The flopping black shape on the floor did not utter a sound, but one could discern a shallow concavity that appeared like a rudimentary mouth. A mouth that stretched as if to howl, but couldn’t.
5 was screaming, and backed up hard into 6’s chest. 3 yelled, “Go get 2!”
“Who?” 6 said, unable to take his bulging eyes off the creature.
3 looked at 6, and a vague desperation seized her. She pushed her way between 5 and 6 and went dashing off down the hallway, in the direction of the confessional. Hadn’t 2 told her he would be performing his “Reconciliation”?
“Entropy,” 2 muttered, like a dreamer. His eyes were slitted half closed. He was a macrostate, being pulled apart into so many microstates. Or was it, somehow, something like the opposite?
3 threw the door to the confessional open, and screeched in terror.
2 was draped heavily in the office chair, his head lolling to one side, slack-mouthed. From all four walls, four walls completely coated in the black and white graffiti, gooey threads extended to 2’s body, attached to him like attenuated suckling leeches. Drooping cables like jungle vines that had grown out of the walls to make a nexus of him. He was the center of a black web, a net that had an oddly geometric look to it, as if the angle of each strand were significant. Some of the thicker of these tendrils pulsed like organic things.
“Come on!” 3 wailed, near hysterical. “Wake up! Wake up!” Despite her horror and her aversion to letting any of those creepers make contact with her, she stepped into the room, protected by the outline of the door’s threshold where it formed a gap in the graffiti. Hunching low to protect her head as she moved in further, she seized 2 by the ankles. After swiveling him around in the chair to face her, she pulled hard, teeth gritted. 2 slumped down lower in his seat. Gathering her strength, adrenaline flushing through her, she yanked at 2 again. This time he slid out of the chair and onto the floor with a thump. She heard him moan and his head rolled to one side. Many of the connecting strands had snapped free, and their ends wavered in the air like the severed tentacles of an enraged giant squid. 3 started backing toward the doorway, dragging the math teacher’s large body across the floor. Fortunately it wasn’t far to the hallway, and in seconds he was fully out the door. The last sticky strings broke free of him.
3 reached in to close the door. While countless tendrils still coiled and wriggled in the air, others were receding into the walls and vanishing. 3 slammed the door shut and turned back to 2, knelt down by his side. For a moment she was afraid to touch him, lest whatever had reduced him to this state should afflict her through contact, but then she grasped and shook him. Tears in her eyes, she again shouted, “Wake up! Wake up!” She would have called his name if she’d known it.
2 lifted his head from the floor and blinked at her groggily. “Oh Christ, my back. I think I fell out of my chair and hit my head.”
Convulsing with sobs of exhaustion and relief, 3 fell across his body. Confused, though not unappreciative of her concern and the physical contact, 2 slid his arms around her.
When from the tail of his eye 6 saw two figures moving down the hallway toward him, he whipped around with a gasp, but was relieved to recognize them as 2 and 3. 3 was holding onto 2’s arm, the latter shuffling like an old man and looking pale, sweat filmed on his face. “You got to see this thing, quick!” 6 called. “Before it’s totally gone!”
Mesmerized, one hand clamped over her mouth as if she might scream again or even be sick, 5 moved out of the way so 2 could step into the doorway to the men’s dormitory and view what lay inside. 3 leaned around his body for a look, as well.
Where before there had at least been a vague semblance of a body, now there was only a gelatinous black heap on the floor. It quivered, pulsated, and it was coming unraveled, ribbons rising up in greater and greater numbers and rippling as if a strong fan were blowing them from below. One by one they came loose from the mass, and almost instantly as they went airborne they dissolved and were gone. With each ribbon torn loose, the mass on the floor diminished that much more.
“It’s like the thing we saw outside in the grass,” 6 exclaimed. “The same thing!”
“What the fuck is it, though?” 5 said behind her palm. “Ectoplasm?”
“It’s like the stuff that was all over 2 just now, in the confessional,” 3 told them.
The last bands of black tissue drooped and went limp on the floor, as if all the mass’s energy had been spent. Worm-like, these strands writhed across each other but more and more sluggishly. Then, one after another, they grew still and rapidly melted away. Within several more seconds, there was nothing left — not even a stain.
“Was that a ghost?” 6 cried. “I never heard of a ghost like that! What the fuck was it?”
5 looked across the room at the mural of graffiti. “Whoever or whatever it was,” she said in a stunned, drugged voice, “they’re gone now.”
2 shoved open the green metal door at the end of the hallway on the third floor. He led the other three subjects into the room in which he and 3 had chanced upon the chairs and sleeping bags grouped in the corner. The bags were still unrolled on the floor where he and 3 had spread them out and made love on them. In a far corner were scattered five doll heads of various sizes, styles and materials.
But in the middle of the room stood a lone, sixth chair with one rolled-up sleeping bag resting on it. The rolled bag made him think of his dream of the giant snails. He was confused; why hadn’t he and 3 opened this bag, too? Was this the bag they had seen 5 drag into the room? No… no, he recalled opening that one, finding another doll head. He walked to the chair, took down the new sleeping bag and unfurled it. Sure enough, a sixth doll head was secreted within. He added it to the discarded collection, moved the chair to join the others and lay out the bag on the floor with the rest.
“This is where we’re going to sleep tonight,” he announced.
“Why?” asked 5.
“Why?” 6 exclaimed. “It’s obvious — there’s no graffiti in here!”
“We were designated our rooms to sleep in,” 5 protested. “Maybe we’ll be going against orders if we sleep in here instead, and forfeit everything.”
“Why should they have a problem with that?”
“The graffiti showed up in our bedrooms for a reason. They want us to sleep near the graffiti.”
“Fuck that,” 6 spat. “I’m not sleeping in a room where ghosts walk out of the walls!”
“I’m not sure that was a ghost,” 5 said. “Strictly speaking.”
“Then what was it?” 6 argued. “If it wasn’t a ghost, then that’s even worse.”
“If I hadn’t come in when I did,” 3 said, “who knows what would have happened to 2.” She looked up at him. “How do you feel?”
“I feel pretty fucking unnerved, is how I feel, after hearing what was happening to me.”
“But did it hurt you in any way?” 5 asked.
“I feel confused, and like I could jump right out of my skin.”
“But that’s just nerves, right? It didn’t actually do anything to you.”
“That’s because I stopped it before it could!” 3 persisted. “If you want to sleep alone beside the graffiti, go ahead; the rest of us want to sleep in here. We should barricade the door with the chairs or something.”
“Good idea,” said 6.
5 laughed, wagging her head. “Listen to you guys! Yes, some very bizarre things are going on. But it’s obviously part of the test we’re getting paid to participate in! We signed contracts!”
“They never told us about this crap,” 6 said.