Three students stay late at college to study, but strange sounds and fresh footprints lead them toward an abandoned laboratory no one wants to enter.
The old College of Technical Sciences seemed to hold its breath after dark. Even Room 213, usually loud with arguments, laughter, and shuffled chairs, had gone strangely small and tense, filled only with the rustle of pages and the occasional knock of a coffee cup against a desk. Patrick, Ola, and Damian were bent over their notes, trying to force formulas and definitions into tired minds while the wind rattled the windows and the radiators hissed like they were complaining about the hour.
Ola was the first to look up.
"Did you hear that?" she whispered.
Patrick was already half-waving it away when a faint clatter sounded from somewhere out in the corridor. Damian went still. His face lost its colour.
"That's not the first time tonight," he said quietly. "Every time I checked the clock, it was 23:13."
No one laughed. The number sat between them like a bad joke that had gone sour.
They grabbed their phones and stepped into the corridor, their beams sliding over locked cabinets, dust-coated notice boards, and blackboards crowded with faded chalk marks from classes long over. The building felt abandoned in the way old schools sometimes do at night, as if the walls were keeping secrets and just waiting for someone to notice.
The sound led them to the far end of the wing, where the hallway narrowed and the air grew colder. There stood the chemistry lab, the one students talked about in lowered voices and avoided whenever they could. The door was shut. The handle was icy under Patrick's fingers, untouched, dead weight in the dark.
Then, without warning, it moved.
The door swung inward with a soft groan, and a stale, chemical smell drifted out to meet them. Their phone lights caught a line of wet footprints crossing the floor, one after another, leading deeper into the room. Shelves of cloudy jars stood in the glow like watchful eyes. At the back, beneath a table draped in black oilcloth, something shifted again, slow and deliberate, as if it had just realised they were there.