The Other Place

A whole new wooooorld~

Photo by Abhinav Anand on Unsplash

You ever wake up one day and decide you’re tired of it all? Like you just don’t want to be here anymore?

Before you get the wrong idea, I’m not talking about killing yourself. No, I mean a fresh start. Packing up and moving somewhere far, far away where nobody knows who you are. All your past mistakes are wiped clean, and you get to start anew. Doesn’t that sound great? I think it sounds great.

Normally this would mean going to a different town at the very least. If you’ve got the cash for it, another country entirely. But what if that’s still not far enough? No matter where you go on this earth, there’s always the chance your past can catch up to you. The internet will make damn sure of that.

Another world now, that’s a different story. In another world nobody knows your face. Nobody knows your name. Nobody knows that you got fired from your last three jobs or that you got kicked out after your girlfriend caught you cheating.

In another world I could get a second shot. Do everything all over again, and do it right this time.

That want’s what led me to break into my old high school in the middle of the night. Wasn’t really worried about getting caught; if I did this the right way it wouldn’t matter if anyone saw me. Can’t arrest a guy for trespassing if he’s not there.

For context, there was a guy I went to school with named Dylan, and one day Dylan just disappeared. Gone. It was a huge deal, police all over the school and reporters clustered outside, pestering every single teacher or student they saw with the same questions. ‘Did you know Dylan Carter?’ ‘When did you see Dylan last?’ ‘Did Dylan have any enemies?’ ‘Was Dylan unhappy at home?’ On and on and on.

For the first few weeks you couldn’t even turn on the TV without seeing either his or his parents’ faces. You could see his mother deteriorate in real time, going from worried but sure her son would be found to a bedraggled wreck who could barely do more than cry and beg for him to come home.

It’s been ten years, and she’s still holding out hope that he’ll come back one way or another.

The weirdest thing was what he’d been doing before he vanished. People saw him going up and down the staircases in the school in a specific order: right, middle, left, right, middle, left. He’d been doing this for days on end, but always stopping before going up to the fifth floor. Even when he wasn’t performing his little ritual, he’d sometimes stop and look at the stairs leading to the fifth floor in this weird way.

I remember Kaylee talking about it. One day she asked him what he was doing and what his problem was with those steps. She said he just looked at her with this sad, kind of scared face and said one thing.

“Once I go, I can never come back.”

She thought it was weird. I thought it was weird. We all thought it was weird. Dylan always struck us all as a little bit strange, but this was a lot even for him. Never come back from where? The fifth floor? You’d see some guys cowering in mock-fear of the stairs whenever he was around, saying ‘Once I go, I can never come back!’ in trembling voices. We’d all laugh, and poor Dylan looked like he wanted to sink into the floor.

To be honest, we were probably the reason why he finally took that last step.

He started out all the way on the right, so did I. Up to the third floor, then down the middle staircase back to the first. After that, up the leftmost staircase to the second floor, then all the way to the right and up to the fourth.

The whole while I was doing this, I was wondering what led him to do any of this. Why the stairs? Why in this order? Who or what even told him that this would take him somewhere else? Too bad I never thought to ask him.

From the fourth floor I had to go down one flight on the middle staircase, then over to the left. This was it. One more step and it’d be the point of no return.

Once I go, I can never come back.

I stood there just like Dylan did all those years ago, looking up at those stairs with a weird mix of apprehension and anticipation. If I went up there, I would vanish from this world. No one would ever know what happened to me. Everything and everyone I knew would be gone, replaced by who-knows-what.

But was I really giving up all that much?

My family thought I was a loser, and what friends I still had really didn’t have that much better an opinion of me. Didn’t help that my ex made sure to tell all of them what I did. No one was looking to hire me. Résumé after résumé sent out with no call-backs. So yeah, would anyone really miss me if I just up and vanished?

Probably not.

Without ever looking back, I took that next step and made the final ascent into a new world.

It’s not a flashy process. I was expecting to get sucked through some kind of interdimensional tunnel, or maybe a whirlwind picking me up and depositing me on an old witch, or even blacking out for a bit and waking up someplace else.

No, I just shifted realities between one step and the next. Kind of like a jump cut, but in real life. All of a sudden I was greeted with pea green walls and a checkered floor instead of muted beige and brown. The air smelled a little different, but not in a way I can really describe. The best way I can put it is that I never actually breathed this air before, so it seemed unusual to me.

Also, I’d made my trek up and down the stairs in the middle of the night and now there was full sunlight shining in through the windows. I knew I hadn’t taken that long to go up and down the stairs, maybe fifteen minutes at best if you factored in walking from one end of the building to the other.

This was it. A new world.

A new life.

I could barely contain my glee as I ran back down the stairs, confusing the hell of the schoolkids who were filing through the front doors.

For the most part, this world isn’t any different from the one I left. It’s not like history took a sharp turn and nothing’s like I remember it or that the dominant species is a race of sentient cat-people. Hell, it doesn’t even have something harmless but weird like a green sky and blue grass. It’s pretty much the world as we know it, except I don’t exist in it. I never did.

Nobody knows me, not even my friends and family.

…Well, that’s not exactly true. Dylan’s here. An older, less-awkward, happier Dylan, but still the same guy who spent days going up and down the stairs until he finally worked up the courage to take that last step. I practically fell over myself apologizing to him. He waved it off, having put all of the experiences of the old world far behind him.

He helped me get settled in, and I’m happy here. I’ve got a new job, my own place, and if I play my cards right, maybe a new girlfriend.

Yep. Aside from the shadow creatures that come crawling out at night to prey on us, this new world’s pretty great.

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This installment of The Cobweb Game was inspired by The Staircase to Another World, which you can read about here: https://theghostinmymachine.com/2021/03/03/the-most-dangerous-games-staircase-to-another-world-ritual/

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