quarantine

I return to an old house I used to live in and where other people live now. I know my way along the hidden staircase and through the attics. I know the back entrances to the apartments, and I'm thinking how the students will be away for the holidays and that I can crash there for just one night in someone's empty apartment-- but once I'm inside, it all turns into a nightmare. people are home, and I'm forced into sneakiness and feel like a real trespasser-- then it gets more complicated and scarier-- I find that someone has been conducting experiments on animals in the basement, breeding monsters-- and it becomes my mission to quarantine the place, lock all the doors from the outside-- in effect trapping all the tenants inside, human and beast alike, until the authorities arrive on the scene. there is sickness and death, even amongh the people, and I have to take the part of the animals so they won't be destroyed but instead rehabilitated, if possible. they're ferocious ad yet victims of some dreadful custodian, who still, I know, wanders the free infrastructure of the house, the same secret back ways I use-- I'm afraid of running into him, worried about the danger, but I never do.

we're checking out the camp buildings, making sure they're empty and clear, ticking them off one by one. then we're working on the homework assignment we've been set-- the instructions are confusing-- there are several pages of questions we're supposed to be writing responses to, and I finally figure out that the questions are numbered and there's a complicated system wherein we're supposed to write responses to so many number eights and so many number sixes and so on-- an element of choice and freedom built in, but still a lot of writing to get done.