 It is Redacted's best kept secret. No one outside of the university knows it exists. Its habits include terrorizing students and occasionally eating us. You're probably wondering why we would attend a school with its own personal monster, no matter how prestigious the school is. You might as well ask me why the sky is blue or the grass green or why everyone eventually grows old and dies. We just do. I can't explain why. Those of us who are still alive have never actually seen it, but we hear it shrieking late at night as we're desperately shuffling through books and cramming for our examinations, fighting over the coffee someone braver than us snuck inside. And of course, we've all seen the corpses it leaves for us. Our first year during Trinity term, it took Jennifer Carr and then spat her mangled body back out on the grass in front of the camp, our main library. It had taken her body from the waist down, her intestines spilled out in messy loops and the ragged edges of her torn skin fluttered in the wind. The camp is inarguably the most photographed building of Redacted University and Redacted Square is the top place tourists flock to. Possibly it hates tourists as much as the rest of us. More likely, it wanted to make some kind of point about how it chooses to stay in the camp, but doesn't actually have to. Whatever its actual shape and appearance, it always sounds like a crying girl emphasis on sounds because it is most definitely not human. You don't even need to see it to know that. Although they would deny it, if you asked, Redacted University administrators have documentation that it's been here for over a thousand years, leaving behind one mutilated and half eaten body after another. Obviously, no human can live that long. Two decades ago, a handful of university students got the bright idea to analyze some remains, i.e. the corpses of its victims. The rest of the community promptly shouted them down for desecrating the dead, but not before said students managed to determine that it has claws 30 centimeters long at minimum. You might think that the sound of someone crying in the dark would be out of place and warn us all from going there. Actually, many students cry in the relative privacy of the stacks. A lot here have breakdowns in general. I once saw a classmate sit down in the steps leading to the top floor of the Bodley, the other main library. We have over a hundred libraries, all with sweetly vomit inducing nicknames. And ball her eyes out. A herd of tourist pastor looking alternately bewildered and sympathetic. Meanwhile, the tour guide didn't even break his stride. So hearing crying in the stacks isn't necessarily a sign of alarm. What is alarming is your friends accidentally leaving you by yourself in the lower levels after sundown. In the darkness, you're probably thinking, what darkness? It's dark because someone decided that the cam needed motion activated lights on its lower levels, a supremely idiotic notion given that the cam is a library. And as anyone with a modicum of common sense knows, students usually stay still while reading their books and absorbing the requisite amount of information to regurgitate back in their studies. Because I was completely alone, I had to jump up and down several times to bring the lights back on. I looked frantically up at the graded ceiling to see if I could spot any of my friends above me. The same brilliant mind that had dreamt up installing motion activated lights in a library had also decided that the floors of cam's lowest levels needed to be made out of metal grates. This meant that on an ordinary day, if you happen to be sitting at a table on a lower level, bits of mud from people's shoes dropped through the grates from the floor above and onto your head in books. Ominously, I couldn't see anyone above me either. At least the grates made sure my screams would echo beautifully through the above levels, warning off everyone else from this level. Milton's paradise lost just had to be shelved here, I thought bitterly, and I just had to write my 3000 word paper tonight. The lights began to dim yet again, so to keep them on longer, I waved my arms wildly, like someone on the airport tarmac waving down an airplane. And that was when I heard it, somebody crying. Maybe I wasn't completely alone, or maybe it had noticed that I was, and fancied itself a mid-afternoon snack. I tucked paradise lost under my arm, collected the books I'd scattered across the table, and shouldered on my messenger bag, preparing to leave. Just because my friends had happened to abandon me didn't mean I was an utter idiot. We roamed the lower levels in packs because we knew that it usually went after people wandering around by themselves. Did it truly expect that I would simply walk into the stacks, offering myself up like a particularly dim-witted sacrificial lamb to the altar? The usual etiquette is to pretend that you don't notice anyone crying and or loudly losing their shit. But I'm not completely heartless. Yes, I didn't care enough to venture into the stacks, but I didn't want to leave anyone by themselves down there either. So on the off chance that it was an actual human being crying and not a sadistic monster trying to lure yet another victim to their doom, I said, is anyone else here? No one responded. The sobbing simply grew louder. I edged towards the exit as I scanned my surroundings. I couldn't see anyone, or more to the point, anything. Which didn't mean much, because even when the lights stayed on, they were so dim that you couldn't see more than five feet away from yourself. Naturally, today was the day I'd forgotten to bring my portable phone charger so I had no handy flashlight to light my way. My dead phone sat heavily in my pocket, a useless lump of metal. I heard a faint clicking noise, though the increasingly loud sobbing drilled into my ears and prevented me from pinpointing where it came from. I suddenly had a horrible image of something right behind me, something monstrous, inching ever closer, drooling and leering and capering in the dark with malicious glee. I whirled around. The space behind me was empty. There was a clicking sound again. I glimpsed a black shadow out of the corner of my eye. It swooped down into the darkness at the end of the room. Too fast for me to make out any details. It was stalking me through the stacks, toying with me the way a cat toyed with a mouse. Of course, right as I had this realization, the lights went out because I'd been standing still for too long. The sobbing stopped abruptly. In the darkness, the clicking noise grew louder. I ran. I ran with my arms held out in front of me and sweat pouring down my forehead. I crashed painfully into the tables I couldn't see and bit down on my cries of pain because I didn't want to draw any more attention to myself if I could help it. Running brought the lights back on and I saw the exit on my right. I veered towards that direction with my heart and my throat, my ears straining to hear any movement behind me. Just as my fingers touched the handle of the door, some great force lifted me and threw me like a rag doll against the closest bookshelf. I hit the shelf so hard that it toppled over and rained books down on me. Blood ran down my forehead from a cut and dripped into my eyes. I wasted precious seconds just sitting there in the middle of all those fallen books, too stunned to move. The sound of clicking from above finally made me look up. It clung to the graded ceiling with sharp claws, a vast mass of darkness that my eyes kept sliding off of as though I gazed at something too horrible to look at for long. I met half a dozen dark yellow eyes watching me, pupil-less and scattered across all that darkness they shone with intelligence. Those eyes told me that my death wouldn't be slow. It would pluck me from where I sat and it would bring me back to its layer, to the mounds of rotting corpses stacked almost to the ceiling. And then a sharp pain pierced my side and my vision doubled. I had nothing to use as a weapon as I couldn't outrun it. Yet as I glanced to my right, my breath caught in my throat. I was actually close to the exit. I ran and I slammed the door open, ducking and rolling through it just in time. Fiery pain erupted across my back as sharp claws dug in. I crawled free, moving on my hands and knees to the foot of the stairs. I used the railing to pull myself upright and then adrenaline gave me the strength for a much-needed burst of speed and I bolted up the stairs, leaving bloody footprints behind. As I continued to run, I heard a shriek below me, the same one I'd heard countless times before. It was so loud, my nose and ears began to bleed. Somehow I kept going until I reached the lower reading room. I heard a loud babble of concerned voices and felt hands grasping my arms. Purple spots danced before my eyes as I swayed on my feet and I knew I was going to pass out. I only hoped that they would take me back as far away from the library as possible. I dropped out of the university a few months ago, given the fact that I couldn't bring myself to step foot in many of the buildings ever again. I'd begun to fail all my exams, but I didn't care. I would do anything, go anywhere, just to forget the terror I experienced while stumbling around in the dark, not knowing which way the exit was. Sometimes when I dreamed, I heard the sound of its claws as it hunted me. My parents welcomed me home without any questions or lectures and unexpected gift. These days, I spend a lot of time thinking over and over again about how lucky I was, how I got away. But here's the thing, luck doesn't last. It's proved before with Jennifer Carr that it can leave the building if it wants to. I worry about coming home one night to see a patch of darkness moving against the sky. I worry about hearing its shrieks ringing through the air as it plunges down towards me, its sharp mouth aiming for my soft throat. I worry about meeting its dark yellow eyes and seeing that it still remembers me, even after all this time. So I wrote this post to warn you. I don't know how long this post will stay up or if you'll even be able to understand which university I'm talking about. If the university administrators catch sight of this post, I suspect they will do what they've always done, which is to sweep all information about it under the rug. I'm hardly the first student to have abruptly quit and attempted to tell others about what lives here. I most certainly won't be the last. Next year, yet more unknowing first years and visiting scholars will go to the university only to find themselves in its maw. So if you're reading this, please know, should you find yourself in the redacted dreaming spires, do make sure you avoid the lower levels. And if you can't help but go there, whatever you do, don't stay past sundown.