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’mtearing 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.
Sothink, 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?
