I live in a college dorm out in the middle of nowhere. To be specific, Nowhere is this industrial wasteland located on the very outskirts of the outskirts of the city and for some strange reason, had a name slapped on it despite being nothing but an amalgamation of busy highways and smoking factories, perpetually choked by waves of soot and ash, as though this pseudo-town had tripped and skidded a million years ahead into nuclear winter. To the students who regularly commuted between the city and college, the town was like an ugly janitor’s closet affixed to a limousine. Except that this janitor’s closet had one of the top universities in the country set up in pristine condition behind all the mops and plungers and cans of bleach.
The scenery in Nowhere was the same everywhere - long, perfectly straight roads, surrounded on all sides by ash-covered, gray vegetation, the straw roofs of fresh hovels, the crumbling foundations of old houses jutting through the pallid green.
On these roads, at all times were gigantic lorries, each hurtling by with it’s own colorful corporate logo inscribed on to it’s sides. Looking at it for more than a minute could give you this strange sensory vertigo, your mind grappling with the monstrous size of capitalism as every other second, a new, completely original, totally distinct image would flash by. John used to joke that a caveman would’ve burst a blood vessel if he stared at the highway for more than five seconds.
However, it was like the highway absorbed all the violently functioning pandemonium of everyday life into itself and away from the surrounding grasslands - nothing moved there, nothing made a fucking sound. Rows and rows of hovels, and we’d never see a single living inhabitant. The only time I saw animals was whenever I was in the hostel, and this one time I’d seen a puppy trotting through the roads, covered in soot like some overworked Victorian orphan and completely alone - this sight had carved itself into my brain like some biblical image, striking, moving, a million volumes of morals and humanist lamentation brimming underneath.
I digress. ADHD makes you bad at telling stories but damn does it help you reach the word count.
I live in a dorm built in the campus of one of the top universities in my country. This university is located for some mysterious reason in Nowhere. To get into the University of Nowhere, I embraced a sad, lonely high school life, filled with study sessions set to the tunes of alternative rock and punctuated by quiet family dinners with my Asian parents.
For a change, I chose the dorm life instead of the commute and I got what I wanted, at least partially. I was never alone again. Dinners were never quiet again.
I’ve been living in the dorm for about a year now. The first time I saw a Door was when I was six months into college, but even before that little cosmic fright, I’d seen plenty of disturbing things in the hostel. This first story involves my childhood friend, John, vanishing off the face of the earth for no conceivable, rational reason at all.
For the sake of anonymity, and also so that no one ever needs to know where these stories take place, I’m going to use made-up, generic names for my roommates - John, Doe and Ant.
This one time, my roommates had left to get a second serving of dinner or something and it was just me, sitting on my bed and brooding about a fuckton of work that a senior at the ‘Speakers’ Club’ (another club with made-up positions and made-up problems) had given me. I’d switched on a single lightbulb that glowed a beautiful, uninterrupted white, taken fresh out of the supplies closet because the previous one had exploded the very day my three roommates and I moved in.
The breathing began from Ant’s bed. Violent, labored breaths, like someone was fighting for their life under my roommate’s bed, but also excruciatingly slowly, one dying breath rising up from his absolutely motionless bed every second.
My brain came up with a million explanations that all had to do with the wind, but my legs were scrambling with an athletic prowess that would’ve gotten me into the track team with my man-crush back in tenth grade.
My room was divided into two halves, each half occupied by two beds that were glued to each other but separated by one thick, tall fender, so that it almost looked like the room was divided into four different sectors. At each corner was a single gigantic locker provided by the dorm, where we put our own clothes and laptops and stuff.
Now, I was scrambling over to John’s bed, which is glued to mine. Why I didn’t just turn that doorknob and walk out the room, I have no idea. The breathing stopped for a few moments, and this stretch of silence was more terrifying than the preceding moments because I had no fucking idea what was going to happen.
The breathing erupted from my bed, painfully strained, almost a scream at this point. It was like the man was being buried, taking his last remaining gulps of air through holes in the soil, rapidly being sealed by worms and pebbles until nature had crawled down his esophagus and choked him to death.
It stopped again, abruptly. A few moments later, I heard a few faint breaths over from Doe’s bed on the other side. Shock clouding my mind, I waited patiently for the breathing to surface under John’s bed. It did not.
I waited for a few minutes. Then I opened the door, switched off the light and took a long, long piss. They were playing cards in the other room, and I hovered nervously about the door for several moments before walking in. Just like that, my episode dissolved in a barbaric, blood-soaked game of Uno. When I finally walked back to my room after being forcibly kicked out by them, my roommates were already fast asleep, obligatory calls to girlfriends and mothers and fathers finished.
I lay on my bed. I stared up at the ceiling for a long time - my shoulders felt like blocks of woods, the mattress stiff and unwelcoming. I counted the bars in the windows, and when that didn’t work because I kept remembering the breathing, I tried another sleep technique of mine where I’d run through a little fantasy world in my head. It’d always worked for me since I was a little kid.
I woke up less than an hour later to the worst sound I’d heard in my entire life. My roommates were up, phone flashlights pointed at John’s locker, their expressions like gargoyles in the darkness. Something banged on the locker, screaming like it was being murdered, screaming the same six words over and over again.
The worms are in my eyes.
The locker did not budge an inch, but the banging was so violent that it felt like the floor would split.
The screaming degenerated into choked breaths after a few seconds, the voice cleaving into gasps, then eventually into nothing.
John, who had been standing near the door the whole time, was the first to say something.
“What the fuck.”
Ant walked to the locker door, threw it open even as John hurled as many swears at him as he could fit into a single breath.
The smell of earth and decay flooded the room. It was so strong, so overpowering that our brains were genuinely having trouble believing where we were and I flashed back and forth between the room and this image of a moss-eaten crypt in my head. John hit the light switch and the scent was immediately gone.
There was nothing in John’s locker but clothes, cables and a bunch of rolled-up Weekend posters. We all decided not to sleep and watched Doe play The Sims 4 until 8 in the morning, and then we packed our bags and went to college.
Three days later, John came back from playing badminton to find a colony of blue-colored fungus growing on his bed. It wasn’t that big of a deal at the time and we just called in the housekeepers to take care of it, and they did.
The next day, he found around twenty dead snails under his bed, shells scattered in one corner, their mangled, dried corpses strewn about in a formation that clearly formed some shape, but no shape that our conscious mind was able to recognize. As though our brain was refusing to tell it’s name, refusing to let us comprehend it any further than a haphazard smattering of snails on the floor. After the initial shock, we called in the housekeepers yet again, and they swept them into plastic bags while we stood outside the room and watched.
From that day onwards, we began to scratching noises from within John’s locker. A light bang, now and then. The door would creak slightly. After opening the locker about a hundred times and finding nothing, we decided to just ignore it. Poor John though, having to sleep next to that thing everyday.
One day, we were all crouched over our tables doing our Engineering Drawing assignments - we had about a dozen shapes to carefully construct, and every so often a friend from another department would walk in, look at what we were drawing and ask us why we were drawing butt-plugs, laugh to themselves and then walk out. About four shapes in, I fell asleep on the desk, earphones still streaming Sigur Ros into my dreams.
When John woke me up, all four of the lights in the room were switched off except for mine. I removed the earphones, turned around to face him and saw that his face was utterly still like that of a doll’s, petrified by panic. I asked him what was going on and he told me he was hearing something from the locker for an hour now. I walked over to his side of the room, pressed my ear to the locker door. It was crying. Hysterically. It sobbed like a machine.
We both looked at each other.
“It’ll stop if we open it,” John said.
“It always does,” I said.
I opened it. It stopped. John illuminated the inside with his phone’s flashlight.
There was a faint whistling coming from underneath John’s clothes.
“What are you doing?” he asked as I started throwing his clothes out of the locker and onto his bed.
“There’s a…” I moved away from the locker and told him to lean in. His jaw tightened.
“I’ve been hearing it since the day we found the fungus on the bed. I could only hear it if I listened really hard… I didn’t even know it was coming from this locker.”
We emptied out his locker, quietly laying his belongings on his bed so as to not wake the other two. Then we pointed our phones at the locker, now an empty echo-chamber, amplifying the sound of the whistling until it felt like it was right in our ears.
We both saw it at the same time. Two tiny holes, punctured through the lower half of the locker. John leaned in closer to look at it.
“That’s where the breathing is coming from.”
I heard it too. The sound of faint, faltering breaths, blowing through those two holes.
We moved the locker. There was nothing behind it but plain walls with peeling paint.
We both stood there for a very long time, staring at the holes. John began gathering his clothes, throwing them back into the locker.
“I’m going to sleep. We have to submit those assignments tomorrow morning.”
Remembering my extremely incomplete Engineering Drawing assignment jolted me out of whatever existential dread I had been feeling at the moment, so I also decided to think about the locker later and go to sleep.
A week before John moved out of our hostel room, he told he was having dreams. In one of them, something was watching him from the locker. In the other one, he was being buried alive, dirt and rocks being shoveled onto him, the pitch-black, starless night sky vanishing from his vision, patch by patch until dirt filled his eyes and worms filled his lungs. And he laid there, decomposing for a hundred years, listening to rocks crumble atom by atom to bury him even deeper. He would wake up the next morning, having lived a hundred years in the night, and he’d have to pack his assignments and his notes into his bag and go to college.
I never asked him about the locker after that night. I wish I had. The day before he vanished off the face of the earth, about five months after he’d moved out of the hostel room, he walked right into my class in the middle of a lecture and told me to unblock the two holes. He’d hammered nails into them after stuffing paper into them didn’t work. He pressed the key to the locker into my hand. I never saw him again.
In the months since he’d moved out, the locker had given us no trouble but in the span of these five months, I’d seen things in the hostel that were far, far worse than John’s little paranormal scuffle with his locker. Yes, things even worse than having to dream of your entire body rotting away, cell by cell, for a hundred years in your sleep. So I obliged him.
I unlocked the locker door with Ant standing behind me, flashing the light as I swung the door open.
The insides were awash with crimson fungus. Like mould, but blood-red, covering the whole interior like a wallpaper. Not a inch of the locker’s metal peeked through the fungal layer. The smell was so bad that Ant stumbled away, dropping the phone on his bed and staggering out of the room.
Before slamming the door shut, I saw the two nails hammered into the holes. Blood seeped from around the nails, dripping in a steady, tenuous stream down onto the fungus below. The fungus absorbed the blood, turning even redder, it’s webbing spreading over other webs, releasing a fresh stream of fluids.
Like I said, stranger things have happened in this hostel - like the Doors, which I haven’t even gotten around to telling you about. So maybe, when things calm down, I’ll grab something flammable and torch that fucking locker.
To wrap up this story, the last time anyone saw John was the very night after this. He was wearing a blue shirt, a backpack and sunglasses and had a very visible skin infection, purple tendrils crisscrossing his neck and cheeks.
He’d attacked one of the security guards at the gate, beating him over the head with a piece of wood until one of his eyes popped out, and walked into the college’s abandoned humanities building at 2AM in the night. No one ever saw him again. The police nor the dogs ever found a trace of him. However, we did.
The day after he vanished, Ant came to me and told me to open the locker. I didn’t ask him why - we had to pursue whatever thin leads we had.
A red shirt was plastered to the fungal walls, soaked in fluids, squelching as the tendrils slithered across it. Two fingers were stuffed into the holes. We heard crying. Faint, familiar crying.
We always kept the locker door slightly ajar after that.