Last Updated 3/16/2024

“Come on! We have to get home,” Sarah insisted, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet to fend off the cold.

Jessica rolled her eyes.

“You’re the one who insisted we get pizza, and I’m not paying for delivery. Besides, this place has the best slices on campus.”

Sarah looked like she wanted to protest, but Jessica was pretty sure she’d had one too many vodka Red Bulls to come up with a coherent argument. Sure enough, Sarah’s stammering turned into a low roar of frustration which rose over their heads in a cloud of smoke.

“You better not make me miss anything,” Sarah said as they moved up a place in line.

“I promise you won’t miss anything important,” Jessica said, putting extra emphasis on the last word. For the most part, Sarah was a good roommate. She was clean, she didn’t judge Jessica for any of the guys she brought over, and she had a fake ID. For these reasons, Jessica put up with her stupid Night Owls obsession. Still, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t give her shit for it.

“You have to be the only person that would leave a frat party to go listen to the radio,” Jessica said. The line had progressed far enough that they were standing next to The Wild Mushroom’s open door. The pizzeria was on the second floor above a small dive bar, but even at the bottom of the stairs the warmth from the stone oven poured out onto the street.

“That’s not true,” Sarah said, taking a step closer to the cozy entryway. “There’s a dedicated fan base.”

The line seemed to move faster when they were inside, but Jessica still saw Sarah pulling out her phone frequently to check the time. By the time they got their slices and were heading back out, she had progressed to simply staring at the clock, touching the screen every few seconds to keep it awake.

“We’re going to have to run,” Sarah said, staring at Jessica with a melodramatic sincerity that could only be achieved after a night of heavy drinking.

Before Jessica could reply, Sarah had gripped her pizza firmly in both hands and began running toward their dorm, her blonde ponytail bouncing wildly back and forth.

She’s lucky she’s a cute idiot, Jessica thought as she took off after her drunk roommate. When they reached the lobby, they were both laughing as much as they could manage between large gulps of air.

“Holy shit,” Sarah said clutching her side with one hand, “running makes me so hungry.”

“Good thing you have pizza,” Jessica said.

“Oh yeah!”

Jessica couldn’t tell if she was joking or not, but the next second Sarah was shoving her pizza into her mouth like her life depended on it. Jessica made a mental note to remember this moment if Sarah ever got married, never too early to start planning a maid of honor speech.

Passing the front desk, Jessica had started for the stairs when she saw that Sarah wasn’t with her anymore.

“Oh shit, I’m sorry,” Sarah said, looking between Jessica and the lit elevator call button. “We can take the stairs.”

“No, it’s fine, I don’t want you to miss your show,” Jessica said.

“You sure?”

Jessica nodded, not feeling very sure at all.

Earlier that year, Jessica had come home late from a party alone after Sarah had met a boy. The elevator had gotten stuck between the tenth and eleventh floors. The emergency phone button wasn’t working, and Jessica didn’t get reception in the elevator, so she would have been stuck there until the next morning when someone realized it was out of order and maintenance was called.

She’d been drinking heavily that night and after a few hours, dehydration started to get to her. She was nauseous, light-headed, drifting somewhere between awake and asleep. She wasn’t religious, but she had prayed for someone or something to get her out.

When she told the story, she would always say, “then it just started moving again.” It wasn’t untrue, but it also wasn’t the full story. Jessica had felt something, an energy of some sort surrounding her. She couldn’t explain it, but it was like it had been waiting for her to ask for its help. When she did, the elevator had lurched back into motion, opening on her and Sarah’s floor.

As they stepped onto the elevator now, Jessica punched the button for the eleventh floor and shut her eyes tight. She felt Sarah’s hand reach out and wrap around hers. It was greasy from the pizza, but Jessica still welcomed it.

As soon as she heard the ding, Jessica bolted out of the elevator, almost bowling over several students waiting to get on. She apologized, a little embarrassed, but not really sorry for how she had acted.

“I still can’t believe they wouldn’t let us move to a lower floor,” Sarah said. “Bullshit housing people.”

“Yeah,” muttered Jessica. She hated it, hated that one bad experience could have such a big effect on the rest of her life.

“At least the stairs make your ass look great,” Sarah said, giving Jessica’s bottom an affectionate tap. One of the boys sitting in the floor’s common area wolf whistled as she did.

“Shut the fuck up loser!” Sarah said as Jessica unlocked the door. The guy’s friends started teasing him as the two girls entered their dorm.

Jessica walked to grab a beer from the fridge as Sarah ran into her bedroom to look for her Bluetooth speakers. When choosing between more debt and having to share a living space with no walls, Jessica had chosen debt. She hoped it wouldn’t come back to bite her in the ass, but UW Wittenberg was a good school. She was sure she could find some sort of job after.

“You could always get your MRS degree if engineering doesn’t work out,” her dad had joked, laughing at his own imagined wit.

And he wonders why I don’t call him, she thought as she sat down on the couch next to Sarah. She couldn’t imagine a worse hell than being trapped in the same place serving someone else for the rest of her life, except maybe being trapped in the elevator again.

As the song on the radio ended, a sound effect of an owl hooting began to play before the host came on and said, “who’s still up out there?”

Jessica groaned audibly.

“This is what we rushed home for, I just want you to remember that.”

“I know, I know. I don’t listen for the jokes. It’s like—remember that quiz thing a few years back? Where the game was fun, but the host was an annoying tool? It’s like that, but not as bad,” Sarah said.

“Uhm, how dare you slander Daddy Scott,” Jessica said, but Sarah put her finger up to her lips. “What? It’s just the intro, you must have heard this a million times.”

“I know, but you haven’t, didn’t you hear him say, ‘to all you new listeners out there?’ Well, that’s you,” Sarah said.

“You’ve talked about this show enough that I could probably write a book about it,” Jessica said.

It was true that Jessica knew all about Night Owls thanks to Sarah. She knew it started when an intern named Arthur at the campus radio station, WFGU, started hijacking the DJ booth late at night. She knew that the show had gained a cult following, enough that the station let Arthur do his show during the worst possible time slot, 2 a.m. on Fridays, and she knew that for the first time this year, he would be broadcasting during prime-time hours on Halloween. This last part she knew because Sarah had stolen one of the posters for it from the bulletin board in their floor’s common room.

“In celebration of rush week coming to a close, I have a story that ATO probably doesn’t want you to hear, because it’s one they save exclusively for their pledges. Honestly, I don’t know which is scarier, that this story is true, or the message it sends to new members of the frat,” the Night Owls host was saying.

Jessica wouldn’t have admitted it to Sarah, not after how much she had made fun of her obsession with the show, but the story sounded interesting. She tucked herself into the corner of the couch, leaning against one of the fuzzy throw pillows Sarah had bought.

It was nice and warm, and when Sarah laid down, putting her feet on Jessica’s lap, it was almost like she had a tiny blanket.

“As it was relayed to me, the story starts back when ATO bought the house they occupy now. According to the story, there was a townie couple that lived across the street. An older lady and her husband who refused to sell their land when the University expanded.

Now, I know some of you are going to go and Google this, try and say this wasn’t when it happened, or that this story gets told at every school, so on and so forth.”

Jessica shot a knowing look over at Sarah. The latter began to sit up to protest but bumped her head on the windowsill that hung slightly over the edge of the sofa.

“Are you okay?” Jessica asked, trying her best to suppress a laugh.

“I’m fine,” Sarah said, rubbing her head a little where it had collided with the painted cement.

“—not a true crime show,” Arthur the Night Owls host was saying. “This show is for looking at the stories we tell about our school and why we tell them. These stories have a power to them, just like this place does. Let’s not cheapen that by ‘well, actually-ing’ up the phone lines.”

Jessica sat up a bit straighter, paying a bit more attention to the story now. What had he meant about the school having a “power.” Was it the same thing that she had experienced in the elevator? Had he felt it too? Heard about it?

“Anyway, apparently the old woman’s husband became weirdly fixated on the ATO brothers. At first, his wife thought he was annoyed by them when she’d see him staring across the street, but one day he said something that concerned her.

Her husband told her that the frat brothers had a power, one that he’d never felt before in his life. He said he could hear it calling him.

The wife worried that he was starting to develop some sort of psychological condition, but he refused to go to the doctor. You know, boomer shit. He said that he would be better if he could get some of the power for himself.

The old man started finding excuses to talk to the frat brothers. He even started dressing like them. He told his wife about all the compliments he was getting from them, but she was sure they just were making fun of an old man trying to be hip. Several times she told him that she didn’t like him spending time over there, but he dismissed her.

Things took a turn when the frat threw their first rush week party. The old man dressed in his frat bro best and tried to get in. At first, they thought he was kidding. When they realized he wasn’t they asked him to leave.

He got upset. Started trying to force them to let him in and they had to physically remove him from the property. When his wife got home from the store, she found him curled up on their porch, crying, repeating ‘I need it’ over and over.

The next day, her husband seemed completely better. Out of nowhere he stopped talking about the frat house and barely looked over there. He even got back into his hobby of curing meats in their basement. The old woman was so happy, until she saw on the news that one of the frat brothers had gone missing.

The whole thing turned into a media circus as several of the brothers began throwing each other under the bus while speaking to police. Each was worried that they were the one suspected of causing their brother’s disappearance, and each tried to give the police a different person to look at.

Several of the members were arrested on drug charges, and their chapter was suspended, but there still weren’t any signs of their missing brother. The old woman started to get worried. She wondered if she should tell the police about her husband’s brief obsession with the house, but she didn’t believe he could be capable of hurting the boy.

Finally, one day when he was out, the old woman decided to go into the basement and look around in her husband’s things. She was convinced she wouldn’t find anything out of the ordinary, but she felt she needed to check just so she could stop worrying.

In the basement, she found strips of cured meat that her husband had smoked and dried into jerky. The basement smelled funny, however, not like the beef she was used to. It was as if her husband had used a different kind of meat.

Opening the meat locker, she found that it was empty, and seemed like it had been for a while. Then she heard it, scratching coming from the door to their panic room and a dull moaning.

Inside, she found the missing frat brother. Most of him at least. Huge sections of his body had been cut off, used to make the jerky that filled the basement.

The ATO pledge that told me this story said that they never told them what happened to the old man, but instead told them that they needed to trust their brothers. Insisted if they hadn’t wasted time turning on each other, that their brother could have been found more quickly.”

“That’s fucked up,” Jessica said as the story ended and a musical break started.

“Yeah, who would want to eat an ATO,” Sarah said, smiling.

“I meant the story. That they try to stop new members from telling the police about illegal shit that they do.”

“They’re going to take calls after the break, you should call in and talk about it,” Sarah said encouragingly.

“What’s the number?” Jessica asked.

“Aha! You liked it!” Sarah said. In her excitement, she sat up even faster than before. A loud dull thud preceded a tiny yelp as Sarah fell quickly back onto the couch.

“Are you okay?” Jessica asked, no trace of a laugh this time.

“I don’t know,” Sarah said. When she moved her hand from her forehead, it was covered in blood. Seeing it, she puked onto the coffee table.

“Shit,” Jessica said, jumping up. “Don’t move, I’m calling 911.”

“No, don’t!” Sarah said, coughing up the last bits of vomit. “I can’t get a drinking ticket, my parents will kill me.”

“They might not get the chance if I don’t call.” Jessica said, who was already dialing.

“Please,” Sarah said, “they’re going to be so mad. Just like with Lindsay…”

She trailed off mid thought, staring at the wall of the apartment for a moment. Jessica’s mind was made up.

It only took the paramedics a few minutes to get there since the roads were mostly empty this time of night. They put Sarah on a stretcher and wheeled her into the elevator. Jessica joined them, so worried about her friend that she barely had time to be afraid of the ride down.

“I’ll be okay, just get some sleep,” Sarah said after one of the EMTs told Jessica she wasn’t allowed to ride in the ambulance with them.

Jessica stood and watched the ambulance all the way down the street until she couldn’t see any traces of red light.

Turning back to the lobby, Jessica instinctively started for the stairwell. However, when she reached into her pocket, she realized she hadn’t brought her keys. She had been too caught up in making sure Sarah was okay.

It’s okay, she tried to reassure herself, but her heart was already starting to pound louder. Just ride up one floor, it’ll be okay.

The stairwells were only locked on the ground floor to keep strangers from wandering up there during the hours that the security desk was unoccupied. Luckily, there was a keypad on the elevator that residents could use to enter a code and get up to their dorms after hours. All Jessica had to do was get to the second floor and she could walk the rest of the way.

Still, when the elevator doors dinged open, Jessica’s legs suddenly felt too heavy to move. She waited so long that the doors began to close, prompting her to push the button a second time. When the doors slid open again, Jessica took a deep breath and stepped in. She punched in the code and pushed the second-floor button, squeezing her eyes shut as the doors began to close in front of her.

How long does it take to get to the second floor? Jessica thought. It felt as though she should have been there by now. Sneaking a peak at the display, she saw that she was already passing the fifth floor. Frantically she slammed the button for the sixth floor, and then the seventh, but the elevator kept going.

Jessica began pressing the button for eleven as quickly as she could, not even caring that her acrylic nails were starting to chip as she did. She pleaded with the elevator to stop at her floor, first in her head, then quietly out loud.

“Stop, stop, stop!”

The elevator kept rising until it came to a great shuttering halt at the top floor. The doors didn’t open.

Jessica shut her eyes again. This wasn’t happening. She had fallen asleep on the couch and would wake up covered in drool any second now, and Sarah would make fun of her like she always did.

She willed herself to wake up, tried sucking in air the way she normally did when she woke up from a night terror. All she managed to do was make herself light-headed.

Her heart was pounding in her ears, louder than she had ever heard before. Desperately she hoped the same strange energy that had appeared before would help her again. She needed it to be real, to help her. And it came.

She could feel it as though it poured from the ceiling, coiling around her like thick tentacles of fog. She breathed it in, felt it filling her up.

Jessica willed the elevator doors to open, but nothing happened. She tried harder, reaching out to the strange power, letting it pour itself into her in hopes that it would be enough. She shut her eyes once more, feeling it course through her.

Then, suddenly it dispersed, as though shooting out of her every pore and spreading itself out around the small, enclosed area.

An odd red glow illuminated Jessica’s eyelids. She threw them open, hoping that the doors had opened and the glow was from the exit sign to the building’s roof. What she saw caused her to scream in terror.

The elevator wall had become a pink fleshy mass. It pulsated rapidly, and Jessica realized that it was beating in rhythm with her heart.

Instinctively, she stumbled back, accidentally running into the opposite wall. It too felt moist and fleshy, and Jessica could feel it pulsating around her. She tried to move away from it but found that she was stuck fast.

As Jessica strained to free herself, she realized she wasn’t just stuck, but the wall was pulling back on her. Her entire upper body was being pulled back toward the sinewy wall, its pink tendrils unwilling to release their grasp on her clothes.

She felt her hair being pulled from its roots as her screams of terror were only enhanced by the pain. She felt her skin on the underside of her wrists begin to split like wrapping paper stretched too thin over a flat box.

She screamed even louder as it began to tear away from her muscles, the pain was like nothing she had ever experienced before. Her eyelids were torn away, and she was forced to stare at the fleshy pink wall across from her or else see the horror of what her body had become.

She begged the elevator for death, and finally it listened to her. When her heart stopped beating, she was grateful for the silence.