Rise of the Night Witch

For SUAR 2

A/N: Same as previous chapter, this is part of the rewritten version.

When the cat phased through the wall to the history department, it did so near an open door. One normally needed a transponder to get into this one, but someone seemed to have left the path to the basement open.

Marissa didn't have time to complain. She plunged into the history department's basement and slammed its door shut behind her.

She needed to calm down. It wasn't like her life was in danger, her life was only in danger.

Blood pumped through her fingers as she reached into her pockets and retrieved her cell phone. Instinctively, she dialed 9/11.

Big mistake.

Nauseating vertigo tugged at the pit of her stomach and forced her to drop the phone. She wanted to vomit. It always happened like this. Each time she tried to call for help against those monsters, it was like the universe itself conspired against her to prevent it.

Her vision fogged. She could barely make out this labyrinth of dusky, poorly-lit corridors that called itself the history department's basement.

She picked up her phone. It wasn't of any use her.

She wasn't insane, the weird was real, and it'd kill her if she didn't act now. Think, Marissa, think. You just heard a 90 minute lecture on that stuff.

Didn't black dogs briefly appear in it, too?

A silent meow interrupted her train of thought.

The white cat was here. Even if she somehow got out of this, there was no way she could walk home in good conscience without having looked past the cat.

She raced past locked doors with no janitor in sight anywhere. Those that remained open included a small kitchen and rooms on old literature about Medieval Metaphysics and similar subjects.

One door stuck out.

Located next to the boiler room, it was the wooden manifestation of pestilence. Green spots festered over a surface as yellow as rotten cheese. Ivy dripped out of its frame, knotted around the hinge, and connected patches of moss that spread through the texture like poison.

She wouldn't touch such a door with a ten-foot pole. One of the surrounding storage rooms at least had an old baseball bat with which she could open it. Even when she pushed it down with the wood, vines moved around the frame as if they might grab her at any moment.

When the door opened, cold mist streamed out into the hallway. A carpet of moss covered the dimly lit room and grew over its boxes full of Renaissance-era artifacts. Next to it bloomed a garden full of decaying vines, black roses, and purple hedges of thorn bushes with the hellhound at its center.

It had the rough length and height of a grey wolf, but that was where the similarities ended. With its trunk of rippling muscle and its head too large for its body, it reminded her more of the Hound of Baskerville. Nothing about it felt like a real animal. Its fur was as black as death, its eyes as red as hellfire, and its teeth as long as its scythe-shaped claws. When it growled, it felt like listening to the howl of a ghost.

And, unlike a real animal, it lacked the caution most predatory canines had. It just lunged toward her like she was a caribou.

Marissa slammed the door shut and pressed every pound of her skinny back against it.

The hound's impact punched the hinges out of the frame.

It was a miracle that she remained on her feet. Despite its weakened texture, the moldy wood absorbed part of the collision, but it wouldn't withstand the pressure long.