starts to swing her bag to work the ache out of her shoulder as she walks, but swings too high once and almost slips, catches herself before she falls on the sparkly clean floor. The janitorial staff always polishes Crawley Hall’s floors until they glisten at the beginning of the school year. They must have already started for the fall semester. Last time she checked, the floor in her office still held last year’s scuffs and leftover grit from snow, now evaporated. No one’s emptied her office garbage can all summer, not since the spring Liberal Arts budget cut announcement, and her wastebasket brims with used bubble envelopes, old Cup-a-Soup containers, cellophane wrappers from journals, and cardboard coffee cups. But soon her wastebasket will be fresh and empty, perhaps it already is. The overcast light notwithstanding, this hallway gleams.
Silence has dropped like snowfall. She hears none of the white noise that insinuates itself everywhere else in the building: air vents, buzzy fluorescent lights, the distant ding of an elevator, the hum of a photocopy machine. Her sneaker squeaks violate the silence, as though she’s accidentally trespassed into a medieval chapel. Or a dungeon. The shiny silence makes her want to tiptoe. She peers every so often under the cubicles to see if she can unearth the student lovers.
Nothing but skinny metal chair legs. No sound but the memory of sound.
She jogs toward the dawning sunlight slanting through the window in the exit door. It says Push.
But the door pushes back. Locked.
Through the wire-meshed glass in the door, a jackrabbit on the lawn pulls at grass tufts with its teeth. Crawley Hall’s dawn shadow lies thick on the quad. The Kinesiology building twinkles only a hundred metres away.
She piles herself into the door, pushes and grunts, her bag clumping to the floor. She refuses to acknowledge this door’s refusal.
She spins and rams her back into the door, but this door is so locked it’s really just wall. She wipes her nose on the back of her hand. Rests her back on the door.
The hallway unspools ahead of her; her earlier rubber-soled footsteps are matte splotches dotting the floor’s oily and unrelenting cleanness.
She slings her bag over her shoulder and walks slowly back down the hallway, her sneaker soles squelching.
Her sneakers stop squeaking in the gloomy light. She stops. Hairs prickle awake on the back of her neck, her shoulders, her forearms.
Where is she?
The tidy carrels with their neat, tucked chairs are no longer neat. The chairs scatter themselves in her way, every one pulled askew and turned around willy-nilly from their cubicles.
Who moved the chairs? Without making a single sound?
She just wants to go for a damn swim. Why is exercising always so damn complicated? Now she has to deal with supernatural bullshit too? She’s always suspected something was off about this building. Coral used to say so too.
Time to leave, shortcut or no.
She wades between the parallel lines of study cubicles and their disordered chairs. She pushes and scrapes the flimsy chairs out of her way, rams herself through them. She refuses to register misplaced clusters of shadows under the cubicles, shadows that weren’t there earlier, shadows too small and numerous to be a single pair of mischievous or desperate lovers. A shining red eye – she swears it’s an eye – mirrors at her from a shadow under a cubicle.
She barrels toward the very first door – the door with the needless steps leading up only to stairs down the other side. But the steps on this side of the door, those steps that shouldn’t have been there in the first place, have disappeared. The floor all the way to the door gleams clear and flat and wide and shining.
She pushes away a cold drip of fear.
Fed up, she violently shoves herself into the door, ready for it to stick. The door whooshes open and she stumbles forward, panicked that she’ll tumble down the other set of stairs and snap her skull in half, shatter her knees. She stretches out her hands, lands on her palms – her hands and feet staggered on the steps – her bag thumping as it rolls down the steps. Excellent save. Her knees intact.
She stays crouched, panting, then gathers up her bag in her arms.
She scurries away toward a side door she knows leads to some outdoor nowheresville, but that hopefully will take her out. She turns a perfectly oiled handle, and the door bursts open.
A jackrabbit abruptly leaps away.
She gasps in fresh air.
A rush of dusty, dead-mousey air billows around her, announcing her to the outside world.
The door lolls open behind her.
The door yawns, moist air from inside the building soughing out the doorway. An inappropriately human sound.
She sways a little, her wrists still shocked, her shoulder bruised and aching, a new crick in the small of her back. Her synapses frizzled.
She has a feral desire to flee – hightail it for her Taurus, hurtle home, and collapse into bed wrapped inside two comforters. But she hasn’t swum for three years. Vivianne told her to choose her furnishings. She will not let anyone or anything else, some grumpy, sticky-doored building with a half-assed paranormal hallway, choose her furnishings.
Illogical. Irritating. Time-consuming. Her time consumed. A small black marble sticks to her left palm. A jackrabbit turd. She flicks at it until it unsticks, bounces, thocks into the grass. She looks back at the Crawley Hall door swinging listlessly, like a tooth, in the dim, grim doorway. She needs to call Vivianne.
No. She needs to make Vivianne proud.
She plods heavily, warily, the long way around Crawley Hall’s giant, protruding concreteness, past normal pine trees, along normal sidewalks past the library, past the students’ union building to the Novacrest School of Kinesiology building. The electronic front doors slide open and wait for her, like gentle, non-racist butlers. She enters the glamorous, state-of-the-art building, its brand-new, open-concept loveliness, and pool-chlorine and squash-ball smells enfold and embrace her.
Edith curls her toes on the pool’s edge, thirty-one minutes late for lane swimming. She snaps on her goggles and eases herself into the freezing chlorine soup. She thrashes out a single lap in the pool, then halts midway through the next lap, panting, choking for air. She paddles her arms and legs, floating in place, water sloshing in her earholes, waiting for her lungs to pump less frantically. Is she traumatizing her lungs by leaping into exercise so quickly? Shouldn’t she go home and rest after being gaslit by Crawley Hall and nearly assaulted by rows of chairs? She is not frightened, but so many jammed and locked doors certainly rattled her; obviously, witnessing possible paranormal phenomena is a distressing way to start the day. She doesn’t like having to believe in the supernatural, especially so early in the school year, and so early in the morning. She is a scholar, an intellectual. There has been no peer-reviewed, conclusive article published about the existence of the supernatural, but she also understands that some things can be unknown, some explanations still percolating and awaiting discovery. The first European scientists to examine a platypus thought it was fake, for goodness’ sake. Edith ducks her mouth under the water and blows bubbles.
The teenaged lifeguard busily texts, grimacing at something on her phone. The clock at the far end of the pool reads 7:01 a.m.
I am the architect of my life; I build its foundation and select its fixtures.
She bobs in the water, remembers her back-to-school shopping from the day before. So what if there’s a supernaturally contaminated hallway. The building’s old and contaminated with all sorts of things. Maybe she’s special and that’s why the hallway rearranged itself for her. She should have tried to communicate with whatever mysterious entity it was instead of running away like a goose. The tiny balloon of elation still hasn’t popped from the three new blouses hung side by side in her closet, the new cardigan tucked back into its tissue paper, and the new pair of Hangakus yin-and-yanged back into their cardboard