The silence in Room 402 wasn't just a lack of sound; it was a physical weight. It was the kind of silence that pressed against your eardrums until you could hear the frantic, rhythmic thudding of your own heart.
It was the sound of thirty students holding their breath, punctuated only by the aggressive ticking of the circular clock above the chalkboard and the occasional, agonizing screech of a chair leg against the linoleum floor.
Marcus sat at his desk, his palms slick with a cold sweat that made the wooden pencil feel like a live eel in his hand. Before him lay the trigonometry final—four pages of equations that looked less like math and more like a death warrant.
Focus, he told himself, the word echoing hollowly in the cavernous space of his mind. Just focus on the numbers. Sines, cosines, tangents. If you fail this, you're stuck in this town forever.
But his eyes wouldn't stay on the numbers. For the last three weeks, the world had been losing its grip on reality. It started with the sleep paralysis—waking up in the dead of night, unable to move, feeling a heavy, freezing pressure on his chest while a shadow stood in the corner of his room, watching.
Then came the "waking blinks"—split seconds where the sunlight seemed too bright, turning the trees outside into jagged skeletons of charcoal.
Today, the air felt different. It felt thick, like he was breathing through a layer of wet wool.
Marcus wiped his brow and looked down at question fourteen. As he watched, a drop of sweat fell from his chin, landing directly on the word "Calculate."
The ink didn't smudge. It didn't blur into a blue-black stain on the pulp of the paper.
Instead, it shuddered.
Marcus froze. He leaned in closer, his glasses slipping slightly down the bridge of his nose. The black ink of the printed question began to liquefy. It rose from the page in tiny, microscopic droplets, vibrating with a high-pitched frequency that only Marcus seemed to hear—a sound like a thousand distant mosquitoes.
Then, the ink began to crawl.
The letters detached themselves from the white background, turning into jagged, six-legged insects made of pure darkness. They swarmed over the paper, scurrying across the geometric diagrams, devouring the angles he had spent the last hour trying to solve.
I'm losing it, Marcus thought, a spike of pure, crystalline terror driving through his gut. The hallucinations. They're getting stronger.
He closed his eyes tight, counting to ten.
One. Two. Three. He squeezed his eyelids until he saw stars, trying to reset his brain, trying to force the chemistry of his mind back into its proper channels. Nine. Ten.
He opened his eyes.
The paper was clean. The ink was back in its place, frozen and inanimate. But the silence in the room had changed. It was no longer the silence of a classroom; it was the silence of a tomb.
"Mr. Miller? Is there a problem?"
The voice was sandpaper on silk. Marcus jerked his head up, his heart leaping into his throat.
Standing at the front of the room was Mr. Halloway. He was a man in his late fifties, usually defined by his beige cardigans and a perpetual scent of peppermint and old books. But as Marcus looked at him now, the beige of the cardigan seemed to drain of color, turning a sickly, washed-out grey.
"I... I'm fine, sir," Marcus stammered. His own voice sounded wrong—tinny and distant, as if he were speaking through a long metal pipe.
"You look pale, Marcus," Halloway said. He began to walk down the aisle, his footsteps making no sound on the floor. "You look as though you've seen something... unpleasant."
As Halloway approached, the light from the fluorescent tubes overhead began to flicker. Buzz. Click. Buzz. With every flicker, the teacher's appearance shifted.
Marcus gripped the edges of his desk so hard his knuckles turned white. He couldn't look away. Under the harsh, artificial light, Mr. Halloway's skin began to lose its opacity. It became translucent, like parchment soaked in oil.
Beneath that parchment skin, something was moving.
Thick, rope-like veins, as black as the ink that had just crawled off Marcus's paper, began to throb.
They weren't just veins; they were pulsing channels of shadow. They branched out from Halloway's neck, creeping up his jawline and surrounding his eyes.
And they were pulsing in perfect, terrifying synchronization with Marcus's own heart.
Thump-thump. The black veins on the teacher's forehead bulged.
Thump-thump. The shadow behind Halloway's eyes flickered.
Marcus looked around the room, desperate for someone else to notice. Sarah was biting her lip, staring at her paper. David was scratching his head. No one looked up. No one saw the monster standing in the middle of the aisle.
"Marcus," Halloway whispered, though he was still five feet away. The voice didn't come from his mouth; it vibrated in the air around Marcus's head. "The King is hungry. The King wants his boy back."
"Stop it," Marcus hissed, his eyes watering. "Stop it, you're not real. This isn't happening."
"Oh, it is happening, little prince," Halloway said. He leaned over Marcus's desk. The scent of peppermint was gone, replaced by the overwhelming, cloying stench of wet earth and ancient rot.
The teacher's face began to distort. The skin stretched and groaned like wet leather being pulled over a frame. The black veins began to glow with a faint, sickly violet light. Marcus felt a coldness radiating from the man—a coldness so intense it felt like his own blood was beginning to crystallize in his veins.
The shadow in Marcus's mind, the one that had been whispering in his dreams for weeks, suddenly roared. It wasn't a sound of fear; it was a sound of recognition.
Eat, a voice deep inside Marcus's marrow commanded. It wasn't his voice. It was older, deeper, and filled with a terrifying authority. Consume the vessel.
"Get away from me!" Marcus tried to shout, but his throat felt as though it had been filled with dry sand. Only a pathetic whimper escaped his lips.
Mr. Halloway's eyes—the kind, blue eyes of a man who loved calculus—dissolved. They melted into twin pools of oily black liquid that spilled down his cheeks like tears of tar. He reached out a hand. The fingers were unnaturally long, the nails sharpening into points of jagged obsidian.
"Don't be afraid," the creature that wore Halloway's skin said, its jaw unhinging with a wet, sickening crack. "The Abyss is just a doorway. And you... you are the key."
Marcus blinked, his vision blurring with tears of pure terror. For a fraction of a second, the image of his teacher vanished entirely.
In its place stood a nightmare.
The creature's face split open—not just the mouth, but the entire skull, dividing down the center from the forehead to the chin. Inside was a vertical cavern of pink, raw flesh lined with hundreds of needle-thin teeth, all vibrating with a hungry, chattering sound. A long, grey tongue, covered in tiny, blinking eyes, lashed out, tasting the air.
Marcus's lungs seized. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't think. The world was dissolving into a kaleidoscope of grey and black. He opened his mouth to finally let out the scream that had been clawing at his throat, a scream that would surely shatter every window in the school.
But before the sound could escape, a sensation of absolute, zero-degree cold settled on his left shoulder.
A hand.
It wasn't the clawed hand of the creature in front of him. This was a human hand, but it was colder than ice, its grip as firm as a steel vise.
Marcus froze. He knew the layout of the classroom. He knew exactly where he sat. He was in the very last row, in the very last seat.
There was a brick wall behind him.
The seat behind him was empty. It had been empty all year.
"Don't scream," a voice whispered directly into his ear. The voice was calm, masculine, and held an edge of iron that cut through the chaos in Marcus's head. "If you scream, they will hear you in the Deep. And you are not ready to be found."
Marcus's eyes darted to the side, but he was too terrified to turn his head. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a sleeve of dark, weathered leather. He saw the glint of a silver buckle.
The creature that was Mr. Halloway stopped. Its split face twitched, the hundreds of teeth clicking together in a frantic rhythm. It seemed to see the person behind Marcus. For the first time, the monster looked afraid.
"Who... who are you?" Marcus managed to gasp, his voice a mere thread of sound.
The grip on his shoulder tightened, not in a threat, but as a warning.
"I am the one who keeps the gate," the voice whispered. "Now, close your eyes, Marcus. Close them and don't open them until you hear the sound of steel."
"Why?" Marcus sobbed.
"Because," the voice said, and Marcus could almost hear the grim smile in the words. "You're about to see how your father treats his servants."
From the front of the room, the creature that had been Mr. Halloway let out a shriek that wasn't sound, but a wave of pure psychic agony. Marcus felt his nose begin to bleed.
The fluorescent lights overhead shattered simultaneously, plunging the room into a darkness so thick it felt like liquid.
But in that darkness, Marcus felt the man behind him move. He heard the distinct, metallic shring of a blade being drawn from a scabbard—a sound that felt like music compared to the monsters' chattering.
And then, the air in the room didn't just feel cold. It began to howl.
Marcus squeezed his eyes shut as he was told, the darkness of his eyelids a flimsy shield against the madness. He felt the hand leave his shoulder, and for a moment, he felt more alone than he had ever been in his life.
Then came the sound.
It wasn't a teacher's voice. It wasn't a student's whisper.
It was the sound of something ancient and heavy, something that had been asleep for a thousand years, finally, violently, waking up inside his own chest.
"Mine," the voice inside him roared, drowning out the screams of the room.
"THE HEIR IS MINE!"
Marcus felt his heart give one final, massive thud—a thud that seemed to shake the very foundations of the school.
And then, the screaming began.