. Troy was starting to regret asking Victoria to regale him with stories of his fallen predecessors.

  “Nelson was my fifth, and he was my favorite. If you can believe it, he was actually a twenty-year-old slave from 1835. I was taken by everything he said, because—well, that time period was just so interesting. Don’t you think so? I’ve always been fascinated by it.”

  Interesting wasn’t the word Troy would have used to describe the subjugation of an entire race. But he reminded himself that Victoria came from another time, when the norms of society were very different.

  His feet were heavier all the time. The cracked dirt was not kind to his heels or his toes, and now and again he found himself stumbling.

  Victoria didn’t seemed to notice his halting progress, being lost in her story. “Anyway, Nelson made it this far, all the way to the Brown Room. He would have made it farther, but he suffered a severe concussion when something slammed into his head. He became so confused that he never could find the Exit. Eventually he died of starvation and exertion. It...took quite a long time.” Her voice cracked as she choked out the last few words.

  Dying of starvation. Troy wasn’t going to be able to take much more of this. Fortunately, Victoria had only one more Runner to tell him about. He wondered how far he’d walked. It felt like miles, but was likely only a fraction of that.

  “My last Runner before you was Archie. He was from Australia, in 1907. He’d just gotten a job as a junior clerk in a mail room, at fifteen years old. He was so proud—it was his first job. I was proud that he made it as far as he did inside the Corridor. He was so innocent, so…untouched. He’d never had any tragedies in his life, and he’d never done anything dangerous, ever. Even his death was mundane—he’d tripped and was falling down a staircase when he woke up here. He was as unprepared for the Corridor as anyone could possibly be.

  “But Archie was very brave, and it carried him as far as the Purple Room. At first I was sure it would take him farther, maybe even to the end, but when he reached the Purple Room, he—he had a problem. I don’t know what the proper term is for it, but it was like his mind and his emotions were…broken. And couldn’t be fixed. I’m not sure he was fully aware of what he was doing when he ran through the door that sent him back to where he came from.”

  A nervous breakdown. That was the proper term for what Archie had experienced.

  Her voice heavy with emotion, Victoria’s story ended. There was no grand flourish or climax. She was simply done, and now she waited to see if Troy would be the seventh Runner she would have to watch die.

  He wanted to tell her it was going to be alright. He didn’t know that it was, of course. But he wanted to encourage her, remind her that it wasn’t over yet. He wanted to reassure her. It amazed even him. Troy was the one in mortal peril here, but somehow he was concerned about Victoria.

  That was new.

  Forgetting his situation for a moment, he opened his mouth to offer words of comfort, and then he was on the ground feeling as though a tank had just flattened him. A boulder-sized ball of tightly-packed dirt had rolled into him, forcing him to the ground. Something cold pressed into his chest as he lay there, and it was a moment before he realized that it was the cylinder.

  All of this faded from his thoughts quickly, due to the sharp, throbbing sensation on the top of his foot. He tried to scream, but yet again the noise stubbornly refused to leave his throat.

  “Troy! What happened? Are you okay?”

  Troy couldn’t offer her any affirmation yet; he was still assessing the damage. It was his bare, de-socked foot that had taken the hit, and his stomach turned at what he saw there. The skin was broken and bleeding because of a tiny piece of bone sticking out of it at an angle. The surrounding skin was turning red as he watched, and he knew that the swelling would soon start.

  He had to get out of this Room before that happened.

  He looked ahead and saw something through the brown haze. Something tall and rectangular. Was it the door? He felt certain it was.

  But would he be able to compartmentalize this injury, like he had before? How much more could he tuck away before his mind reached its breaking point? Troy was astounded that he’d made it this far without losing his mind like poor Archie.

  Placing all of his weight on his good foot,
he sprang upright. With all of his might, he pushed the piercing pain radiating from his foot into a far corner of his mind. With a deep breath into the wet sock, he focused instead on the Exit, vaguely visible through the brown dust. It wasn’t really that far; maybe one hundred feet. But there was no getting around the fact that every step he took was going to be torture.

  What would his dad do in a situation like this? Mr. Goggin, as all the kids at school were required to call him, was the soccer and football coach, and he also alternated leading the basketball and baseball teams with another faculty member. It was a small school. Everything about Troy’s dad was athletic, Troy was not. Troy knew this was why they had never grown close. He loved his dad, and his dad loved him and genuinely tried to be the best father he could be, but the two of them couldn’t have been more different.

  No. There was no point trying to predict what his dad might do in a physically demanding situation like this. His dad wasn’t here, Troy was. And the fact of the matter was, he’d made it this far by being himself, relying on his knowledge of endless trivia and a healthy application of creative thinking.

  Troy wanted to run, to make a mad dash for the Exit, but a slow, hobbling gait was all he could manage. And with every step he took, he felt his frustrations rising closer and closer to the surface.

  The Corridor was just wrong. It was sick. Somebody’s idea of a messed up, twisted joke. No one was meant to survive it. How could they, when it cheated at every turn?

  “How bad do you want it, Troy?” said Victoria, repeating her familiar mantra.

  Troy hesitated, trying to ignore the pain he felt. He honestly didn’t know how badly he wanted it anymore. He may have made it farther than most Runners do, but the Corridor was destroying him, bit by bit. Even if he managed to escape, would there be anything left of him on the other side?

  Every few feet he had to stop and rest his swelling foot. He’d just taken his third rest when he felt the air stir beside his left ear. Something had just flown by, and he felt it. It was true—he really could feel the objects coming.

  On a whim, Troy closed his eyes as he hobbled, trying to keep his weight off his bad foot. He knew where the Exit was now, and remained on a straight course for it. But he found that the lack of sight helped him focus better on the movements around him. He was surprised to discover how much the air was in motion, tossed this way and that almost constantly.

  As he neared the Exit, he felt a tremble in the ground and a whoosh of air. He dove straight into the Exit door’s alcove just in time to see another massive boulder roll by.

  Troy waved his arm in front of the door, and it lit up and opened. He hobbled through and gasped at the clean air, incredibly relieved at the sound it made.

  “Congratulations, Runner thirty-seven thirty-five. You have escaped the Brown Room.”

  He stood hunched over, catching his breath and trying not to pass out from exhaustion. He took a sip from his water canister and tried to imagine the water spreading through his system, reviving his weary bones and muscles.

  “Man, this is messed up.”

  “It’s a game. A game made to prevent you from winning,” said Victoria, sympathizing. “The Corridor is cheating.”

  “Yeah…” said Troy, standing to his full height. A brand new thought was forming in his mind. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t considered it before. “Don’t you think it’s time we do something about that?”

  THE GRAY ROOM WAS a very big, very gray room. Round and utterly empty. He didn’t see the Exit, but whatever. As of this moment, finding the Exit was no longer his objective.

  His thoughts were carrying him far away, firing one after another in rapid succession. A big snowball of an idea was building upon a notion so crazy, it might just work.

  “Victoria, you said your connection to the Corridor is similar to your connection to me,” he asked, standing on one foot in front of the entrance. He wanted to pace, but couldn’t with a broken foot. “Our connection goes both ways, but the other one doesn’t. Is that right?”

  “Yes,” she replied, hesitation in her voice.

  Troy paused, considering his suspicion one last time before saying it aloud. “What if you’re wrong about that?”

  Victoria paused. “What do you mean?”

  “You told me the Corridor ‘pushes’ its will on you, its thoughts and directives. Right?”

  “That’s what it feels like.”

  Troy steeled himself before making his next statement. “I want you to push back.”

  A long silence punctuated the other end of their connection. “I don’t know how.”

  Troy thought hard. “They had baseball in the nineteen thirties, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay… so think of your will power as this little ball of intensity. Really picture a ball in your mind. Let one, lonely thought fill the inside of that ball, and nothing else. I want you to think the word ‘stop’ as powerfully as you can. Ball it up and, you know, throw it at the Corridor like you’re pitching a baseball.”

  She was quiet so long, he wondered if she might have panicked, severing the connection. Or was she actually trying to do what he asked? Finally she spoke.

  “You want me to turn the Corridor…off,” she said, and even Troy had to admit it sounded insane.

  “Doesn’t have to be the whole thing. Maybe just this one Room. Or some small part of it—the Exit or a panel that could come loose. Anything that can be de-powered enough for me to get out. There has to be something in between all these Rooms, right? I mean, they’re all different shapes and sizes. There’s got to be a—a ‘back-of-house.’”

  “A what?”

  “It’s like at Disney World—ah, you don’t know what that is. Or a big resort hotel in Las Vegas. Crud, you probably don’t know that either. Okay, imagine a humongous stage production. You’ve got the people out front watching the show, you’ve got the stage where the show is happening, and then you’ve got the backstage area where the performers get dressed and made up, sets are stored, and so on. With me so far?”

  “Okay,” Victoria said in a tone that indicated she wasn’t completely with him but trying hard.

  “The Corridor has to have some kind of backstage area, okay? And that’s what I want to find. Maybe there’s somebody out there that can help us. Or maybe there’s machinery making all this work. There has to be something beyond these walls. If I can escape from this big ‘production’ of Room-after-Room, then maybe I stand a chance of beating the Corridor at its own game. Maybe I can be the first to escape on my own terms. And isn’t that what the Corridor is after? It keeps testing my intelligence and drive and determination. Maybe I’ll even be rewarded for creative thinking.”

  “I don’t know, Troy,” Victoria said slowly. “We could both be punished just for trying something like this.”

  “You can do this,” he said with more conviction than he felt. “Listen…please. You have to try. And I believe in you. I really do. I just… I can’t play the Corridor’s games anymore. I can’t keep going. I don’t have anything left. I’m hurt, I’m tired, and I’m scared. Please, Victoria. Please do this for me. Help me get out of here.”

  He could already hear her reply. The only way out is to Run. She quoted the rules to him so often that it sounded like she genuinely believed everything the Corridor told her. But then, advising him and offering hints wasn’t part of her required role here. Wasn’t she already bending the rules by doing that?

  And what he was asking of her might not even be possible. Was he insane to think that Victoria might have some iota of influence over the Corridor—enough to switch it off? The kind of power required to run a structure this massive… It almost had to have its own generators, its own dedicated power source. If Victoria could influence them at all, even for just a few seconds, maybe he could slip away.

  “I’ll try,” Victoria said at last. “But if we do this, and it works…if you do manage to get out…there’s one thing I would ask f
rom you in return.”

  His thoughts came to a halt. “Anything.”

  “Don’t forget me,” she said softly. “Please.”

  Troy looked around expectantly, but then froze. This was what she wanted from him in return for helping him get out. All she aspired to in all of this was to be remembered.

  “What are you talking about?” he cried. “If I make it out, I’m coming back for you. I’m getting you out of here, too.”

  Victoria sighed. “But Troy…think about what you’re saying. You’re the three thousand, seven hundred and thirty-fifth Runner. The Corridor has been around for a very long time. If it were possible to even find it and break in from the outside, surely somebody would have shut the whole thing down long before now.”

  Troy’s shoulders sank. She was right, wasn’t she. He had no idea what he would find outside the Corridor, but assuming that anyone ever got out, there had to be security measures in place to keep them from finding it again. Maybe it was cloaked somehow. Maybe whoever built it was running society now, and had no opposition. Maybe he was on an alien world, and this was all some kind of elaborate experiment. Or maybe if he ever found a door or a hatch that led outside, he would open it to find the empty vacuum of space.

  He shuddered. No, that was ridiculous. More than likely, the same process that brought him here would be used again when he left. He’d been plucked out of his own time and place before waking up here, so who was to say he wouldn’t be sent to a different time and place when he stepped outside?

  Regardless, he had to find a way to help Victoria. But not from inside. In here, the Corridor had all the power. He had to get out, find out just where and when and what this place was, and then mount some kind of rescue. And he might not know where Victoria was in all this, but she was hardwired to the Corridor, so she had to be nearby.

  If there was a way out, there had to be a way in.

  Troy’s thoughts returned to all of those names and birthdates inscribed on the ground in the Purple Room. How many of them had tried to escape? Maybe no Runner had ever tried using their Conduit like this. Or maybe they had. There was no way of knowing.