My Roommate is a Non-Human | Chapter 5 | The Shadow in the Stalls | Novela.app

Chapter 6 - The Shadow in the Stalls The entire building was swallowed by a tomb-like silence, save for the frantic, uneven rhythm of my own footsteps echoing against the concrete. My mind was a chaotic blur, and a cold sweat—born of pure, unadulterated terror—slicked my skin. I hadn't seen the shadow clearly, but I knew our water room lacked curtains, and there certainly shouldn't have been any wind. As I had sprinted past the duty room, the digital display on the monitor was frozen at 00:43:35. It hadn't flickered, hadn't ticked forward. In this suspended slice of reality, it seemed only I and that shadow were truly alive. By the time I reached the fourth floor, a wave of regret washed over me. Why was I hunting this thing? Weren't the events of the night already bizarre enough? Lu Daoshi’s words from earlier that evening drifted back to me with chilling clarity: *Between eight and ten at night, when the dorm is at its liveliest, someone flayed an entire human skin perfectly... and no one noticed a thing. Not a sound.* Why? Perhaps because time had simply stopped. If time resumed its march, no one would remember this interval. It shouldn't exist in the ledger of human experience. In this "non-time," one could do anything, couldn't they? The realization hit me like a physical blow: the thing that had killed Old Chu was likely right above my head. And then, I heard it. The footsteps were heavy, clumsy, and fast, emanating from the top-floor restroom. It was pacing, circling, accompanied by a sharp, brittle crunching sound—the wet noise of chewing and swallowing. I couldn't fathom what it could possibly be eating up there; it sounded like someone snapping sheets of crispy seaweed. Yet, the air beginning to permeate the stairwell was thick with the copper tang of blood, overwhelming and cloying. Terrified, I realized the central light on the fourth-floor landing had been turned off. I needed to flee, but my nerves were frayed to the breaking point. I tried to back away slowly, but my heel caught on something. I stumbled, crashing into the heavy steel trash bin that sat on every floor. The resulting *clang* vibrated through the silent building like a funeral knell. The frantic swallowing sounds from above ceased instantly. In their place came a high-frequency, rhythmic buzzing—a sound like the rapid fluttering of dragonfly wings. My heart threatened to leap out of my throat. I scrambled into the darkness of the left-hand corridor, ducking into the recessed frame of a dormitory door. I curled myself into the smallest possible ball, praying to be invisible. I heard it descending, one heavy, deliberate step at a time. The stairs were positioned in the center of the building, facing a dormitory room flanked by long corridors. From my vantage point in the first doorway on the left, I watched the wall of the opposite room. At first, it was merely a shifting of shadows, like ink bleeding into water. Then, as the creature reached the landing and paused, the nightmare took shape. Its silhouette was projected starkly against the door. I couldn't tell its exact size, but its form was utterly repulsive. It had a massive, bulbous head reminiscent of a toad, covered in pulsating pustules and coarse, short bristles. Its abdomen was distended and bloated, and a pair of malformed, vestigial wings twitched on its back. The mere sight of its distorted shadow made my stomach churn. As it lingered, a wave of acidic rot hit me—a stench so foul it felt like a thousand buckets of spoiled rice had been left to ferment in the sun. My eyes stung, watering uncontrollably from the sheer toxicity of the air. It stood there for a long moment before finally turning and heading back toward the top floor. If it had stayed a second longer, I would have vomited. I heard it moving toward the left side of the upper corridor—toward Old Chu’s room. Taking a shaky breath, I tried to stand, but my legs were like jelly. I clung to the doorframe for support. I knew I couldn't stay here. What kind of hellish thing had I encountered? I planned to bolt for the ground floor while it was occupied upstairs, but as I pressed myself against the door, the sounds stopped. I waited a full minute in agonizing silence. Driven by a desperate need to know, I peeked out from the doorway. I came face-to-face with a person. I burst into tears on the spot, a pathetic, primal reaction. I scrambled backward, trying to crawl away, but I was too slow. A hand clamped down on me. "Why are you screaming and crying?" It was my roommate’s voice. The moment he spoke, the world snapped back into focus. Doors in the nearby rooms began to bang open. Angry voices shouted from the hallways, cursing me for losing my mind in the middle of the night. It was as if, in an instant, I had been thrust back into the mundane world. My roommate held me by the waistband of my gym shorts with one hand; in the other, he carried a steaming bowl of duck blood vermicelli soup. I cried even harder. The transition from the brink of a monstrous death to the sight of my roommate with takeout was too much. It was a relief so profound it felt like a grievance. He led me back to our room by my waistband, a humiliating sight. I heard someone down the hall mutter something about "fucking sissies," but I didn't care. I was just glad they were still there, still human, and not frozen in time. Back in the room, I couldn't stop sobbing. The horror, the stench—it was all too much. My eyes were still burning from the creature's foul odor, so I asked my roommate to get me some eye drops. Instead, he knelt before me, his expression uncharacteristically focused. He pried my eyelids open to inspect them. Before I could react, he leaned in, and his tongue swept heavily across the inner lining of my upper eyelid. The sensation was bizarre—psychologically revolting, yet physiologically, it felt incredibly soothing. After he finished with my left eye, he cupped my head and repeated the process with the right. Miraculously, the stinging vanished. He mentioned something about needing to burn a certain herb to clear the rest of the irritation, but I didn't catch the name. When I asked him to repeat it so I could write it down, he paused and said, "It doesn't exist anymore." His sincerity made my face flush. I stammered a thank you, and he reached out, stroking my cheek. "You're too dry," he said, his voice dead serious. "I want to lick you wet." The blatant sexual undertone made my skin crawl, but it wasn't just that. It didn't sound like a human flirtation. Even the most forward person wouldn't say something like that. What did "too dry" even mean? I used moisturizer! A heavy, awkward silence settled between us. The tension was broken by a phone call from Lu Daoshi. He was cursing me out, claiming he was stuck on a second-floor balcony and couldn't get up or down. My roommate went down to let him in. When Lu Daoshi saw the state I was in, he was at a loss. How could I tell them? *Hey, time stopped, and I saw a giant, stinking monster eating something in the bathroom, and I cried like a baby.* And the smell. God, the smell. I told them to go check the upstairs restroom themselves. I was too afraid of finding another flayed corpse, but when they returned a short while later, they looked perfectly fine. Lu Daoshi just had a disgusted look on his face. "Man, there's a lot of 'Auntie Flow' in there." My roommate was used to it. The braver students on our floor ignored the police tape and used the stalls anyway, too lazy to walk to another floor. He was one of them. He simply replied, "There's less of it now." I was confused. "There wasn't anything else in the bathroom?" My roommate shook his head impatiently and pushed the duck blood vermicelli soup toward me. I had no appetite, but he stared at me until I took the chopsticks. As I bit into a piece of duck blood, the realization hit me like a lightning bolt. I dropped the bowl and ran to the restroom door. In the summer heat, thin layers of blood dried and scabbed quickly. The "Auntie Flow" graffiti—the blood Spring Morning had smeared on the walls—had been like layers of dried lacquer. Now, there was less of it. I retched. I finally understood what that brittle, crunching sound was. The monster had been peeling the dried blood scabs off the walls and eating them. It was sickening. What kind of pathetic monster was this? It had the power to stop time for the entire world, and it used it to sneak into a college dorm and snack on old blood scabs? It was a neurotic, filthy, bottom-tier freak. Suddenly, my terror turned into a bizarre sense of indignation. I actually started to laugh. They thought I’d finally snapped, but the absurdity was just too much. Why was it so powerful yet so... trashy? Just then, the wail of sirens cut through the night. Several ambulances sped into the campus, bypassing our dorm and heading toward the West Gate. Lu Daoshi crushed his cigarette and leaned out the window to look. He rushed to my computer to check Renren. The site was exploding with activity. Apparently, the art students in the neighboring building had all gone collectively mad. Everyone in their dorm had fled to the street, waiting for the 120 crews to arrive. Lu Daoshi wondered if it was food poisoning, but I knew better. The university cafeteria wasn't like a high school—everyone ate different things. Why would only the Art School be affected? They were notoriously solitary. I had a more logical guess. Time had stopped for everyone, and I wasn't the only one who had experienced something during that gap. I resolved to find out exactly how they had "gone mad" tomorrow. Lu Daoshi, unsettled by the night's events, took one last look at the scratches in Old Chu's room and prepared to leave. He had seen the four-toed marks. He noted that while birds have four toes, the power behind these suggested something more like an amphibian—a crocodile, perhaps. "But why would there be a crocodile here?" I wished it were just a crocodile. We could send that to a zoo. Instead, we had a "divine beast" that ate period blood. Lu Daoshi left, his mind clearly weighed down by the mystery.