The Test

It was any normal night. He had been doing his homework; a few problem sets for a professor that he did not particularly like. Under his breath he was cursing his name at the sheet of paper where his calculations laid. He was in a trance of trying to complete his work, almost unaware of the time that had flown by… almost. You see, he had this propensity about time management. In almost supernatural fashion, he could always tell when the clock was about to hit midnight, and he never missed getting ready to turn in before then.

He turned his head quickly to the digital clock that stood on his desk.

“Shit.”

With a start he threw down his pencil and ran into his room, reappearing with his towel and toiletries. It was 11:50 pm. Right on schedule.

He scurried out of his room and down the corridor of his residential hall floor, quickly finding the men’s bathroom. It wasn’t huge, but it worked for a floor of 16 students. The room was split into a section of stalls and mirrored sinks, where closest to the door was a row of 4 showers. He jumped into the second one, as usual. Fortunately, he was a creature of habit.

Throwing his clothing into a crumpled mess on the floor, as he always did, he started taking his shower. This took him 20 minutes, which deviated by about 10 minutes from his average time. This deviation was most likely due to an anomaly that was occurring with this particular stall. While he normally preferred a shower where the water had a comfortable warmth, as the course of the shower went on, he started to notice the water’s heat slowly increasing bit by bit. It had gotten to the point where it was almost unbearable to be in, and even when he turned the handle to balance it back to cold water, the shower would not comply. He kept fidgeting and playing with the handle trying at last to bring the water pressure down to a drip, but even then, the water was so hot that a single drop wouldn’t hit the ground before it would evaporate.

By the time he had cleared his body of suds, the entirety of the stall was thick with steam. He didn’t notice it at first, but as he started to search for his towel amongst the fog, the steam started to migrate, almost as one giant clump. Maybe it was the gaining of visibility or the cool chill of the air around him going from hot to cold, but eventually he started to notice this phenomenon too. Putting on some clothes he peered out of the shower trying to understand what was happening, only to see that the steam had come to somewhat of a rest at the other end of the room. He watched as it swirled around, coming together like an almost perfect tubular cyclone. In about 15 seconds time from the steam’s first movement, he looked on in terror as it formed itself into a human-like creature, the gas transforming to a solid, ice looking substance before his very eyes. It was featureless, with a six-foot stature and slim build up until its hands, which were perfectly angled spikes.

He stood motionless, unsure how to react to the creature in front of him. But that’s when it attacked, lunging its spiked hand right towards him. In miraculous fashion, he was able to dodge out of the way, falling backwards through the door right into the corridor. He scrambled to his feet, slamming the door on his attacker’s face, and watched as one of the spikes just narrowly missed his arm as it punctured through the door. He might have thought he was safe, seeing the creature struggling to free its hand, but then he noticed the floor in front of him becoming more and more wet. Where the spike once was, a small waterfall emerged that rejoined with the liquid that was flowing from the other side of the door. He stumbled backwards, frantically regaining his balance as the creature arose from the pool.

What else was he to do but run for his life?

In a full sprint, he tried to dodge and weave the creature’s attacks, going in no particular direction except away from the monster. But he was reaching the end of the hallway, and was starting to run short on breath. With one final burst of energy, he tried to put as much distance as he possibly could away from his attacker, as every feasible option raced through his mind. Eventually, one stuck. Eying the last possible dorm room in the hallway, he started to pound on it, calling on anyone to help him, to save him.

The student roused from her sleep like a shot from a gun, hearing the commotion at her door. She started mumbling angrily to herself, something about the nerve of some of the people at the school, but then the pounding stopped. How curious. It was just silence. She started moving closer to the door, contemplating if she should even open it, but then after a long silence, she heard a thump as something hit the floor. She opened the door to see a student convulsing on his knees with one hand clasped around his neck and the other holding himself up on the floor. Before she could even react, the subject tumbled into the room, eyes wide open and mouth agape, his body laying still.

Frozen in confusion and fear that a man laid dead in her doorway, she almost didn’t notice a wet substance starting to drip from his mouth and turning to a cloud of steam. As it enveloped the area around her, she started to see something form right in front of her; a face out of the fog that emerged as the creature, in only 3 seconds this time around. Before she could even scream, it struck out with its piercing arm, cleanly slicing through her jugular with perfect precision.

By this point, the other dorm rooms had become a stir with the outside noise, and some had peeked their heads out to see what was happening. With a record 1.9 seconds the creature dissipated into thin air, making its escape through the grill of a nearby air vent. Luckily, no one had caught sight of it. Instead, its two victims were found to the horror of the students who witnessed their disheveled corpses firsthand. It was a cold case for the police, and an urban legend for the student body. How else could you explain what had happened that night? It was ripe for conspiracy theories and supernatural phenomena alike.

But every little theory they came up with was far from the truth, but that’s fine, because they aren’t supposed to know the truth. I know the truth, because my hidden cameras witnessed it firsthand. And after months of gathering data, and fine tuning my experiment so it would be perfect, the test went spectacularly better than expected.