The Night Hall 6 Died: Two Survivors on the Run

A few days before All Souls' Day, I was lying in bed binge-watching a show when my roommate suddenly lost her mind and bolted for the door.

Terrified that something was wrong, I scrambled after her.

Trust me. Just follow me!

I barely caught up to her in the hallway. Before I could even ask what was going on, she grabbed my wrist and dragged me all the way out of the campus.

My stomach was tied in knots of confusion. We crashed at a rundown motel on the edge of town for the night.

The next morning, the university's online forum exploded.

[Hall 6 Girls' Dorm. Everyone is dead!]

[Rumor has it... two girls from Room 304 snuck out last night. They might be the only survivors...]

My heart slammed against my ribs. My phone slipped from my trembling fingers and clattered onto the cheap carpet.

I lived in Room 304.

I had been entirely absorbed in my show when Sandra suddenly scrambled out of the room like a maniac.

It was past eleven at night. The dorm monitors had already locked the main gates. Where the hell was she going?

I couldn't just let her go alone, so I chased her down.

"Sandra, what is going on?"

When she turned to me, her face was completely drained of color. I had never seen such pure, unadulterated terror in her eyes.

She gripped my hand so hard her nails dug into my skin. "If you trust me, you need to leave with me right now."

"What about the others? We're just going to leave them?"

She let out a guttural whisper. "If we worry about them, we die!"

My eyes went wide. The rest of my words were snatched away by the chilling night wind. Sandra practically hauled me across the campus grounds. We ran so fast my lungs burned, gasping for air as I blindly followed her off the school premises.

Just as we crossed the campus boundary, I started to turn my head to look back at the iron gates.

"Don't look back!" she screamed.

She kept her eyes locked dead ahead. In the dim streetlights, her profile looked as cold as stone. "From this exact second forward, no matter what you hear or what you feel, you do not look back. If you do, I will leave you behind."

The sheer intensity of her threat sent a shiver down my spine. I nodded frantically. "Okay. I won't look."

We found a cheap, cash-only motel near the edge of town and huddled together for the night.

Whatever sleepiness I had back at the dorm was entirely gone. I lay there staring at the water-stained ceiling, my mind racing.

After hesitating for what felt like hours, I finally whispered into the dark. "Sandra. What happened tonight?"

Why did we have to run? And why couldn't I look back?

Her voice drifted over from the other bed, thick with dread. "Harper... we are hiding from It."

My chest tightened. "Who is... It?"

"It is unnamable. Unseeable. Unspeakable."

Before I could press further, Sandra cut me off. "Stop asking questions. Try to sleep. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow."

I opened my mouth to argue but eventually swallowed my words.

A heavy, suffocating anxiety settled over me. Maybe my brain was overloaded, because the moment I finally drifted off, the nightmares began.

In the dream, a grotesque, raspy voice kept whispering in my ear, urging me to return.

"Go back to campus. Go back. Do not head west."

A blurred face materialized in the darkness. I stepped forward, curious, but just as the features were about to sharpen into focus, someone slapped my shoulder.

I jolted awake. Sandra's pale, exhausted face hovered over me.

"Harper, get up. We need to leave. Now."

I threw on my clothes. I had nothing else to pack except my phone.

"What's wrong? Why the rush?" I asked.

Sandra slung her backpack over her shoulder, not even glancing my way. "Something happened. We have to get out of Northwood immediately."

Before I could ask what happened, she was dragging me out the door, heading dead west.

She rented a heavily modified motorcycle from a shady garage nearby. She revved the engine, and we tore down the highway at terrifying speeds.

In just three hours, we reached the county line.

She pulled over at a rundown gas station to buy some cheap snacks. Taking advantage of the break, I finally pulled out my phone and connected to the internet.

The moment the university forum loaded, the blood in my veins turned to ice.

[Hall 6 Girls' Dorm. Everyone is dead!]

[Rumor has it... two girls from Room 304 snuck out last night. They might be the only survivors...]

I lived in Room 304.

I stood completely paralyzed, the screen glaring back at me.

A delayed wave of sheer horror washed over my body. I couldn't even bring myself to imagine what would have happened if I had stayed in my bed last night.

I scrolled through the thread with trembling fingers. The comment section was a mess of wild theories. Serial killer, gas leak, a cult ritual...

Hall 6 had six floors. Eight rooms per floor. Four girls to a room.

Last night, over a hundred girls died.

The sheer magnitude of the number crushed the air out of my lungs. I was drowning in a sickening mix of terror and grief.

I didn't even notice Sandra walking back until she tapped my head.

"Why are you spacing out?" she frowned, looking at my frozen posture.

I slowly turned the phone toward her, playing a video someone had uploaded to the forum.

The footage was shaky. Hall 6 was surrounded by layers of yellow police tape. Medics and heavily armed police officers were rushing in and out, while crowds of sobbing students and staff stood on the periphery.

As Sandra processed the headline and the video, her face went totally blank. It took a long time before she finally blinked.

"We need to move. We have to find a place to lay low before the sun sets."

"Sandra... you knew this was going to happen, didn't you?" I asked, my voice shaking uncontrollably.

She gave a stiff nod. Her face remained a mask of chalky white. "And if I did? Could I have stopped it?"

I shook my head, desperately wanting to say she was wrong. "We could have called the police. They didn't have to die for nothing."

A bitter, broken smile touched her lips. "The police? Do you think bullets work on It? Calling them would have just dragged us down into the slaughter. Stop being naive, Harper. We are running for our lives. You have no idea what is hunting us. We couldn't save them. We can only try to save ourselves."

My shoulders shook as the tears finally spilled over. "Why is this happening? Everything was completely normal yesterday."

She pulled me into a tight hug, gently resting her chin on my head. "We aren't saviors, Harper. Sometimes, you have to be selfish just to survive."

For the past three years, Sandra wasn't just my roommate; she was my absolute best friend.

When she watched that video, the agony in her eyes was just as intense as mine, but she buried it under a layer of cold survival instinct.

After a brief, heavy silence, she pulled back and looked me in the eye. "We have to reach Westbridge as fast as humanly possible. It's the only place we might actually stand a chance."

"Do you trust me? Are you coming with me?"

I wiped my eyes and nodded. "I trust you."

I shoved my swirling questions to the back of my mind. Just as we were about to get back on the bike, my phone started buzzing. Unknown caller.

Sandra snatched it from my hand and answered it. She didn't say a single word. She just listened to whatever was on the other end.

A moment later, she ended the call. Her expression had darkened considerably.

I watched her take a deep, steadying breath. "Let's go. We can't afford to stop anymore."

I nodded, reaching for my phone, but she pulled it away.

Right in front of my eyes, she popped the SIM cards out of both our phones, snapped them in half, and hurled the devices deep into the overgrown ditch by the road.

She didn't even look at me as she explained, anticipating my panic.

"Phones carry our traces. It uses them to pinpoint our location. And we're going to have to lose a lot more than just our phones."

Her words made sense an hour later.

We stopped at an independent thrift store miles away from Northwood. We bought entirely new outfits and tossed our old clothes directly into a dumpster behind a diner.

Shoes, jackets, backpacks, everything was replaced. Sandra even ditched her leather wallet, stuffing the loose cash into her new pockets.

I climbed back onto the motorcycle, wrapping my arms around her waist. "If we change our stuff, will It lose our scent?" I yelled over the engine.

"For a little while," she shouted back. "We broke out of Its domain. It can't track us perfectly outside of it."

I understood what she wasn't saying. This blind spot wouldn't last forever. Every second It spent searching for us was precious time we had to use to cover ground.

Time was bleeding away. We were locked in a literal race against death.

I still had no idea what this Entity actually was.

But anything that could wipe out an entire dormitory in a single night and force us into a desperate cross-country run had to be something out of a nightmare.

I remembered what Sandra had said. Unnamable. Unseeable. Unspeakable.

My heart skipped a beat. Just as the thought crossed my mind, that disgusting, raspy voice from my dream hissed right into my ear.

"Come back. Do not go west. Come back. Come back right now..."

It felt like needles driving into my brain. I buried my face into the back of Sandra's jacket, clamping my eyes shut and trying to drown out the noise.

I lost track of time. It wasn't until Sandra finally killed the engine that the whispers slowly dissolved into the wind.

She grabbed her new bag and turned to me. "We're on foot from here on out."

I looked around. We were standing on the edge of an abandoned industrial refinery. Ahead of us was a murky creek, flanked by thick, overgrown wildgrass.

I didn't argue. Any questions I had would have to wait until we were safe.

I trudged behind Sandra for what felt like miles. We only stopped once to choke down some dry granola bars and gulp warm water.

Thank god I used to jog every morning before classes. If I didn't have that stamina, I would have collapsed in the dirt hours ago.

The further we walked, the sparser the vegetation became. Nestled against a cluster of jagged boulders, I spotted a crude, makeshift shelter built out of dried sagebrush and woven branches.

It was primitive, but it was our safe house for the night.

The moment we stepped inside, the rigid tension in Sandra's shoulders finally dropped. A thin layer of cold sweat coated her forehead.

I handed her a tissue to wipe her face as I inspected the hut. There were no beds, just piles of dried straw on the dirt floor.

To me, it looked like a five-star hotel.

I collapsed onto the straw, chewed on a piece of stale bread, and finally asked, "Sandra, what exactly are we running from?"

A shadow of pure terror flickered in her eyes at the mention of It. She took a tiny bite of her food, chewing slowly, buying time.

"It's not something bound by the laws of science or nature."

I nodded, urging her to keep going.

"This shelter... the herbs used to weave these walls were brought in from Westbridge. They mask our presence. Harper, I can't give you a scientific breakdown of what It is."

"All you need to know is that we cannot look back. We cannot actively think about It. We cannot describe It. If we do, we establish a connection. We act as a beacon."

I swallowed hard, my throat sandpaper-dry. "Then... how did It kill all those girls?"

"Because It possesses a domain," Sandra said, her voice dropping to a terrified whisper. "Once Its domain is cast, everything inside belongs to It. That's why we had to run. Harper, inside Its domain, It is a god. Snuffing out a hundred lives is as easy as breathing."

A domain.

I stared into the dark. The way she described it... It sounded like some ancient, eldritch deity.

A heavy sigh broke the silence.

"I don't know who on the sixth floor summoned It. By the time I felt the shift in the air, the only thing I could do was grab you and run. Harper, It had already descended. The dorm became Its feeding ground. We are just human. We had no choice but to run. Please, stop blaming yourself."

She was trying to comfort me, knowing that the guilt of leaving the others behind was eating me alive.

Her words managed to soothe the ache a little. I squeezed her hand. "I know. Thank you."

If Sandra hadn't dragged me out of that room, I would be a corpse on a stretcher right now.

But my mind kept spinning. How did Sandra know so much about It? Just as I opened my mouth to ask, a bizarre, sickeningly sweet voice echoed from right outside the woven walls.

"Sandra? Harper? Come out, it's time for class."

It was the voice of the girl who lived next door to us.

Sandra's hand turned instantly to ice.

We both stopped breathing.

A million invisible spiders crawled up my spine. I forced down the scream building in my throat and locked eyes with Sandra.

She gave me a microscopic shake of her head. Do not make a sound.

The voice outside continued, upbeat and terribly normal. "Guys, seriously, why aren't you coming out? We're going to be late! The professor is going to dock our grades!"

That girl was dead. I knew she was dead. So what the hell was standing on the other side of that door?

But the voice wasn't the worst part. The worst part was that the crude wooden door of the shelter was slowly creaking open.

An unnatural, freezing wind pushed against the wood. I sat completely paralyzed as the crack widened... and widened...

The door was fully open. I could almost see the silhouette of the "student" standing in the gloom.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the silhouette's mouth stretching into a horribly wide, impossible smile.

Smack!

Right before I could look directly at the thing, Sandra slammed her hand against the side of my head, forcing my face down. She breathed into my ear, "Do not look up. Do not look at It."

My heart felt like it was going to explode.

How did It find us so fast?

Because we didn't answer, the thing outside shifted tactics. The voice warped, melting into the whiny, playful tone of a freshman who lived below us.

"Harper, can I borrow your black dress? I really, really love it."

"Harper, why are you ignoring me? I brought you cupcakes. Come out and get them."

"Harper, let's go downtown to take photos! Just look up at me. Just look at me!"

Line after line. It was wearing the voices of my dead friends like cheap Halloween masks, trying to bait me into acknowledging it.

Every word It spoke only solidified the horrific reality that my friends had been slaughtered.

I clamped my hands over my ears, squeezing my eyes shut. I only had one thought left in my head.

I have to live. I have to survive this.

The voices kept going for hours, but for some reason, the thing never crossed the threshold. It was as if an invisible barrier kept It at bay.

It wasn't until dawn, when the first slivers of morning light pierced the shelter, that the voices finally evaporated.

We had stayed awake all night. When I finally spoke, my voice was cracked and raw. "It's... gone."

Sandra lifted her head. Her exhausted eyes were fixed on the bottom frame of the doorway.

Over the course of a single night, the woven herbs at the threshold had completely rotted away, turned to black ash.

"The ward is broken. It's useless now," Sandra said, scrambling to her feet. "We have to leave. Right now."

Our safe house had lasted less than twelve hours.

We moved with practiced efficiency. Within minutes, we were back on the road.

We had barely covered a few miles when a massive explosion ripped through the air behind us.

I instinctively threw myself into the dirt. Sandra dropped beside me, her whole body shaking violently.

Through chattering teeth, she whispered, "They... they're here too."

I looked back. The shelter we had just slept in was nothing but a crater of roaring flames and thick black smoke.

Besides the Entity, there was another group hunting us?

My brain scrambled to put the pieces together, but survival overrode logic.

"Run!"

We screamed it at the exact same time and scrambled to our feet, sprinting wildly into the brush.

We broke through the tall grass and found ourselves staring at an abandoned, rusted oil pipeline cutting through the landscape.

"Follow me. Stay close to the pipe," Sandra commanded.

She took the lead, and I trailed closely behind, scanning our surroundings.

If we took a bus or a train from Northwood to Westbridge, it would be a two-day trip at most. On foot, through the wilderness, it would take at least a week. And that was assuming we barely slept.

I tried to visualize the map in my head. If we followed this pipeline and crossed the rolling hills ahead, we would hit the Westbridge county line.

While I was doing the math, an unnatural screeching wind filled my ears.

Ahead of me, Sandra's jacket whipped violently in the gale.

My survival instinct flared. "Sandra, get down!"

A terrifying gust of wind roared up from behind us. We flattened ourselves against the cold steel of the pipeline, feeling an immense, crushing pressure wash over our bodies.