"I know it sounds crazy, which is why I came to you and not any of the others," Mike told Sam the next morning. He had insisted on meeting up with Sam before classes to talk to her. "My lights flickered, then it felt like somebody was with me. It felt like Jessica was in the room with me, even though I couldn't see her."

"You mean like a ghost?" Sam asked in a hushed tone, leaning in to listen to Mike.

"Please, don't say that," Mike begged, bringing his hands up to his temples as if he could ward off the thought. "It was like a warm presence, not like a cold one like a ghost."

"You might be imagining things, Mike, but at the same time… I honestly don't know what to believe anymore," Sam admitted with a sigh.

"Me neither," Mike said. "But until I see proof this time, I'm going to assume that Jessica's alive."

A noise behind Mike startled him. He jumped and spun around, pulling his knife out of his pocket on instinct.

There was a yelp of surprise from Ashley, and Chris had one arm around her, one hand up in a placating gesture towards Mike.

"Hey, man, it's just us," Chris stated. "You carry a knife now?"

"After all the mountain shit, it makes me feel safer having a weapon on me," Mike said, relaxing and putting his pocket knife away.

"Even though even if wendigoes could get to us here, a knife would be useless on them?" Chris asked.

"It's not just wendigoes I'm scared of," Mike stated.

"Anyways," Ashley cut in, not wanting to think of all the ways they could be attacked right now. "I decided to do a little research, and there have been a couple other students who mysteriously stopped showing up to classes. Daniel Armen seems like he's the first, Except maybe Brittany Lang. Though apparently she wasn't doing well in her classes, so her vanishing isn't really that strange, except for the timing."

"And just this morning, I overheard in my dorm someone commenting that a student named Ryan hasn't been seen since last night and didn't come back to his dorm," Chris added. "So, I'd say something is definitely causing students to disappear."

"Just what we need. Another psycho murder mystery to solve," Sam commented with a sarcastic bite to her tone.

Mike was thoughtful for a moment. "The lights were flickering at my dorm last night. Was it the same for yours?" he asked Chris.

"Come to think of it, yeah," Chris replied with a nod.

"Not mine though," Sam chimed in, with Ashley shaking her head.

"But there was a power outage the day that your roommate disappeared, too," Ashley commented to Sam. "And apparently they're sometimes localized. I wonder if there was any power surges when Jessica vanished."

"I'll see what I can find out about that," Sam stated with a nod. Besides Mike, she was the one with the most connections around the school outside of their group, and Mike didn't seem up to socializing.


"You found the phone around here, right?" Sam asked Emily, the two girls returning to the construction site fence.

"Yeah, it was on the ground right here," Emily replied, pointing out the spot.

"Let's see if there's been any electrical problems," Sam suggested, going into the nearest school building, Emily in tow. Just a couple steps into the building and Sam spotted someone she recognized. "Hey, Thompson," she greeted one of the professors.

"Oh, Sam! It's a pleasure to see you again. How are your classes going this quarter?" he asked.

"Fine, except the power surges that keep happening," Sam replied, as if it was just a casual complaint. "I bet they're disrupting your classes, too."

Thompson nodded. "They are a bit annoying, but it happens sometimes when there's a big construction project going on," he commented. "They end up messing with the power sometimes, and this building gets the brunt of it for being so close."

Sam looked at Emily, her eyebrow raised. Emily apparently had the same thought and pulled out her phone to send a message in the group text.


"Power outages apparently due to construction? Doesn't seem right, but may be connected."

Mike frowned as he read the text from Emily.

"No way that construction would cause just our dorm's power to flicker," Chris commented to Mike, voicing everyone's thoughts.

"I'm taking a look tonight," Mike told the group in a hushed tone.

"Mike, you can't just break into a construction zone just because they might be behind something shady," Matt protested, having joined the group once he got out of his class.

"Especially if they might be behind disappearances," Ashley added. "You could be next."

"Well, I have to do something, and I'm not hearing any other plans," Mike stated.


That night, Mike waited until midnight before leaving his dorm. Thankfully his roommate was a heavy sleeper. He snuck across campus to the construction fence, straining his eyes against the darkness to try to see what was going on. There was a faint light emanating from the building that was being constructed, but that was all he could notice.

"Alright, this is easy," Mike assured himself in a hushed tone, before hopping up onto the fence, sticking his fingers through the chain link and trying to shove the toes of his shoes into what footholds he could get. He winced in pain when he put too much weight on his left hand, forgetting that he was down a couple fingers on that side.

Mike easily climbed the fence, landing heavily on the other side. He paused a moment to make sure nothing was coming, before walking towards the building. "What is this?" he asked himself as he approached the door. It didn't look like classes, it looked more like a lab of sorts. But the campus already had a fairly new science building.

Once he determined there was nothing of interest in the entryway, Mike started exploring deeper into the building. There was a set of stairs that led downward into a strangely finished-looking basement.

"What do you think you're doing here?" a man forcefully asked from behind Mike, and he felt his left arm getting firmly grabbed.