Strange Times - Part 6: After School

[1989]

The primary school had no one around, dark, got the moon coming through the windows like art. Like I needed it to get scary, it was creepy enough. A deserted school isn’t right or nothing but here we were after hours, me – I'm Ralph - and Mark and Sam and Darren.

‘I heard it was buried under the old belltower’ Sam said. He kept like moving his torch to see through the dark

‘I heard it landed on the oval and that’s reason why the oval has that bump in the middle’ Mark replied.

I tried to open the door to old Mr Moloney’s science room. Locked. Old fuck always locked it.

Mark’s baseball bat was real shiny in the dark

‘I mean, old man Halbot knows about it, my grand-dad too. There’s too much proof to say it never happened’ said Darren. He knew more about it than any of us. He’d suggested we break in.

We were looking for the lost comet. All the kids had heard it since we were real young like, and since we had graduated and were leaving Haverbrook tomorrow morning, we decided it was worth a shot. We’d planned it for a while, we knew the old Primary School like the back of our hand and now, on a hot Sunday night we were going to search for it.

I kinda wanted to go home though. I hadn’t wanted to come here in the first place. I’d had plans to hang out with my girlfriend before going up to Melbourne but I was here, acting like the donkey from Simpson and his donkey; carrying all the equipment. Like, I felt a bit used, you know? The others said they were my friends but I couldn’t help but feel like the runt of the litter, like the shittiest animal on the farm. Maybe it’s just me though, but I think if you feel anxious around your friends, uneasy, unsure, that maybe they aren’t your friends. I imagined being back with my girlfriend on the farm; I think we both knew that when I left for Melbourne, everything would change. We wouldn’t stay in touch, we’d break up and things wouldn’t be the same no more.

I sighed. We were standing in the Hall, a big wooden ceiling above us like a church or something.

‘So do we have any idea where to start?’ I said and nobody said nothing.

Sam looked at Mark. They were both good friends and they seemed to hate the fact that I was with them. I don’t really know why I was friends with them actually, or why if they hated me, they made me come with them. I saw them look at each other and the look was like one you make when you see dogshit; they thought I was disgusting. Like dogshit. I felt like dogshit.

‘The Primary School isn’t that big Ralph.’ Darren said, turning with a hand drawn picture of the school from his maths book. ‘You and me are going to take the A wing, while those guys’ he pointed at Sam and Mark ‘take the B wing. And we meet back here.'

We might have only been eighteen or so, but we knew what we were doing. Mark brought out these walkie-talkies his family used on the farm so we could stay in contact. We split up and I was stuck with Darren.

Darren had been my friend during Primary School – is that what irony is, because we’re investigating the primary school right now? – and the only reason we’d probably stayed friends is because my family’s farm was next to his. He’d become friends with Sam and Mark in year eight and then they’d sort of just put me in their group. But then they’d just starting making fun of me all day, not letting me join in group stuff at school, although Darren didn’t do it much. He’d look at me like he was worried, shaking his head. I liked having friends though.

The backpack dug into my shoulders and I tried to move them; it didn’t do much. I was pretty much carrying everything here.

'Hey Dazza, could you carry this for a bit?’ I asked. Darren didn’t respond, not even when I asked again louder. Maybe he hadn’t heard me. ‘So where’d you get the bat from?’

‘My older sister used to play baseball’ he said.

‘Why do you have it with you?’ I said. I could only see his torch, it was real dark like.

‘Fuck, Ralph, for protection and shit. Mate, if someone finds us? If the school is haunted like we think it is, how do you think I’m going to fight the ghosts?’

Kids said the school was haunted with ghosts. I didn’t think a baseball would hurt a ghost though, they usually go through walls. My long hair kept getting in my face so I used one of my girlfriend’s hair pins to stick it up

‘Mate, get a haircut’ said Darren as the torch blinded my eyes.

‘I like it like this. I like my hair’

‘You look like a girl. Using hairpins like one too’ Darren said and we kept walking around.

The primary school was old, really old. Might have been one of the oldest buildings in town. It had these tall, wooden hallways and polished floorboards. Felt like a church or a big cave. We checked each classroom, feeling the walls, checking corners, trying to find evidence of a hidden door. One of the only clues we had was that somewhere in Room 12, a door had been painted over or something – sealed shut – and that this was the entryway to where the Comet was. But old man Halbot had said that and he had that disease old people get when they don’t remember shit so good.

‘So Ralph’ and I felt a bit worried. Darren had the tone in his voice like what Sam and Mark had when they were about to get mean ‘What are you going to do next year?’

‘Going to Monash’ I said. ‘Engineering’

‘Ooohhhh’ she said with a hint of sarcasm ‘Engineering. Big stuff’

I decided to ask a good question ‘So what score did you get?’ I heard about Darren and his shitty final exam scores. And he got all quiet, Darren did.

‘...Maybe later, keep searching. We’ll find it eventually’

I smiled in the dark. I’d done real good at study. Although I was pretty shit at English and stuff, I could really work with numbers and graphs, maps especially. Something about it just clicked with me, you know?

The next hour passed in with a real tense mood, like the dinner table after my mum and dad have fought. I knew I’d asked a good question. We looked in each room, each cupboard and table. The primary school had always scared me as a kid. The teachers who seemed to just hate all the kids, the hidden rooms plus the school had some fucked up stuff happen in it, that no one remembered. Nobody knew anything about the town since the library burnt down just before my dad was born.

All of a sudden, a burst of static came from Darren’s radio.

‘Mark, hey, what’s going on?’ He said, voice making an echo. I stared at his walkie-talkie.

‘Maybe Mark’s is a bit broken? Or he’s messing around?’ Darren nodded and tried again. The walkie-talkie was all static when we heard Mark’s voice, really far away through all the noise.

‘We found it, the comet, it’s under the school, it’s—’ and the static blocked out the message.

A noise began to echo through the halls. Like a metal pipe being hit. CLANK CLANK CLANK…the noise sounded like it was far away, yet really scared me. It sounded sharp, you know? Like if sound could cut you and it was getting closer. Darren and I looked at each other. The noise was getting louder. I wanted to go back home, to the farm and my girlfriend. I grabbed his shoulder.

‘I think we need to go home…now, get Sam and Mark and go!’ and he nodded. I was so fucking scared. Something was happening that I didn’t understand at all.

The noise got louder, getting closer to us like it was chasing us. Echoing in those giant hallways. A rumbling passed underneath us, like something huge travelling underground. I looked behind me to see the floor breaking up into this blackness, like night but darker, so dark I could see nothing.

‘DARREN! RUN!’ and we were running real fast, for our lives even. The blackness was tearing apart everything, all wood and glass and brick, splinters all around us as we ran.

Mark and Sam were running towards us, yelling things about the comet. We couldn’t hear them over the noise, the clanking was right on top of us.

Sam was red faced, out of breath ‘The comet, it’s—’

The hallway bent in shape, the corner buckled and came outwards like a spring, pushing Sam against the opposite corner. He burst like a bag of blood. I’d seen animals die on the farm, but never my friends. We turned and ran in the opposite direction, ending up in the center hall.

The huge ceiling was pulsing, like a breathing chest, all the wood bending and flexing like a giant living thing. Then the wood began to twist out like tentacles of a sea monster, the floor rocketing up in places like spikes. My leg was cut open by a huge piece of wood, all jagged, cut me to bone I think. Mark screaming over the din of noise and crashing. We made it into the B Wing as the door frame fell like a guillotine, cutting off a large part of my hair.

‘SHIT’ I yelled.

All of a sudden we were falling; the hallway became a pit and we began to fall. Like gravity just decided to stop working. I grabbed onto the door frame as everything shifted. Darren was holding onto a broken window, his left hand cut open by the glass shards while his right was holding onto Sam. Sam’s weight was dragging him down and was driving the glass through his hand; it punctured right through the skin. I saw his mouth go wide as he yelled but couldn’t hear him over the clanking noise. As gravity went back to normal, we ran for the glowing green exit sign.

The hallway was closing around us like a camera lens, walls and floor coming in with loud grinding sounds. I threw the dumb backpack off and gained speed. That roaring clanking metal was the only thing I could hear.

The exit was closing fast and we had to run with our heads ducked. Then bent over. Mark and I made it out with a few meters above us but the ceiling knocked Darren to the floor.

‘DARREN! QUICK!’ Mark shrieked and tried to grab his hand as the hall way was barely any bigger than a pipe. We tried to grab him as he crawled like a madman, the hallway almost on him. The gravity shifted and Darren began to slide backwards. Mark had a grip on his left hand, dragging him up but the blood was too slick from the cut, and he lost his grip. He began to slide down the closing hallway. Darren screamed, drowned out by the clanking. Mark couldn’t stop crying. The hallway closed in until all we could see from the door was brick.

We sat outside the school, the noise faded away. Mark sobbed hysterically and I sat there, covered in blood. The ambulance came, the police, our families.

I went to Melbourne. I broke up with my girlfriend. I cut my hair. I studied engineering. I got married, had kids, moved to the suburbs. I went to therapy.

They never found our friends bodies.

- Ralph, age 44

#Haverbrook #StrangeTimes #mystery #horror #surreal #highschool #fiction #australian #recount