Maybe it was the thick greasy surge of black clouds rushing the campus. Maybe it was the deafening crescendo of cicadas, buzzing like a suffocating funeral dirge. Something so hellish and nightmarish about this place. The grounds have an electrifying quality to them that send your rational mind and your screaming intuition into a nauseating power struggle. The actual air and dirt radiate warning and alarm.

One building was particularly ominous, though I can't remember which. We made our way up the varying stories, opening the heavy fire doors from each stairwell. They were steel grey, impervious to decay. Narrow windows above each door handle, with thick-paned glass and reinforced with wire, afforded a scant glimpse between stairwell and ward. I closed my fist around the steel handle, pushed it down, and pulled the cumbersome weight of the door open. We stepped onto the ward, the heavy door, noiselessly closing on its hydraulic pump.

Call it chance. Call it instinct, one of us attempted to reopen the door. The fucking fire door locked behind us. Dumb shock bled into white-faced panic as we acclimated to the reality of our situation. We hunted around for the next stairwell. Locked. The only two points of egress, completely inaccessible. Hindsight is always 20/20: we remembered a garbage can wedged between the ground floor door.

As fortune had it, there was a small steal chair. We used the leg to puncture the window, the chair back to gash it all out. Our tall friend reached one lanky arm down and opened the door from the outside. Relief was was postponed and suspended by the panic-fueled need to exit this twisted hellhole of a building.