Green Door

I saw it when I was escaping from the seminar: a little green door standing up on the road. There was nothing behind it, nothing it was attached to. It just stood there, like someone was playing a prank on the students.

I knew the other club members would catch up to me eventually. Running through the campus would just leave me running in circles, and all lecturers locked their doors after office hours. No one was allowed to exit the university parameter.

So I had to take my chance.

Without thinking too much of it, I lunged for the green door’s knob and yanked the door open.

If the world I was from was all road cones, black tape and seminar halls, the world behind that door was nothing but a pitch empty freedom. That’s not to say there was nothing in it. There were clocks, dozens of clocks, floating around with their hands stuck to the approximate time when the seminar had started. I balanced on an old grandfather clock, wobbling backwards and forwards, until I could grasp the edges of its worn wooden surface and it stabilised.

The first thing I thought to do was to look behind me. The green door was still there, stationary, hanging mid-air without anything to attach itself to, but somehow never drifting away. I felt a bit of relief, even if I didn’t exactly look forward to having to go back through it again.

The second thing I needed to do was to figure out where I was.

Some heads above me, a larger clock was floating. It was a blue plastic alarm clock, which somehow was the size of a large sailboat. It made the grandfather clock I was standing on seem like a pittance. I wondered who would use such a clock. A giant?

I looked around but could find no other living creatures but myself.

Maybe, I thought, if I climbed up that alarm clock, I’d be able to see better.

With a push of my legs, I managed to jump high enough to get a grip on the alarm clock’s side. It suddenly occurred to me that this was a completely smooth surface – yet I found my hands sticking to it, as though there was some kind of force in the clock that was helping me climb up.

When I reached the top, I found I could see even more of the strange space. Not only were there more clocks, there were also little mechanical creatures that floated between the clocks. I saw one which held a duster and was cleaning the surface of a clock tower. I saw another that was opening the back of a clock to repair it.

One of the creatures noticed me and floated up to eye-level.

“Can you spare a moment of your time?” it said in a tinny, metallic voice.

“Sure,” I replied, wondering what it had to tell me.

Instead of speaking, its eyes flared up into a bright orange – like headlights on a car – and I felt disoriented.

“Thank you,” it said curtly, before turning around and floating away from me.

“Wait! I need your help. I was running away from someone,” I said. “Can you tell me if there’s someplace safe? Where I can stay?”

“Stay?” said the creature. Its insides creaked, and I thought the sound came across as scornful. “Nothing stays here.”

I shut my mouth before I could say anything else. I looked around at all the clocks, and at the vast number of creatures that were flying around repairing them. I had to choose my words carefully. If I made this one mad, it might call its friends to help it get rid of me.

Before I could figure out what to tell the creature, its eyes flared orange again.

My world went black. Then, like a camera shutter, my vision came back, as bright as usual.

“What did you do?” I asked. I patted the sleeves of my sweater, as though there would be a rip or tear or something that would mark the effect of whatever had been done to me. There was none.

“I have taken some of your time away,” it replied.

My anger got hold of me. I was caught off guard by the interruption. I felt my cheeks go warm, but unlike with my course mates, I didn’t care if the mechanical creature could see it or not.

“You can’t just do that!” I said. “The reason I’m here is because I didn’t want to waste my time. There was this awful seminar. I’ve been going to these awful seminars for years, now, and they won’t let us leave. I came to the university to study history, but all the history lecturers were gone. There was only this club left organising seminars for the subject.”

I had long abandoned the theory that it was some kind of scam. The black tape that surrounded the campus perimeter, the road cones blocking off every entrance, the way club members would catch you and drag you back to the halls . . . I could not understand it. I couldn’t even try to.

“Every time they bring us back to tell us the same thing about how our pants don’t have pockets, and how that means the world is ending. I’ve stopped wasting time there, I’m not going to let you take what little time I have left.”

I was breathing heavily, with a droplet of sweat running down my face from the exertion.

“Well,” the creature said. I took its moment of silence for surprise. “But all people come here to have their time wasted.”

The large round eyes shone a light all around it, as it seemed to swivel its ‘head’ back and forth, looking at the other ones just like it. Then it looked back at me. “I’m going to take another moment. That’s my job here.”

I didn’t wait for that moment to pass – I bolted. Just like how I bolted out of the grey and dreary seminar hall, I clambered over the ridge of the blue alarm clock and leapt back onto the grandfather clock. I almost missed. My arms scrambled to hug the wooden body tight. When I stepped onto it, my feet slipped on the glass, and I had to reach for the top of the clock to regain purchase.

The green door was still where it was, utterly motionless.

I could hear the whirring of the creature right behind me. I grabbed the doorknob and pulled it open, before hurling myself out.

I landed – back where I was – on the rough tar of the road, somehow unpleasantly warm, despite the grey storm clouds that were gathering in the sky above campus. A breath escaped me. I felt like there was no air in my lungs, but I still kept breathing.

The sleeve of my sweater moved gently with the breeze. It had been split down the middle up to the forearm. I guess it must have gotten caught on something as I got away.

I pushed myself up to my feet and looked around.

Three uniformed women were walking briskly in my direction. They each wore grey skirts and had sunglasses disguising hiding their faces. Sunglasses, when it was just about to rain.

“What are you doing out there?” the tallest one asked me, as she looked me up and down.

“I was running to the restroom,” I said with a monotone voice. “I tripped.”

The women escorted me back to the seminar hall. The presenter with a pink scarf was just finishing the third slide of her lecture on the seams of pockets and what they represent in society. The cold metal seat burnt my skin as I sat down – I welcomed the sensation.

At least here, I had time, if nothing else. Time was not really being wasted.

After all, over the course of the lecture, I wrote all of this.

Written by:

Subject No. 3936