CH 38

The hallway was made to look like a very old, abandoned school.

Scattered on the ground were things like a blackboard snapped in half, crushed chalk, a ruined broom, and ripped-up slippers. I flashed light on the walls and saw that the white and green paint was peeling off in patches. Perhaps they wanted to make it look like there was blood because there were red splotches on the wall. There was also a fire-hose cabinet with the door destroyed. In the cabinet was a hose with holes in it. I checked underneath just in case, but there were only two pencil stubs.

“Watch your step. There’s a lot more debris than you think,” I said to Goyeon, who was standing behind me as I picked up a piece of chalk. I didn’t hear a reply from Goyeon, but seeing as I didn’t hear a scream or a thudding sound, she must have been treading carefully. As I walked with my hands running against the wall, my hand caught onto the sticky cobwebs.

The doors were further from the stairs than I expected. I expected to see countless doors along the wall like the mansion I saw a long time ago, but that wasn’t the case. I guess if we found a door right away, it wouldn’t be fun or suspenseful.

Befitting an abandoned school, the doors were shaped like classroom doors. They were painted in a variety of colors, but they were all wooden, sliding doors. Some of them were locked with a silver lock. From where I was standing, I could see about two doors that were locked in that fashion. Beyond that, it was too dark to see. In order to open those locks, it seemed like we needed to find the right keys.

Just as people discussed yesterday, it was possible for each person to just open 10 doors in one day for a total of 80 doors. Even if some of those rooms had special traps installed, most doors could be opened. It made sense that there were some locked doors to prevent that. That way people would use up time searching for the keys.

It was only my prediction, but I didn’t think that finding the keys to the doors would be that easy. There was no way that the keys to the locked doors would be hidden on the same floor as the corresponding door. Finding the keys was one issue, but not knowing which floor the keys were hidden on raised the difficulty of the game significantly. You wouldn’t know which door on which floor some key found coincidentally would fit in.

“It’s a lot trickier than I expected,” I tapped the silver lock as I mumbled.

“Let’s go into one of the unlocked rooms first,” Goyeon said as she pointed to one of the doors. The door had a translucent piece of glass on it and one corner of it was broken.

I pointed the light into the cracked portion and could see part of the inside. The first thing I saw was a dark red fabric and the golden tassel of a curtain. Tilting the angle a bit, the light bounced off the glass of a picture frame hanging from the wall. Nothing about the room looked particularly dangerous.

Slide.

Perhaps it wasn’t oiled well because the sliding door was difficult to push. It didn’t open beyond a certain point and I told Goyeon so, but she said that we could just enter anyway. The two of us could squeeze in without difficulty, but if someone who was bulkier than us tried, they would probably get stuck in the middle.

“A music room? Broadcast room? Acting club? Oh, it must be a music room.” The deep red fabric that I saw was a curtain after all. The heavy soundproof curtain hanging from the ceiling completely covered one wall. Goyeon carefully lifted the curtain. However, it looked like she found nothing because she returned with a frown. She said that she only saw a thick layer of dust and a pile of recorders.

“I expected as much, but there really are no windows here.”

“You’re right. It feels stuffy here.” I thought this place was a music room because there were several stools gathered in the center of the room, and in front of them were a bunch of music stands for sheet music. Also, on the wall opposite the curtains were broken violins and guitars carefully lined up against the wall. The floor was a mess of scattered and ripped-up sheet music. I picked one of them up and chuckled.

‘Lightly row, lightly row, o’er the glassy waves we go.’ They were pieces that could belong in elementary books by F. Beyer.

But in case there were any strange things recorded, I skimmed through the sheet music. I saw “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “The School Bells,” “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” “Yellow Forsythia,” and “…under the yellow shade of the flowers, a pair of baby’s shoes lay neatly beneath.” Apparently, all the famous children’s songs were scattered here. Eventually, I gave up looking through the sheet music.