Kyushu

The late-night munchies had seized Stephan’s stomach with an unusual intensity. Maybe it was because he hadn’t had anything to eat since he woke up at noon. Maybe it was the fault of the Mountain Dew and vodka shooters he’d been shooting since he woke up at noon. Whatever it was, he didn’t care. He was hungry, and drunk, and ramen noodles sounded awesome.
He stood before the stove, in nothing but boxers. He scratched his beer gut fondly with the fork in his hand, and stared at the water. It wasn’t boiling. “Damn it, boil!” he shouted at it, using his typical lack of consideration for others. Then something peculiar happened, as it often did those days since those girls disappeared.
The oven door swung down, cracking him hard in the thigh. “DAMN IT!” he bellowed, kicking the door shut. He lifted the leg of his boxer and stared at the bright red mark on his leg. It was shiny around the edges and blistered in the center. But the oven door handle didn’t get hot when the oven was on; hell, the oven wasn’t even on! He stared at the front panel of the stove, just to make sure the oven light wasn’t on.
He reached out to touch the knob for the oven, just in case the light was out. His arm was over the now-boiling pot of water; some of it splashed up to burn the underside of his arm. “GOD DAMN IT!” he swore, jumping away from the stove. “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS THING?” he kicked the stove, and the oven door fell open.
“God damn it Stephan, shut the hell up. It’s four in the fucking morning!” someone shouted from the hallway.
“Shut your goddamn Canuck mouth Taylor!” Stephan bellowed back, bending over to peer inside the oven. He cautiously put his hand out; the dark interior was cool. “Some fucked up shit going on in here.” he declared to himself. He edged a little closer to the open oven. There seemed to be something in the very back corner, something very light and out-of-place.
His knees hit the open door when he edged closer; it was cool to the touch. He had no way to explain the burn on his thigh. As he stared at the odd thing in the back of the oven, a strange thought occurred to him.
His new apartment was clear on the other side of housing from his old one. His old one, however, had been straight across from the apartment where all those girls disappeared. He’d been friends with two of them, indifferent to one, and rude to the girl who’d died in there. She’d died, then Pam had disappeared, then the freshmen, and the RA’s body was found in the bathroom jammed halfway down the shower drain. Everything that had happened in that apartment was completely unexplainable and frightening.
(Keep in mind that his brain, in its vodka-soaked state, achieved this series of suppositions at a slower rate than that of his hand as it reached into the back of the oven to touch that strange white thing.)
He touched the thing; it was cold and clammy. He poked it; it felt like a balloon full of hair gel. Just as Stephan started to withdraw his hand, the thing snaked out and clamped thick fingers on his shoulder. The fingers were pudgy and wet and the chill seemed to run off of them and all over his body. He opened his mouth to yell, but a second hand shot out from the back of the oven and jammed three more disgusting fingers into his mouth. They held his tongue still and the best he could do was croak. He struggled, kicking the oven door up and closed.
The hands still had him by the shoulder and the tongue, and something brackish and smelly was running out of the tattered ends where the oven door had severed them from their owner. He tried to pull the things off, but the hands had nails and suddenly his tongue was pierced. He let out a strangled moan and started to cry. Tears streaked down his face as he ran down the bedroom hallway, banging on his roommate’s doors.

Taylor stuck his head out and glared groggily at Stephan. “Dude, what the fuck are you on?” he managed to say before yawning hugely. It looked to him like Stephan was tripping; his eyes were all bug-eyed and he kept staring at his shoulder and pulling on his tongue. “Dude, I told you not to take the blue ones.” he admonished before slamming his bedroom door in Stephan’s face.
Stephan grunted incoherently at the door, bewildered at Taylor’s reaction. Didn’t Taylor see the hands? Didn’t he? Didn’t Taylor see the blood pouring from his mouth? Didn’t he? Didn’t he? Didn’t he?
Then a thought occurred to Stephan, although if you had asked him at that moment, he would’ve said it wasn’t his.
It’s a trick is all. Taylor’s getting you back for leaving him stranded on the beach without his clothes. He got one of the dorks out at the arts’ complex to help him. That’s all it is. A terrible joke. You should go back to the oven and pull the rest of the dummy out; get him to open his door up again and let him know you’re onto him.

Stephen nodded, suddenly in complete agreement was that random alien thought. He stumbled back up the hallway to the kitchen, smearing the wall along the way with his bloody and that strange filling of the dummy. He stood before the oven, a niggling sense of trepidation causing him to pause. Then that alien thought played in his head again, and he shrugged off the paranoia. Stephen opened the oven door and reached inside with both hands to grab the dummy. He couldn’t see where it was, but there couldn’t be much to it and it had to be in the back of the oven. His hands brushed something cold, and he smiled in satisfaction, even with the hand clamped on his tongue.
He pulled, but the dummy wasn’t coming out. Maybe if he removed the wire racks from the oven, he could get it out then. So he pulled the wire racks out and laid them carefully on the floor. Bits of blackened food broke off and crunched underfoot as he tried once again to pull the dummy out.
Maybe if you got a little deeper into the oven, you could wedge it out. Get some leverage.
The thought felt alien still, but it seemed to make sense. Stephen would trust what made sense. He tried to dive headfirst into the oven, but didn’t get far.
No, no. Try folding yourself real small to get in; it’s like hiding under your desk during a tornado drill.
His thoughts were right! Getting inside the oven would take the same kind of body-scrunching it took to get under his desk in grade school. He’d just have to go slow and steady; yeah, that would win the race.

It wasn’t the alarm that woke Taylor early that Monday morning; it was the smell of burning hair and bacon. He frowned; what the hell had Stephen made? Whatever it was, it reeked something God-awful. He hoped Stephen had thought to put on a cup of coffee when he started making whatever the hell it was he was making.
Taylor stumbled out into the hallway, only to find it full of gray smoke. He coughed and dropped to the floor; the smoke was thick and terrible! How in the hell did the smoke-detector miss this? The battery must have gone dead in it or something; Taylor didn’t care at that moment. He crawled into the kitchen, where he saw that the smoke was coming out of the oven and the racks from inside the oven were on the floor. Stephen was nowhere to be found.
“Stupid bastard almost burnt the apartment down.” Taylor shook his head and stood. He turned on the exhaust fan above the stove; it didn’t help much, but at least now he could see to turn the oven off. It had been cranked to 450°. He grabbed the crusty towel off the fridge and opened the oven door.
Smoke poured out of it and for a minute there he couldn’t see anything. He waved the towel in front of his face, trying to get the smoke away from him. He went to the front door and propped it open with the trash can. The fresh air cleared the apartment faster than the exhaust fan ever could, and he could see what was in the oven. It wasn’t pretty, and Taylor screamed.

The police and the fire department came by the clean up the mess; they’d gotten used to coming over to the campus in those past few months to clean up the things that shouldn’t happen in real life. Several of the men threw up on-site and had to be thrown out of the building to get it together. No one could blame them though.
There was no explaining how the kid managed to get into the oven. He’d somehow managed to fold his 6’1” frame into the oven, and sat in there with one hand on his shoulder and the other clamped on his own tongue. Where he’d gotten the idea or even why he’d done it was beyond everyone. The roommate was useless to ask; he’d been the only one home and at that moment he was sitting in the back of a padded paddy wagon mumbling about bacon.
This was going to go public very soon, the on-campus police knew. First the girl who went head-first through the wall; then the girls who disappeared and the RA who’d somehow gone halfway down a four-inch shower drain. Now this good who’d baked like a Christmas ham. And once this went public, there was no telling just how bad the backlash was going to be.