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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/nomass39 on 2024-05-04 13:06:04.

Part 3

Something just occurred to me: these last few nights have been the first in years I’ve gotten through stone sober.

Having a few beers after work was just a matter of course, like taking medication before bed so you won’t feel sick. If it was a particularly bad day, I’d end up overdoing it and condemn myself to wake up the next morning with a murderous hangover and the knowledge that yet another potentially productive afternoon slipped right through my fingers.

But now, I feel focused. Fulfilled. Like I’m doing something that matters for the very first time.

The headmistress has the place under lockdown, of course. Every window covered and sealed, multiple lanky security agents attending every class, gas occasionally flushed through the ventilation system. For a woman so emotionless, the slight perspiration on her brow was basically her equivalent to a nervous breakdown.

And yet, of course, she demanded that her precious teaching schedule be maintained, through thick and thin. I didn’t mind. I liked to think that I was helping keep the kids sane — although really, it was more like the other way around.

I noticed the kids didn’t bother to hide their less human features anymore. Like Billy’s arm stretching a macabre seventeen feet to collect his graded papers from my desk, or Abigail climbing along the walls like a spider during recess. It made me smile, somehow, like they were letting me in on a secret world most people would never get to see. I was just reading them a cute little book about how a human boy and a wendigo learned to set aside their differences when the ball rang, and there she was at the door, ushering me with a finger.

“So who is this Saladin guy, anyways?” I asked as she led me down the hall.

“A hunter. Perhaps the most skilled we know of in the modern era, with a reputation for being capable of… punching above his weight class, so to speak,” she explained. “We thought we had him occupied chasing false leads across Bangladesh. To think that he was here in America all along, that he was slowly narrowing in on our exact location all this time and we never knew…” She clenched a hand into a fist. For her, the equivalent to screaming in frustration.

“Why did he decide to target… me?”

“Because you’re the first fully human teacher this school has ever had,” she confessed. “You were an unprecedented experiment. Even though it may introduce many… risk factors such as this, I thought it would do good for the children to have experience with a regular, everyday human.”

“And did you really choose me because I was… a loner? Expendable?”

She didn’t hear that question. Or maybe she just pretended not to hear it. “Saladin always pursues more covert means of achieving his ends, at first. He likes to take his quarry by surprise. But if that fails, as it now has, his plan B invariably involves some form of, well… overwhelming force.” She sighed. “But there is some good news, at least. Thanks to the efforts of you and Katie, he was forced to leave behind his weapon of choice.”

From her sleeve, she produced that blade that Saladin had been pulling from his throat. The one that would have dealt Katie the killing blow, if I’d just been a second later. It was jagged and black, and looked primitive, but a bit dazzling with the scarlet streaks embedded into its surface. “What’s so special about it?”

“It’s a blade of obsidian damascened with aglaophotis. To put it simply… it can cut through anything.” I reached out to feel its shiny surface, but she jerked it away from me. “I would recommend you avoided even so much as touching it. It may have… deleterious effects on a regular human.”

For some reason, I was reminded of Saladin’s words: when dealing with matters of the occult for long, there are two options: sacrifice your life, or your humanity. There is no third path.

We came upon a heavy iron door in some obscure corner of the school, and she set about unlocking multiple tiers of locks. “I apologize, Mister Vermeil. I know you appreciate your autonomy, but I must insist that you remain within the complex for the duration of the lockdown,” she said. “That means staying in the dorms. The ‘bunker’ down the mountainside. I’m sure you’ve noticed it.”

“Is this some sort of… secret path?”

“The school’s access tunnels provide secure routes to many places. But I must confess, while the school itself was made to provide a safe and welcoming front for human visitors, the tunnels were not. They were never intended for your kind.” She paused. Even she seemed the slightest bit nervous. “There are… many dangers down there. So I must ask that you stay by my side, and do exactly as I say, when I say it. Are we understood?”

She didn’t have to ask me twice.

I immediately saw what she meant when she said these tunnels weren’t designed for human use. They were horrifically claustrophobic labyrinths of concrete, to the point I sometimes had to bend down or angle myself sideways just to squeeze through. The must was suffocating. Hallways of seemingly random shapes and sizes jut out in every direction, and I had no idea how she’d memorized which to take.

All it took was a single moment. A single instant’s lapse in concentration, a single glance away as my clothes caught on a hunk of concrete. And she was gone.

I’ll be honest: I don’t do well with cramped spaces. And when it fully sunk in that she had vanished, and I was alone down here in the dark, my first instinct was to crumple into a ball and start sobbing.

Embarrassingly, I had to calm myself down in the exact same ways I calmed my students when they were having a tantrum: I talked through my feelings, took deep breaths, grounded myself. You’ve been through so much worse than some tight hallways, I thought. Keep it together. But every step forward was a herculean effort, like I was knee-deep in sludge.

All I had to light the way, now, was my little phone flashlight. And the darkness around me seemed to somehow be fighting back against the light, and was rapidly taking territory. I’d venture forward down a hall, and it’d get tighter and tighter with every step… so I’d turn around, and somehow, the same thing would happen on my way back. Was I losing my mind, down here in the dark? Or were the walls really closing in on me, like I was about to be crushed by the peristaltic motions inside of some cyclopean creature?

And every so often, I’d run into one of those shed skins, like I’d seen in the ditch outside the school all those days ago. They’d tangle around me like a spider’s web, and I’d cry out as I thrashed to tear them off of me. On a closer look like this, they didn’t seem reptilian in the slightest. They looked… human.

And then, down the hall, came a sound. I breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, thank God,” I called out. “Headmistress, I’m right-”

And then came another sound, the guttural crackling of a snarl rising from an unnatural throat. And I realized that I had just drawn the attention of something terrible.

I bit my tongue to stifle a gasp. Mentally I screamed at myself over how stupid I’d been. I tried to turn my flashlight off, but ended up dropping my phone and illuminating the entire hall. All I could do was back up as far as I could, press my back to the dead end, and await whatever was coming to me.

Footsteps in the darkness, of a sort of hobbling, awkward gait.

In the dim light, a silhouette came vaguely into view. It looked roughly the shape of a man, but the proportions were all wrong. The shapes. It was like a child’s drawing of a human being. Too angular, too thin. And along that jagged form was a garden of tumorous growths, hair and teeth and blind half-formed eyes poking from malignant teratomas, cushioned in almost scrotal pockets of loose and wrinkled flesh.

There was no head above its shoulders. Instead, there was a limp, swaying tube of flesh, and when it faced me, I could see down into the countless rows of teeth lining that esophageal tube like a Lamprey eel. Some sort of black ichor drooled from that undulating tube as the creature stood where my phone had landed, creaking and groaning in place.

Then, the thing turned, and shuffled back into the darkness.

It was blind! Of course! It had just been investigating the last noise it had heard. I thanked whatever gods may be, and clung to my little corner for what felt like hours before finally working up the courage to retrieve my phone with a shaky hand, and kept creeping down the halls.

Another noise. My blood froze in my veins. But then the headmistress’ face emerged from the dark, and I almost cried from relief. “Oh, thank God! I lost you, and… and why didn’t you warn me about the, the creature down here? That blind… leech-looking thing!” I demanded. “I know you said it was dangerous, but I cannot believe you let something like that just… go waltzing around down here!”

And, for the first time in my life, I saw the headmistress go pale.

“We don’t.”

This time, she kept a hand squeezed around my wrist as she practically sprinted down the halls. We came to an observation deck observing what looked like some sort of containment chamber. One of those security agents laid sprawled across the floor, split in two. The chamber below was littered with those shed skins, as well as chunks of other things I couldn’t name. She looked down on the empty chamber with...

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