The Key to Everything by Alex Kimmell Page B

stone hit his neck, causing him to choke for a moment, and he almost dropped the key. Another rock, this one quite heavy, smashed into his stomach, almost doubling him over in pain.
    It was getting closer. Each impact struck with more force than the last. Welts rose and skin tore. Ribs cracked. The laughter grew deeper and louder. The ground shook. Glass in the window began to crack and split. Only a few more feet and it would be on top of him, tearing him to pieces. 
    The key slid home, and the doorknob turned. 
    Jabez shoved the door open and kicked out at the terror racing toward him. He missed his target but was able to pull himself across the doorway. Scrambling through, he watched the horrible black mouth filled with terrible sharp teeth launching through the air . 
    The door slammed shut.
    Silence. 
    White. 
    Everything was a pristine, warm white. 
    A soft feather bed with a hand-quilted white comforter against the wall. In the center of the room, a writing desk. A blank stack of paper with seven white sharpened pencils rest on top. On the wall across from him, an ornately sculpted white frame enveloping nothing but black space. 
    Completely illuminated, Jabez looked around the small room for a window or some other light source. Other than the dark void surrounded by the gilded frame, he saw nothing but the empty, painful white. So brilliant he squinted against the glare. Then he noticed the real problem. There was no door.

-14-
    Jabez: The Room
     

    The second hand on his watch stopped working during the team’s ambush, so there was no way to gauge the passing of time. He spent a while tracing his hands over the walls, looking for some hidden seal or sign of a trap door. Trying to find anything that might grant him a way out. 
    Even standing on the bed, the ceiling was too high to reach. He thought about sliding the desk over and putting it on top of the bed, but even that wouldn’t lift him enough. Hopping down to the floor, he took one of the pencils off the stack of empty pages and started drumming the eraser on his knuckles. It was something he always did in school when he was a kid. It calmed his nerves during a test or when he actually built up the nerve to talk to one of the cute girls in his class. 
    He measured the length of the room by counting his steps. He wore size 12 boots and, stepping heel to toe, counted off ten feet from wall to wall. The room felt a lot bigger than ten by ten, and the echoes reverberating around him took a noticeably long time to come back to his ears. In this imaginary or dream room, why should the laws of physics apply?
    Dragging the eraser against the wall across from the bed, his peripheral vision saw the desk moving away from him. He turned and walked back to the center of the room, coming to the surprising revelation that he no longer felt any pain in his leg. The brace he had made was gone, and he wasn’t limping anymore. His uniform was gone as well. The soft white pants were drawstring-tied at the waist, and the loose-fitting shirt hung down to just above his knees with long, flowing sleeves. Between the crazy, fucked-up squirrel and this place, he was starting to think there was a misprint on the label of his pain pills. 
    Things were a bit too ass-up right now to get any real sleep, but that bed was starting to look pretty damn good. He fought against the urge to lie down and threw his pencil as hard as he could. It hit lead point first, leaving a dark grey crumble that stood out from the white background, then fell to the ground and settled perfectly into the corner where the floor met the wall.
    Jabez took both hands and fiercely rubbed his fingers through his hair. With his eyes closed he started walking. Five, six, then seven steps forward. Ten, eleven, up to fifteen steps before he opened his eyes. The wall was immediately in front of his nose, but the pencil and the grey crumble it made on the surface were gone. He scanned the floor, and it was