Classroom of Nightmares and Giggles

By Magnius of the Chaos

You walk into a class, tense and nervous. Today is the day you start university, and you’re afraid that you might screw up and make a fool out of yourself, like you always do. You check the small piece of paper in your hand, the one that gives you the number of the room in which you have your first class. You think about the warning that the sophomore, the one that wrote down the number of you when you asked for help finding directions, gave you.

“Never sleep in Prof. Sabin’s class. Seriously. Anyone who does ends up regretting it.”

You don’t know if it’s some trick he’s pulling on you or if it’s really true. Either way, you want to survive your first day, and you decide to pay heed to his warning.

You stand in front of the door to the classroom, hesitant. You don’t know what lies beyond that door. It could be penguins. It could be cheese. Or it might even be a professor and a class full of peers. How awful.

Taking a deep breath, you open the door and walk in. And sigh in relief. The professor isn’t there. Just a bunch of students. Some look at you as you come in, some don’t. Some are talking to each other, some are sitting alone. Some seem confident, some seem nervous, some seem calm and the one guy in the back seems like he needs to go to the bathroom. Badly. All in all, it’s normal. You don’t know whether you should laugh or cry. Or shut your mouth, stop staring and sit down, as the voice in your head is telling you to.

You find, to your dismay, that the only available seats are the one in front of the classroom. Perfect seats… if you want to be singled out by the professor. Sighing, you walk and take the chair furthest from the professor’s area as possible. Well, try to, more likely. For a big and ugly guy with a tattoo of Barney the Purple Dinosaur on his bulging arms shoves you away and takes it for himself, glaring at you, daring you to challenge him.

Of course, you wisely refrain from doing so. Your dream is to live a long life. So you take the only seat left – the one right in front of the professor’s desk. It is at that moment that the professor enters. And you can only gaze in awe.

The first word that comes to your mind is different. Or unique. There’s no other way to express it. Professor Sabin is different from the rest. Long, white hair, most likely dyed, and a sense of fashion different from the old fogies. You know at that instant that you’ll like this man. He’s cool.

The professor puts down his things on his desk, and you watch in interest. There are plenty of things that you wouldn’t expect from a professor, or even a normal person, in fact. Besides the textbooks, there are also some books on mythology and magic, a small crystal orb, a photo of what seems to be his family with a red cross mark over the face of a cat (you have really good eye sight and are seated right in front of his desk, so you can see everything), a top hat (you have no idea why he keeps it in his bag, and not on his head), something that seems to be a personal notebook or journal and a small figurine that you can’t see that well. Strange stuff. Even stranger is the fact that he owns nothing made of metal.

Professor Sabin begins his first-day speech, introducing himself and the course, and it’s quite entertaining and witty. It’s something you’d enjoy listening to, and you could listen to it all day… if you hadn’t stayed up all night playing games. As he continues to talk, your head begins to droop down, and you decide to close your eyes for one second… In your state, you do not realize that the professor glances at you for a second without stopping his speech. And darkness envelops you.

You haven’t been in the darkness for long, when out of the shadows a man comes. He looks like Professor Sabin, but slightly different. You push that thought away, reasoning with yourself that you’re simply dreaming. What the professor is doing in your dreams you don’t know, but you don’t attempt to find out. After all, many things happen in dreams.

Suddenly (from your point of view), the professor explodes into a dark mass, and you scream and take a step back. The new creature that replaced the professor fills you with fear, glaring at you with six blood-red eyes. It feeds off fear. You don’t know how you know it, but you simply do.

The creature walks closer and closer to you while you stand, paralyzed in fear. It grows bigger and bigger with each step (or whatever it does to get closer to you, for you don’t think it has feet), and you feel yourself shrinking. What kind of freakish dream are you in? You want to escape, to run. You want to wake up, but even that right is deprived.

You see its mouth forming into a hideous grin, its bright white (you wonder for a fleeting second what kind of toothpaste it uses) and sharp teeth menacing you. Finally, it stands right in front of you, towering over your pitiful form. And it touches you with its mind.

You are subjected to a million terrors. Visions fly by your very eyes, filling you with anguish and horror. You see monsters – werewolves, vampires, zombies, skeletons and beasts – all through the eyes of their victims. You experience massive pain as you are forced to endure the sight of watching innocent people being tortured. You cower in fear at much more, desperately wanting out. And suddenly, all the visions disappear.

You know in your heart that the shadow creature is nearly finished with you. But it’s not finished yet. It’s saving the worst vision for the end, and your heart drops as it realizes what it is. You want to prepare yourself for what is to come, but try as you might, you can’t. And as it comes, you remember the word for the kind of situation you’re in. Nightmare.

You startle your entire class as you jump out of your seat, screaming out a phrase you hoped that you would never need to say again.

“No, mom, I don’t want to be a ballerina!!!!!!!!”

An amused expression on his face, the professor asks you if you’re feeling all right, and offers to let you off early. You decline, knowing that your parents would kill you if you even thought about accepting that offer.

And as everyone in the class giggle and mutter among themselves, you realize that your life is doomed. But that doesn’t matter to you at the moment, because something else has caught your eyes. Standing up, you are in a good position to see the figurine on Professor Sabin’s desk. It’s black, as if made of shadows, and has white and pointy teeth. But its most notable features are its six red, red eyes, seeming to mock you…

You will never sleep in his class again. You may never sleep at all.

And as you sit down, utterly humiliated, you wish you’d listened to the sophomore’s warning. And look, through the corner of your eyes, at one of the books on the professor’s desk, one that reads “History of the Mystical Creatures.” Maybe, just maybe...