MYSTERY BEHIND THE HALLWAY
CHAPTER ONE: LIGHTS OFF
They said the hallway had always been there.
Older than the repainted walls, older than the Anatomy block itself — a narrow passage between two labs that most students hurried past without thinking. Some said it wasn't even part of the original design when the Faculty of Science was first built in the early 1970s. Others believed it was added later during one of those rushed renovations the university was always doing without full records. But whatever the truth was, the hallway felt like it didn't belong. Like it had simply appeared one day and the building accepted it out of fear.
During the day, the corridor was almost invisible — just a dim stretch between ANA 204 and a locked storage room no one used anymore. The windows were always too dirty for sunlight to come through. Cracked white tiles lined the floor, faded green lab signs clung to the ceiling, and somewhere in the air was the faint, sour smell of formalin. But when the last fluorescent lights flickered off in the Faculty of Science, when the night sounds of OAU's forested campus swallowed the buildings, the hallway changed.
Or maybe… it came alive.
No one remembered the first disappearance. But everyone remembered the story — the one whispered by torchlight in hostels or murmured over soaked lab coats during long practicals:
*"If you walk the hallway alone at midnight... you'll see your own body on the dissection table."*
Most called it nonsense.
Some dared each other.
A few... vanished.
---
Dara Ajayi didn't believe in ghost stories.
She believed in logic, in results, in proper lab documentation and protocols. Third-year Microbiology students at Obafemi Awolowo University had no time for urban legends, not with Dr. Onadeko's exam questions breathing down their necks. Yet, on the night of Ifeanyi's disappearance, something in her shifted.
Maybe it was the silence that fell over the corridor.
Maybe it was the way her torchlight flickered the moment she glanced toward the hallway.
She had stayed back late in the departmental reading room that evening. Her roommates had left after dinner, grumbling about PHCN and the upcoming ANA 306 practical. But Dara stayed, fueled by two sachets of TomTom, half a gala, and pure fear of carrying over.
She didn't even notice the time until her phone buzzed.
**12:03AM**
The screen glowed in the dark, nearly blinding her.
One new notification.
> *Time for your practical. ANA 204. Attendance Mandatory.*
Dara frowned.
There was no practical scheduled.
She double-checked her printed timetable. ANA 204 had been canceled last semester after a gas leak. She had the circular. Everyone knew.
So where did the notification come from?
She opened the message. No sender ID. No reply option. Her phone screen glitched for a second, then returned to normal.
Her breath caught in her throat.
The hallway.
She hadn't looked at it all night. But now the darkness beyond the corridor pulled at her eyes like a magnet. She turned slowly, torchlight in hand. It was still there: narrow, empty, darker than the rest of the faculty.
And the light above it?
Off.
Always off.
---
Three hours earlier, Ifeanyi Nnaji had entered that hallway.
He was one of those quiet geniuses — always typing furiously on his battered HP laptop, always borrowing department keys, always asking technical questions that made even final-year students blink. Everyone respected him. Some envied him. No one expected him to just vanish.
Security footage showed him walking toward ANA 204 at exactly **11:59PM**.
The guard stationed at Block B saw him pass.
But no one saw him return.
The next morning, his folded lab coat was found at the end of the hallway.
His student ID card? Not his.
It was blank.
Except for one thing:
Written in red ink, smeared slightly at the edges, was a single word:
**You**.
---
Dara reached for her bag.
She should go. She should leave. Call security. Wake up Zainab. Tell someone.
But her legs moved on their own.
The hallway seemed to grow longer the closer she got, like the walls stretched backward endlessly. Her heartbeat synced with her footsteps. One. Two. Three.
A cold breeze slipped through the passage, even though the windows were sealed.
She reached the edge.
Her torchlight flickered.
Then it went out completely.
Darkness.
Complete and consuming.
---
She never entered.
Not that night.
A voice behind her shouted. It was Uche, panting, waving his phone.
"Dara! Don't go! It sent you that too, right? The timetable? It sent it to me too. I traced it. It's not from any OAU server. It's not even from Earth, I swear."
His words made no sense, but they broke the spell. Dara stumbled back, eyes wide.
The hallway remained still.
Dark.
Silent.
But not empty.
She was sure of it.
---
That was the beginning.
The night the hallway first noticed her.
The night it whispered her name in the dark.
The night she almost answered.
---
She couldn't sleep after that. Not that she really tried. She lay in her bunk in Angola Hall, wide awake, scrolling aimlessly through her gallery. Her roommates were already asleep. Zainab snored softly. Yet the air felt wrong. Heavy.
At 2:33AM, her phone glitched again. A new notification flashed across the top of the screen, this time quicker than before:
> *ANA 204: You missed attendance. One more strike.*
She stared at the screen.
Before she could screenshot it, the message vanished.
---
The next day on campus, no one mentioned Ifeanyi. Not openly. A few whispers passed around in the Faculty of Science canteen: "I heard he ran mad and is in a psych ward." "Someone said he travelled without telling anyone." But Dara knew better. He wouldn't leave his research behind. Not his hard drive. Not his beloved lab coat.
She visited the corridor again in the daylight.
Still dim. Still quiet.
But now there were marks on the floor — drag marks, faint but long, starting from the center of the hallway and leading toward ANA 204.
She reached out and touched the wall.
It was warm.
Like something breathing behind it.
---
Later that afternoon, she cornered Uche in the cafe behind ETF 2. He was already tapping away on his laptop, headphones half-on.
"Show me what you found," she said.
Uche looked up, lowered his voice. "That thing... Dara, it's not code. It's not from the portal. It's not even a bug. It's like it rewrote parts of my phone. I found code fragments in my gallery app, bro. My GALLERY."
He turned his laptop toward her. There was a line of corrupted text on the screen.
> *ANA204_ACTIVE_MODE: CYCLE_BEGIN > NEXT: SUBJECT [D.AJAYI]*
Dara felt her throat close.
"It's naming me?"
Uche nodded. "It knows who you are."
---
By 6PM, her name had been removed from the OAU student portal.
When she entered her matric number, the page read: *"No student found."*
She tried to laugh. Maybe the network was just bad.
But it wasn't.
Uche checked. Zainab checked.
Her data was gone.
That night, her name was missing from the ANA 306 class group too.
---
It was like she was being erased.
---
At exactly 12:01AM, a knock came at her window.
Her phone buzzed.
Another notification:
> *Practical rescheduled: ANA 204. Attendance Mandatory.*
This time, Dara didn't go near the hallway.
She sat in her bed, clutching her pillow, as the knock repeated.
Once.
Twice.
Then a voice outside:
"Dara. Ajayi. Present?"
She didn't breathe.
She didn't blink.
When she woke up, her room door was wide open.
And a red ID card had been placed neatly beside her pillow.
Blank.
Except for one thing:
**You.**
---
(End of Chapter One)