Bugged into This

First and foremost, I didn’t exactly follow up on documenting what we’ve  been dealing with. Good reason for it too! Sick as a fucking dog. I thought  the medicine helped, but I ended up with a TERRIBLE fever and sat out of  class for a whole week. So yesterday and today when I could actually feel  well enough to leave my bed, I spent it playing catchup with my work.

Well, to be honest, being sick only played a part in it. The other  half was the fucking figure I saw Sunday.

Brendan and I decided we needed to get more access to the door,  specifically late into the night since we only see it during the day. The  penny we threw in was gone, and we were regularly watching the door during  the daytime hours when the Library was open, so it stands to reason something  goes on during the night. So I bugged a friend of mine who used to work at  the library to loan me a copy of the master key he copied himself before he  left his position. I remember asking him once why he did that, and he only  said he does this with every place he works “just in case.” He both confuses  and terrifies me, and I am glad he is on my side.

I took over Sunday night and, I swear to God, on the other side of  that door, some kind of shape peeked through the crack and looked right  fucking at me. I flipped out, the door started jiggling like someone was  trying to open it, and I ran the fuck back to my dorm. The following day, coincidence  of coincidences, is when my cold kicked into overdrive and brought their  friend fever over to visit.

Brendan’s been keeping an eye on the door since then, and A’s been  helping out in the limited time she has on campus. She’d be more than willing  to stay longer into the night if any of us had cars, but she’s reliant on her  parents for her commute and they don’t seem the type to be very thrilled to  drive to and from school around midnight. Since then, though, nobody’s seen  the figure. A and Brendan both HOPE it was just a hallucination caused by my  cold since it kicked in so hard the following day, but we all kind of expect  it to actually be something real at this point.

Still, we could be wrong. That’s why I’m parked in the Library right  now. I’m checking the door every so often, and still no signs of movement on  the other side. Brendan usually turns in around Midnight when he stakes out,  so I’m holding out until either sunrise or at least 2 in the morning.  Whichever I survive without passing out first.

I ran right to the library after Brendan sent that text. Apparently  he had gone into the library early to get a head-start on his reading so he  could spend this evening at a party he was invited to, and while he was in  the area he checked out the door. Needless to say, the backpack he left on  the footstool was invisible through the crack, even though it didn’t do  anything of the sorts yesterday.

So, we decided to take a break, go to the caf to grab breakfast, and  discuss what the hell’s going on over eggs and toast. We worked out that the  door couldn’t have had that thing happen to itself overnight, otherwise we  would have seen the crack show up yesterday. Brendan was the one who  suggested it needed 24 hours to grow back, since we opened the door around  evening last time and it was THIS morning the event happened again. We agreed  to test it out, but first we had something else to work out – did the door  just make things invisible, or was it, like, a portal to somewhere? Brendan  was the one who brought this idea up, saying maybe the doors connect to a  parallel universe where everything’s the same except we never went to the  library.

To figure this one out, Brendan ran back to his dorm to get one of  those thin poles that change the angle of the blinders in his window (his  fell off near the beginning of the semester like the cheap shit it was) and I  went back to the library to just watch through the crack. If Brendan was  right, maybe SOME student or faculty member would pass by on the other side.  There was always the chance this was a version of the library that was just  abandoned, but everything seemed too clean for that to be a possibility.

In the ten minutes it took for Brendan to come back with the pole,  nobody had passed by the door. I stood on the other side of the doors as  Brendan pushed the thin pole through the crack as far as he could while  keeping a hold of it. He said he could see the pole sticking out the other side  in the “other” lounge area, while I saw nothing of the sorts sticking out on  my end. So, that proved it – the doorway was a portal connecting our Library  to some other kind of library.

After making sure the door was still jammed shut from the pull end,  we talked for, like, an hour about what this means. Why did it only happen  with THIS door? What version of the library were we peeking into? Was anyone  even around in that version? We eventually decided to kill two birds with one  stone to test our two ideas, that the door took 24 hours to regenerate its  power to act as a portal and whether or not someone was walking around on the  other side: Brendan tossed a penny through the crack to the other side, then  I pushed the doors open from the lounge side, breaking the spell and turning  the crack back into a normal view of the library lounge.

This happened around… 10:40, if I remember the time correctly.  Brendan and I are taking turns checking the doors every hour to see if it’s  acting as a portal again. Once it regains the power, we’ll see if the penny  is still laying around on the other side.

Felt out of it, probably from a bug or the medicine, decided  to go to Library Lounge and just rest on the couch for a bit. Got out my  phone, started setting up an alarm to wake me up in an hour if I ended up  falling asleep. Got to the second floor, Brendan already set himself up on a  couch. He had his laptop open and resting on the footstool thing and he was  lounged back on the couch reading a book. I recognized the book as one of the  assigned Core class readings. He’s a Sophomore, so probably Aristotle. I  dropped my backpack on the opposite couch while looking at the closed set of  doors. My gaze traveled from the doors to the footstools and laptop sitting  on them. The panic and events of Sunday flashed through my head. I decided to  check it out one last time, re-assure myself I only saw it out of stress.

Well, good news is that I WASN’T hallucinating on Sunday. I must’ve  kept running back and forth between the lounge and the door five or six times  to reaffirm that, yes, the laptop WAS still on the footstools and, yes, it  DID completely vanish through the crack in the doors. At some point Brendan  even stopped reading his book to ask me what I was doing. Naturally, I wanted  to make absolutely certain my brain wasn’t just glitching out so I asked him  to look through the crack in the door. Thing is, he actually tried pulling  the door open to get to the other side and find out if his laptop was on the  footstool or not, but the door was stuck closed.

He walked around to go back into the lounge to make sure his laptop  was still there while I checked out the door. There wasn’t any locking  mechanism that I could see and while the hinges were slightly rusty, it wasn’t  anything worse than when I opened it just last week. I gave the door a hard  tug to make certain it was really stuck closed or if Brendan was just fucking  with me… no such luck, definitely stuck closed.

Brendan came back and peeked through the door again to make sure he  didn’t just have a brain fart and imagine his shit turned invisible. We both  just kind of stared at each other for a minute, not really sure what to make  of this. In hindsight, we were both pretty fucking calm considering the  actual literal glitch in the universe we were looking at that should not  exist by any stretch of the imagination. Brendan tried to explain it away as  light refraction or some shit like that but I shut him up by walking to the  other side of the doors and standing directly in front of the crack. He  assured me I was just as invisible as his laptop. NO amount of light  refraction would’ve made that possible.

Brendan had the idea to open the doors while I was on the other end  to see what the fuck was going on. I stayed on the lounge side pushing while  Brendan pulled as hard as he could. Turns out that was unnecessary as I was  able to push my side of the doors open without any effort. That would have  been nice to know ahead of time since I took a running start to slam it open,  shoving poor Brendan against the wall. He’s okay.

We peeked back through the crack in the closed doors and we saw  Brendan’s laptop on the footstool, so I have no idea what the fuck just  happened. Were we simultaneously going fucking nuts? Was it a one-time thing  that stopped when the doors opened? Then why did they stay shut tight like  that when they’ve never been so much as locked? And why did they only pop open  when I pushed them open?

Neither of us wanted to be branded as crazy, so we decided to keep  quiet about this for now. Only person we’re gonna tell is A, and that’s only  because she reads this blog. We’re gonna try testing it out tomorrow to see  if it really was a one-time thing and we got rid of it by opening the doors  or if it comes back after a long enough period of time. Honestly, I’m still  kind of in a state of shock that it even fucking happened. Last time I  freaked out because I was at the end of my ropes studying and the panic  attack was just waiting for an excuse to be released, but now… I genuinely don’t  know if any of that shit even HAPPENED. I feel like my brain’s in a haze,  like this shit’s all part of a dream and I’m gonna wake up at any minute.