Shadows Out of Time

Next to Emily, her boyfriend Sean thumbed a text message covertly into his phone and hit send. It appeared silently in a window on the screen of her laptop. Can I come over again tonight? She glared at him, annoyed at the intrusion, but he grinned and his gray eyes flashed. Those sharp, inquisitive eyes were the first thing she’d noticed about him, and they were still hard to say no to. She nodded, then forced herself to focus on the notes she’d been taking. She couldn’t let herself get distracted. It was important she pass Professor Vaughan’s pre-med neuroscience class. She’d kept her nose to the grindstone all year making sure her grades remained good enough to get into a decent medical school after graduation and she wasn’t about to let it slip now.

Professor Vaughan glanced at his watch. “We’ve got a few minutes left. Are there any questions?”

The students in the lecture hall looked at each other as though daring anyone to delay their escape. No one ever asked questions.

And then she heard it.

“Can a human brain continue to function outside of the body?”

But when Emily looked up from her laptop, Professor Vaughan was still looking expectantly at his students, and the students were still looking around in the hopes of being dismissed early. It was as though no one had spoken.

“No questions? All right, then,” Professor Vaughan said, switching off the SMART board. “For next time, read chapter six in Brain, Mind, and Behavior. You’re dismissed.”

Emily frowned. She could have sworn she’d heard a voice. A woman’s voice.

I can’t see anything. Everything is dark.

I try to blink, but I have no eyes.

I try to listen, but I have no ears.

It’s as if I don’t exist. But I do. I’m here. I’m real.

Where am I? Is anyone else here? These are the questions I want to shout, but I have no mouth.

As a senior faculty member at Middlewood, Professor Vaughan had his own office far from the faculty building the other teachers had to share. It was inside a small stone cottage that sat at the far end of the student parking lot, a private office he’d decorated with shelves of books, framed degrees, and an antique, single-lensed brass microscope from the 19th century that Emily thought was beautiful in its simplicity. She felt bad about taking up the entirety of the professor’s office hours after the lecture, but no other students came by and Vaughan didn’t seem to mind. She’d been taking notes on her laptop all through their discussion but had stopped halfway through when she noticed the door in the wall. Now she couldn’t stop looking at it. Every time she looked up from her computer at Professor Vaughan, she found herself sneaking peeks at the door, squinting at it, trying to figure it out.

It was a perfectly ordinary-looking door. There was nothing special about it, except for the fact that she could have sworn it had never been there before. What’s more, she couldn’t figure out where it could possibly lead. There was nothing on the other side of the wall except the little cottage’s stone exterior. If she were to open that door, it would lead directly outside, but even that didn’t make sense. There was only one door into this building. There had only ever been one door.

“Miss Bannerman, are you paying attention?”

“Yes, of course,” Emily said, turning back to him. What was wrong with her? She needed to focus. Except she was sure she’d never seen that door before.

“Good.” Professor Vaughan leaned forward, elbows on his desk, fingers laced together. “Anyway, this project I’m talking about could be a very important opportunity for you. You would receive extra credit for it, obviously, but it’s also the kind of addition to your C.V. that medical schools find very appealing in candidates. When I was presented with the opportunity to bring in students from my class, I thought of you immediately. You’re one of my brightest pupils, Miss Bannerman. I’ve seen how hard you work to keep up your GPA. I think you’ve got a good mind — the right kind of mind for this project. If you’re interested, of course.”

She was. She’d always had a strong intellectual curiosity, driven since a young age to understand the world around her, how things worked, how things connected. It was why she was pursuing a medical degree. There was so much to learn about the human body, and especially the human mind, which often seemed to her as boundless and infinite as the cosmos itself. And Professor Vaughan was right, this did sound like something that could give her an edge when she started sending out applications.

“What exactly is the project?” she asked.