VOICES BEYOND TIME

The night pitched over the road that burrowed through Wyoming’s interior. Ethan drove under the midnight oil, hoping to reach Cheyenne before morning, aware that his aging figure would give out if he never stopped to rest. He switched on the radio, hoping for lively music to stir him awake for the next few hours; instead, he came across a news report on a heated escalation abroad. He promptly switched it off, yawned, and refocused on the dotted lines rolling underneath the cone of lights. Perhaps it would have been all the wiser had he taken the interstate rather than bound through the countryside, especially for someone out of state with a bias towards the scenic routes. However, with luck, he ran into what appeared to be a small town.

Stopping along the curb, he checked his whereabouts. To his consternation, the maps indicated nothing except a long tract of road. Funny, he thought, and suspected a glitch in updates, the GPS taking its sweet old time to render out the lay of the land. Placing down the phone, he noticed the outline of a large red-brick structure partially hidden by a grove. On a whim, he pulled inside.

The driveway was riddled with cracks and weeds that sprouted from the withering pavement, and his car rocked and bucked from the perturbations. No other vehicle lay in sight. The place looked abandoned, and from its advanced state of decay, likely marked for demolition. Yet he saw nothing to indicate that fact; no barricades or construction tape his headlights would have captured. Succumbing to curiosity, he decided to poke around and parked his car under a flourish of overgrown foliage, narrowly avoiding the giant pit to his right.

When he shut the lights, he noticed the crack of dawn shimmering over the horizon. It was bright enough that he wouldn’t need his flashlight when trudging along the perimeter, but kept it handy if he wanted to peek inside a broken window or some other opening.

 The first thing he noticed under the veil of morning was a large sign out front jutting up from a weed-rimmed sidewalk. It turned out to be an elementary school, its windows all boarded up, and from the weathering on the plywood, the place looked as though it had been shut for a number of years.

The woods suddenly rustled. He snapped to his left, watching the shadow of a small creature scurry past him and around the building. The lighter tip of its tail gave away the animal. Just a raccoon, he simmered to himself.

Continuing forward, he passed under the vestibule and tugged at the front door. Predictably, it was locked. However, when skirting around the corner, hoping a larger, wilder animal wouldn’t jump out in front of him, he noticed one of the back doors ajar. He pulled out his flashlight and crept toward the entrance, padding over grass and tiny shrubs that punched through the concrete.

He reached out a trembling hand and pushed. The door creaked, sounding ready to snap from its hinges. Plunged in darkness, he shined his flashlight. The receding geometries of a long hallway resolved into life. Cobbles of fallen spackle, wood, and nature’s encroachment crackled under foot, but cleared as he made headway inside. Soon, details emerged, revealing a world buried by time and dust. He passed a wall tacked with sallowed commencement photos, display cases full of trophies, and classrooms beyond the open doors filled with furnishings from days when students gamboled through the halls, eagerly awaiting the recess bell or the mounted clock to strike three in the afternoon while buses rumbled into the loading zone.

Soon, light from outside penetrated the holes and slats along the shuttered windows. For a moment, he switched off his own light, having done so with mild apprehension. The light was still dim, leaving the space immersed in a ghostly presence, and refusing to take chances, he switched it back on.

He entered the nearest classroom, its door jammed open, and made out a ruler left on the teacher’s desk. Beside it were filing bins that seemingly predated the age of computers. One of them contained a sheet of paper with a B+ marked in pink highlights and a staple fastened to the upper left-hand corner. Below, a broken pencil littered the floor, its two halves left undisturbed since the last custodian had exited the building. They had even left the trash can behind as it laid on its side butting against the wall by the windows. The scene was ghastly in its own right, and it made him recall the portentous news report from earlier.

The wind picked up from outside, rustling the trees in a symphony of sighs. A spell overcame Ethan. He couldn’t pin it, but it made him uneasy, as if he had stepped into forbidden territory, or violated the grave of a restless spirit. He didn’t even hear the rush of traffic on the road just over a hundred feet away; even the remotest of places had at least a car or two passing on occasion. But he dismissed it as a figment of wild imagination and resumed his search.

As he crept out of the classroom and headed down the hall, he heard what sounded like someone talking in the adjacent room. He froze, hoping not to move and betray his presence. For all he knew, it could have been the building inspector, or the appraiser, probably discussing plans for the condemned property with the local code officer. Worse, they must have seen his car and called the police. An arrest was the last thing Ethan needed, especially for a man of his years. But after a minute, there was no reciprocal voice, nothing indicating an ongoing conversation typical of the subject at hand. It could have been his mind filling the gaps in the funereal silence, that he began experiencing aural hallucinations under the stress of having trespassed a place of danger, or, in terms of the rotting mementoes throughout the building, a case of parasocial nostalgia. He couldn’t be sure, and continued to listen for another minute before dismissing it on account of his waning faculties.

Toward the far end of the hall, he came to a door that sagged to one side, its upper hinge weakened from neglect. It opened with a struggle, the bottom rail scraping and scuffing the carpet riddled with grime. Inside, stood a desk and a couple of strategically placed chairs. The principal’s office, he presumed, and visualized a pupil sitting opposite the desk enduring a stern reprimand. Ethan smiled wryly.

A muffled shout pierced the calm. He flinched, his hands smacking the doorjamb. Minimizing his chance of getting caught, he darted behind the door, hoping no one snooped around and tracked his course of exploration. Another volley of chatter prattled through the walls, skittered across the ceiling, and echoed down the hallway. Whispers turned to murmurs, murmurs into moans, and moans turned voluble, even garrulous, as if the speaker had been jovial that moment. Yet it was all transitory, like fleeting thoughts at the edge of sleep, and he couldn’t understand a shred of it, no word standing out that he readily identified. Everything was nebulous, as if a strange reinterpretation of vocalized speech by non-human entities, or some arcane language he had never heard.

Who goes there? he almost cried aloud, but restrained himself from any brash reaction normal to his impulses, which took considerable effort to suppress.

Two minutes ticked by in tentative silence. As he slowly peered around the side of the door, his eyes still adjusting to the twilit corridors beyond, the chattering gossip stirred once again. He yanked his head back into the relative safety of the office, wondering when something would grab the edge of the door and pry it open.

Any second… Any second… More chatter, the voices growing clearer, yet still unfamiliar, the diction as indecipherable as the noises an animal made, but with notable structure and flux in its intonations. It came and went like sonic phantoms, toying with Ethan’s logic. They acted non-corporal, disembodied from any flesh-bound creature. No other way could describe it. Physical vocalizations never acted so erratically, phasing in and out of range in sporadic bursts, as if existing outside natural parameters. He concluded the place, for all intents and purposes, might have been haunted.

He made a list of conjectures on what he heard. They might have been imprints, past sounds embedded into the building’s framework that kept repeating at random, spontaneous and without warning. He expected laughter, shouting, the amalgam of sounds children made at school, yet he heard nothing of the sort. Perhaps they were bona fide ghosts, that someone had died on premise. Yet it could have been internal, that age had finally caught up with him, or, as he gave it some additional thought, his lack of sleep from the previous night, that he currently ran on the fumes of a large, espresso-laced cup of coffee that he had slaked barreling down the empty roads. 

One thing was certain, however: voices themselves didn’t bite, material or eidolic, but it was their respective bodies that posed a threat. Muttering a prayer to summon his courage, he snuck out the office and back into the hallway. A lone picture hung from the wall, framed and prominent, an old, unfamiliar face, someone long dead who must have spearheaded a role in the selfsame institute. With a firm but humble smile, donning a pair of wireframe spectacles and a finely pressed jacket and tie, he defined erudition, a pedagogical figure who molded and shaped the minds of the future.

As Ethan stared into the keen eyes that beamed from the photo, he saw a subtle, yet perceptible flash inside them. At that second, another host of voices chirped and yammered up and down the rows of lockers, the corroding metal lending to the reverb that trailed into the realm of dreams. They sounded less human with every manifestation, leaving him equally enthralled and terrified as they grew louder, more invasive, and soon merged with his conscience, commingling with his own memories as if his own.

The semantic stream continued to lash at his mind, like a tornado sucking him inside its shaft. Soon, visual patterns phased into memory, coupling with the sounds and voices, becoming inseparable, a corporeal counterpart to the flurry of hauntings that drummed through the walls. What were they? Ethan couldn’t tell, too panicked to scrutinize the uroboric forms. But from what he discerned, they looked vaguely animalistic, almost raccoon-like, but wide-eyed, and standing on two feet; beyond that it was a blur, perhaps an illusion.

Stricken with panic, he wanted to run, but he couldn’t escape what tethered his mind to the intangible source. Finally, after enduring the endless bombardment, he bellowed out, angrily fighting the spell of madness, demanding whoever flooded him with the blast of sensory overload pony up and show themselves. Yet the hall grew dim; every object became less tangible, that he was unable to wrap his mind around whatever it was that tossed him in all directions. He stubbornly continued to fight, struggling to keep his ground, but on what ground became the burning question…

The chattering abruptly stopped. Ethan found himself down on his knees. They must have buckled after the stress of constant exposure, the trauma too great to accept into his sense of reality, and that he had collapsed without knowing. It could have also been an act of supplication. He didn’t remember, but it certainly felt that way. Although, his conscience was clear as it was before, and the torturous storm had passed. As he scanned his perimeter, the hallway, the school, the derelict building, they all looked brighter, and inspecting once more, he confirmed it as fact.

The sun had risen. Hours had passed, and that he had fallen asleep from the grinding exhaustion his curiosity made him temporarily forget. Getting up, he stretched, his back popping and creaking like the classroom doors, relieved he hadn’t strained his spine. But he felt the burden of guilt of slumbering inside an abandoned school, only to breathe in years of dust and recollections of a long dead past. He sneezed. When he came to, one of the locker doors had opened. Strange. He never touched the walls.

Slowly, he crept toward the locker, the gaping space too dark to see what lay inside. As he drew closer, a sheet of paper resolved, barely visible within the shadows. He grabbed it as quickly as he could escape the clutches of whatever might have festered beyond the walls. His brow crinkled. It was a drawing, a crude diagram etched out by the likes of a child showing two circles connected by a wiggly arrow. Atop the first circle, the word “Earth” was written out, all in lower caps. The second one said “TIBBETH,” all in capitals.

Cute, he thought. Yet he pondered what the artist could have meant by this, if it meant anything besides a child’s creative meandering, but it didn’t explain why it lay in the only open locker that had been closed before he went comatose. It might have been a coincidence. Maybe not. Probably not. He placed it back in the locker, letting it rejoin the withering procession of time.

Then it hit him as hard as a hammer. Stricken with a bone-chilling horror, he spun on his heels and ran as fast as he could toward the exit.

Stumbling back through the open door, he debouched into the sunlight, relishing its warmth and praying to escape, to leave all that he saw and heard behind him, never to return. However, the moment he searched for his car, he froze, his eyes bulging out of their sockets. The light had changed color, casting the land in a marmalade tint. The sky was no longer blue, but a steely violet peppered with small scuds and billows that penetrated further into the reaches of space. The biggest shock came from the towering trees. Their boughs twisted and knotted into a mesh of botonees, draping with strange, purple foliage adorned in yellow fruits, or whatever they were, and limbs tasseled with catkins or some variant of Spanish moss. It looked as though a painter had liberally dabbed his brush across an oil-on-canvas using the wildest palette imaginable.

Struggling to gain his bearings, he turned back around. Gone were the greens, the ashes, and the cottonwoods. Gone was the ratty pavement, the road, and the scrub-addled plains. Gone was Wyoming, or any familiar place. The school remained as it was, rotting under a foundation of terrestrial growth now clashing with the radically changed environment. Even when he arrived in the blackest of night, the place never looked like this. The town even failed to show up in his GPS, as if snatched from some other place or time. Where was he? Where was his car? How would he get home? Did this have something to do with the eyes in that photo suddenly flashing? Nothing made sense; he never recalled falling asleep, nor the peregrination that swept him to the other side of the cosmos. Someone, somewhere, knocked him out of his senses, and he remained unconscious longer than he had thought, still dreaming, possibly dead—dead but dreaming in a place far outside the bounds of Earth.

He glanced once again at the alien purlieu, examining it to the best of his abilities, then back at the school. As he tried reconciling the differences, something else had changed in the seconds he had looked away. He stood as still as a brick, his mouth agape.

Between himself and the doorway, a figure no bigger than a raccoon, the one he had seen earlier skittering around the school, as well as the one in his maddening visions, now stood on two stubby legs and invitingly waved its long bushy tail, staring back at him with the large, glaring eyes of a loris, its taut skin—or was it fur?—capturing the pall of orange light that enveloped the world. It sported a witty smirk, then chittered a string of garble. Ethan, to his surprise, understood every word.

“Welcome, Earthman” the creature greeted with open arms, “to the planet of Tibbeth, the halcyon world, a world free of war!”