The School, Which Rots There

A few years ago I overheard my daughter’s friend, Florence; tell a story that immediately puzzled me. She recalled a personal experience which she claimed had happened a few hours before at the old abandoned high school which sat on the mesa overlooking our small town. She didn’t really know what to do with the experience, as she feared getting in trouble for being on the old campus at all. She wanted my daughter’s opinion of what to do, and I was just eavesdropping from an adjacent room.

Florence often accompanied a few other older kids around town. I will vouch that they were never “bad” kids, despite occasionally doing stupid things. The group had apparently wandered onto the old high school campus around ten o’clock at night, Florence was reluctant to travel there, but was dragged along by the others. They explored the area for about thirty minutes or so, laughing and talking, until they saw an emergency vehicle of some kind rushing toward their location. So the teenagers immediately split up, some ran from the complex altogether while others just tucked behind the various buildings and debris. Florence turned the corner and ran alongside the east building, until she tripped on some clutter piled against the wall. She brushed it aside and discovered a small broken window just above ground level, which she found to be just big enough to fit through.

 It lead to one of the school’s bathrooms, just above one of the middle stalls. The drop was about four or five feet, so she hopped down with little difficulty onto the toilet, and decided to sit down on the tank of the toilet with her feet on the seat. By then she could see the blue and red lights of the approaching vehicle shine through the window above her. The siren wasn’t on for whatever reason and she could hear the officers looking around behind her. The car was stopped somewhere on the road adjacent to the open window, with the lights blinking above her for at least fifteen minutes.

  While she sat there, Florence took a book out of the satchel she carried with her and began to read it. The light pollution from town was apparently just enough to make out the words, and the book quickly calmed her. She read about half a chapter as she sat there, then the lights suddenly turned off and she heard the car begin to slowly roll away. She took a breath and was thankful for her luck, before deciding to finish the page she had started.

However just as she placed her bookmark between the pages a few minutes later, she heard something moving into the bathroom from the desolate hallways leading deeper into the school. Its footsteps were to an odd rhythm, as the creature must have been limping. “Thud- thud, thud. Thud- thud, thud.” She heard the thing move toward the center of the bathroom, stopping at the sink across from Florence’s stall, and it struggled to turn the rusted faucet’s handle.

The water trickled out of the sink, drowning out any ambient noises. But Florence heard the person wheezing and slurping as it thrashed about, trying to drink, but its head obviously couldn’t fit beneath the spigot easily. Through the cracks in the door she could barely make out the figure’s left leg, which looked to be crushed and mangled, but still somehow usable. The leg contorted violently with every slight movement the creature made, and the grim noises of pain it made reflected that.

Then the faucet was slowly turned back off and the figure began to shift to its left, but stayed bent down to the level of the sink. Its face became visible in the crack of the door, showing a weathered older woman with matted blonde hair. Its right eye lined up with the crack perfectly, and the pupil grew and shrank to bring Florence into focus. It seemed to focus on her for a long time, until the lady’s leg once again began to move, and the wretched animal dashed toward the stall door yelling,

“They punished me!?! They punished me, for their grief? You punish me with them?!”

Florence leaped from her seat, dropping her book to the floor as she did, and leaped through the window. Stumbling to her feet, she ran from the campus into some surrounding brush. The lady did not pursue Florence, but simply screamed in pain from far within the school, seeming to retreat deeper into it. Florence’s friends were all probably long gone by then, and she fled to a gas station on the edge of town to catch her breath. She didn’t know what to think or do about it, and my daughter had no immediate answers for her either. 

Reviews

[alanwgraham]

What a story - I mean your 'about me!' Ha ha! What was that about the squiggly light bulbs?
Seriously now - your story is full of questions - that is good! Is it all fictional? Why was the emergency vehicle there? Florence was pretty cool reading her book in that situation. You referred to the 'creature' and referred to 'it' but then it turned out to be an old lady but you called it a 'wretched animal'? Lots of questions at the end - I could guess at who 'they punished me' might be but why 'you punished me with them?'
A facinating read -well done.
Alan