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                  INTERVIEWEE: Yes, I had quite the… disturbing experience. I’m not sure if it’s PARANORMAL, but it certainly was NOT normal.

                  INTERVIEWER: We investigate all paranormal events, not just ghosts, sir. Would you like to state your name?

                  INTERVIEWEE: No, no names. I don’t want them finding out.

                  INTERVIEWER: Aaaallright. What happened.

                  INTERVIEWEE: I go to the nearby college. Golden State U. I am… was. I was a biotechnology student. It all started when we got the substitute.

                  INTERVIEWER: Who?

                  INTERVIEWEE: The substitute. His name was Mr. Stevens; we never got his first name. He said our ordinary teacher was, and I quote “out for the lunch!”. That doesn’t make a damn lick of sense, and yet, he pretended it did! Over all, his English skills were poor. But not learning the language poor. I TA’d a class for people new to English in high school, and he didn’t talk like them. He talked like… like someone pretending he didn’t know English.

                  INTERVIEWER: Why do you think he did that?

                  INTERVIEWEE: I think he was doing it to distract us. So he could brush us off. Like we were children. Most of us were seniors in that class. A few juniors, sure, but overall, most of us almost had our degrees.

                  INTERVIEWER: Do you think he might have been an alien, or some kind of long lived shapeshifter?

                  INTERVIEWEE: After what I saw, I wouldn’t put it past him…

                  INTERVIEWER: Why do you say that?

                  INTERVIEWEE: The only thing he had us do was grow human flesh. For about a month straight. Just human flesh, over and over again. He had us working like an assembly line, but we never saw where it went. Or where it came from. He just kept putting it away after class, and each morning, he would give us that saccharine smile. “Today we will be the doing of growing flesh!” He said it in the exact same tone every day. Like a robot. Eventually, we all started to notice this rancid smell. Flies were always in and out of the room, but I could never quite tell what it was. Eventually, we all banded together. We went on strike, sort of. We said we wouldn’t do it anymore, that we wouldn’t put up with him. And you know what he said? hehehEHE… you know what he said?

                  INTERVIEWEE: He just looked at us with his stupid smile, and he said “That is the ok! We have the enough already!”

                  INTERVIEWEE: And the next day our old teacher was back. He didn’t even seem to remember he was gone.

                  INTERVIEWER: So, you encountered some sort of monster that pretended to be a substitute so he could feed on human flesh?

                  INTERVIEWEE: I wish that was what happened.

                  INTERVIEWEE: I spent the next week playing catch up. Despite Dr. Monroe’s ever so convenient amnesia, she was already 2 months ahead in a course we never participated in. It was hell, but what didn’t help was that the smell I mentioned earlier had grown. It wasn’t just near our room anymore. It was in the entire school. Nobody even seemed to notice it except for our class. Maybe the smell was ours. Marked by what we had helped. And the same thing with this shuddering noise. It started months after the substitute was gone. It sounded like… there’s no other way to say this. It sounded like a heart. Beating in each of our heads until we left the campus. Even then, we could still hear that faint yet dreadful drumbeat echoing off of the walls.