The work was over; the documents were typed and the errors corrected, but upstairs there was no work left. Yet even as the final period had been struck on the last document hours ago, its ink drying into bureaucratic permanence, I couldn't shake the sensation that our typing pool's fingers had worn grooves not just into keys, but through the fabric of the building itself. Which explained why, when I ventured upstairs through the flickering stairwell lights, the offices stood vacant—desks polished to a clinical shine, the air smelling of lemon disinfectant and abandoned purpose. They'd all gone home, or more accurately, vanished into the walls where the memos we'd typed continued circulating endlessly in the ventilation shafts.

So instead I went to my room—or rather, the storage closet they'd let me claim between broken projectors and boxes labelled ARCHIVES: 2000-2022 (DO NOT SORT). There, the others who lingered had that same hollowed-out look of people who exist only when needed. We were, after all, the ones they called when Teachers (always capitalised, always plural) decided which students needed "detailing"—a process involving manilla folders and the occasional bloodstained handkerchief pressed to weeping eyes. Sometimes, when the heating pipes groaned, I swore I could hear the walls whispering last term's detailed students' names backwards.

Among them was Harold (if that was his name), a complete sick person whose actions shattered reality itself. Unlike Charley’ss two—who moved with terrifying synchronicity, their identical blazers never wrinkling—Harold's limbs jerked to music only he could hear. I'd witnessed his hand pass through teacups, or worse, multiply them into twelve china copies that screamed when dropped. Today, as he tried to eat a stapler, it became clear his sickness wasn't medical but ontological—a fundamental wrongness in how he occupied space, like a corrupted file in the school's operating system.

Meanwhile, people were writing about technical problems with increasing desperation. First it was just screens showing static hymns, then keyboards typing backwards Latin, until finally the Head's ancient Dell coughed up a blue screen declaring: “YOUR SOUL HAS BEEN WEIGHED”. That's when they remembered I'd taken an IT course in 2009. The virus, I soon realised, wasn't malware but metaphysical—slithering through Ethernet cables like a bad dream, its code written in the margins of detention slips. After exorcising it with a floppy disk labelled “BACH'S CELLO SUITES”, I noticed the cables had grown warm and pulsing, like veins.

This was how I reconnected with that friend—though friend was generous for someone who'd become more of a warning. He'd tried to leave at 3:15 PM exactly 427 days ago, only to discover the front gates now led back to the cafeteria. Now he lived behind the stage curtains, his skin taking on the yellowish hue of library varnish, surviving on custard creams and chapters torn from geography textbooks. We'd stopped asking when he'd go home. Some places, I'd come to learn, won't let you leave until you've learned your lesson, and here the curriculum changed daily.

My solution for the ceiling-stranded teachers came to me during a fire drill. "They’re not stuck," the Deputy Head had hissed earlier, adjusting her neck-tie noose, "they’re vertically realigned." But the truth was in their chalk-stained fingers, clawing at acoustic tiles as they swayed like hanged men. "Try the fire hose!" shouted the friend behind the stage curtains—his voice muffled by geography textbooks. The hose coughed up a decade’s worth of rust before the water came, thick and brown as forgotten tea.

"Mind the—"

Too late. Mr. Hendricks from Chemistry hit the ground knees-first, his glasses now bifocals of shattered plastic. "Fascinating," he murmured, watching his own blood droplets float upward, "the descent replicates the Oxford pendulum experiment…"

Others followed—some weeping "I can’t feel my register!", others giggling as their ties coiled into nooses mid-air. The Headmaster remained upside-down, one patent shoe dripping reverse raindrops onto the ceiling. "This," he announced to a startled Year 7 class watching through the door crack, "is an improved pedagogical perspective. Note how my beard grows toward God."

Only Miss Pevensie from Music refused. "The light fixtures sing Palestrina," she whispered, hugging a fluorescent tube. We left her there, her ankles bound with extension cords, humming a countertenor line that made the fire hose writhe like a dying serpent.

All this time, Cummings guarded the clock-tower. Since the Incident, he’d stood vigil over the cure clock—not a clock that cured, but one being cured, its hands swaddled in yellowed sticking plasters, its face leaking slow amber tears. Every hour it chimed, another classroom ceased to exist. Not vanished, not collapsed—simply unhappened, as though the clock’s mechanics were erasing them from the school’s memory.

We’d tried unplugging it once. The cables slithered away into the wall behind Room 7B’s blackboard, where the caretaker had last been seen pressing his palms to the chalk-dusty surface, whispering "it’s all in the angles" before the door sealed itself. Now only Cummings remained, his left pupil dilating in perfect sync with the second hand’s shudder.

"Just hay fever," he insisted, as the clock’s gears groaned like a man swallowing broken glass.

Then came the day something exploded to the right while I tried to put the sky out.

It had leaked in overnight—first in hesitant puddles, then in great cerulean waves that slammed against the stationery cupboard, warping the labels on the toner cartridges into Cyrillic script. I mopped frantically with a 1997 atlas (pre-Kosovo borders), its pages dissolving into blue pulp, when the explosion hit.

The windows shattered not into glass, but into jagged fragments of last Tuesday’s maths test, equations bleeding ink as they skittered across the floor. Question 3(b) lodged in my sleeve. The room itself had come unmoored—walls breathing, expanding like a lung, the ceiling tiles peeling back to reveal not rafters, but a starless expanse that smelled of overheated projector bulbs.

I pocketed a shard of exploded calculus. It melted on my tongue—burnt almonds and the acrid tang of unfinished homework, the kind of regret that knots your stomach at 2 AM. Above me, the fire alarm clicked its tongue, then began a wavering Gregorian chant in perfect four-part harmony. Somewhere down the hall, a door slammed. Then another. Then all of them at once, in a rhythm like teeth chattering.

Afterwards, I wiped down tables veneered with class lists—not rosters, but casualty reports:

Emily R. – 1 missing kneecap (left, presumed swallowed)

Daniel K. – voice-box infestation (Lepidoptera, ongoing)

The ink bled upward through the wood grain like sepsis in a wound. My damp cloth smeared their diagnoses into a single verdict, the letters swelling with moisture:

ALL – TERRIBLY, TERRIBLY LATE

The laminate grew warm under my palm. When I lifted my hand, fine blonde hairs had sprouted between my fingers, each strand split at the tip like a miniature tuning fork. The tables were definitely growing pelts now—patchy at first, but thickening by the hour into something soft and schoolgirl-gold.

I reached for an incident form, but the instructions hissed at me in tiny sans-serif:

REQUIRED: 6ml arterial blood (Type O-negative preferred)

WITNESS: Art Dept. staff (living signature only)

The last art teacher’s clay bust of the Headmaster still sat in the faculty lounge, her fingers visibly fossilized mid-sculpt, the hollow where her face had pressed into the wet clay now glazed to a permanent scream.

Through it all, the library-first programme hummed beneath the floorboards—a deep, rhythmic thrumming like a sleeping giant's heartbeat. It wasn't software but something older: leather-bound volumes breathing in unison, Dewey decimals rearranging into prophecies. Whenever a book burst into flames, the librarians (all seven named Margaret) would stamp WITHDRAWN on the ashes. I realized this was the only thing preventing the building from folding into itself like a bad origami experiment—that and the quiet sobbing coming from the staff toilets, which nobody mentioned but everyone scheduled around.