Story Time pt. 3

[Confused? Read this first! Then read this second!]

Some strange stuff happened again. It wasn't like last time when I saw a creature, which I think might have been a gremlin. I know this sounds weird but I put the description of what I saw into Google and it came up with a bunch of lizards like Kimono Dragons and Godzilla. But, it also came up with gremlins, fictitious creatures that like to damage and destroy mechanical objects. It also said that they enjoy causing mischief among humans. The sad reality is that the explanation of gremlins that I found online accounted for everything that I saw that night. I also learned that gremlins are harbingers of psychosis, going crazy. I'm not sure how that makes me feel, especially in light of the elevator accident that happened two days later in the student center.

I heard some of the building staff was moving some equipment from the third floor to the basement. They loaded the equipment on to the elevator and then got on themselves to ride it down. When they pushed the button for the basement, all the lights in the elevator flickered and the emergency bell went off. Then the elevator dropped to the basement as if the cable and winch system had given out. Apparently, it crashed down pretty loud and scared a bunch of people who have offices in the basement or were walking around at the time. Luckily, no one was injured in the accident but when the maintenance crew went into the elevator room they found the elevator control panel a mess of wires and fried circuitry. The cables had been almost fully cut. They also found a wrench...

But that has nothing to do with what I saw last night. Last night I was working in the main dining hall. Around ten at night we are supposed to lock all the doors except for the one that opens near the building manager office. It's one of those safety precautions that let us see who is coming and going from the building. I was locking the doors when I heard some noise upstairs near the dining hall entrance. Usually this means that someone has taken the elevator up to the third level of the building and is hanging out on the "track" above the food service area.The dining hall used to be a gym. Technically, the whole dining hall space belongs to the company that supplies food for the campus so we building managers only have keys to back stairway for emergencies. The rest of the area is locked. But, the elevator goes through all levels so they're still accessible. What was odd, though, was that the noise sounded like a door opening and closing which didn't make any sense because anyone who would have keys to that area had left around six that evening.

I went upstairs to the track level and found the door ajar. Moving onto the track, I did a quick sweep of it to see if someone was sitting on one of the many couches that are up there. No one. I even walked around the entire track once to make sure no one was hiding from me. Still nothing. As I was leaving the way I entered, the door to the back stairway clicked and swung open. The dining hall has those halogen lights that never go off, you know the emergency lights or whatever they're called. Some corners of the space are dark, but most of it is well lit from these "always on" lights. When the door to the back stairway opened, the emergency lights flickered and dimmed, making the already dimly lit track area even darker. The lighting from the stairway was the only source of light on the track level and even that seemed dimmer than usual. Then she appeared in the doorway.

She was young, no more than nineteen or twenty and she was wearing a pair of jeans and a "Hello Kitty" t-shirt. I couldn't see her face because her long black hair covered it. She took two steps toward me and fell; she began to crawl towards me, pulling her legs as if they didn't work. I took a step back unsure of what to do. I could hear her mumbling something as she crawled towards me. This was a little much for me so I pulled out my walkie-talkie and called for the police officer who is on duty at night. I got nothing but static. I radioed again and got more static. The girl kept crawling closer, until she was close enough for me to hear what she was saying.

"Stop... please! No!" She kept repeating. I backed up some more until I felt the crash bar of the main door in the small of my back. She looked up at me and through her hair I could see one of her eyes, all white with a small black pupil. That was enough for me. I turned and pushed the main door open and moved forward to exit the track area. But then I felt pressure on my shoulders.

I turned and was face to face with the girl who, just seconds before, had been crawling. She dug her fingernails in. As she leaned toward me, the one eye I could see looked directly at me. I watched in terror as the pupil widened to take up the entire space of the eye. I screamed and screamed and staggered backwards with the girl still clutching me. We twisted in an awkward dance and I struggled against her weight, but I couldn't shake her off despite being bigger than her.  She forced me back to the railing that ran around the track. I felt myself slipping over the railing but I couldn't get from underneath her. Her strength was overpowering and I felt my lower back reach the edge of the railing and I knew I was going to be forced over it. Our combined weight was too much. She leaned in and we both toppled over the edge.

I hit the floor of the building manager office pretty hard. My head snapped back and the world swam in and out of focus. It took me a few seconds to realized that I had fallen out of my chair. I sat up but there was no sign of the girl I'd seen and when I went back up to the track level all the doors were locked. There was no sign that anything had taken place. At the end of the night, I locked up the rest of the building in a daze. I guess I could have fallen asleep and dreamed the whole thing but that doesn't explain why I have bruises on my shoulders. Something is going on here and I'm not sure what it is. But it's affecting me and I need to do something about it before it get more out of hand than it is now. I'm not crazy. I know what I saw, but...