It has always been challenging for me to find my way around my university. The buildings are a mess of ancient brickwork and modern additions. Hallways suddenly turn at odd angles to account for the new classrooms, staircases bend in odd directions with uneven flights, and narrow ramps fill the half-floor gaps between some rooms. The corridors of the older sections are massive and the rooms down their length are all identical. To top it all, the lighting can’t have been updated there anytime in the last half-century, and it’s always so dim that you can’t clearly read any of the posters on the walls.
It didn’t help that I was hungover this morning. I walked blearily through the hallway in a crowd of other students, cursing myself for staying out so late on a Wednesday. There were bronze plaques outside of each classroom with the room numbers on them and I was looking for W204, where my Ethics of Engineering class was held. I traced my gaze along the wall as I walked. I thought that I should have been somewhere in the W250s, since I’d just come up from the central staircase, but the closest plaque read W205. With a shrug, I decided that I must be even more hungover than I thought, and I made my way into the next room down.
I went to the very back of the lecture hall. I needed somewhere that would be mostly dark and quiet. I dropped my backpack on the floor, slouched into a seat, and took out my laptop. The sudden brightness of the screen caused me to wince and I quickly dimmed it. There was no way I was going to be able to pay attention to the lecture today, so I opened 2048.
Other students came into the room, chatting loudly, and I looked up to see if my friend Ben was with them. He was usually the more punctual one and I was a little surprised that he wasn’t here yet. He hadn’t even been at the bar last night.
I returned to my laptop as the room eventually quieted down and Ben still didn’t make his appearance. The professor began the lesson, their voice scratchily echoing through the cheap microphone system, and I could feel my headache building. I wouldn’t be here at all if I hadn’t already missed enough classes to burn through my allocated absences for the course. I didn’t really feel like facing a check-in from my advisor if I could avoid it.
I filled up the grid in 2048 and the game flashed the ending screen. Lacking the motivation to start again, I looked idly across the room and noticed that the student sitting down a row in front of me was scrolling through photos on their laptop. With nothing better to do I started watching them. At first I couldn’t tell what they were looking at, but I eventually realized that it was grayscale pictures of yawning dogs. They scrolled quickly from one image to the next, as if they were looking for a particular one. It was fairly unsettling. The pictures contained every possible variety of dog, all in about the same orientation, facing directly at the camera with their eyes closed and their jaws spread open. It had to be my imagination, but the further down the person scrolled, the wider the jaws stretched apart and the longer the faces became. Perplexed, I looked up at the person, wondering what they were getting out of this. They were dressed ordinarily enough in jeans and a flannel, looking like a typical student, but they were enraptured by what they were seeing. I don’t know how else to describe it. Their eyes were wide open and bulged out from their face, they were grinning widely, and they breathed in quick bursts, as if uncontrollably excited.
I nudged the person next to me, muttering, “Take a look at this.” There was no response, so I turned to face them and felt my heart skip a beat. The girl next to me was staring down at the pictures with the same expression on her face. Her head was bent until it practically rested on her right shoulder so that she could see better over the person’s back. Shocked, wondering what I was missing, I looked again at the photos, but saw nothing besides those elongated canine mouths.
Unnerved, I looked around the room at large, and felt a surge of relief upon seeing that most of the students were facing the professor and taking notes. It was just my bad luck to have sat down beside these two weirdos.
Then I started to hear what the professor had been saying.
“Inwards, and inwards, and inwards again,” they intoned, and I suddenly realized that I couldn’t identify the gender of their voice. My Ethics of Engineering professor was a middle-aged woman with a noticeably southern accent, but the voice I was hearing now had no such inflection. I had the strong urge to not look over at the speaker, but my curiosity got the better of me.
The professor standing at the podium could loosely have been called human, and that was some of the worst of it. They looked, for the most part, like someone I could have met walking downtown: a stocky figure dressed in a formal business suit, complete with a red tie and slicked-back hair. It was just that everything was off. As they spoke, the inflation of their chest with every breath and exhale was strangely exaggerated, like watching billows being used to stoke a fire. The gestures of their arms made use of one more joint than possible, bending somewhere halfway up the forearm, and their fingers bent fluidly in both directions. Worst of all, their eyes remained fixed at exactly the same position no matter which way they bent their head. The skin around them buckled out or withdrew, like if you had attached clay to a fixed metal ball and then pulled it upward or pushed it down.
“Inwards, and inwards,” they kept repeating, and I saw that they were using two of their fingers, bent backwards, to zoom in on some image on the tablet they had connected to the projectors. That same image sprawled across the board: a dark hallway, with the outlines of door frames just barely decipherable in the gloom. They were zooming in on the center so that our perspective seemed to be moving down the hall. My heart started racing a mile a minute.
“There!” the professor suddenly exclaimed. “Do you see that?”
Most of the students in the room gave an excited “Yes!” and started whispering to each other. Swallowing a rising knot back down into my throat, I looked through the dim door frames, petrified of what I might see within. There was nothing. I found the fact that I couldn’t make out whatever was there even more frightening.
“A very healthy one,” the professor said, nodding slowly, their face deforming as their eyes stared straight ahead at their paperwork. “Not all of them can be like this.”
At this point I decided to leave the room - but as I stood up, the girl next to me swiveled one of her eyes over, her skin twisting to support it as her head continued to face forward, and I sat back down, shaking. The photos on the laptop of the student in front of me had transformed into pictures of creatures that I could only vaguely associate with dogs. The teeth had shrunken down into sharpened fragments, and many of the jaws were splitting open like the Demogorgon.
The image on the board was a black-and-white rendition of the sea. The professor zoomed in to the surface and focused our view around a half-emerged creature. The sight of it filled me with unspeakable dread. The majority of the thing was a fish, with an unnatural amount of spiny fins, but the head - the head had my own features, warped into the pointed, curving structure of a fish’s face. My own eyes stared down at me from the board, and I could have sworn that the picture moved enough for it to turn and grin vacantly at me.
“Do we know what is wrong with this one, class?”
“The heart!” someone exclaimed, and the phrase echoed throughout the room.
“Quite right!” the professor said. “Someone has taken its heart.” He moved the view slightly, and I could see a gaping hole in the monstrosity’s chest. The exposed flesh was pale and speckled with rot. “In fact, it was someone in this room, and they are now selfishly keeping the heart to themselves!”
“I know!” the girl next to me cried, raising her hand. “I know who has it!”
“IT’S THIS ONE!”
She was pointing at me, and everyone in the room turned towards me at once. They stared at my chest, and I heard my heart-beats suddenly magnify across the room.
“Very good,” the professor said. “We have to give it back for it to heal.” They addressed me with a shining expression. “Would you please give it back?”
I felt a lurch and the skin around my upper chest stretched outwards. I could feel my flesh bending, making way for my heart to move to the surface, and at that, I abandoned all sense and ran. The students moved forward to stop me, each with a strange look of confusion, but I pushed over one of the smaller ones and lunged through the gap. I bolted down the central aisle, ducking below sets of grasping hands, and rolled under the reach of the professor to make it to the door.
I’m only able to write this now because it wasn’t locked. I burst out into the hallway and looked back over my shoulder, only to see that the door swinging shut behind me was the one that belonged to the men’s restroom on the floor.
Really, the worst of all this is that I’m going to have to transfer now. I mean, it seems like the only reasonable thing to do, but there’s so much paperwork involved. I guess I’m asking if you think it’s worth it.