Classroom76x | [2021]

He stared at it. The students did not. They kept their eyes on their notebooks, on the board, anywhere but the clock. Then the light changed. The fluorescent hum dropped an octave, and the F-sharp became a deep, throbbing C. The air thickened, tasted of ozone and old paper. The chalkboard, clean a moment ago, began to show faint impressions—equations that weren't his, diagrams that twisted into impossible knots.

Elias shrugged and began the geometry lesson. The students were brilliant, unnervingly so. They solved Euler's formula in their heads. They corrected his minor slip on edge count before he could finish the sentence. But by the twenty-minute mark, he noticed something wrong. The clock on the wall—a plain, battery-operated school clock—was ticking backward.

The others exchanged a glance. A ripple of something—fear? anticipation?—passed through the room. classroom76x

He fumbled for his phone. The flashlight beam cut across the room. Samira's desk was empty. The frost was gone. The clock ticked forward normally. The lights, when Maya flicked them back on, hummed their usual F-sharp.

The students filed in at the bell. They were quiet. Not the sullen quiet of teenagers forced into algebra, but the precise, attentive quiet of a congregation. There were eleven of them, ranging from a girl with purple-streaked hair and a nose ring to a boy in a pristine chess club blazer. They took their seats in a specific order, and Elias noticed the desks were not bolted down, yet none of the students ever touched another's. He stared at it

"Why?"

He took attendance. "Maya Chen?" Present. "Leo Torres?" Present. "Samira Jahangir?" A pause. A girl in the third row, wearing a hoodie with a faded NASA logo, raised her hand slowly. "Samira is… she's absent today, Mr. Elias." Then the light changed

But Maya Chen was already moving. She walked to the wall switch without asking permission and flicked it down. The room plunged into darkness save for a single rectangle of pale light from the windowless door's bottom gap. In that darkness, Elias heard it: a soft, rhythmic tap-tap-tap , like a fingernail on glass. But there was no glass. Only the steel door.