His name was Robert

Having forgotten about this incident, I walked away from the door and carefully placed the folders with the experimental protocols on the shelves, carefully aligning them along the edges so that there was not the slightest disorder. As always, everything had to be in its place, even if night was falling outside the window and the unchanging silence reigned outside the laboratory windows.

I locked the cabinet with important data, hung the key on a nail, and, throwing on a robe, headed for the door. My steps echoed monotonously off the old tiles, perfectly leveled in the corridor, echoing in the emptiness. Everything was as usual. Only I felt the tension in the air growing.

Down at the end of the hallway, where I always left a couple of lamps on in case it got dark, the silence had returned, but now it felt strange, like something was wrong. I looked away from the lab doors and stopped abruptly, feeling something cold tighten in my chest. It was as if my brain was working faster than my emotions.

Footsteps. Exactly. The sound I heard now was definitely not an echo of my own footsteps. It was something else. A clear and distinct echo in the silence of the night.

A moment of confusion - and a thought struck me like lightning: a rat. I couldn't be mistaken. One of the rats that ran around in my experimental enclosure might have escaped from its cage. But how could it? It was securely locked. I checked myself.

But the steps continued. No, they were not mine. They sounded more and more distinct. And now I distinctly heard something scraping at the door, sliding along the floor, shifting light objects, almost touching them.

I froze with my head up, not daring to turn around. My breathing became heavy, and my muscles seemed to have turned to stone. The last moments before the lab closed flashed through my mind: I was sure that all the cells were in place, everything was hermetically sealed.

But the steps continued. Echoing in the air, they became unbearably loud, filling the space.

"It's impossible," I whispered under my breath, but my voice seemed unable to penetrate the wall of fear.

I looked at the door again. This time I felt not only the physical presence of something alien, but also the awareness that I might have missed something, something invisible that had slipped past my attention. The fear was strange: it did not dictate my actions, but seemed to blur reality before my eyes, subordinating it to its shadow.

I carefully pulled the handle, but did not open the door right away. My hand, as if under the weight of an invisible weight, froze in the air. And only at that moment did I hear something quietly scratching the floor, as if something small and quickly gliding, leaving behind traces invisible to the eye.

And then I understood. A rat. It was a rat, but not a simple one. It was the result of my experiments that could not possibly exist. How long I had prepared it, how many times I had reworked the same protocols, trying to perfect the lab work, and now, perhaps, one of the experiments...was getting out of control.

A moment of calm, and all was clear. Something more than a rat could leave these walls.

I was standing in a dark corridor when suddenly, from the shadows, a grey ball rushed towards me with some incredible speed. It flew straight at my chest, and before I could react, its body collided with mine, literally throwing me back. At that moment, the air seemed to compress, and my heart almost jumped out of my chest. I was so terrified that I could neither move nor scream. My body seemed paralyzed. The seconds dragged on like an eternity.

The grey ball was something far more vile than I had expected. It was not just an animal, not just a rat or a cat. It was something that defied understanding. I could feel its fur rubbing against my skin, leaving behind cold, sticky marks. It was alive, but it also seemed dead, somehow disgustingly inert, as if a part of it had come straight from a nightmare.

I was so terrified that I could barely breathe. My throat was so tight that I couldn't even take a breath. It felt like something was stuck inside me, like a lump of rough ash. A horrible, crazy lump that filled my chest, burning from the inside. I tried to push it away, but I couldn't. My fingers were stuck in its wet fur, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't move that nasty lump from my chest.

Every moment felt like a test of endurance, every breath like a struggle against an invisible obstacle that defied willpower. I felt my body giving in, and at that moment I tried to make such an effort as if I were throwing off a stone slab. Everything inside me exploded, and I was finally able to move the ball from my chest, knocking it aside. I collapsed on the floor, gasping for breath, my hands shaking as I grabbed for air.

But something about what I had just felt was still behind me. I lay there, exhausted, on the cold floor, unable to believe what had just happened. It was as if that horrible, slimy lump had been part of something bigger. And I knew that if I didn't stop it, it would come back.

I woke up in the car seat, stunned by the feeling as if I had just been pulled out of a deep sleep. A strange feeling in my head - my head was heavy, my eyes could not get used to the semi-darkness, and my body seemed not yet ready to return to reality. I tried to move, but as soon as I raised my head, I noticed that I was not alone. Robert was sitting next to me.

In the darkness of the dashboard, a green light flickered faintly. It fell on his face, making his profile hard and clear, as if he had been carved from stone. I could see his eyes, which were focused on the road, and his figure, relaxed against the seat. He kept his hands crossed on the wheel, and seemed completely unconcerned, as if he had driven this route a thousand times.

At that moment, I realized that he was almost ironically calm, like a man who was used to being behind the wheel even in the most unexpected situations. His posture was too confident, too calm for a night drive that had begun so strangely. Somewhere, perhaps, he had seen this posture - perhaps from some professional driver, or from some movie where the hero always sits as if he controls everything around him, as if asserting his power over the traffic.