Halloween is coming up. What fun! We can pretend to be goblins and ghouls and vampires and politicians – you know just monsters in general! This year I'm going as whatever my brain concocts at the last moment, as I do every year. Yay for last minute creativity!

Sunday 20th March 2013

I haven't had a reason to write for the past 3 days. Nothing much has happened. Lili is still fading in and out of the waking world while the pile of supplies under her bed gets bigger every time I visit her on my shift. Suzy's right hand is still in a sling, but he's been pretty efficient with just one hand. Maybe he can teach Lili some tricks once she is fit for existence again. Bella and Mo are hale and healthy having shaken off their fevers, but Ed is still down and now Heracles is sick too. It took some convincing to get him into the med bay because he knew Sadie was on duty a lot there. He said he would have rather been delirious with the fever than have to trust Sadie to treat him- and he got his wish a couple of hours later when the sickness made him hallucinate about a moth on the ceiling speaking fluent Greek at him.

Peter is totally delighted to have been injured; the past couple days he has shown off the big bruise on his neck and the bandages on his left shoulder off proudly. Later when I checked in with Sadie, he told me Peter was lucky he still had a face. Apparently if the fixture had fallen a few centimetres more to the right he would have lost an eye and a good portion of his nose to shattered glass.

It's funny. The building is not a health hazard (wouldn't say the same for the students who inhabit it). We had a team of devoted handymen who made sure the future leaders of the world were safe from the horrors of leaky pipes and flickering lights. I swear these people had no families to go home to. They were always around. It hasn't been more than a couple weeks since this all started, so the building shouldn't have become a danger zone in such a small amount of time. And can I also mention I haven't seen a single handyman either?

Where the hell is everyone? I can't believe that the fraction of students and Security have survived this situation. People have stopped arriving entirely now. I don't think anyone has left the perimeter in days….

Okay I should probably admit the real reason I started writing again after three days. I wanna avoid talking about it but it might be better if I just got it out of my system before it sends me crazy. You see I thought I should hold off writing for a couple of days to help with the sick people and arrange the escape routes and whatnot with Kiku, so I haven't bothered to record anything. But like I said, something has happened to me I think I need to share.

On the night of the 17th I drank waaay too much water. I went to the bathroom nineteen times. As I was coming back from the last time I ducked outta the dorm to pee, I heard heavy breathing coming from a room. The door was open a crack. If I had trusted Security I would have run off to the nearest member of the personnel and demanded they deal with the unnerving phenomena. If I my thoughts had been clear I would have retrieved a friend from the dorm to help me check it out, or at least cursed myself for taking a bathroom break without carrying a weapon. But no. I am Alfred Jones and he does not think before he acts.

Cautiously, I peered into the dark room through the crack. Inside I saw a shadowed figure with their back turned to me. The person appeared to be wearing a long overcoat- like the trenchcoat and overcoats Ivan and Sadie wear in the winter. Black spots were scattered across the person's back, which now that I reflect on it I guess it was blood. The figure was hunched in the dark next to a reading lamp on the floor. I watched the guy for a moment wondering what I should do, than the guy turned its head to the side and coughed. I saw it was a man. Someone I recognised.

This will sound insane, but it was Sadie and there was blood on his lips. I gasped and blinked. Literally in the split second my eyes were shut the guy had somehow travelled from the floor to the door. A set of sharp green eyes stared into my eyes for what seemed like years. Then the door slammed shut and I fell on my ass.

Shock? I don't know. It hurt my butt though. Not knowing what I was hoping to achieve, I wrenched the door open onto an empty room with no desk lamp or Sadie. If he had been in there I probably would have fallen on my ass again and screamed. I shot off to the dorm, dove under the covers of the first bed I reached which was not mine. Fortunately for me, Suzy is not squeamish about sharing a bed so he rolled over and let me shiver under the shared blanket.

The next day I walked past the room as brazenly as I could. I had planned to go straight past it, passing the whole thing off as a hallucination due to sleep deprivation, then I screeched backwards and karate chopped the door open. Still empty. I spent the day glancing over my shoulder and examining Sadie's face, comparing the mental image of the other version I had seen beaten up in the room.

This was the only face-to-face interaction I could summon up the courage to preform:

"So where were you last night?" I asked him.

"I was in my bed asleep." He said.
"Are you sure you weren't in the big closet on the fourth floor?"

"Yes I am Alfred."

"Alright Sadik. Good talk."

"It was."

Then he checked me for a concussion.

I make it sound funny but my knees are knocking together as I write this. Metaphorically. The past few days have actually been the scariest supernatural experience of my life. I am not good with this shit.

So first I saw the Sadie doppelgänger, who looked a little older than he really is like 20 or something, and the following night I saw something even weirder. It was 9 o'clock at night. A regretful lapse in judgement had left me on my own. I stood with my back to the wall, scared out of my wits. I had to wait for Bella to bring from her dorm room and may I say she took freaking centuries to come back. Just when I had begun to think I might not be attacked this blonde streak zoomed down the hall going so fast my eyes couldn't track it. I barely registered it had gone by. And only a few centimetres in front of my face.

I can't explain it. I was alone in the dark and then for a second no longer than the time I spent staring into those green eyes I was not, then I was alone with the words the zooming thing had shouted in my ears: "I WILL NOT BE LEFT BEHIND!" the voice was mine.

Too scared to move, I stayed frozen against the wall until Bella came back and peeled me off it. I think she asked a question which I didn't hear. I just obediently followed her back to the dorm and went to bed, the wrong one, but Antonio is also not conservative when it comes to bed-sharing. I spent another night shivering under a different shared blanket.

Today was the worst of all. I went to painful lengths to avoid the room and hall. Of course I ended up getting haunted in a new place. My own dorm. This time I wasn't alone and I was still the only person who saw it. I opened the closet the dorm shares for my closet and a MOTHERFUCKING BODY WAS IN THERE. IVAN AND KIKU WERE TALKING RIGHT BEHIND ME AND THEY DID NOT NOTICE A FREAKING SIX FOOT WOMAN WAS IN THERE. SHE SAID "EXCUSE ME", THREW A JACKET AT ME AND SHUT THE CLOSET DOOR. WHAT THE FUCK?!

THIS WOMAN WAS COVERED IN BLOOD AND BRUISED AND SHE LOOKED LIKE BRAGINSKY WITH THE BIG NOSE AND WHITE HAIR AND ALL THAT SHIT. I OPENED IT AGAIN AND SHE WASN'T THERE. I LOOKED AT THE OTHER TWO AND THEY HADN'T NOTICED A THING. WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?! IS MY HEAD IMPLODING OR WHAT? SOMEONE MAKE IT STOP I AM NOT FOOLING AROUND I AM JUST SCARED!

Okay I needed a breather. By breather I mean I stuck my head under a pillow and hyperventilated. Now that I have penned it all out and read my predicament from an impartial observer's position, it sounds like a tired guy suffering from vivid hallucinations because he hasn't slept or eaten enough. I imagined a girl version of a friend and an older blood-covered version of another friend and that a blondish streak of matter passed inches from my nose and yelled in frustration in my own voice. I'm just going a little nuts.

After I finish this I'll sneakily pack a bag full of peoples' clothes and store it under Lili's bed then take a walk on the rooftop for some fresh air. I'm alright, really.

I had originally planned to add this slightly scary part into the story but much later on than I have introduced it, but it being so close to Halloween I figured hey, why not let's scare the shit out of Ali a few chapters early. What exactly his haunted experience means is a complicated concept that ties in with different stories that have yet to be published, but in the current context of the story feel free to interpret it as him losing his mind or whatever else you consider a possibility.

I think he'll hate me for this too if he ever comes out from under his security blanket. This may take a while…seriously people, the guy has a snorkel for oxygen. Alright I'm gonna wait here with this shivering wreck of a nation, you guys go on ahead. Have a nice Halloween!