The bell rang in the hall outside the elevator.
“Ten minutes”, James thought. It was morning, time for his
Moments later the door split open and granted him entrance to the third floor. It was dark and for some reason the air was musty with a strange scent.
“Smells like something crawled up in here and died” he complained to the darkness, covering his nose with his t-shirt. He glanced at his watch
“Eight minutes” he muttered aloud.
He turned and glanced suspiciously at the elevator. If he let it go downstairs again it might not come back up. He didn’t’ much care for the thought of explaining to the dean how he had come to be trapped on the third floor so he set his backpack in the door. When the door tried to close the backpack would stop it, keeping the elevator here.
He reached into his pocket to produce his LED pen light. It seemed the Boy Scout motto of always being prepared had paid off for him today. With flashlight in hand he set off into the darkness to explore the third floor.
Supposedly, the new floor was going to contain a research lab for the chemistry department. It would be neat to see all of it before they finished it next fall.
There was a draft. That didn’t really make much sense because all of the windows had been installed and even though it had been windy outside, there shouldn’t be places for the air to circulate through here.
James wandered the halls whistling as he went. At most of the doorways he would stop and point his flashlight in. There wasn’t really much to see. The rooms were unfurnished and some hadn’t even had drywall put up. You could see the wiring in a lot of places. There was something about being up here, however, that was invigorating; perhaps it was the fact that he wasn’t supposed to be in the first place.
He glanced at his watch.
“Five minutes” he told the darkness.
He was about to turn to head back, hoping that the elevator might let him up here again after class, when he got another strong whiff of that smell. Something was definitely decomposing up here.
“Dr. Poe would probably love to show the dead animal to his parasitology class.” He thought, smirking.
He was certain that he must be fairly close now. Having lived on a farm he had been around his fair share of dead animals. The dogs had always loved to kill squirrels and leave them lying about. Just one more smelly thing he’d had to clean up with a shovel.
He wandered down the hall to an area he guessed would become a set of faculty offices.
“It would be neat if I used one of these some day”
As he wound the corner into one of the office spaces that he suspected the smell was coming from, he paused to look at his watch.
He still had a few minutes left.
He was taken aback by the scene that greeted him in the next room. There were men. He was shocked terribly at first. Thousands of thoughts ran through his head.
“Who are these guys?”
“What are they doing here?”
“Do I need to get out of here?”
He realized however that the smell must be coming from them. Dead people really don’t pose much of a threat. They were homeless, all except one. Each was leaned against one of the unfinished walls, propped up in all their final glory, almost as if on display for him to see. He couldn’t imagine what these guys could be doing here. They were all most likely dead, at least from the smell. His first instinct was to run.
He stopped to think for a moment.
“There is no reason somebody would hide bodies up here, these guys were probably in need of shelter and died one night.
“All five of them.”
He decided that perhaps they weren’t all dead and maybe one of them might need help. He went from body to body, checking for a pulse where it seemed needed, and sure enough one after another turned up dead. The strange thing was that each was in a different stage of decomposition. One looked like he had been dead for a while, and number four looked like he had only died just yesterday. He stopped at number five.
Number five was different than the rest. He was bald. His eyes were slightly sunk into his head and he wore a weird frock, or robe looking thing. It was brown and tied with a rope at the waist. He felt like he had only died a few hours ago when James touched him to feel his pulse. He had, it seemed, just recently assumed room temperature. His skin felt completely normal other than being cold and he wasn’t really rigid or anything like that.
James moved the LED to his face to get a better look at him. It was like a flashback into the past. The guy looked like some sort of monk or something.
That’s when his eyes opened.
James had been wrong, earlier about that smell. Something dead had crawled up here and had been living.
With a shriek James stumbled backwards into the hall in a desperate attempt to escape his dark discovery. He only made it a few feet before it was upon him. No sound but a gurgle was able to escape his lips as it sank its teeth into the soft flesh of his throat. The smack of hungry lips echoed down the empty hall. Heart racing James tried to worm his way out of the iron grip of his attacker but it was to no avail, and with each passing moment his struggles grew less and less. Before long he laid still upon the icy stone floor.
Downstairs there could faintly be heard the sound of a ringing bell. It was time for class.