The Shibboleth by John Hornor Jacobs Page A

from my open mouth.
    The sound of feet and wind being pumped in and out of lungs. Maybe some exasperation in there as well.
    I press the bar as slowly as I can. It’s a heavy, thick metal door. Industrial strength.
    Below me, the footfalls continue.
    When the gray door opens, there’s a hot wind matching my breath, whipping inside the building due to some pressure differential I can only imagine, and I see an expanse of black and then white gravel and then black once more. I slip outside, onto the roof, as gracefully as I can manage, some drug-addled reflection of it. I’m out and moving away from the door before I realize that it might shut with a loud clang and alert the nurse.
    Turning, I see the door swinging shut.
    In movies, I’d make some dramatic leap, some superhuman dash, and stop it before it closes. But I’m still swimming in molasses, and an ungainly lurch is about all I can manage.
    The door slows its movement at the very end, when it’s about to close and latch, but I’m still too slow and now I see there’s no handle to grab onto anyway, just a deadbolt. I fumble at it, hands numb, but the damned thing clangs shut.
    The wind whips over the roof, making any other noise small and indistinct. But I heard the
clang
of the door shutting, and if I did, I have to assume whoever was ascending the stairs did as well.
    I whirl about, my hospital gown giving a little flourish, and scope out my surroundings. Big metal boxes, gray-green, and some galvanized tin pipeworks. There’s a wall of what looks like stone to my right, and capping the stone are little ornamental teeth, like the jagged skyline of a castle. It’s an old building, the Tulaville Psychiatric Hospital.
    I shuffle across what I realize now is black tar roofing. I hit a sticky spot, and it pulls the slippers from my feet. I take four steps before I realize the slippers are gone. I turn back to get them, stop, and then turn back again to the gray-green shapes I was heading for. Some sort of electrical or air-conditioningunits like gargantuan building blocks. As quickly as possible, I hide behind the bulkiest of them.
    It’s dark now, and the meager lights of Tulaville wink and tremble in the steamy night air. It’s humid and loud with the roar of some ventilation machinery, and the spray of stars above is lost in the high, wispy cirrus clouds whipping by on hot winds.
    I peek around the corner at the door. There’s a single wire-framed bulb above it, swarmed with insects battering themselves against the glass. The door remains closed.
    Breathless, I wait long enough to know that whoever was in the stairwell doesn’t have an inquisitive bone in his body. Either that, or he’s deaf.
    Five minutes? Ten? I can’t tell. My breath has slowed, and I’m not panting anymore. Sweating, though.
    Eventually, I stand and shuffle back to the door and see if I can open it.
    No dice.
    I look around, wandering to the edge of the roof, the toothed—
no, crenellated
—wall surrounding me. Not much up here except splatters of bird shit and tar roofing and patches and puddles of water. There’s some metal sheeting stacked in a corner, behind the stairwell hutch.
    I can see most of Tulaville from the vantage, and beyond that, the phosphorescent lights marking the trestle bridge over the Arkansas River. Below me, the soft, manicured lawns. A parking lot, dimly lit. The building is old and over six stories tall. And judging by the crumbling mortar along the crenellations, falling into serious disrepair. But I guess I already knew that from my stint downstairs.
    In the dark, I can make out a sub-roof below me, over the wings of the fourth floor and what looks like another stairwell hutch or some sort of rooftop storage shed, but it’s a drop of twenty-five feet. Tulaville Psychiatric Hospital is an absolute beast of a building.
    I don’t know what to do. I can bang on the door and hope someone