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I saw something in my chemistry lab at night and now I can't wait to go to school on Monday.
I’m taking a ton of chemistry over summer break. Like four classes, all I can think about every day is how much I wish I were back at my parents’, spending my days lounging around or studying stuff I actually want to study and not stuck in a lab, stooping over a burette doing my twentieth titration that week. It’s not all that bad, though. For the first half of the summer, all I have are labs every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It’s not until July that the difficulty ramps up and my last semblance of free time goes on vacation. But that’s not important.
The chemistry lab is fairly efficiently set up. All the students have their own drawer full of glassware with everything they need. The system isn’t perfect, but I’ve been fastidious about making sure that if I borrow extra glassware from the reserve, I return it when I’m done.
I noticed fairly quickly that there was something odd going on. Every time I pulled out the equipment needed for that day’s lab, all the pieces had already been labeled. The writing was really messy, but trying to write on a non-Euclidean surface is tricky, and hey, less work for me.
The first time I noticed this, I had assumed that it was leftovers from the spring session. That assumption was challenged immediately in the next lab when all the labels had been changed to fit the chemicals we were using. Stuff like sulfuric acid and sodium hydroxide are standard and can easily be explained away as leftovers from spring (even if they were always updated to the concentrations we were using), but some of the very specific chemicals used absolutely could not. Especially the ones that were used once the entire semester.
Before I start explaining how I figured out there’s not another chem lab, I should mention that my roommate and I carpool together. I only have the one class, but she’s taking a bunch of classes. In fact, for some reason, my chemistry lab and her anatomy lab are connected by a room full of chemicals and chemical disposal. No clue why the two are connected, but Chemistry and Biology share a floor in this building, so it’s not totally out of place. Whenever I have to dump something in the disposal, I stick my head in and wave at her.
Anyway, because of the carpool situation, I end up spending a lot of time on campus with no schoolwork. I don’t mind this since I am currently gunning to take the JLPT in the future, and I don’t concentrate well at home, so the extra time to work is somewhat appreciated. We usually get there at around 8:30 and leave at 5:30. I hang around the labs because it’s quiet and the chairs are comfortable. This is how I know there’s absolutely no morning class. Any night class would temporally be unable to correctly label my equipment because they'd be doing a lab I had already done that day. Also, my class ran on a three-day schedule, so that kind of ruined the possibility of a class running on the days we weren’t there
One day, one of my classmates mentioned the labels, and I wanted to hug her. I never brought it up out of fear of sounding absolutely insane, so seeing others notice it made me feel so much better. I told her about my deductions (paraphrased to not ramble), and a TA who was listening in chimed in and told us there were absolutely no other classes held in this lab and that it was all just left over from spring. I told him about the labels changing, and he just shrugged. I later pulled up the software you use to enroll in classes, and when I searched for another summer chemistry class, sure enough, he was right; this was the only session of this class running this summer.
While I spent time pondering this, I wouldn’t say that it consumed me. Sure, it was weird, but I mostly just liked the convenience. That all changed one day when I pulled a beaker out of my drawer and saw “0.1 M Phosphoric Acid” written on the label. My blood ran cold…that was \*my\* handwriting. I write the lowercase letter “d” in a very distinctive way; it looks more like the quarter note you see on sheet music than a letter. I absolutely did not write this, never mind the fact that we hadn’t used phosphoric acid in the lab before today; I would never write out the concentration unless it mattered. Who or what had written this?
I looked at it closely and realized that it was not an exact one-to-one match for my handwriting. It was too practiced; I could see slight differences in the curves of the letters and the spacing between them was just a little bit too far apart. If anyone else had seen this they would probably think it was mine. It was actually more uncanny when I stared at it closer, noticing how closely the writer had tried to mimic my penmanship.
A sudden realization hit me, and I pulled out my phone with sweaty hands. I prayed I would be wrong.
I had been taking at least one picture of every lab to send to my boyfriend back home. In all of these pictures, the labels were legible. I looked at the first picture, and the writing was still messy and totally distinct from mine. As I swiped through the photos, I felt like I was going to be sick. As the photos got closer to the present time, the writing on the labels got closer and closer to my own handwriting.
It was slow; first, it was the way the arches on the letter “m” changed from vaguely jagged to very smooth, just like mine. Then the spacing got closer together. The little details slowly culminated into Monday’s photo. That writing, omitting the letter “d”, had mimicked mine as closely as the writer could. I zoomed in and noticed that the letter “d” was smudged, like the writer had tried to write it the way I do, but gave up and did it like they normally would. I looked around the classroom and noticed several classmates staring at their glassware the same way I was.
I did that day’s lab with a sense of foreboding. I tried to concentrate on my work, but handling the glassware with the mimicked writing on it was making me feel ill, so eventually I tore it off and labeled it myself.
As soon as class was over, I ran through the connecting room and told my roommate that I was going to stay at school for a while so she could just go home without me and I would take an uber back. She asked why, I had just complained about being bored now that I was done with my Japanese workbooks, and I muttered something about wanting to hangout with a new friend.
Her eyes lit up, she had been trying to cure me of my terminal asociality for a while, always telling me to talk to more people and make new friends. I felt incredibly bad but what could I possibly say? I was investigating a serial labeler who had my handwriting? She would have me committed. So I lied, and quickly cut the conversation short to hang out with my “new friend.”
I ended up hiding in the depths of the library. I felt ridiculous having to hide but if lying felt bad then having to lie more about why I wasn’t hanging out with my new friend would feel worse. I didn’t make my way back to the lab building until I got a text from her asking how I was doing and that she had ordered delivery so I should get something on the way home.
The building the labs are in technically never closes. I had a classmate last semester who was always tired because he manned the front desk at three in the morning. This may not have been the case in the summer, but this building was so large and empty on the upper floors that I could find a place to hide if need be. I did end up hiding but it was a half hearted attempt. There was a nook in the lobby that was easily visible from the stairs, but if someone took the elevator (and most people do), they would not see me at all. There was a table in this nook, but I sat on the floor, back up against the windows that stretched from the ceiling to the floor.
I was unsure when the writer would come in, so past six thirty, I half heartedly played solitaire on my phone and strained my ears to hear if the elevator would ping signaling that someone was arriving.
Around seven o’clock, a different class slowly started trickling in, and they all went down the hall opposite to where my lab was, so no luck there. The only guy who took the stairs regarded me with a strange look as he walked by, but that was the only interaction I had with that class. When the class let out at eight thirty, and all the students left, the third floor was stiflingly quiet. I felt like I could hear the blood flowing in my ears. This suffocating silence lasted for hours.
It was about midnight when I really needed to pee. I hadn’t heard the elevator, and no one had come up the stairs, so I decided to very quickly relieve myself. When I got up and started heading towards the women’s bathrooms, I noticed that the laboratory’s lights were on. Which was so strange I forgot about the reason why I got up in the first place. The lights in the common areas were always on, but the labs were almost always dark.
I peeked into the window of the lab as discreetly as I could. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to see, but it was certainly not the sight in front of me. At first, I thought I was looking at the anatomy models from the connected lab. They looked like humans, sort of, except just like anatomy models, you could see their organs.
Each one of them had a different piece of them exposed. One had a large hole in its chest, heart rhythmically beating like the absence of a rib cage and skin didn’t bother it at all. Another had a hole in its abdomen, I watched its intestines writhe in the open air. The worst one didn’t have a face; it looked like someone had taken a human head and put it through one of those slicers you see at a deli counter. With no lower jaw, its half-formed tongue lolled out of its underdeveloped mouth and so, so much drool constantly ran down its neck and onto a shirt, my shirt.
I had been so distracted by the exposed organs that I didn’t even look at their faces closely. It was just like the handwriting. They were almost perfectly identical to the faces of my classmates, assuming you didn’t look too hard. But when you did look hard, you noticed that little defects started piling up. Eyes spaced too far apart, a nose that was just a bit too much to the left, one of them seemed to have more teeth than humanly possible. I was glad that, for some reason, my doppelgänger didn’t have a face. I can get past the bleeding flesh and exposed organs, but I knew that if I saw my own face, just ever so slightly off, I would dream about it every day for the rest of my life.
The fact that they were completely silent just made it worse. Every time I watched them pantomime talking to each other, I felt my skin crawl. Their gestures and social interactions were so stiff that even someone as socially oblivious as I could tell it was like they were acting out conversation like they’d only seen it on TV.
I watched them perform the future lab in a trance. I felt absolutely rooted to the spot. The trance and the silence were broken by the sound of shattering glass. The guy who sits across from me’s double (I think his name is Marvin), had accidentally shattered a burette. Just like with real people, every one of those things stopped what they were doing for a second to see what caused the noise. They all stared a bit too long before going back to their work. I watched as my faceless double walked over to help with a strange stiffness to her gait.
I didn’t stay to see what else was going to happen. They hadn’t acknowledged me, but clearly, they react to external stimuli and I wasn’t sticking around to see if they noticed me eventually.
The rest of the night went by in a blur. I sprinted out of the building and got an Uber home. Even though it was very late when I finally made it to my bed and I was dead tired, I couldn’t fall asleep. My brain kept running through what I saw in the lab and coming up with question after question that I tried to answer through the internet to no avail. I was still awake when the sun came up and I heard my roommate leave to go to class. I had been frantically reading about the history of my school, the current faculty, folklore about creatures that looked like you, and had come up completely empty-handed.
Eventually, my lizard brain took over and told me it was time to sleep. My dreams were a muddled mess full of unfinished humans and the burning smell of vaporized acid. I didn’t sleep very long, maybe four hours.
When I awoke, I saw I had several texts from my boyfriend wondering why I hadn’t talked to him last night like I usually did. I wanted to tell someone about what I saw, and he was the person most likely to believe me, but I just couldn’t think of a way to start. I had photographic evidence of the handwriting change, but I didn’t take a picture of those things last night. I was simply so overwhelmed by the sight of it all that it never occurred to me.
I told him I was feeling very sick and that I wanted to talk to him really late tomorrow night. I told him that what I would tell him would sound absolutely insane and that he should prepare himself. Then I muted the conversation, not wanting to talk to anyone and instead be alone with my thoughts.
Since the Internet had no answers for me, I went to the library. If there was a disgraced former professor who dabbled in making whatever those things are, then there was sure to be some sort of old newspaper article about them. Perhaps it was a story the university wanted covered up, or it was so old it never made it to the internet. Either way, I was going to find it.
Many hours later, I had been asked to leave the library by a kindly librarian who looked like she wanted to say something about the dark circles under my eyes but obeyed the laws of social niceties and didn’t. My search had been fruitless. There were plenty of disgraced professors and breaches of ethics, but they were all of the mundane variety.
When I got home, I told my roommate I would be going into class on my own, shoved some goldfish down my throat, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
At the lab the next day, I didn’t even bother to open my drawer and instead used pieces from the reserve drawer. I was having difficulties focusing, not only because being in this room made me feel like there was something under my skin. I also had a feeling of deja vu so strong it was starting to make me nauseous. I had watched those things do this exact lab the other night, but, paying attention to the other students around me, I noticed that the way they behaved was actually identical to the way those things did. Now that I had thought about it, my double, even with no face, had seemed to be glancing around the room, deep in thought.
Actually, when I first stumbled upon the class, it was early into the lab. Aside from the fact that she had no face, my double had stood out to me early on because she had been rushing around the room, grabbing things. I hadn’t connected the dots that she was me at that point and paid it no mind. Surely she hadn’t been grabbing equipment from the reserves.
I had already not wanted to open my drawer, and with this dawning realization, I wanted to open it even less. I had to, though, just like with the handwriting, if I never had the opportunity to debunk my own idea, it would eat away at me. I slowly opened my drawer, and I saw the label I had put on the phosphoric acid beaker from last lab, which simply read “phos.”
I wanted to scream, to run out of the lab and never return to this university. This thing, double, whatever it was, had acted out my movements before I had even made them. It had been grabbing glassware from the reserves before I even saw it. How is this possible? If it were just mimicking how I act, it wouldn’t have done that; how could it predict that I would be so intrigued by the mimicked handwriting that I would camp in the building to catch whatever was doing it? The only possibility in my mind is that it was acting out the future, but I absolutely refused to believe it.
The shattering of glass caused the low murmur of conversation in the lab to go quiet, and we all cast a quick glance at Marvin, who looked embarrassed and tried to cover his embarrassment by cleaning up the glass from the burette he had just broken.
I stayed in my seat. My double had gone over to help but I wouldn’t. One act of defiance could possibly cause this whole nightmare to disappear is what I hoped. I would stay absolutely rooted to this chair or die trying.
And then my left leg moved, followed by my right leg. I felt like a marionette being pulled forward by invisible strings. I fought against it and tensed my body up, but even still, I hobbled over to Marvin. I remembered in a daze how stiffly my double had been walking and wondered briefly if I had stumbled across some sort of omnipotent being who was toying with me for its amusement.
Marvin did not look confused by my awkward walk and the look of terror on my face; in fact, he looked completely indifferent to my presence. Before he could say anything, my body started picking up the shards of broken glass on the floor.
Whatever was controlling me was clumsy. Instead of lightly picking the glass up to avoid getting injured, I picked it up with all the force in my fingers, like a toddler who hasn’t realized they can vary the amount of strength in their hands. Immediately, I felt the glass tear into my fingertips. When I was done picking up a piece, I deposited it into my free hand, which quickly formed a tight fist around it in order not to drop it.
I watched helplessly as blood oozed from both my hands and dripped onto the floor. Again and again, I was forced to pick up the glass. It probably didn’t take much time but every piece felt like it took centuries to pick up. When I was finally done, my body threw the glass into the broken glassware bin and I regained control of it. I looked at my hands. I could see tiny pieces of glass embedded in my palm and fingers. I had been silently crying the whole time, and now that I had control again, I had started to cry more audibly. Marvin seemingly could not hear my cries and awkwardly thanked me the same way you’d thank any classmate you don’t know very well.
I went back to my bench and went back to work. Even though I was bleeding profusely, no one seemed to care. I forced myself to do things as normally as possible out of fear that control would be taken away from me again. Even though that meant further grinding tiny particles of glass deeper into my fingers as I worked the burette, causing blood to fall into the solution and ruining any possible results. Even though it meant washing out the glassware and leaving it dirtier before.
By the end of the lab, I was feeling woozy, but just exiting the room made me feel significantly better. The first thing I did was grab some paper towels from the bathroom and wrap my hands in them before taking a painful drive to the closest CVS and purchasing first aid supplies. The cashier looked concerned about my hands as the paper towels had gotten soaked through on the drive in. He started to ask me if I was ok and I told him I didn’t want to talk about it.
Have you ever tried to dig tiny particles of glass out of your finger with your non-dominant hand in the driver's seat of your Toyota Camry? Not only was it already a difficult task, it was made even more difficult by the fact that operating the tweezers was painful. I don't know how long I sat there doing that. Every time I thought I had gotten it all out I found another piece. I considered going to the hospital, but even if I didn’t have a prior history, I couldn’t come up with an explanation for the wounds that wouldn’t land me in a psychiatric hospital. After I shot that idea down, I considered driving somewhere scenic and letting myself bleed out. I knew I had lost a lot of blood. I felt positively cold on this scalding June afternoon. But eventually, after I dug out as much of the glass as I could, I wrapped my hands in bandages and headed back to the university.
If I could just get a picture of these things and convince a few others to believe me, maybe someone would face consequences. Next week was the last week of class and I was certain that those things had some sort of objective and the end of the class would signal for them to start whatever it was they were created for. At the time, I felt like I absolutely had to press on for fear of running out of time, but now I think it would have been better to just forget about it and accept whatever was going to happen to me was a punishment for interrupting the natural order of things.
When I got back to campus, I ate as much food as I could and lay down in my hiding spot after setting alarms at midnight and every fifteen minutes after. I slept like a rock; even the pain in my hands couldn’t overcome my deep slumber.
I slept through the first two alarms before the 12:30 alarm successfully roused me. While I was still half asleep and walking towards the lab, all the drowsiness left my body when I saw that the lab light was on.
I peeked into the lab, and when I thought it couldn’t get worse, it had. Those holes they had in their body…they were getting smaller. My double had a forehead now and I could see the corners of her eyes on the side of her face. The little abnormalities in everyone’s faces were slightly less anomalous. Eyes were closer, noses were more centered, the one with too many teeth now had the correct number of teeth but they were slightly too large.
I felt on the verge of passing out. I absolutely needed to get this photo. I discreetly held my phone up to the window, making sure it was silenced in case they reacted to the shutter sound, and was about to take a photo when something unexpected happened.
My double had been carrying a flask full of something in her bandaged hands to her bench when she tripped. I couldn’t see anything she could have possibly tripped on; it’s like her ankle gave out. As she fell, she hit the side of her incomplete head on the sharp corner of the lab counter and spilled whatever was in the flask all over her. I watched her flesh sizzle as the chemicals ate away at it and as blood gushed out of the side of her head and pooled on the ground. She twitched and writhed in agony, all the while letting out a silent, mouthless scream.
All the doubles came over to see what was happening, and a few tried to help her, but as the pool of blood grew larger and larger and her twitching became weaker and weaker, nothing could be done and my double finally lay still, chemicals still eating their way through her rapidly cooling body.
I can’t remember exactly what happened after that. I took the picture and called my boyfriend on the way home. I don’t know if he thinks I’m insane or pranking him but the desperation in my voice at least convinced him to drive to my apartment that night. It’s now Saturday morning. I’m thankful that, at the very least, I have the weekend to try something to avoid ending up like my double.
I don’t know who to go to for help. The police aren’t any help. When I tried to talk to them, my frenzy was so palpable that after an officer heard me out, I later heard him say something into his radio about a psych evaluation. He wouldn’t even let me show him the photos, insisting that he had heard enough and would send someone to check out. I left the station as soon as I could.
The rational side of me knew that being locked away in a place with 24/7 surveillance was probably the best solution. Yet for some reason, I knew I absolutely couldn’t be locked away. It wasn’t out of fear of dying or of losing control of my body again. No, it was out of the fear of missing out on something spectacular. It was the same fear that grips the hearts of children when their parents tell them that if they don’t stop misbehaving, the trip to Disneyland will be cancelled.
I lie now in bed, my face contorting with two very different emotions. I am both petrified and absolutely elated. My sobbing flipping to gleeful laughter and back to sobbing in mere moments. I am locked in here; my boyfriend and roommate barricaded the door when my behavior started to become a danger to them. Occasionally, if I spend more than a minute sobbing, my boyfriend quickly rushes in and tries to talk to me. It never works; I always end up crying harder when I see the deep gashes my fingernails left in his face.
I felt as if I had been detached from my body; whatever thoughts were running through my mind were so primal or foreign that I had given up on trying to understand them. I noticed later in the evening that the nearly 50:50 ratio of crying to laughing had skewed, and I was spending more time giddily giggling and kicking my feet in anticipation.
I recently heard the two of them talking about calling an ambulance and having me committed. It’s a bit unfortunate that my apartment is on the third floor, but I will survive the fall. In fact, if I leave now, I will have plenty of leeway to get to campus on foot and make it to class exactly on time.
#entertainment
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I’m taking a ton of chemistry over summer break. Like four classes, all I can think about every day is how much I wish I were back at my parents’, spending my days lounging around or studying stuff I actually want to study and not stuck in a lab, stooping over a burette doing my twentieth titration that week. It’s not all that bad, though. For the first half of the summer, all I have are labs every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It’s not until July that the difficulty ramps up and my last semblance of free time goes on vacation. But that’s not important.
The chemistry lab is fairly efficiently set up. All the students have their own drawer full of glassware with everything they need. The system isn’t perfect, but I’ve been fastidious about making sure that if I borrow extra glassware from the reserve, I return it when I’m done.
I noticed fairly quickly that there was something odd going on. Every time I pulled out the equipment needed for that day’s lab, all the pieces had already been labeled. The writing was really messy, but trying to write on a non-Euclidean surface is tricky, and hey, less work for me.
The first time I noticed this, I had assumed that it was leftovers from the spring session. That assumption was challenged immediately in the next lab when all the labels had been changed to fit the chemicals we were using. Stuff like sulfuric acid and sodium hydroxide are standard and can easily be explained away as leftovers from spring (even if they were always updated to the concentrations we were using), but some of the very specific chemicals used absolutely could not. Especially the ones that were used once the entire semester.
Before I start explaining how I figured out there’s not another chem lab, I should mention that my roommate and I carpool together. I only have the one class, but she’s taking a bunch of classes. In fact, for some reason, my chemistry lab and her anatomy lab are connected by a room full of chemicals and chemical disposal. No clue why the two are connected, but Chemistry and Biology share a floor in this building, so it’s not totally out of place. Whenever I have to dump something in the disposal, I stick my head in and wave at her.
Anyway, because of the carpool situation, I end up spending a lot of time on campus with no schoolwork. I don’t mind this since I am currently gunning to take the JLPT in the future, and I don’t concentrate well at home, so the extra time to work is somewhat appreciated. We usually get there at around 8:30 and leave at 5:30. I hang around the labs because it’s quiet and the chairs are comfortable. This is how I know there’s absolutely no morning class. Any night class would temporally be unable to correctly label my equipment because they'd be doing a lab I had already done that day. Also, my class ran on a three-day schedule, so that kind of ruined the possibility of a class running on the days we weren’t there
One day, one of my classmates mentioned the labels, and I wanted to hug her. I never brought it up out of fear of sounding absolutely insane, so seeing others notice it made me feel so much better. I told her about my deductions (paraphrased to not ramble), and a TA who was listening in chimed in and told us there were absolutely no other classes held in this lab and that it was all just left over from spring. I told him about the labels changing, and he just shrugged. I later pulled up the software you use to enroll in classes, and when I searched for another summer chemistry class, sure enough, he was right; this was the only session of this class running this summer.
While I spent time pondering this, I wouldn’t say that it consumed me. Sure, it was weird, but I mostly just liked the convenience. That all changed one day when I pulled a beaker out of my drawer and saw “0.1 M Phosphoric Acid” written on the label. My blood ran cold…that was \*my\* handwriting. I write the lowercase letter “d” in a very distinctive way; it looks more like the quarter note you see on sheet music than a letter. I absolutely did not write this, never mind the fact that we hadn’t used phosphoric acid in the lab before today; I would never write out the concentration unless it mattered. Who or what had written this?
I looked at it closely and realized that it was not an exact one-to-one match for my handwriting. It was too practiced; I could see slight differences in the curves of the letters and the spacing between them was just a little bit too far apart. If anyone else had seen this they would probably think it was mine. It was actually more uncanny when I stared at it closer, noticing how closely the writer had tried to mimic my penmanship.
A sudden realization hit me, and I pulled out my phone with sweaty hands. I prayed I would be wrong.
I had been taking at least one picture of every lab to send to my boyfriend back home. In all of these pictures, the labels were legible. I looked at the first picture, and the writing was still messy and totally distinct from mine. As I swiped through the photos, I felt like I was going to be sick. As the photos got closer to the present time, the writing on the labels got closer and closer to my own handwriting.
It was slow; first, it was the way the arches on the letter “m” changed from vaguely jagged to very smooth, just like mine. Then the spacing got closer together. The little details slowly culminated into Monday’s photo. That writing, omitting the letter “d”, had mimicked mine as closely as the writer could. I zoomed in and noticed that the letter “d” was smudged, like the writer had tried to write it the way I do, but gave up and did it like they normally would. I looked around the classroom and noticed several classmates staring at their glassware the same way I was.
I did that day’s lab with a sense of foreboding. I tried to concentrate on my work, but handling the glassware with the mimicked writing on it was making me feel ill, so eventually I tore it off and labeled it myself.
As soon as class was over, I ran through the connecting room and told my roommate that I was going to stay at school for a while so she could just go home without me and I would take an uber back. She asked why, I had just complained about being bored now that I was done with my Japanese workbooks, and I muttered something about wanting to hangout with a new friend.
Her eyes lit up, she had been trying to cure me of my terminal asociality for a while, always telling me to talk to more people and make new friends. I felt incredibly bad but what could I possibly say? I was investigating a serial labeler who had my handwriting? She would have me committed. So I lied, and quickly cut the conversation short to hang out with my “new friend.”
I ended up hiding in the depths of the library. I felt ridiculous having to hide but if lying felt bad then having to lie more about why I wasn’t hanging out with my new friend would feel worse. I didn’t make my way back to the lab building until I got a text from her asking how I was doing and that she had ordered delivery so I should get something on the way home.
The building the labs are in technically never closes. I had a classmate last semester who was always tired because he manned the front desk at three in the morning. This may not have been the case in the summer, but this building was so large and empty on the upper floors that I could find a place to hide if need be. I did end up hiding but it was a half hearted attempt. There was a nook in the lobby that was easily visible from the stairs, but if someone took the elevator (and most people do), they would not see me at all. There was a table in this nook, but I sat on the floor, back up against the windows that stretched from the ceiling to the floor.
I was unsure when the writer would come in, so past six thirty, I half heartedly played solitaire on my phone and strained my ears to hear if the elevator would ping signaling that someone was arriving.
Around seven o’clock, a different class slowly started trickling in, and they all went down the hall opposite to where my lab was, so no luck there. The only guy who took the stairs regarded me with a strange look as he walked by, but that was the only interaction I had with that class. When the class let out at eight thirty, and all the students left, the third floor was stiflingly quiet. I felt like I could hear the blood flowing in my ears. This suffocating silence lasted for hours.
It was about midnight when I really needed to pee. I hadn’t heard the elevator, and no one had come up the stairs, so I decided to very quickly relieve myself. When I got up and started heading towards the women’s bathrooms, I noticed that the laboratory’s lights were on. Which was so strange I forgot about the reason why I got up in the first place. The lights in the common areas were always on, but the labs were almost always dark.
I peeked into the window of the lab as discreetly as I could. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to see, but it was certainly not the sight in front of me. At first, I thought I was looking at the anatomy models from the connected lab. They looked like humans, sort of, except just like anatomy models, you could see their organs.
Each one of them had a different piece of them exposed. One had a large hole in its chest, heart rhythmically beating like the absence of a rib cage and skin didn’t bother it at all. Another had a hole in its abdomen, I watched its intestines writhe in the open air. The worst one didn’t have a face; it looked like someone had taken a human head and put it through one of those slicers you see at a deli counter. With no lower jaw, its half-formed tongue lolled out of its underdeveloped mouth and so, so much drool constantly ran down its neck and onto a shirt, my shirt.
I had been so distracted by the exposed organs that I didn’t even look at their faces closely. It was just like the handwriting. They were almost perfectly identical to the faces of my classmates, assuming you didn’t look too hard. But when you did look hard, you noticed that little defects started piling up. Eyes spaced too far apart, a nose that was just a bit too much to the left, one of them seemed to have more teeth than humanly possible. I was glad that, for some reason, my doppelgänger didn’t have a face. I can get past the bleeding flesh and exposed organs, but I knew that if I saw my own face, just ever so slightly off, I would dream about it every day for the rest of my life.
The fact that they were completely silent just made it worse. Every time I watched them pantomime talking to each other, I felt my skin crawl. Their gestures and social interactions were so stiff that even someone as socially oblivious as I could tell it was like they were acting out conversation like they’d only seen it on TV.
I watched them perform the future lab in a trance. I felt absolutely rooted to the spot. The trance and the silence were broken by the sound of shattering glass. The guy who sits across from me’s double (I think his name is Marvin), had accidentally shattered a burette. Just like with real people, every one of those things stopped what they were doing for a second to see what caused the noise. They all stared a bit too long before going back to their work. I watched as my faceless double walked over to help with a strange stiffness to her gait.
I didn’t stay to see what else was going to happen. They hadn’t acknowledged me, but clearly, they react to external stimuli and I wasn’t sticking around to see if they noticed me eventually.
The rest of the night went by in a blur. I sprinted out of the building and got an Uber home. Even though it was very late when I finally made it to my bed and I was dead tired, I couldn’t fall asleep. My brain kept running through what I saw in the lab and coming up with question after question that I tried to answer through the internet to no avail. I was still awake when the sun came up and I heard my roommate leave to go to class. I had been frantically reading about the history of my school, the current faculty, folklore about creatures that looked like you, and had come up completely empty-handed.
Eventually, my lizard brain took over and told me it was time to sleep. My dreams were a muddled mess full of unfinished humans and the burning smell of vaporized acid. I didn’t sleep very long, maybe four hours.
When I awoke, I saw I had several texts from my boyfriend wondering why I hadn’t talked to him last night like I usually did. I wanted to tell someone about what I saw, and he was the person most likely to believe me, but I just couldn’t think of a way to start. I had photographic evidence of the handwriting change, but I didn’t take a picture of those things last night. I was simply so overwhelmed by the sight of it all that it never occurred to me.
I told him I was feeling very sick and that I wanted to talk to him really late tomorrow night. I told him that what I would tell him would sound absolutely insane and that he should prepare himself. Then I muted the conversation, not wanting to talk to anyone and instead be alone with my thoughts.
Since the Internet had no answers for me, I went to the library. If there was a disgraced former professor who dabbled in making whatever those things are, then there was sure to be some sort of old newspaper article about them. Perhaps it was a story the university wanted covered up, or it was so old it never made it to the internet. Either way, I was going to find it.
Many hours later, I had been asked to leave the library by a kindly librarian who looked like she wanted to say something about the dark circles under my eyes but obeyed the laws of social niceties and didn’t. My search had been fruitless. There were plenty of disgraced professors and breaches of ethics, but they were all of the mundane variety.
When I got home, I told my roommate I would be going into class on my own, shoved some goldfish down my throat, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
At the lab the next day, I didn’t even bother to open my drawer and instead used pieces from the reserve drawer. I was having difficulties focusing, not only because being in this room made me feel like there was something under my skin. I also had a feeling of deja vu so strong it was starting to make me nauseous. I had watched those things do this exact lab the other night, but, paying attention to the other students around me, I noticed that the way they behaved was actually identical to the way those things did. Now that I had thought about it, my double, even with no face, had seemed to be glancing around the room, deep in thought.
Actually, when I first stumbled upon the class, it was early into the lab. Aside from the fact that she had no face, my double had stood out to me early on because she had been rushing around the room, grabbing things. I hadn’t connected the dots that she was me at that point and paid it no mind. Surely she hadn’t been grabbing equipment from the reserves.
I had already not wanted to open my drawer, and with this dawning realization, I wanted to open it even less. I had to, though, just like with the handwriting, if I never had the opportunity to debunk my own idea, it would eat away at me. I slowly opened my drawer, and I saw the label I had put on the phosphoric acid beaker from last lab, which simply read “phos.”
I wanted to scream, to run out of the lab and never return to this university. This thing, double, whatever it was, had acted out my movements before I had even made them. It had been grabbing glassware from the reserves before I even saw it. How is this possible? If it were just mimicking how I act, it wouldn’t have done that; how could it predict that I would be so intrigued by the mimicked handwriting that I would camp in the building to catch whatever was doing it? The only possibility in my mind is that it was acting out the future, but I absolutely refused to believe it.
The shattering of glass caused the low murmur of conversation in the lab to go quiet, and we all cast a quick glance at Marvin, who looked embarrassed and tried to cover his embarrassment by cleaning up the glass from the burette he had just broken.
I stayed in my seat. My double had gone over to help but I wouldn’t. One act of defiance could possibly cause this whole nightmare to disappear is what I hoped. I would stay absolutely rooted to this chair or die trying.
And then my left leg moved, followed by my right leg. I felt like a marionette being pulled forward by invisible strings. I fought against it and tensed my body up, but even still, I hobbled over to Marvin. I remembered in a daze how stiffly my double had been walking and wondered briefly if I had stumbled across some sort of omnipotent being who was toying with me for its amusement.
Marvin did not look confused by my awkward walk and the look of terror on my face; in fact, he looked completely indifferent to my presence. Before he could say anything, my body started picking up the shards of broken glass on the floor.
Whatever was controlling me was clumsy. Instead of lightly picking the glass up to avoid getting injured, I picked it up with all the force in my fingers, like a toddler who hasn’t realized they can vary the amount of strength in their hands. Immediately, I felt the glass tear into my fingertips. When I was done picking up a piece, I deposited it into my free hand, which quickly formed a tight fist around it in order not to drop it.
I watched helplessly as blood oozed from both my hands and dripped onto the floor. Again and again, I was forced to pick up the glass. It probably didn’t take much time but every piece felt like it took centuries to pick up. When I was finally done, my body threw the glass into the broken glassware bin and I regained control of it. I looked at my hands. I could see tiny pieces of glass embedded in my palm and fingers. I had been silently crying the whole time, and now that I had control again, I had started to cry more audibly. Marvin seemingly could not hear my cries and awkwardly thanked me the same way you’d thank any classmate you don’t know very well.
I went back to my bench and went back to work. Even though I was bleeding profusely, no one seemed to care. I forced myself to do things as normally as possible out of fear that control would be taken away from me again. Even though that meant further grinding tiny particles of glass deeper into my fingers as I worked the burette, causing blood to fall into the solution and ruining any possible results. Even though it meant washing out the glassware and leaving it dirtier before.
By the end of the lab, I was feeling woozy, but just exiting the room made me feel significantly better. The first thing I did was grab some paper towels from the bathroom and wrap my hands in them before taking a painful drive to the closest CVS and purchasing first aid supplies. The cashier looked concerned about my hands as the paper towels had gotten soaked through on the drive in. He started to ask me if I was ok and I told him I didn’t want to talk about it.
Have you ever tried to dig tiny particles of glass out of your finger with your non-dominant hand in the driver's seat of your Toyota Camry? Not only was it already a difficult task, it was made even more difficult by the fact that operating the tweezers was painful. I don't know how long I sat there doing that. Every time I thought I had gotten it all out I found another piece. I considered going to the hospital, but even if I didn’t have a prior history, I couldn’t come up with an explanation for the wounds that wouldn’t land me in a psychiatric hospital. After I shot that idea down, I considered driving somewhere scenic and letting myself bleed out. I knew I had lost a lot of blood. I felt positively cold on this scalding June afternoon. But eventually, after I dug out as much of the glass as I could, I wrapped my hands in bandages and headed back to the university.
If I could just get a picture of these things and convince a few others to believe me, maybe someone would face consequences. Next week was the last week of class and I was certain that those things had some sort of objective and the end of the class would signal for them to start whatever it was they were created for. At the time, I felt like I absolutely had to press on for fear of running out of time, but now I think it would have been better to just forget about it and accept whatever was going to happen to me was a punishment for interrupting the natural order of things.
When I got back to campus, I ate as much food as I could and lay down in my hiding spot after setting alarms at midnight and every fifteen minutes after. I slept like a rock; even the pain in my hands couldn’t overcome my deep slumber.
I slept through the first two alarms before the 12:30 alarm successfully roused me. While I was still half asleep and walking towards the lab, all the drowsiness left my body when I saw that the lab light was on.
I peeked into the lab, and when I thought it couldn’t get worse, it had. Those holes they had in their body…they were getting smaller. My double had a forehead now and I could see the corners of her eyes on the side of her face. The little abnormalities in everyone’s faces were slightly less anomalous. Eyes were closer, noses were more centered, the one with too many teeth now had the correct number of teeth but they were slightly too large.
I felt on the verge of passing out. I absolutely needed to get this photo. I discreetly held my phone up to the window, making sure it was silenced in case they reacted to the shutter sound, and was about to take a photo when something unexpected happened.
My double had been carrying a flask full of something in her bandaged hands to her bench when she tripped. I couldn’t see anything she could have possibly tripped on; it’s like her ankle gave out. As she fell, she hit the side of her incomplete head on the sharp corner of the lab counter and spilled whatever was in the flask all over her. I watched her flesh sizzle as the chemicals ate away at it and as blood gushed out of the side of her head and pooled on the ground. She twitched and writhed in agony, all the while letting out a silent, mouthless scream.
All the doubles came over to see what was happening, and a few tried to help her, but as the pool of blood grew larger and larger and her twitching became weaker and weaker, nothing could be done and my double finally lay still, chemicals still eating their way through her rapidly cooling body.
I can’t remember exactly what happened after that. I took the picture and called my boyfriend on the way home. I don’t know if he thinks I’m insane or pranking him but the desperation in my voice at least convinced him to drive to my apartment that night. It’s now Saturday morning. I’m thankful that, at the very least, I have the weekend to try something to avoid ending up like my double.
I don’t know who to go to for help. The police aren’t any help. When I tried to talk to them, my frenzy was so palpable that after an officer heard me out, I later heard him say something into his radio about a psych evaluation. He wouldn’t even let me show him the photos, insisting that he had heard enough and would send someone to check out. I left the station as soon as I could.
The rational side of me knew that being locked away in a place with 24/7 surveillance was probably the best solution. Yet for some reason, I knew I absolutely couldn’t be locked away. It wasn’t out of fear of dying or of losing control of my body again. No, it was out of the fear of missing out on something spectacular. It was the same fear that grips the hearts of children when their parents tell them that if they don’t stop misbehaving, the trip to Disneyland will be cancelled.
I lie now in bed, my face contorting with two very different emotions. I am both petrified and absolutely elated. My sobbing flipping to gleeful laughter and back to sobbing in mere moments. I am locked in here; my boyfriend and roommate barricaded the door when my behavior started to become a danger to them. Occasionally, if I spend more than a minute sobbing, my boyfriend quickly rushes in and tries to talk to me. It never works; I always end up crying harder when I see the deep gashes my fingernails left in his face.
I felt as if I had been detached from my body; whatever thoughts were running through my mind were so primal or foreign that I had given up on trying to understand them. I noticed later in the evening that the nearly 50:50 ratio of crying to laughing had skewed, and I was spending more time giddily giggling and kicking my feet in anticipation.
I recently heard the two of them talking about calling an ambulance and having me committed. It’s a bit unfortunate that my apartment is on the third floor, but I will survive the fall. In fact, if I leave now, I will have plenty of leeway to get to campus on foot and make it to class exactly on time.
#entertainment
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| 12,000 mlx | |
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