Ceiling Trap I

With the revelation that the classroom has been destroyed, and with nowhere else to go, the only choice is to head past the previously screaming wall and out into the corridor. The corridor is long enough that your light will not reach the end of it, and wide enough that you have to stand in the very very centre in order to see both walls at once.

As you head down the corridor you are hit by a series of three increasingly violent shock waves. Each is a low-pitched rumble that resembles grinding stone and thunder. They are accompanied by sheets of dust falling from the ceiling and the corridor shaking beneath your feet. As you reach the point which triggers the third shock wave, if you look up you can see that the ceiling ahead retreats into a domed alcove, at the very top of which hangs a busted chandelier. Partway through the third shock wave, the chandelier comes crashing down and is an instant death. The trap is timed so that if you run continuously, it WILL hit you. The only way to avoid it is to stop and wait for it to fall, at which point it will take considerably longer to do so. It's a dumb trick, but it gets most player's twice. The first time it kills you, the second time you wait and when it does not fall, presume its a one off, only to be killed by it again.

The chandelier death is nasty. The screen is ripped from your control and the player character looks up, utters the briefest burst of a panicked gasp, then tries to shield her face as the mass of black iron and glass falls towards you.

If you trigger the rumbling in the classroom before heading out to the corridor, the chandelier crashes down before you can even see it. In the event that you do trigger this, looking up into the domed alcove reveals a tiny flurry of movement behind a long crack in the ceiling with a short wet breathing sound. It's not much of a hint towards the following puzzle, but it's something.

At the end of the corridor is an open door leading to another spiral with stairs leading up and down. There are occasional cracks in the wall through which you can see black ivy growing up outside. After a few seconds in the stairwell the door slams shut behind you, and the area is filled with wet, sickly wheezing. This is the second phantom, nicknamed Ceiling Trap.

Ceiling Trap is difficult to visualise because you only see so much of it at a time. Like all phantoms it is cloaked in black smoke, but it appears to be considerably larger than Neighbour as its body fills the entire width and height of the stairwell. It has four points that occasionally peaks out from the smoke and thick legs that it uses to drag itself forward. Each time these legs extend and grab the wall they make a slurping noise, suggesting they are perhaps like the tentacles of an octopus.  The four points flail around and are reminiscent of the eyes of a snail.

You cannot look at Ceiling Trap for long, even less time than Neighbour. As the blackness spreads towards you, Ceiling Trap is effectively propelled closer and closer. This section of the game is a flat out chase down the stairs with the sucking and wheezing phantom quickly gaining on you. This puzzle is the first to really take advantage of the unconventional key bindings, and its a difficulty barrier that lots of players fail to pass. If you attempt to climb the stairs up, you are quickly enveloped in darkness and die. If you run down the stairs, obstacles block your path and must be Left Handed. The first few are blackboards which the character happily shoves aside. They slow you down, but not by much. Ceiling Trap for its part, simply crashes through them, swallowing them into the darkness and destroying them with a series of crunches.

Then you round the curve to find your path blocked completely by a mass of broken furniture. You hammer Left Hand and the character shoves the mass as hard as she can, then glances back towards Ceiling Trap who is inevitably rounding the corner close behind. And then your phone rings...