For those of you not in the know, I graduated from college last sunday. It was an exciting event, and a fun one as well. It was a pleasent day outside, the sun shined (which made it way too hot for those black gowns, but ehh), the birds sang, and a good time was had by all. That night, I decided to do the one thing at Oxy that I hadn’t really done yet: explore the tunnels.

We don’t have any of those nifty bomb-shelter areas or anything, our school just happens to have a series of interconnected maintenance tunnels that run pretty mch beneath everything. They’re actually a fairly dangerous place, mainly due to all of the piping for things like hot water that run through them now. In the 70’s, though, they were a great deal safer and they were kind of a hangout for several of the students. Now, you can still see the graffiti left behind by these old students (Make love, not war, that kind of peacenik stuff). I had to see it before I left, so I and one of my closest friends (who just happens to be a pretty good looking woman… hey, you can’t blame me can you?) who I’ll call S, decided to just go ahead and get in. I knew where one of the doors into the tunnles was, and I had the master key to that building (being an RA, and the door into the tunnels was behind the storage area for my hall). We let ourselves in with a flashlight and disposable camera, prepared for an all around good time and some neat pictures to share with friends.

After about 30 minutes of wandering, unrolling a ball of twine behind us (we’re not stupid, thank god) we both began hearing this weird thumping noise. It sounded like drums, but both of us just wrote it off as water coming through the pipes. It kept a fairly steady beat, think the drums from “the lurking horror” and you’re pretty close to what I was hearing. As we kept walking, the intensity would go up and down, and eventually we figured out that we could track the noise to its source. We turned down an old hallway and found: a door.

This door was an ancient looking metal door. I don’t mean ancient as in from antiquity, I mean ancient as in at least 50 or 60 years old, and solid rust. The old padlock on the door had already rusted through, so we figured no one would noticed if we just knocked it off using my maglite and opened the door. We were expecting piping, old, and a wave of heat or something. Instead, we both got really nauseous as soon as the door was opened, and very afraid. Inside was an inky black shape, that blended in too well with the shadows to actually see clearly. I waved the light over the thing, and got a pretty good impression of its appearance. It was roughly humanoid, about 5’6″ tall. The arms were longer than a humans would have been, and the head was smaller. I never got a look at any of its features, other than its beady red eyes and long, sharp teeth. S took off running, and I slammed the door then followed as fast as I could. I lost her after a couple of turns, but assumed that she was also following the thread… until I heard her scream coming from a side passage.

I ran down as fast as I could, horribly afraid that a friend had been mutilated because of my insatibale curiousity. To my relief, she was just screaming in hopes that I’d hear her, because the batteries on her flashlight had died and she’d gotten lost. We held hands, and continued through our path. I could feel somethings eyes upon me the whole time, and we began to hurry. That’s when I tripped. I dropped my flashlight, and it rolled off down a side passage. I also fell on the camera, which was in my breast pocket, smashing it to bits that dug into my chest like a thousand gnawing teeth. I got back up, and pulled her up after me She’d fallen when I had) then grabbed my flashlight and we took off again. We both knew we were being followed. We ran out of the tunnels into the storage area, and I quickly turned and shut the door, locking it behind us. We both looked at each other, panting, wondering what the hell had just happened.

Why the hell does this kind of shit always have to happen to me? I don’t even go looking for it anymore, and it still finds me.