Radley's Labyrinth for Horny Monsters by Annabelle Hawthorne (highly recommended books .txt) 📕

causing them to spring open. Mike was ahead of Ratu when he slammed into the second set. This door didn’t budge at all, causing Mike to bounce off and land on his butt.

“Fuck!” Mike rolled onto his side, holding his face. It had been the first thing to hit the glass. “See if you can open it!”

“It won’t,” she said, helping him up. “It doesn’t go outside.”

“What do you mean, it doesn’t go outside?” Standing, Mike saw that the window of the door wasn’t actually glass. The outside world was painted on a rocky surface, the door embedded in it.

“We need to find another way out. Are there any other doors that go outside?”

“A few,” Mike said, but the ringing of the bell silenced him. He and Ratu crammed themselves into opposite corners of the entryway. Though the lobby was all glass doors and walls, so many posters had been plastered to the glass that it was easy for them to hide. They put hands to their ears to shut out the orchestra of whispers that filled the air.

The flurry of activity outside the doors made his heart leap into his throat several times as the shadows bumped against the push bars, causing them to click. None of the shadows came into the lobby though, and Mike assumed it was because of the fact that the exit wasn’t real. Several minutes passed, and the shadows vanished once again.

Ratu started to stand, but Mike felt like he was going to be sick. He motioned for her to stay, and the sound of metal clunking on the tile of the front lobby made her shrink down. Mike turned his head toward the glass, realizing there was a very small gap between a poster about recycling and a D.A.R.E. poster with a cop car on it. Pressing his face against the glass, he could see Baba Yaga step into the lobby.

She was old and fat, wearing the kind of clothes old Russian women wore in movies. Her head was comically big, her face easily the size of a hubcap. Large, hairy moles had been planted across her face, and her squashed nose was made of dull, unpolished iron. She bared her frightful yellow teeth, swiveling her head from side to side. She was muttering to herself.

“Bad children should be punished, gonna make soup, gonna make bread.” Her words became unintelligible as she slipped into another language and then another after that. Mike was fairly certain she was mumbling in Spanish when she shoved her way through the doors opposite where she’d come in, wandering down toward the cafeteria.

Holy fuck, he mouthed at Ratu. The coast clear, she scurried toward him.

“We need to find the way out,” she told him. “She built this place from the corners of your mind. This isn’t the exit for a reason.”

“To be honest, I hated going home.” He looked at the painted scenery of the outside world. “Home meant my mother. At the end of the day, it felt like a prison sentence.”

“That’s part of the puzzle. You didn’t see these doors as an exit. So where would your brain have put it?”

“I honestly have no idea, but…” An idea came to him. “Oh shit.”

“Oh shit, what?”

“The gym.” He looked back through the gap. “My favorite class was gym. Not because I was any good at it but because we got to go outside and run the nature trail.”

“Nature trail?”

“Yeah, we had a little river that ran by the school. The gym teacher would take us along the nature trail, and I used to sneak off into the bushes and read books that I had stashed away before school.” It was the only place he’d been able to be alone with his thoughts. “There’s a door in the back of the gym that leads outside to the basketball courts and the nature trail.”

“Okay, so why the big deal?”

“It’s a gym class. The shadows seem to be preprogrammed to go about their day until we are spotted. That means a giant room full of them.” Mike flinched when a door slammed in the distance. “I’m not sure how we could make it to the door…wait, I know! The first five minutes of class are when we change clothes, so the gym should be empty.”

“But not a real five minutes.”

“No, but maybe it will give us enough time. We need to get close to the gym and find a hiding spot so that…” A flash of movement caught Mike’s eye through the gap, but all he could make out was a flash of blonde hair disappearing around the corner.

“What is it?”

“Thought I saw something. Or someone.” He shook his head, focusing on the task at hand. “There should be a set of recycle bins across from the gym. If we can hide in those, we can wait until the bell rings.”

“Then let’s do it.” She helped him stand, and they quietly pulled open the doors. The long halls of the school had taken on a sinister presence, and the two of them slowed whenever they neared a set of windows. They crawled beneath the large windows that looked into the computer lab, and he could hear the shadows within clicking away on their keyboards.

Nearing the gym, they spotted the large bins but had to wait. Baba Yaga was limping around near the entrance, sniffing through her giant nose. Clearly tracking something, she frowned, her whole face shifting down, and then stormed off toward a nearby set of stairs. Once she was out of view, Mike and Ratu scrambled down the hall and stood in front of the bins. They were about four feet tall and full of plastic bottles. Mike helped Ratu in, careful not to make any noise. Once she had her footing, she braced him as he slid across the top, and they lowered the lid on top of them, leaving a tiny gap through which to see.

Some time passed, and the bell rang. The hall filled with