You always remember where you were when something truly horrible happens. That afternoon I was sitting at my desk, feet up, cola in hand, not a care in the world.
I flipped my notebook to a blank page and took a sip of my drink. A few taps of the keyboard, and LECHALL8B from year 2020 became LECHALL8B from year 2019. And lo and behold, I, Michael, the world’s first technotard turned technowhiz, was in.
See, finals were next week, and the recordings were missing. I had scrounged around the site and found a couple of posts from students complaining that the lecturer had been slack in recording them. I had a trick these whining suckers didn’t, though.
The end of the URL of the recording read: LECHALL8B-12-14-20.mp4. You see, when I DID skip class, some were simply not uploaded, as a result of technical difficulties or otherwise, and I began to miss out. But the trick here: you could change the site’s address to a year prior, and funny enough, a lot of the time the same lecture was recorded the year before. And for a lot of classes, the content had not been changed. Bingo. Problem solved.
The lecture started off like any other: the ceiling-mounted camera recorded the lecturer front and center with a whiteboard behind. The back of a few student’s heads framed the bottom of the screen, watching the speaker and the board.
This recording however, something was… off. There was no youthful babbling at the beginning of the session before the start, the video feed was slightly grayscale and the picture a little out of focus, as if the camera and projector hadn’t been tended to in some time. Most curiously, the whiteboard had one word untidily written in red: ELIZABETH.
I stared at my screen, utterly intrigued. The students in the video did not move nor speak, they only stared forward at the whiteboard in center frame. This surely couldn’t have been my class, these guys had funeral service behavior. And who was this woman? I hadn’t seen her around campus before.
She stared at me. Eyes sunken and face gaunt, she looked unblinkingly toward the camera. The class was silent. Frayed brown hair had drifted partially over her pale face. And the class sat quiet. She opened her mouth, but not to speak - she moaned a single tone, and it didn’t stop. My heart was racing, it felt less like I was watching her and more like she was watching me. I stared back at the hole in her face.
The sound coming out of her mouth began to sound like a distant blowfly buzzing a deep hum, but I couldn’t bring myself to close the site - I kept looking on. My stomach twisted and turned, but I simply couldn’t look away. What the fuck was she doing?
And then I saw it. Its head was disproportionately massive, the size of a torso upon one starved neck. Because of this, it seemed to struggle to wander into frame behind the woman. It moved unpredictably, stepping one foot forward only to move the other backward to steady itself under its leaning head. The head was a moldy grape, round, smooth and fleshy, bobbing and leaning unsteadily as it slogged behind the woman.
It was then close enough to breathe on the woman’s neck. Abruptly, she shut her mouth.
From what I could see, it had no eyes, but it did have a mouth now agape, lined with long finger-like teeth that looked like white pencils.
That was the last time I saw her face. The thing engulfed her head with its own, its gangly body hanging limp, its lips still tightly wrapped around her throat.
The previously motionless students broke into a screaming frenzy, jumping and climbing out of their seats, clambering over one another.
And then nothing. The screen went black.
I felt like throwing up, I reached for my bin. And then it hit me: it was a practical joke. Right?
Come on, Michael. A joke, and you cannot even hit replay.
When I did, I paused it before the woman walked into frame. Wherever this lecture hall was, it was familiar but blurry, both in vision and memory.
Like every good one, there is truth behind the joke. A hurtful jest has you wondering if someone really meant to hurt you, a bitterness left behind. And when I stared at my screen, I couldn’t help but think about some sort of hurtful truth behind it all.
I knew where the room was.
A couple nights later, I found my head still spinning when drifting away to thoughts of the video. The head. The teeth going through her neck at one end and coming out the other. The way it never let go after it swallowed her.
It was a couple hours past midnight, and the campus was utterly haunting. Somewhere usually filled with bustling students and chatter, now hollow and quiet, made my heart race.
There were lights on outside to dispel people that were just like me. I wrestled with the locked door of the east wing for a while. I prayed that hallways were not the security’s priority to add alarms to, rather, the rooms inside which housed exam papers and valuable equipment.
And I was right. No alarms sounded when I lockpicked my way through. I was in, but my mind went to a possible silent alarm. I had to be quick.
Down the hall to the right, I found the room. It was sealed from the outside, the windows plastered with some sort of plasticky material that could not be peeled if I gave it all my might. It had been blocked off from students and staff for almost four years on account of maintenance, but at that moment I didn’t quite buy that. I needed a way in.
The locks on the door were intimidating. One large metallic contraption above the doorhandle, a second below requiring a small key. But I couldn’t turn back.
That’s when something quite peculiar happened. The handle turned, and the door opened. Curiosity beckoned me and yielded.
Inside, I heard each and every of my steps with reverb. There was no sound in the theatre, and each movement echoed to the black curtain against the wall behind the whiteboard.
This was where it happened.
Nothing happened, Michael. This is where they recorded the prank, or whatever awful-taste idea that was.
I was halfway down the steps. I looked about. Things were dusty, unkept. The projector and camera mounted to the distant ceiling were tilted. Pivoted. Leaning. Leaning because of the weight. The heavy weight and the thin, thin neck holding it together. I shuddered.
Each step drew me closer to the board. Into frame. Into where Elizabeth must have been standing when it happened.
I had reached the bottom. The room smelled like sulfur, dust coated my tongue and throat.
I was standing at the stage, but there was no show. Looking back there were just empty rows where many smiling faces must have sat before. I pushed a line of dust off the lectern with my finger and for the first time in a few days, smiled.
And that’s when I noticed it. It didn’t want to be seen, nor heard. Not at first. But I saw it.
My heart sank. Across the back wall towered an obsidian curtain draped from ceiling to floor.
Almost to the floor. In the few feet it didn’t reach the ground stood two legs. Gawky, awkward legs.
“Hello?” I called.
Nothing.
The pace of my breath raced my heart to the finish line. I flicked the dust off my finger with one sweaty palm.
“Who’s there?” I shuddered out a cry.
Nothing. The two sticks stood awkwardly posed behind the curtain.
Each stride made me think my heart was going to give out. It almost did when it darted behind the curtain one end to another.
My hand touched the fabric. It felt like razor wire to me, my body refused to pull it away.
When I did, I knew I should have stayed home.
The rotten peach of skin upon a sickening contorted frame stood before me. A pitted skin-fruit wobbling upon a skeletal neck. It opened its mouth and the decaying stench hit me.
Through its fence of boxcutter incisors, staring into the void of its throat, I think I saw her.
I’ll see you soon Elizabeth.
For the most part, the university site was down.
Before they took the course Q&A forum down, I signed my post off with: Thanks, Brian.
The majority of the university’s website functionality had been cordoned off since an incident occurred at lecture hall eight in December. They were under some real damage control, while we were kept in the dark.
I found a diary written by someone named Michael in one of lecture halls at the university, detailing his encounters and what I believe to be the reason for the university's closure.
And thanks to him, I had a workaround to access lectures.
I changed the URL of one of the lecture recording’s we were emailed to access some of 2020’s videos hoping that the lecture content hadn’t changed much, and that it would still apply to the 2021 course.
This footage however, something wasn’t quite right. The video was a tinge grayscale and the picture out of focus, as if the camera and projector hadn’t been tended to in some time. Most remarkably, the whiteboard had one word untidily written in red: MICHAEL.
---
You always remember where you were when something truly horrible happens. That afternoon I was sitting at my desk, feet up, cola in hand, not a care in the world.
I flipped my notebook to a blank page and took a sip of my drink. A few taps of the keyboard, and LECHALL8B from year 2020 became LECHALL8B from year 2019. And lo and behold, I, Michael, the world’s first technotard turned technowhiz, was in.
See, finals were next week, and the recordings were missing. I had scrounged around the site and found a couple of posts from students complaining that the lecturer had been slack in recording them. I had a trick these whining suckers didn’t, though.
The end of the URL of the recording read: LECHALL8B-12-14-20.mp4. You see, when I DID skip class, some were simply not uploaded, as a result of technical difficulties or otherwise, and I began to miss out. But the trick here: you could change the site’s address to a year prior, and funny enough, a lot of the time the same lecture was recorded the year before. And for a lot of classes, the content had not been changed. Bingo. Problem solved.
The lecture started off like any other: the ceiling-mounted camera recorded the lecturer front and center with a whiteboard behind. The back of a few student’s heads framed the bottom of the screen, watching the speaker and the board.
This recording however, something was… off. There was no youthful babbling at the beginning of the session before the start, the video feed was slightly grayscale and the picture a little out of focus, as if the camera and projector hadn’t been tended to in some time. Most curiously, the whiteboard had one word untidily written in red: ELIZABETH.
I stared at my screen, utterly intrigued. The students in the video did not move nor speak, they only stared forward at the whiteboard in center frame. This surely couldn’t have been my class, these guys had funeral service behavior. And who was this woman? I hadn’t seen her around campus before.
She stared at me. Eyes sunken and face gaunt, she looked unblinkingly toward the camera. The class was silent. Frayed brown hair had drifted partially over her pale face. And the class sat quiet. She opened her mouth, but not to speak - she moaned a single tone, and it didn’t stop. My heart was racing, it felt less like I was watching her and more like she was watching me. I stared back at the hole in her face.
The sound coming out of her mouth began to sound like a distant blowfly buzzing a deep hum, but I couldn’t bring myself to close the site - I kept looking on. My stomach twisted and turned, but I simply couldn’t look away. What the fuck was she doing?
And then I saw it. Its head was disproportionately massive, the size of a torso upon one starved neck. Because of this, it seemed to struggle to wander into frame behind the woman. It moved unpredictably, stepping one foot forward only to move the other backward to steady itself under its leaning head. The head was a moldy grape, round, smooth and fleshy, bobbing and leaning unsteadily as it slogged behind the woman.
It was then close enough to breathe on the woman’s neck. Abruptly, she shut her mouth.
From what I could see, it had no eyes, but it did have a mouth now agape, lined with long finger-like teeth that looked like white pencils.
That was the last time I saw her face. The thing engulfed her head with its own, its gangly body hanging limp, its lips still tightly wrapped around her throat.
The previously motionless students broke into a screaming frenzy, jumping and climbing out of their seats, clambering over one another.
And then nothing. The screen went black.
I felt like throwing up, I reached for my bin. And then it hit me: it was a practical joke. Right?
Come on, Michael. A joke, and you cannot even hit replay.
When I did, I paused it before the woman walked into frame. Wherever this lecture hall was, it was familiar but blurry, both in vision and memory.
Like every good one, there is truth behind the joke. A hurtful jest has you wondering if someone really meant to hurt you, a bitterness left behind. And when I stared at my screen, I couldn’t help but think about some sort of hurtful truth behind it all.
I knew where the room was.
A couple nights later, I found my head still spinning when drifting away to thoughts of the video. The head. The teeth going through her neck at one end and coming out the other. The way it never let go after it swallowed her.
It was a couple hours past midnight, and the campus was utterly haunting. Somewhere usually filled with bustling students and chatter, now hollow and quiet, made my heart race.
There were lights on outside to dispel people that were just like me. I wrestled with the locked door of the east wing for a while. I prayed that hallways were not the security’s priority to add alarms to, rather, the rooms inside which housed exam papers and valuable equipment.
And I was right. No alarms sounded when I lockpicked my way through. I was in, but my mind went to a possible silent alarm. I had to be quick.
Down the hall to the right, I found the room. It was sealed from the outside, the windows plastered with some sort of plasticky material that could not be peeled if I gave it all my might. It had been blocked off from students and staff for almost four years on account of maintenance, but at that moment I didn’t quite buy that. I needed a way in.
The locks on the door were intimidating. One large metallic contraption above the doorhandle, a second below requiring a small key. But I couldn’t turn back.
That’s when something quite peculiar happened. The handle turned, and the door opened. Curiosity beckoned me and yielded.
Inside, I heard each and every of my steps with reverb. There was no sound in the theatre, and each movement echoed to the black curtain against the wall behind the whiteboard.
This was where it happened.
Nothing happened, Michael. This is where they recorded the prank, or whatever awful-taste idea that was.
I was halfway down the steps. I looked about. Things were dusty, unkept. The projector and camera mounted to the distant ceiling were tilted. Pivoted. Leaning. Leaning because of the weight. The heavy weight and the thin, thin neck holding it together. I shuddered.
Each step drew me closer to the board. Into frame. Into where Elizabeth must have been standing when it happened.
I had reached the bottom. The room smelled like sulfur, dust coated my tongue and throat.
I was standing at the stage, but there was no show. Looking back there were just empty rows where many smiling faces must have sat before. I pushed a line of dust off the lectern with my finger and for the first time in a few days, smiled.
And that’s when I noticed it. It didn’t want to be seen, nor heard. Not at first. But I saw it.
My heart sank. Across the back wall towered an obsidian curtain draped from ceiling to floor.
Almost to the floor. In the few feet it didn’t reach the ground stood two legs. Gawky, awkward legs.
“Hello?” I called.
Nothing.
The pace of my breath raced my heart to the finish line. I flicked the dust off my finger with one sweaty palm.
“Who’s there?” I shuddered out a cry.
Nothing. The two sticks stood awkwardly posed behind the curtain.
Each stride made me think my heart was going to give out. It almost did when it darted behind the curtain one end to another.
My hand touched the fabric. It felt like razor wire to me, my body refused to pull it away.
When I did, I knew I should have stayed home.
The rotten peach of skin upon a sickening contorted frame stood before me. A pitted skin-fruit wobbling upon a skeletal neck. It opened its mouth and the decaying stench hit me.
Through its fence of boxcutter incisors, staring into the void of its throat, I think I saw her.
I’ll see you soon Elizabeth.
For the most part, the university site was down.
Before they took the course Q&A forum down, I signed my post off with: Thanks, Brian.
The majority of the university’s website functionality had been cordoned off since an incident occurred at lecture hall eight in December. They were under some real damage control, while we were kept in the dark.
I found a diary written by someone named Michael in one of lecture halls at the university, detailing his encounters and what I believe to be the reason for the university's closure.
And thanks to him, I had a workaround to access lectures.
I changed the URL of one of the lecture recording’s we were emailed to access some of 2020’s videos hoping that the lecture content hadn’t changed much, and that it would still apply to the 2021 course.
This footage however, something wasn’t quite right. The video was a tinge grayscale and the picture out of focus, as if the camera and projector hadn’t been tended to in some time. Most remarkably, the whiteboard had one word untidily written in red: MICHAEL.
You always remember where you were when something truly horrible happens. That afternoon I was sitting at my desk, feet up, cola in hand, not a care in the world.
I flipped my notebook to a blank page and took a sip of my drink. A few taps of the keyboard, and LECHALL8B from year 2020 became LECHALL8B from year 2019. And lo and behold, I, Michael, the world’s first technotard turned technowhiz, was in.
See, finals were next week, and the recordings were missing. I had scrounged around the site and found a couple of posts from students complaining that the lecturer had been slack in recording them. I had a trick these whining suckers didn’t, though.
The end of the URL of the recording read: LECHALL8B-12-14-20.mp4. You see, when I DID skip class, some were simply not uploaded, as a result of technical difficulties or otherwise, and I began to miss out. But the trick here: you could change the site’s address to a year prior, and funny enough, a lot of the time the same lecture was recorded the year before. And for a lot of classes, the content had not been changed. Bingo. Problem solved.
The lecture started off like any other: the ceiling-mounted camera recorded the lecturer front and center with a whiteboard behind. The back of a few student’s heads framed the bottom of the screen, watching the speaker and the board.
This recording however, something was… off. There was no youthful babbling at the beginning of the session before the start, the video feed was slightly grayscale and the picture a little out of focus, as if the camera and projector hadn’t been tended to in some time. Most curiously, the whiteboard had one word untidily written in red: ELIZABETH.
I stared at my screen, utterly intrigued. The students in the video did not move nor speak, they only stared forward at the whiteboard in center frame. This surely couldn’t have been my class, these guys had funeral service behavior. And who was this woman? I hadn’t seen her around campus before.
She stared at me. Eyes sunken and face gaunt, she looked unblinkingly toward the camera. The class was silent. Frayed brown hair had drifted partially over her pale face. And the class sat quiet. She opened her mouth, but not to speak - she moaned a single tone, and it didn’t stop. My heart was racing, it felt less like I was watching her and more like she was watching me. I stared back at the hole in her face.
The sound coming out of her mouth began to sound like a distant blowfly buzzing a deep hum, but I couldn’t bring myself to close the site - I kept looking on. My stomach twisted and turned, but I simply couldn’t look away. What the fuck was she doing?
And then I saw it. Its head was disproportionately massive, the size of a torso upon one starved neck. Because of this, it seemed to struggle to wander into frame behind the woman. It moved unpredictably, stepping one foot forward only to move the other backward to steady itself under its leaning head. The head was a moldy grape, round, smooth and fleshy, bobbing and leaning unsteadily as it slogged behind the woman.
It was then close enough to breathe on the woman’s neck. Abruptly, she shut her mouth.
From what I could see, it had no eyes, but it did have a mouth now agape, lined with long finger-like teeth that looked like white pencils.
That was the last time I saw her face. The thing engulfed her head with its own, its gangly body hanging limp, its lips still tightly wrapped around her throat.
The previously motionless students broke into a screaming frenzy, jumping and climbing out of their seats, clambering over one another.
And then nothing. The screen went black.
I felt like throwing up, I reached for my bin. And then it hit me: it was a practical joke. Right?
Come on, Michael. A joke, and you cannot even hit replay.
When I did, I paused it before the woman walked into frame. Wherever this lecture hall was, it was familiar but blurry, both in vision and memory.
Like every good one, there is truth behind the joke. A hurtful jest has you wondering if someone really meant to hurt you, a bitterness left behind. And when I stared at my screen, I couldn’t help but think about some sort of hurtful truth behind it all.
I knew where the room was.
A couple nights later, I found my head still spinning when drifting away to thoughts of the video. The head. The teeth going through her neck at one end and coming out the other. The way it never let go after it swallowed her.
It was a couple hours past midnight, and the campus was utterly haunting. Somewhere usually filled with bustling students and chatter, now hollow and quiet, made my heart race.
There were lights on outside to dispel people that were just like me. I wrestled with the locked door of the east wing for a while. I prayed that hallways were not the security’s priority to add alarms to, rather, the rooms inside which housed exam papers and valuable equipment.
And I was right. No alarms sounded when I lockpicked my way through. I was in, but my mind went to a possible silent alarm. I had to be quick.
Down the hall to the right, I found the room. It was sealed from the outside, the windows plastered with some sort of plasticky material that could not be peeled if I gave it all my might. It had been blocked off from students and staff for almost four years on account of maintenance, but at that moment I didn’t quite buy that. I needed a way in.
The locks on the door were intimidating. One large metallic contraption above the doorhandle, a second below requiring a small key. But I couldn’t turn back.
That’s when something quite peculiar happened. The handle turned, and the door opened. Curiosity beckoned me and yielded.
Inside, I heard each and every of my steps with reverb. There was no sound in the theatre, and each movement echoed to the black curtain against the wall behind the whiteboard.
This was where it happened.
Nothing happened, Michael. This is where they recorded the prank, or whatever awful-taste idea that was.
I was halfway down the steps. I looked about. Things were dusty, unkept. The projector and camera mounted to the distant ceiling were tilted. Pivoted. Leaning. Leaning because of the weight. The heavy weight and the thin, thin neck holding it together. I shuddered.
Each step drew me closer to the board. Into frame. Into where Elizabeth must have been standing when it happened.
I had reached the bottom. The room smelled like sulfur, dust coated my tongue and throat.
I was standing at the stage, but there was no show. Looking back there were just empty rows where many smiling faces must have sat before. I pushed a line of dust off the lectern with my finger and for the first time in a few days, smiled.
And that’s when I noticed it. It didn’t want to be seen, nor heard. Not at first. But I saw it.
My heart sank. Across the back wall towered an obsidian curtain draped from ceiling to floor.
Almost to the floor. In the few feet it didn’t reach the ground stood two legs. Gawky, awkward legs.
“Hello?” I called.
Nothing.
The pace of my breath raced my heart to the finish line. I flicked the dust off my finger with one sweaty palm.
“Who’s there?” I shuddered out a cry.
Nothing. The two sticks stood awkwardly posed behind the curtain.
Each stride made me think my heart was going to give out. It almost did when it darted behind the curtain one end to another.
My hand touched the fabric. It felt like razor wire to me, my body refused to pull it away.
When I did, I knew I should have stayed home.
The rotten peach of skin upon a sickening contorted frame stood before me. A pitted skin-fruit wobbling upon a skeletal neck. It opened its mouth and the decaying stench hit me.
Through its fence of boxcutter incisors, staring into the void of its throat, I think I saw her.
I’ll see you soon Elizabeth.
For the most part, the university site was down.
Before they took the course Q&A forum down, I signed my post off with: Thanks, Brian.
The majority of the university’s website functionality had been cordoned off since an incident occurred at lecture hall eight in December. They were under some real damage control, while we were kept in the dark.
I found a diary written by someone named Michael in one of lecture halls at the university, detailing his encounters and what I believe to be the reason for the university's closure.
And thanks to him, I had a workaround to access lectures.
I changed the URL of one of the lecture recording’s we were emailed to access some of 2020’s videos hoping that the lecture content hadn’t changed much, and that it would still apply to the 2021 course.
This footage however, something wasn’t quite right. The video was a tinge grayscale and the picture out of focus, as if the camera and projector hadn’t been tended to in some time. Most remarkably, the whiteboard had one word untidily written in red: MICHAEL.
You always remember where you were when something truly horrible happens. That afternoon I was sitting at my desk, feet up, cola in hand, not a care in the world.
I flipped my notebook to a blank page and took a sip of my drink. A few taps of the keyboard, and LECHALL8B from year 2020 became LECHALL8B from year 2019. And lo and behold, I, Michael, the world’s first technotard turned technowhiz, was in.
See, finals were next week, and the recordings were missing. I had scrounged around the site and found a couple of posts from students complaining that the lecturer had been slack in recording them. I had a trick these whining suckers didn’t, though.
The end of the URL of the recording read: LECHALL8B-12-14-20.mp4. You see, when I DID skip class, some were simply not uploaded, as a result of technical difficulties or otherwise, and I began to miss out. But the trick here: you could change the site’s address to a year prior, and funny enough, a lot of the time the same lecture was recorded the year before. And for a lot of classes, the content had not been changed. Bingo. Problem solved.
The lecture started off like any other: the ceiling-mounted camera recorded the lecturer front and center with a whiteboard behind. The back of a few student’s heads framed the bottom of the screen, watching the speaker and the board.
This recording however, something was… off. There was no youthful babbling at the beginning of the session before the start, the video feed was slightly grayscale and the picture a little out of focus, as if the camera and projector hadn’t been tended to in some time. Most curiously, the whiteboard had one word untidily written in red: ELIZABETH.
I stared at my screen, utterly intrigued. The students in the video did not move nor speak, they only stared forward at the whiteboard in center frame. This surely couldn’t have been my class, these guys had funeral service behavior. And who was this woman? I hadn’t seen her around campus before.
She stared at me. Eyes sunken and face gaunt, she looked unblinkingly toward the camera. The class was silent. Frayed brown hair had drifted partially over her pale face. And the class sat quiet. She opened her mouth, but not to speak - she moaned a single tone, and it didn’t stop. My heart was racing, it felt less like I was watching her and more like she was watching me. I stared back at the hole in her face.
The sound coming out of her mouth began to sound like a distant blowfly buzzing a deep hum, but I couldn’t bring myself to close the site - I kept looking on. My stomach twisted and turned, but I simply couldn’t look away. What the fuck was she doing?
And then I saw it. Its head was disproportionately massive, the size of a torso upon one starved neck. Because of this, it seemed to struggle to wander into frame behind the woman. It moved unpredictably, stepping one foot forward only to move the other backward to steady itself under its leaning head. The head was a moldy grape, round, smooth and fleshy, bobbing and leaning unsteadily as it slogged behind the woman.
It was then close enough to breathe on the woman’s neck. Abruptly, she shut her mouth.
From what I could see, it had no eyes, but it did have a mouth now agape, lined with long finger-like teeth that looked like white pencils.
That was the last time I saw her face. The thing engulfed her head with its own, its gangly body hanging limp, its lips still tightly wrapped around her throat.
The previously motionless students broke into a screaming frenzy, jumping and climbing out of their seats, clambering over one another.
And then nothing. The screen went black.
I felt like throwing up, I reached for my bin. And then it hit me: it was a practical joke. Right?
Come on, Michael. A joke, and you cannot even hit replay.
When I did, I paused it before the woman walked into frame. Wherever this lecture hall was, it was familiar but blurry, both in vision and memory.
Like every good one, there is truth behind the joke. A hurtful jest has you wondering if someone really meant to hurt you, a bitterness left behind. And when I stared at my screen, I couldn’t help but think about some sort of hurtful truth behind it all.
I knew where the room was.
A couple nights later, I found my head still spinning when drifting away to thoughts of the video. The head. The teeth going through her neck at one end and coming out the other. The way it never let go after it swallowed her.
It was a couple hours past midnight, and the campus was utterly haunting. Somewhere usually filled with bustling students and chatter, now hollow and quiet, made my heart race.
There were lights on outside to dispel people that were just like me. I wrestled with the locked door of the east wing for a while. I prayed that hallways were not the security’s priority to add alarms to, rather, the rooms inside which housed exam papers and valuable equipment.
And I was right. No alarms sounded when I lockpicked my way through. I was in, but my mind went to a possible silent alarm. I had to be quick.
Down the hall to the right, I found the room. It was sealed from the outside, the windows plastered with some sort of plasticky material that could not be peeled if I gave it all my might. It had been blocked off from students and staff for almost four years on account of maintenance, but at that moment I didn’t quite buy that. I needed a way in.
The locks on the door were intimidating. One large metallic contraption above the doorhandle, a second below requiring a small key. But I couldn’t turn back.
That’s when something quite peculiar happened. The handle turned, and the door opened. Curiosity beckoned me and yielded.
Inside, I heard each and every of my steps with reverb. There was no sound in the theatre, and each movement echoed to the black curtain against the wall behind the whiteboard.
This was where it happened.
Nothing happened, Michael. This is where they recorded the prank, or whatever awful-taste idea that was.
I was halfway down the steps. I looked about. Things were dusty, unkept. The projector and camera mounted to the distant ceiling were tilted. Pivoted. Leaning. Leaning because of the weight. The heavy weight and the thin, thin neck holding it together. I shuddered.
Each step drew me closer to the board. Into frame. Into where Elizabeth must have been standing when it happened.
I had reached the bottom. The room smelled like sulfur, dust coated my tongue and throat.
I was standing at the stage, but there was no show. Looking back there were just empty rows where many smiling faces must have sat before. I pushed a line of dust off the lectern with my finger and for the first time in a few days, smiled.
And that’s when I noticed it. It didn’t want to be seen, nor heard. Not at first. But I saw it.
My heart sank. Across the back wall towered an obsidian curtain draped from ceiling to floor.
Almost to the floor. In the few feet it didn’t reach the ground stood two legs. Gawky, awkward legs.
“Hello?” I called.
Nothing.
The pace of my breath raced my heart to the finish line. I flicked the dust off my finger with one sweaty palm.
“Who’s there?” I shuddered out a cry.
Nothing. The two sticks stood awkwardly posed behind the curtain.
Each stride made me think my heart was going to give out. It almost did when it darted behind the curtain one end to another.
My hand touched the fabric. It felt like razor wire to me, my body refused to pull it away.
When I did, I knew I should have stayed home.
The rotten peach of skin upon a sickening contorted frame stood before me. A pitted skin-fruit wobbling upon a skeletal neck. It opened its mouth and the decaying stench hit me.
Through its fence of boxcutter incisors, staring into the void of its throat, I think I saw her.
I’ll see you soon Elizabeth.
For the most part, the university site was down.
Before they took the course Q&A forum down, I signed my post off with: Thanks, Brian.
The majority of the university’s website functionality had been cordoned off since an incident occurred at lecture hall eight in December. They were under some real damage control, while we were kept in the dark.
I found a diary written by someone named Michael in one of lecture halls at the university, detailing his encounters and what I believe to be the reason for the university's closure.
And thanks to him, I had a workaround to access lectures.
I changed the URL of one of the lecture recording’s we were emailed to access some of 2020’s videos hoping that the lecture content hadn’t changed much, and that it would still apply to the 2021 course.
This footage however, something wasn’t quite right. The video was a tinge grayscale and the picture out of focus, as if the camera and projector hadn’t been tended to in some time. Most remarkably, the whiteboard had one word untidily written in red: MICHAEL.
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