CLOSET CASE

College is not easy for a young person of your disposition, but you have managed to make it to freshman year's winter break without snapping. Nowhere desirable to go and no one tolerant to spend it with, you elected to remain on campus, gradually exploring the college town around you little by little, bringing a notebook and journaling, sketching, things like that.

You were placed at the single-student dorm room at the far end of the girls' dormitory. A nearly windowless building established in the late fifties but retrofitted for inhabitants 20 years later, around the time the student body became co-ed. Some boys stayed this break, but you are the only member of the girls' wing that didn't go home.

It's completely empty — the janitor does not even bother turning the lights on in the hallway, you have to do it yourself. Every time you leave the room for the first time in the day, you have to shine your smartphone flashlight into the abyssal darkness of the hallway.

The room itself has a bathroom and a small closet, which the other dorm rooms lack. Perhaps this was initially for postgraduates, or a resident assistant. The closet boasts a full-size door, but it swings outwards and hits your desk, not to mention the closet itself has barely the depth of a locker.

You are still unsure if this single-occupant room is an accommodation or segregation, but you were never one for forced company; especially not after attending a Catholic boarding school in your adolescence.

There was nothing more you hated than an intrusion. It's not that another person's company makes you sick per se, but rather, what you fear others assume about your presence. There was a time, approximately the middle of 9th grade, where your pretty peers who tolerated or even included you started looking at you… funny. A different kind of funny than you looked at them.

Your presence became an intrusion, and the other girls gave you space — yet again unsure, an accommodation or segregation. To be intruded upon, then, feels almost hypocritical of the world around you.

All of this makes the issue you've been having for the past 4 days all the more difficult: there are four heads peeking out of your closet. Staring at you. This began 4 days ago, and when it began, there was only one.

You woke up from a dream at 4:45 AM. One yellow eye with a stark, quivering pupil in the dark. Your initial startle response pacified itself with a reminder of your childhood. The constant observation of a smoke detector's red LED. The longer you stare, the more it feels like an eye, until you stare long enough that you realize you're being silly.

Yes, it's only normal to interpret faces in the dark, but this eye was certainly staring at you, certainly belonging to a face.

A faint, unknown glow backlit the face. It had long hair, or strings, or whiskers, something, that's for sure. The air conditioner you lugged into the dorm off the side of a sidewalk last month was blowing it around limply. The only indication this shape existed in the physical plane as you. Nervous, frozen — both it and you frozen, unable to acknowledge the other beyond sight.

During the day, the closet was business as usual. After the sun rose on the first night, the head peeking aside retracted into the closet with the instantaneous celerity of a springtail. The mysterious light that manifested inside seemed to fade as well. What were you going to do? Tell the dean? In hindsight, it would have been wise, but you were just relieved it was gone. Besides, you kept your meager, utilitarian wardrobe in the nightstand. You didn't need to check in the closet, so you didn't.

The second night's visitor had two eyes but was no more human than the first, pitch black pupils adjusting in size. Not blinking, but looking, focusing on different things.

You remember that pet store you visited as a kid, the one with the parrot? She would look at you, pinning her eyes, chipped cage bar between her beak; constriction, dilation, constriction, dilation. "Don't worry, she's just interested in you," the owner said. You weren't worried or even curious about what the eyes meant until he mentioned it. These shadows must be awfully interested in you, too.

The third night's head rose from the top of the doorframe, hair settling and overlapping on the paint-rolled gray wood. It looked down on you, nearly scraping the ceiling. The light behind the heads grew brighter every night. Sometimes meeting their gaze caused their eyes to quiver, sclera scrunching slightly but never closing, as if receding from your line of sight. No further movement, seemingly paralyzed, the air conditioner blowing tendrils of hair askew, tendrils that seemed to twitch and flinch now and then.

The fourth head was the most grotesque. It came slithering out slowly, making a dragging sound against the linoleum that would've woken you up had you been able to sleep. It was flattened, lumpy, its left eye nonfunctional, possibly popped out of its socket (if skulls they had to begin with) and laid tethered by a bundle of fibers, flinching at the fan's wind.

Tonight, however, that pattern of intrusion seems to break. There were no more heads, but your first guest has a gift for you. Reaching out is a pitiful attempt at a makeshift arm, complete with a hairball-like hand, tightly bundled black threads holding up an object. Dangling in its grasp is some sort of pendant or a locket, chrome or silver.

Every set of eyes is dilated, every strand of hair split and trembling... This creature is forcing itselves into prehensility.

Of course, you just stare back. You've been staring back for hours. You're so tired, but part of you is saying stand up, stand up, stand up, STAND UP.

"please-hh."

Four different voices. Barely above a croaking whisper put together. The fourth voice lags, taking dire breaths with its crushed throat.

"please take-hh…"

"give therrrrgkk.."

"she.. cominguhhh.."

"she no -hrgk- let gohhh.."

"hurry.."

"sorryyy…"