274 (Complex Series, #4)

Chapter Fourteen

There’s nowhere that the person could have run. The hall travels for a long way without any other halls to slip into. Where could the person have gone?

Tooth slowly walks towards the rolling vial before plucking it up, instantly cutting off the soft clanging.

Tooth stares at me, “Where did they go?”

“I have no idea.”

 “Maybe the person disappeared.”

“But where’s the Official that took them away? Where’s the kid himself? They couldn’t get to the end of the hall that quickly. He couldn’t have disappeared.”

Tooth’s face is unreadable, “Maybe he simply disappeared.”

I search his silhouette of a face, trying to tell whether he’s kidding or not. He can’t be serious, “The kids don’t actually disappear, they’re just taken away from here…right?”

 “Unless they do just vanish.”

 “But, how? A person can’t vanish or dissolve. They have bones and skin and matter and all that stuff we learned in History Lecture Teaching. Besides what about the Official?”

Tooth is silent. Does that mean he agrees with me or has a thought so horrible he can’t voice it?

I persist, “There has to be a more logical reason.”

“There’s no logical reason as to why a glass vial of water would randomly start rolling on the floor in an abandoned hallway.”

I open my mouth to try to futilely defend myself, but Tooth interrupts me, “Unless there’s…”

“What?”

“What if there’s another, I don’t know, type of monster or creature that Ellen has created? One that nobody ever sees until their disappearance. What if it can make people disappear?”

I raise an eyebrow. His idea is a little too far-fetched to be believable.

Tooth sees my hesitation, “Before you came to the Unknown, would you have found the idea of the Things believable?”

“Well, no,” I stubbornly answer, “but I don’t think that you can make a person truly disappear. Besides, say this monster did exist, where did it go then? It wouldn’t be able to hide in this hallway any better than an Official or whoever moved the vial.”

“Unless the monster itself is invisible. What if it just, I don’t know, absorbs the children causing them to vanish?”

I shiver at the image, too chilling to believe. Such a thing couldn’t exist, even with the technologies and sciences of the Heads.

I argue, “What if it was just another kid? What if they just dropped the vial and ran down that other hallway and we just didn’t see them?”