The Thing That Watched Me

The Locked Laboratory

The night I saw the man inside the physics laboratory began with nothing more unusual than an urgent need to use the toilet. I woke sometime after midnight while the hostel lay silent around me, and for a few moments I tried to endure the pressure rather than leave my bed.

My room was completely still. The windows were open, but no wind entered. The curtains hung motionless beside them, pale and lifeless in the darkness.

I closed my eyes and tried to return to sleep, hoping the discomfort would pass. It only grew worse.

The hostel toilet stood at the opposite end of the building, and there were few places I disliked more. Even during the day, it was difficult to enter without covering one’s nose. The floor was always wet with water from broken pipes and things I preferred not to examine. The bowls were stained, the walls were damp, and the smell remained upon one’s clothes long after leaving. At night, cockroaches crept from the drains and scattered beneath the doors when anyone approached.

I considered knocking upon the door of one of the other girls and asking her to accompany me, but the thought of waking someone merely to explain that I intended to go outside instead of using the toilet made me hesitate. We had been warned against wandering through the hostel after lights out, and anyone caught outside would be punished.

The pressure in my bladder finally decided the matter.

I pushed the blanket aside and lowered my feet to the floor. The concrete was cold beneath them. I found my slippers beside the bed and put them on as quietly as I could.

The door gave a faint groan as I opened it. I paused and listened, expecting one of the nearby doors to open, but the hostel remained silent. I slipped into the corridor and closed my door behind me.

The darkness outside my room was different from the darkness within it. In the room, there had been my familiar bed and the quiet assurance that other students slept behind the surrounding walls. The corridor seemed deserted in a more complete way. It stretched ahead of me like some long and narrow passage from which every living thing had fled.

The electric lights had been switched off. A little moonlight entered through the windows, falling across the floor in pale squares. Between them lay broad regions of darkness. I moved from one patch of light to another, listening to the soft scrape of my slippers against the concrete.

The school buildings were never entirely quiet during the day. There were always voices, footsteps, bells, chairs dragging across floors, or teachers calling after students. That night, the silence seemed almost unnatural. Even the trees outside had ceased their rustling. I could hear nothing except my own movement and the occasional creak of the roof above me.

The classrooms stood on one side of the corridor, their doors closed and their windows dark. As I passed them, I caught faint reflections of myself in the glass. Each reflection appeared suddenly beside me and vanished as soon as I moved beyond the moonlight.

I kept my eyes forward.

The last room before the exit was the physics laboratory.

It was larger than the ordinary classrooms and filled with long wooden tables, stools, shelves, and locked cabinets containing instruments we were rarely permitted to touch. During lessons, the room smelled of dust, old metal, and chemicals. At night, its wide windows showed only darkness.

I was almost past it when something moved inside.

I stopped.

At first, I thought the movement had been my reflection. I shifted slightly and watched the glass, but the shape within the laboratory continued moving after I had become still.

It was the silhouette of a man.

He stood at the far end of the room, where the darkness was deepest. I could make out no face, no clothing, and no part of him clearly. There was only the black outline of a head, shoulders, arms, and long legs.

He was walking from one end of the laboratory to the other.

His movements were slow and steady. He crossed the room until he reached one wall, turned, and walked back in the opposite direction. There was something rigid in the way he moved, as though he followed a path from which he could not wander. Yet I heard no footsteps. The room was silent despite the constant motion within it.

I watched him make the journey once, then begin it again.

When he reached the middle of the laboratory, he halted.

The suddenness of it frightened me more than his pacing had done. One moment he was moving, and the next he stood perfectly still.

Then he turned and faced me.

I cannot say how I knew he was looking at me, for I saw no eyes. His face was only a deeper portion of the darkness. Yet there was no doubt that his attention had fallen upon me. His whole body became still the moment he faced the window.

For one strange moment, neither of us moved.

“Hello,” I said.

My voice sounded small in the empty corridor.

He did not respond. He remained where he was and continued staring at me.

At eleven years old, I am not certain whether I was foolish or merely too young to understand what should have frightened me. The first explanation that entered my mind was that a student had been locked inside the laboratory. Perhaps one of the older boys had hidden there after class and had been forgotten. Perhaps he had fallen asleep and awakened after everyone had gone.

The thought seemed reasonable enough to overcome my fear.

I approached the laboratory door.

The figure did not move as I crossed towards it. He continued to face me from the darkness while I reached for the handle.

Before my hand touched it, I saw the padlock.

It hung on the outside of the door, fastened through the metal clasp. I stared at it, confused. The lock was large and old, its surface dull beneath the moonlight. I touched it to be certain of what I was seeing. It was solid, and the door was firmly secured.

No one inside could have locked it that way.

I looked through the window again.

The man had not moved.

He remained in the middle of the laboratory, facing me.

My need to urinate returned with such force that it drove every other thought from my mind. I stepped away from the door and hurried towards the exit. I did not look behind me. By the time I reached the end of the corridor, I was running.

The night air struck my face when I stepped outside. It was cooler there, and the ground was damp beneath my slippers. The hostel yard lay empty beneath the moon. The surrounding buildings appeared abandoned, their windows black and their doors shut. Beyond them, the trees stood crowded together, their branches forming a dark and tangled border around the school.

I found a place beside the building where the wall concealed me from the windows. I relieved myself quickly, glancing towards the trees while I did so. Nothing moved among them. The silence remained unbroken.

When I finished, I began walking back.

I was more concerned about being caught outside than I was about the man in the laboratory. A teacher or senior student might appear at any moment, and I had no excuse prepared for why I had left my room. I hurried towards the entrance and stepped back into the corridor.

The darkness seemed heavier than before.

The physics laboratory waited at the end of the passage.

As I approached it, I saw the figure through the window once more. He was moving to and fro again, walking from one end of the room to the other exactly as he had been before. I did not stop to watch him. I observed his movement as I passed, ignored him, and continued towards my room.

He did not follow me.

No sound came from the laboratory.

I returned to my room, closed the door behind me, and slipped into bed. Everything was exactly as I had left it. Nothing had changed in my absence. I pulled the blanket over myself and lay facing the wall.

I did not wake anyone. I did not tell anyone that a man was walking inside the locked laboratory. I did not call for a teacher or wonder how he had entered. To my childish mind, the matter seemed strange but unimportant, one of those things that could be considered in daylight and forgotten by morning.

Before long, I fell asleep.

For years, I placed little meaning upon what happened that night. Whenever the memory returned, I remembered the locked door and the dark figure moving behind the glass.

It is the silence I remember most clearly now.

The man crossed the laboratory without making a single footstep. I spoke to him, and he gave no answer. When I returned from outside, he had resumed his pacing as though I had never been there.

The laboratory had been padlocked from the outside.

Whatever walked inside it had no need of a door.