Chapter 5

五

As the term went on, day to day life, work was becoming more difficult- and more bizarre. Classes would often be canceled or moved to other classrooms, much of the time without the school informing me, and I’d have to search the hallways, searching the cavernous, mostly empty teaching building, looking for my class.

While looking about the building, searching for my students, I’d see shadowy rooms with emaciated men in tiger chairs, being lashed with a truncheon by men in dark black uniforms. Or sometimes the rooms were filled with equipment, machinery, workers seated in rows, wearing leg irons, assembling Christmas lights. After doing a doubletake, glancing back at the rooms, they’d be empty, the lecture halls filled with nothing but air...

When I did have class, the students, started to shapeshift. From humans to dragons. Humans to rabbits. Humans to rats. And all the different animals of the Chinese Zodiac. The students, the passive lot, who rarely spoke, would shift into sheep, or dogs, or snakes, and sit staring, watching my every move.

I wondered if they could smell my blood, my trepidation, as I attempted to carry on my lectures, seeing a lecture hall full of horses holding phones, tablets and pencils. They’d switch back to human when the bell rang, though, and I’d need to rush to the bathroom to do deep-breathing exercises just to get my pulse under control...

Breathing was becoming tougher, too. As the leaves turned, the air grew sharper, and I was beginning to notice even more pollution in the skies. The air, my lungs, were stinging like they were filled with acid. The air drier than bone, too. The air sour, like spoiled milk, and I’d have regular nosebleeds, cough up chunks of black, gobs of blood...

The rooms around the school, including classrooms were unexplainably hot or cold, even those with thermostats...

Although the campus was newly built, I was starting to find that some of the buildings looked to be 50 or so years old, moldy, with cracks running down the walls, graying and blackened exteriors, crumbling facades, and on some of the half-built buildings, I’d never see any construction being performed, the buildings standing bare as skeletons.

What’s worse, one day after class I found the elevator wasn’t working, so I gamboled to the end of the hallway, opened a door that’d been marked “Exit.” Expecting stairs, my heart skipped a beat and I abruptly stopped in my tracks when I peered down and discovered that the door led to nothing, only air! Had I stepped a foot further I’d have plummeted from the 7th floor of the building!

I immediately reported the incident to the school. The secretary responded that they’d have a repairman look into it, and then she replied later that day, saying the repairman had found no such door.

“Impossible,” I said, but, sure enough, the next day, before class, I went to the same hallway and found that there was no door...