Chapter 44 A Room with an Eeeeeeeeeeeeeew
THE FIRST THING THAT HAPPENS is the floor beneath me begins to widen on all four sides, the walls retreating as the room grows bigger and bigger with each second that passes. Not that I’m complaining—the longer and wider the floor gets, the farther the snakes on the floor get from me.
But the floor’s moving means the walls are also moving, and that is a very big problem.
Because the poles above me—poles that are literally teeming with snakes—are attached to those walls.
I look up, expecting the poles, and the snakes, to come crashing down on me any second.
But it turns out the poles are growing too, getting longer and longer the farther away the walls get.
While that’s way better than the poles just collapsing on me, it’s still a problem. Because the snakes are starting to hiss and undulate—surely a sign that they don’t like the way the poles are swaying and sliding at all.
Still, I take the fact that they aren’t currently falling on me en masse as my first win of this very bizarre morning.
With that thought in mind, I start moving toward the door. The exit doesn’t look so scary now that the floor directly in front of it isn’t covered with hundreds of sleeping snakes. But before I can take more than a step or two in that direction, the floor—and the walls—grind to a halt.
All of which sounds like a good thing—less to make the snakes mad. Except for one small problem. Once the room stops expanding outward, the walls slowly, creakily begin to shift. And by shift, I mean rotate to their left, almost like a revolving door would.
I try to peer through the opening created by one of the moving walls, but all I see is darkness beyond.
Plus, I don’t exactly have a lot of time to look, because this new movement causes the snake poles to swing and sway precariously.
The hissing above me suddenly gets much, much louder as a bunch of the snakes begin rushing toward the wall in a desperate attempt to get down from the pole.
The other snakes decide they want down faster, though, and suddenly my worst nightmare is happening—snakes begin dropping off the pole and falling through the air around me.
I try to run, try to get away, but the poles crisscross across the entire ceiling and the snakes are everywhere.
Dropping at my feet, falling on my shoulder, landing on my head, and sliding down my cheek and arm.
I do start screaming then, waving my arms in the air and slapping at my head, my neck, my stomach, my shoulders, my back, in a desperate attempt to get them to leave me alone.
All that does is make them angry, though, and soon they’re tightening around me, squeezing my arms and legs and any other part of me that they’re touching.
It’s not super painful, but it’s not comfortable either.
Especially when they stick their skinny, forked tongues out and slither them against my skin.
Yeah, the licking is definitely the worst. At least until I feel a fang scrape against my shoulder.
I scream and try to grab the snake, but that just gets the other ones worked up. Soon several of them are striking out at me, their fangs sinking into my biceps, forearms, calves.
It’s too dark to see if they are venomous, so I’m just going to hope really hard that they aren’t—especially since there’s nothing I can do right now if they are.
I try to tell myself to calm down, to just think through the horror and figure out what to do. But it’s really hard to think when a snake is wrapping itself around your neck and looking you dead in the eyes.
Before it can decide that it actually wants to bite me in the nose or something, I grab it and throw it against the wall as hard as I can.
And then I take off running for the doors, shaking off as many snakes as I can.
But as I get closer to the door, I realize two things—one, by now nearly all the snakes have fallen off the rods.
And two, the walls are in the middle of slowly, creakily turning around.
I’m almost to the door when the walls finish their one-hundred-and-eighty-degree circle and slide back into place. And that’s when I realize that this new side of the wall is made up of bookcases.
The entire room—which is huge now—is lined with dozens upon dozens of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. And on those bookshelves, stacked in double and triple rows—some standing on end, others lying on their sides—are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of books.
Some are big and some are small, but they all have one thing in common. They are bound in black leather with ornate silver foiling along the spines and on the covers. And none of the books—not one—has a title or an author on its cover.
There’s a part of me that wants nothing more than to stop and explore—books are my favorite things in the world. But there’s another part of me that is very aware of all the snakes on the ground. And that part just wants out.
The part that’s dying to get out is the part that wins. I don’t know what it is about Anaximander’s and the snakes that seem to be everywhere—everywhere—on this campus, but I am getting darn sick of them. So sick of them that I never, ever want to see another one.
But that’s not an option right now, considering there’s a line of snakes between me and the only exit out of this place. I refuse to let that stop me, so I run straight for them and then jump as high as I can in a desperate effort to clear them.
Somehow I land on the other side. And then I’m tearing open the doors and racing out of the room as fast as I possibly can.
Behind me, the entire room of snakes starts hissing and undulating across the floor to the exit. In a desperate attempt to keep them in, I slam the door as hard as I can, then turn around and try to figure out where I am—and how I can get out of here and back to the surface.
But there’s nothing out here. Just pitch blackness, except for the small flashlight still coming from my phone.
I wave it around in front of me, trying to figure out which way to go, and that’s when I realize there’s nothing in front of me but empty space.
Nothing to the side of me but more empty space.
I’m on some kind of weird platform in the middle of nowhere, and one wrong move will have me plummeting off the edge.
Snakes are wiggling under the door now, covering my shoes and wrapping around my ankles.
I start to freak out—like really freak out—because I don’t know what to do.
I’m trapped with nowhere to go, and I’m terrified that I’m not going to be able to figure a way out.
For the first time in my life, I’m terrified that my brain is going to fail me.
The thought breaks my heart.
I don’t want to disappear from Anaximander’s with no explanation.
I don’t want Fifi and Arjun to blame themselves for me disappearing.
I don’t want Paris and my parents to always wonder what happened to me.
And I really, really, really don’t want to die down here in the middle of some book-and-snake-infested room because I was so busy trying to win some ridiculous contest that I forgot to pay attention to what’s really important.
So think, I tell myself, even as snakes wind themselves up my leg. There has to be a way. There has to be some kind of exit from this place. Otherwise, why does it exist? I mean, who puts books hundreds of feet underground, accessible only by a large slide, with no way out?
There has to be one. I just have to calm down enough to find it.
Which means I need to go back in that room. Which isn’t as horrific as it sounds, considering it feels like half the snakes that were in there are now out here with me on this very tiny platform.
They’re on my shoes, wrapped around my legs, sliding up my pants and into my pockets. So really, at this point, what could possibly happen to me in that room that isn’t happening to me out here already?
It’s that thought that galvanizes me, that has me turning around and reaching for the doorknob. I turn it, try to push the door open, but it doesn’t budge. I move to the second door, do the same thing, and it, too, refuses to open.
“No, no, no, no!” This can’t be happening. This really can’t be happening.
I try again, shaking the doorknob, rattling the doors, but no luck.
They’ve locked behind me. I shine the flashlight on the locks, trying to figure out if I can pick them with one of the bobby pins in my still-soaking-wet hair, but when I do, I realize these aren’t normal locks.
There are two dead bolts on each door, and there is absolutely no way I’m going to open them with anything but a key.
Apparently, I need to add lock-picking videos to my normal rotation of YouTube videos.
In the meantime, I can’t see any way for me to get back into that room.
And that means I really am stuck here on this platform with a bunch of snakes and there’s nothing—absolutely nothing—I can do about it.
A harsh sob tears itself from my chest before I can stop it, but I swallow the next one down. And the one after that. There’s no way I’m going to just stand here on this platform covered in snakes and crying. If I’m going to die, I’m going to do it with a little bit of dignity.
So I close my eyes, try to block out the feeling of a snake sliding along my hip.
As I do, a picture forms in my mind. It’s that woman again—the one with the strong face and the peacock feather in her hair.
A feeling of peace settles inside me at the sight of her, and I take my first deep breath in several minutes. But she fades away as quickly as she came, and the panic starts welling up inside me again. At least until something else takes her place.
A familiar-sounding male voice deep inside me telling me that it’s okay. Telling me that I should jump.
But I can’t! There’s nowhere to jump to. Just an inky blackness that goes on forever.
Still, I check again, shining my flashlight as deep into the abyss as it can go. But there’s nothing there. Nothing to catch me. Nothing to save me.
“Will you just jump?” the voice says again, and it doesn’t sound so distant this time. It does, however, sound vaguely annoyed.
“I can’t! There’s nothing there.”
“Are you sure?”
What does it mean, am I sure? Would I be standing here contemplating being smothered to death by snakes if I wasn’t?
“There’s nothing there!”
“Maybe there will be.”
“And maybe there won’t!” I shoot back. “Maybe I’ll just plummet to my death!”
This time there’s no answer. I’m all alone again, and the warmth brought by the woman—and the nebulous voice—disappears just as easily.
I try never to do anything without knowing what the outcome is going to be.
But from the moment I got to Anaximander’s, that hasn’t been possible.
Things have been happening to me that I have no control over from the second I stepped foot on that bridge.
Wouldn’t it be nice, for once, to take that control back?
Even if it means letting go of everything I know—or at least think—is true?
I can either stay here on this platform because my head tells me it’s the only option and die here. Or I can jump, not knowing if what’s out there is even worse. It seems like a lose-lose situation.
Or a lose-win. The voice is back, but this time it doesn’t belong to anyone else. It belongs to me. And that’s when I know what I’m going to do.
I take a deep breath, blow it out slowly. And take a leap of faith right off the platform and into the inky darkness below.