Danny Tobey - The Faculty Club

Why hadn’t I seen it sooner? It was so obvious. Three rooms. Three puzzles. The first one logic: the two kings. A lawyer’s puzzle. The second: the Ship of Theseus. A philosopher’s riddle. The third, the homunculus-only for a neurologist could that puzzle exist. Three of us-a lawyer, a philosopher, a neurosurgeon.

Oh God, they were just waiting for us.

My hand closed over a shirt, and with the strength that only terror can give you, I pulled back and Miles came with me as Sarah disappeared through the door.

I fell backward and Miles came down, half on top of me, crushing the wind out of me.

A second later, I heard Sarah scream.

I pushed Miles off me and ran to the edge of the door. I expected to see Sarah, to figure out some way to help her. But what I saw instead was a hole in the floor, and a giant trapdoor hanging down. And below that, emptiness. Just a vast hole that sloped down at a steep angle into nothing. The false floor was long. She would have made it several feet into the room before it collapsed below her and sent her spiraling down.

I tried to see down into the hole. I got on my hands and knees and let myself hang over it. Cool, earthy air hit my face. But I couldn’t see more than a few feet. The chute just disappeared into blackness.

I felt my world start to unravel. There was a gnawing sensation in my brain that made me want to start shaking my head like a wandering lunatic. I shouted Sarah into the hole. My voice echoed down and back again and mocked me. But nothing real came back. No call for help. Not her soft voice, calling my name. I yelled again. Nothing.

That’s when I felt Miles’s hand on my shoulder.

“Jeremy.”

I was hanging too deep into the hole, holding on with my hands and trying to see something, anything. Miles pulled me back.

“You’re gonna fall,” he said.

The room was tiny. Just big enough to get the three of us to the middle, on our way to a door at the far end, before the trap sprung. There were candles burning in holders on the walls, the room flickering between shadows and light.

Miles asked how I realized it was a trap. I told him about the puzzles, the way each one was designed for one of us. Like they wanted us to solve them.

Miles shook his head. It was a gesture I’d seen before: a mix of surprise and admiration for the V &D and their tricks-except that this time, there was less surprise, less admiration, crowded out by something I’d never seen in Miles’s face before: defeat. He looked defeated.

“It was a test,” he said. His eyes were sad. “A final warning. If we were smart enough to get it, we were smart enough to turn around and honor our deal. And if not…” He looked at the trapdoor. “Then they’d have to handle us another way.”

I stepped toward Miles.

“What are you saying?”

“Jeremy…”

“What are you saying?”

“You know what I mean.”

He said this surprisingly gently.

“You don’t know that,” I told him.

“Think about it.”

“You can’t be sure.”

“Remember Chance? Remember Sammy Klein?”

“Shut up.”

“We didn’t listen. We went back on our deal.”

“Shut up.”

“They even gave us a last chance. She didn’t-”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“She didn’t see it.”

I went for him. All I felt was rage. I wanted to tear him to pieces-stupid fucking know-it-all. He grabbed my arms and twisted me around. He overpowered me and forced me down.

“Jeremy, stop. Stop. This isn’t going to help anything.”

“We have to go get her.”

“We can’t.”

“We have to. We have to save her.”

“How? How, Jeremy? How could we save her?”

“We go after her.”

We both looked at the hole in the middle of that flickering room. The hole was impossibly dark. Inestimably deep. I tried to imagine what was at the bottom. Given the deviousness, the ghoulishness of what we’d seen so far, the possibilities seemed limitless. Would we fall at breakneck speed into a pit of random spikes, where a dozen skeletons were already impaled? Or maybe we’d land in a pit of half-starved dogs, creeping toward us, snarling, mangy fur glowing faintly with moonlight. Would they throw in a sword and shield to reflect the stars and add some excitement?

We looked at that hole for a long time. It occurred to me that if we wanted to save Sarah’s life-if we wanted to even have a chance-we had to go now.

Miles spoke softly behind me.

“Jeremy, if you were going to jump, you would’ve done it already.”

He walked back across the blade room to the door we’d entered a hundred years ago. He tried the knob, and it opened. He waited for me at the door.

I turned back to the hole.

If this were a movie, I would’ve jumped. I would’ve said something heroic, or at least clever: I’ll be back! Hasta la vista, baby! All in a day’s work!

But it wasn’t a movie.

And I didn’t jump.

God help us, we left her there.

I felt a strange buzzing in my head. It was a giddy feeling. My body was pumping me full of joy, excuses, illusions, distractions. We sat in Miles’s apartment on the red futon, flipping channels and trying not to look at each other. We ordered Chinese food and waited for it to come. There was nothing on TV. We passed Hogan’s Heroes, an infomercial for a gym machine, a Steven Seagal movie dubbed in Spanish, reruns of classic game shows. The badness made it almost impossible to pretend we were actually watching. Miles lit a joint and took a long drag. He offered it to me. I’d never smoked pot before. Never even wanted to. But right now, all I wanted was to stop the feeling of pointlessness that was creeping around the edges of my awareness, looking for a way in. I took the joint. It was wet on the tip. I sucked in and let the raw smoke go into my mouth. I held it there for a second. I knew what to do next. I’d tried cigarettes once in high school and mastered the art of letting the smoke go down my trachea and bloom into my lungs. I wanted that peaceful look I’d seen on potheads’ faces. I wanted to find truth in Pink Floyd. I wanted to find my own hand hilarious. But I didn’t inhale. I just held the smoke long enough to fake it and let it out a moment later. I passed the joint back to Miles.

I couldn’t stand the silence. I asked Miles a question I’d been saving for a late-night chat. I asked it now, just to break the tension.

“Hey Miles.”

“Yeah?”

He didn’t look at me.

“Why’d you quit law?”

He took another hit. He didn’t say anything.

“You had an offer from the best firm in the country,” I said. “People would kill for that. And you turned it down. Why?”

Miles closed his eyes.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it was a mistake, in retrospect.”

“You must’ve had a reason. Do you remember?”

Finally he sighed.

“It’s gonna sound stupid now.” He shook his head. “Something I heard on the first day of class, in Torts. It always bothered me. A man sees a baby on some train tracks. He’s just walking by. No one else is around. There’s a train coming. It’s way off in the distance. All he has to do is move the baby, right? Just pick it up and move it off the tracks. But he doesn’t. For whatever reason, he keeps walking. And Professor Long told us: the law has nothing to say about that. Remember? Because there’s no duty between him and the baby. Not in the legal sense.”

“That’s it? That’s why you quit?”

“No. I started thinking. Say we all get mad. We pass a law that says you have to move the baby or you go to jail. Next time, the guy moves the baby.”

“That’s good. The law worked.”