Something was in the wall. Or someone. Tim could hear it scrabbling and scratching just behind his head, like a squirrel that had lost its way. He was trying to plow through all the Whitman he needed to read for Dade's class on Monday, but he found it pretty hard to celebrate or sing anybody with this thing clawing and scraping just a few inches away, through a couple of layers of drywall and insulation.

He'd been hearing it for a few days now, since he woke up Wednesday morning and failed to recognize Neal, his roommate. He'd been convinced that there was a stranger in the room. An interloper. Something had come over him. It was that feeling he got sometimes, in that space right before waking up, where dreams and reality blurred – the feeling that he'd woken up in the wrong place. Usually that feeling went away a half-second after he opened his eyes. But that morning it lingered. He freaked out and made a fool of himself, and now Dick chortled every time he saw him, and Neal wouldn't even look him in the eye. Which was fine, because Tim was afraid if he talked to Neal he'd just say the one thing that had been on his mind since Wednesday: You're not supposed to be in here.

The awkwardness between Tim and Neal left a vacuum of sound that the thing in the wall was eager to fill. Tim first head the scratching Wednesday night, after all of Neal's friends had left, and it was just the two of them, studying at their respective desks. The first scratches were tentative, probing. Tim at first thought maybe Neal was making the noise, but when he looked over at Neal, he was absorbed in a calculus textbook. Another few scratches. Neal didn't even look up.

The scratching returned the next night, accompanied by something larger and farther away, heavy thumps and scrapes like someone moving furniture around a bare apartment. Neal didn't seem to notice that either.

Now here he was, reading Walt Whitman in bed on the first real Friday night of his first semester in college. Neal was gone, Dick was gone, and he hadn't seen Chet all week. The only girl he'd met didn't want anything to do with him. He didn't know how to get in touch with Alex, even if he wanted to. "Song of Myself," indeed. Tim was alone, as alone as he had ever been, as alone as he had been when Christy shut her front door and left him there standing by his car in the still and silent cul-de-sac.

The only thing on this earth that wanted Tim's attention waited for him behind the wall.

Tim put down his Norton Anthology, the approximate size and weight of a cinder block, and pressed his ear against the wall. The thing seemed to recognize that Tim was listening to it. It made three long, deliberate scratches. Beckoning him.

Chet and Dick kept a toolbox in the breakfast nook on the loft. They wouldn't mind if Tim borrowed their hammer.

Just before he swung the hammer into the wall above his bed, Tim thought it might be a good idea to see if the Handbook had anything to say on the subject.

Should you ever find yourself in one of the secret corridors of Wintertree Hall, the most important thing to remember is this: Never make a left turn. You'll only wind up in a dead end. Stanley Wintertree insisted on the tunnels when he built his namesake hall, but they were intended for DUH staff to gain easy access to all parts of the building, not for students to sneak around in, so they were made as confusing as possible. Every July, all DUH staff attend a week-long training program whose sole purpose is to teach them every detail about the tunnels. You, I gather, have had no such training. You're not supposed to be in the tunnels, but if you're reading this, you've probably found your way in anyway. So please just remember: no left turns.

Tunnels behind the walls. It only made sense, what with the generally insane architecture of Wintertree. Tim had heard that 79A had even been a secret chamber at one point. He looked for any information on how to enter the tunnels, but the Handbook wasn't forthcoming on that point. The hammer would have to do. Tim spun it in its hand, feeling its weight.

He hesitated again. This wasn't right. Hammering holes in the walls was surely frowned upon, if not outright forbidden. It had to be against the rules. At the very least, it was stupid. In movies, when prisoners dug an escape tunnel, they didn't do it right in the middle of the wall where it'd be impossible to cover up. Tim had to be smart about this. He started to pull his heavy wooden bed out from its corner, but stopped again. He had to be smarter than that.

Tim pulled the light metal frame of Neal's bed away from the wall. Somewhere in the tunnels, the thing answered with a creaking scrape of its own.

Something was drawn on the fresh white paint of the wall in the now-exposed corner. Tim squeezed in behind Neal's bed and bent down to have a look. King Milo stared back at him. Go ahead, he seemed to say. Aren't you the boy in the tunnel? Behind the wall, the thing scratched again, taunting him. Tim reared back and swung the hammer.

Twenty minutes later he had his door, and a pile of drywall and shredded pink insulation. A fine white dust covered Tim's hands, his face, his clothes and everything in a four-foot radius. The door was just barely a door – more a hole that he could wriggle into. But it was big enough. He poked his head in and looked around. The space behind the wall was about five feet wide, both walls covered with insulation. The floor was about two feet below the hole. Tim couldn't see more than a few yards left or right. The only light came from the hole he just made.

Tim didn't know when Neal was coming back. He swept up the drywall and insulation as best he could, with two pieces of cardboard as broom and dustpan, and wiped the white dust off Neal's bedframe with a towel. The incriminating evidence went into a trash bag, which he pushed through the hole into the tunnel. He grabbed his flashlight and crawled through the hole after it, then reached back through and pulled Neal's bed back flush to the wall. If Neal went looking for the hole, he'd find it, but Tim was willing to bet he wouldn't look.

Tim switched on his flashlight and swept the beam left and right, up and down. The tunnel curved to the right about ten feet ahead of him. Behind him, it branched left and right in a T-shaped intersection. He saw no sign of the thing that had made all the noise.

"Hello?" Tim called out, into the void of the tunnel. After a moment, an answer came back: a deep thump from somewhere behind him. Tim walked to the intersection and, following the Handbook's advice, took a right.

The tunnel now ahead of him continued straight as far as the flashlight's beam could reach. He moved ahead, one cautious step at a time, waiting for the thing to appear in the white beam of light. With each step, the thumping got louder, joined first by a soft rustling and then by short, heavy breaths.

After half a minute of walking, the flashlight's beam hit a wall at the end of the tunnel. The light resolved itself into an ever-shrinking circle illuminating 2x4s and the brown paper backing of insulation, and a poster tacked to the 2x4s. A blonde girl in a bikini. Tim could just make out the writing on the poster: "Miss Resaca Beach 1983." He had a vague recollection of seeing similar posters in gas stations and carpet mills around his hometown. The joke was that Resaca was like three hundred miles from any beach.

Tim padded toward the poster, and the thumps and the breaths and the rustling increased in volume, moving closer and closer. Tim braced himself for a shadow to enter the circle of light.

But he didn't see a shadow. Something emerged from the circle, as if the light itself had taken form. A human figure stepped forward, glowing with light. For a second Tim thought the blonde girl had stepped down from the poster, but the figure was male. He wasn't just glowing, he was shining, like liquid gold.

The thumping was so loud it now sounded like Tim's own heartbeat pounding in his ears, the gulping breaths his own struggling lungs. "Who are you?" he said.

"I'm the thing you can't unsee," said a voice. "I'm the thing that should not be."

The voice didn't belong to the golden man. It came from Tim's left, from a black corridor branching off the tunnel. Tim turned his head in time to see a huge shaggy beast emerge from the darkness, a thing made of the earth and the trees and the grass. It reached one long green limb to Tim, and Tim dropped his flashlight and ran until his head collided with wood.

******

Tim woke up on a stage, in the hot glare of a spotlight. He was having a dream, obviously, and not a particularly original one. Some kind of performance-anxiety thing, probably about not being ready for Dade's class on Monday.

"Jesus, turn that thing off," said a voice to Tim's left. "There's no need for all the theatrics."

"I never get to play with the lights," said a female voice, emanating from the source of the spotlight. The light shut off.

Tim's eyes adjusted to the new reality. He was indeed in a small auditorium, sitting in a folding chair upstage and to the right of a card table in the center of the stage, at which sat two students, a guy and a girl. They seemed to be having a staring contest. Tim recognized the Indian guy who had told him to use his Handbook to find his room, the day he moved in. A skinny black guy in a purple T-shirt paced behind the card table.

The girl who had been manning the spotlight hopped down the steps from the lighting booth and took a seat in the front row. A few seats to her left sat the thing that had attacked Tim. A round bald head with enormous muttonchops sat atop a huge body, covered in what looked like dozens of hula skirts. Tim recognized him too: he worked in the mailroom.

"Where am I?" said Tim.

The black guy addressed the girl sitting in the front row. "Rosa? You want to answer that?" Rosa stood up and hopped up on stage. She too wore a purple shirt, and glasses that were too big for her face.

"The Shambling Horror found you in the tunnels and tagged you, naturally, hoping to make you his Envoy. But apparently you freaked out a little and bonked yourself on the noggin. I don't know, I'm not a doctor, but you might want to go to the Health Center and get that checked out." Tim realized that his forehead was throbbing. Maybe he finally got that concussion. "And so I found the S.H. here dragging you out of the tunnels, and I told him that you couldn't be the Envoy if you were unconscious, and also I was pretty sure you aren't even a player. So things got a little heated..." She delivered a pointed look at the fat guy in the grassy suit.

"I did not get heated," he said.

"And I decided this was a matter for the Conference." She said "Conference" like it was supposed to be capitalized.

"What's your name?" said the black guy to Tim.

"Tim."

"Tim. I'm Roland, Head Referee. This is Jay, representing the Red Team. Stacy captains the Blue Team. Rosa is an Assistant Referee. And you've met Reese. The Shambling Horror."

Reese gave a little wave. "Sorry about scaring you."

"What exactly is going on here?"

Roland ignored the question. "Jay, Stacy. Can you confirm that Tim is not a member of either the Red or Blue Team?"

"Can confirm," said Stacy. She never took her eyes off Jay.

"Ditto," said Jay. He let his eyes flicker over to Tim, and he cocked his head quizzically, just a little.

"Well, there you go. Tim, you're free to go. Reese, be careful about who you tag next time."

Reese heaved himself to his feet. "Roland, you've got to help me out here. Nobody ever comes into the tunnels. I've been the Shambling Horror since last October!"

"I don't make the rules."

"You don't know what it's like in there, man. Twelve hours in the dark. It's so hot in there. Stanley Wintertree may have been a genius, but he did not understand ventilation at all. And this stupid costume..." Reese tore at the strands of fake grass draped across his broad chest. "It's not right!" He flung a few handfuls of the grass to the ground and slumped back into his seat. The chair groaned under his weight.

"Calm down, Reese," said Jay. He broke eye contact with Stacy and turned to Tim. "Dude, I remember you. You were trying to figure out the map. You ever find your room?"

"Yeah," said Tim. "Though it's, like, part of another room?"

Jay smiled, like he'd found the answer to a puzzle he hadn't been able to solve. "So you're in Chet's attic."

"Yeah. You know Chet?"

"Gentlemen," said Roland. "This business is concluded. We still have a game to play?"

Jay looked at his watch. "That's almost thirty minutes. Where's the Vest? I'll walk Tim back to his room."

Roland handed Jay a purple mesh vest. Jay pulled it on and escorted Tim through the wings and out a door into long hallway. They must have been in the basement. Tim could hear the rumble of dryers on the other side of the wall.

"You guys are playing a game?" Tim said.

"MiloBall. The official sport of Wintertree Hall."

"How do you play?"

"That's...complicated. There are rules in your Handbook. Look it up when you've got an hour to kill."

They came to a staircase at the end of the hall and took them up a few flights.

"So what were you doing in the tunnels?" Jay said.

Tim didn't want to tell him about the noises or the hole he made in the wall. He'd probably think he was crazy. "Just exploring."

"Well, be careful. You don't want to end up like the Boy in the Tunnel."

Tim froze. "The what?"

"The Boy in the Tunnel. It's one of those stories you hear. Probably just an urban legend. There was this guy, ten or fifteen years ago. He actually lived in 79. He and his roommate played Dungeons & Dragons all the time, and eventually they started doing, like, a real-life version of it. Dressing up like elves, plastic swords, all that kind of shit. They started using the tunnels as part of the game, and this guy was running around in there one night and got lost. They were looking for him for weeks. It was a whole thing. But when they found him, it turns out he was using the tunnels to spy on girls in their rooms. He was just some creepy pervert. Anyway, don't end up like that guy."

Jay pushed open a door and they stepped out into the lobby. "I've got to get back to the game," he said. "You can find your way from here."

"Wait," said Tim, as Jay turned to go. "I want to play."

Jay grinned. "Next Friday. Right here, 7:45 p.m."