Marc Laidlaw by Anonymous

Author:Anonymous
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zinepal

The console gave a bleep, calling Messraunt back from the window. There was now a command awaiting his attention:

USER NAME:

Messraunt sat. With trembling fingers, he entered:

HANNEMOUTH

The machine accepted this, then offered up its challenge:

PASSWORD:

Slowly, Messraunt copied a long string of characters from a sheet the Dean had provided.

The car, he said later, was probably destroyed the instant he pressed the ENTER key, although he was not to verify this until his headlong flight down the seven sets of stairs had ended with him rushing out of the main building, treading on the tails of terrified swarming rats. His account of that mad descent is fragmentary at best, and made little sense even to those who had the patience to force him to repeat it. He spoke of the stairs themselves shifting, spinning, folding in and interlocking on themselves in mad configurations. The central stairwells, he suggested, changed positions several times as he plunged between floors; and he felt himself fortunate not to have been crushed in their cogs. He realized halfway down that the seventh floor might have remained stationary, a seat of safety for its pilot or programmer, but by that time there was no thought of return, no matter what might lie below.

What he saw from ground level was if anything even more harrowing than what he had seen from above, in the first instant after pressing ENTER, when the tower blocks had begun to slide along the grooved streets and swing ominously toward his position. From ground level, those huge blocks he had mistaken for dormitories had begun to accelerate, crashing together, locking and unlocking, forming features he had neither the leisure nor the desire to study at such close range. Such immensities should not move at such speeds! The sound was like mountains crashing and calving. And the tall shapes, closing in, pulled the darkness even closer. All at once he recognized the wisdom of the embedded light paths, for between the colliding titans it was impossible to tell which trails were safe to tread. They lit and darkened with a pattern that seemed illogical to a terrified mind, although he sensed that only reason would see him through to safety — that all this was, in fact, by design, and could he but fathom the pattern he might drive out of here unharmed.

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