or locked, even though it has no keyhole. She tugs and heaves, pushes, and tugs again at the door, slaps it, huffs. Like the door resents her wanting to exercise and improve her life. She has psychic furnishings to buy for her psychic foundation. She contemplates the door, trying to ignore the odour emanating from the walls, the ceiling: dust, mould, or fossilized compost in a recycling bin. She sneezes. Pulls out a nearly fresh Kleenex from her bag. Maybe a mouse got trapped in a nearby vent and expired. She wonders if she should call Security to unlock the door. If she circles back out the building and takes the long way, she’ll miss the first ten minutes of lane swimming. If she phones Security, she’ll also miss the first ten minutes of lane swimming. She can’t let Vivianne down this way, this very first real day of being the architect of her life. She kicks the door with her runner.
Edith jumps when the door thuds open. Shoot! Maybe she broke the door. She hesitates in the doorway. The ceiling lights appear spotty with dust, as though they haven’t been cleaned in years, the insides of the light panels clotted with grime.
And in front of her a matchbox-sized landing, and yet another set of stairs, this time three steps leading down. She doesn’t recognize the landing. Or remember these stairs.
She’s travelled through every part of Crawley Hall since she started her job seven years ago, but this hallway looks unfamiliar, the stairs redundant – what kind of pointless architecture is this? Three steps leading up to a doorway with a tiny nothing of a landing, just to go three steps down again? She’s sure this design must violate some kind of building code. The lights grim, the corridor even narrower, if possible. Maybe it’s the eerily early hour? No matter, she’s late for swimming, and as she steps through the doorway, the door bangs closed hard into her shoulder.
She yelps in alarm, in pain. She rubs her shoulder as she steps carefully down the stairs. At the bottom, empty study carrels line the walls to the right and left of her, a single chair neatly tucked into each cubicle. She registers a flicker of movement at the end of the line of carrels, hears skittering, the far-off scrape of a chair. Probably students necking in the dark. But so early in the morning? Probably the same dorkmeisters who jammed the door closed so they could have their sex; she knows how sex ruins logic.
She 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
