A School of Today

`Posted by @Ramirez on April 11, 2023`

Hi guys, it’s been a while. Sorry I haven’t been active recently—school has been a bit of a problem. However, I something… weird happened recently.

I was walking to my fifth-period class. Nothing out of the ordinary. It was a pretty good day—I just found out I got 97% on my math test. Studying finally paid off for me. It was then I noticed that something was happening up ahead.

I’d never seen a fight at school before, so I had nothing to compare the one I saw to. However, it looked pretty bad. My teacher came out of her classroom and told me to get inside. I’m not sure what she intended to do—if she wanted to break it up, she would probably get a few punches while doing so.

After I ducked inside the classroom, I noticed something strange. It was completely empty. The seats were all neatly pushed in, and all the desks were lined up in perfect rows. There were no signs that anybody had ever been here. The clock above the whiteboard blinked `12:00`, like an alarm clock in a house which had lost power. Weird. As I went back outside, I saw the entire hallway was empty, and was eerily pristine. No sign of the fight—or of anything, for that matter.

I started walking down the hallway, asking aloud if everybody was there. At first, I thought I was hallucinating, or that it was some sort of prank. But I ruled both of those out. I’d hallucinated once (after watching a YouTube video on how to do it), and it looked nothing like that. In addition, a prank like this would have been impossible.

As I walked, I found more and more of the same thing: emptiness. The hallway, the ceiling, and the lockers were all the same as I remembered them. There were even the faded pictures of student-athletes who were competing this year on the walls. But there was nobody there. It was about 11:05, and the halls should have been full of people, but they were completely empty.

And every clock on the walls was blinking `12:00`.

I then found out something even stranger. I eventually reached the end of the hallway, but it was different. There was a hallway where there shouldn’t have been one. I had been going to this school for over half a year. I would have known that there were four hallways here instead of three. But there it was, and I went down it.

I became more and more worried. This was not my school, but it did look like it. It was a seemingly endless maze of halls, classrooms, and blinking clocks that looked like the high school where I had spent hundreds of hours in, but one only had to walk for a little to realize that this was no ordinary place.

As I went on, I found even stranger stuff. There was a room with a flickering computer, which I checked out. As soon as I pressed the power button, it erupted in a horribly distorted version of the “DONG” that Apple computers make when they turn on. I jumped back in shock. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the clock briefly flicker, showing something other than `12:00`, but before I could turn and see what it was it returned to normal—or whatever “normal” was. As the computer booted up, all I saw was a live video feed of the room I was in.

But there was no camera to record it anywhere in the room.

Another time, I found a window—the first one I had seen in what felt like hours (but could have been seconds). I rushed over to check it out, but, looking out, I found that what was outside wasn’t the bright, sunny day it had been. Instead, it was a dark black void. If I craned my head, I could see endless rows of other windows on an endless brick wall.

As I walked, I began to lose all hope of escape, and my sanity began to follow. I had no idea where I was or how long I had been here. An hour—if that was even what it was—felt like a minute, and a minute like a day. A horrible thirst started creeping up my throat. The water fountains simply sprayed out air or nothing at all.

I began to glimpse a shadow at the ends of hallways. It was vaguely humanoid, but whenever I saw it, it quickly disappeared. Part of me thought that it was just my imagination. The other part believed it was a monster. The other part thought it was another human.

The days went on. I finally found a half-full water bottle, although the satisfaction it had provided turned out to be fleeting. Hunger became a growing concern. And then, it happened.

I was stumbling through a hallway when I noticed a clock saying something strange. It wasn’t `12:00`. Instead, it was flashing something which took me a second to read.

`r:Un`.

At this point, I couldn’t care less. I kept walking down the hallway, seeing what looked to my mind like another water bottle at the end. Then, I saw another clock flashing the same message. And another.

I was worried now. I mustered all the energy I thought I had and started briskly walking through the hallway. Then, I moved faster. Suddenly, I heard a faint noise behind me. Turning around, I saw nothing there. Then, I heard it again. It was much louder, and sounded like a horribly distorted cry. Something like the feedback on a microphone, but more distorted than anyone could ever imagine. It awakened some sort of primal fear inside me. I began running now, running faster than I thought I ever could. I ran for what felt like hours, but it was likely mere minutes. The scream kept coming, but I looked back, and saw nothing behind me. I kept running, and running, and running, until I missed a turn and slammed into a wall, blacking out.

That’s all I remember.

They told me that I came hurtling out of a door 25 feet above the floor of my school’s gym, a door which hadn’t been used in years and had formerly been an exit from another room before the gym was built. I landed on the ground, breaking my leg and one of my hands. I looked horrible, and was unusually skinny from hunger. I was babbling some sort of nonsense, and eventually passed out. I woke up in the hospital.

It had been 2 weeks since I had disappeared.

It took me several weeks to heal. My memory of what happened eventually came back to me, but nobody would believe me. But nobody has any feasible alternate explanations for what happened. The one that my parents think is true is that I was kidnapped and drugged.

I still feel uneasy, even though it happened a month ago. I have nightmares almost every night. I glance nervously at every clock I see in my school, and live in constant fear that it will happen again. Everything feels wrong. I can’t go into my math classroom without a near-panic attack. I’ve seen two therapists. The thoughts started a couple weeks ago.

Maybe it will happen again.

Maybe it’s already happened to someone, somewhere.

Maybe it’ll happen to you.

> Open Author and Licensing Credits> Close Author and Licensing CreditsAuthor: RiverMan18