Thunder Falls

by Michael Lilly

  That thought is cast aside with a small amount of help from the mental image of the dorm bursting to life like the abode in the film Monster House. Confident that I won’t have to tranquilize it first, I approach the building. The smell of damp, wild vegetation emanates from the excess of growth lining the base of the building. I can’t see well enough to be certain, but it looks as though the plant life continues around the corner, possibly wrapping around the entire perimeter.

  As I sweep my flashlight’s broad, bright beam around, the light catches and twinkles on forming drops of dew stuck to the leaves and grass. A sharp wind rushes through and sends a small cascade of it to the ground from the exposed patches of overgrown grass. The bars on the windows of the upper floors whine here and there, and something man-made and wooden creaks in the distance, but I can’t tell which direction it comes from.

  The area around the courtyard, beyond the walls, is heavily wooded, in the darkness manifesting as a sinister tangle of branches and leaves. Some of the trees have shed their summer coats already, evident by thin, spindly fingers poking up through the otherwise solid mass of blackness surrounding the courtyard.

  The heavy double doors are presumably locked, both by their own mechanism and by a padlock and chain. The main lock wouldn’t be much of a problem, but the padlock, with less outer protection, has succumbed to the prolonged exposure; it’s rusted and corroded. My lock picks are useless here, as would be a key, as the keyhole is entirely inaccessible. My next thought is to break the lock; it’s already been weakened by rust, and a good, solid hit should do it. However, I see nothing remotely heavy around, aside from the stones that make up the walkways, hopelessly embedded in the ground, beyond the possibility of removal.

  I could try to jimmy it or look for something heavy in the school building, but before I try for that, I should circle the base of the building to see if there’s another way in. To do so, I climb up a seam where the building meets the surrounding wall. It’s sturdier than it looks, especially at the height of the stone that wraps around the wall of the courtyard.

  I mount the wall and drop my weight, careful not to teeter over the edge. The opposite side has plenty of loose rock; I suppose that relying on these walls and locks to keep the students inside also frees up the mind from considering the anomalous surroundings as present dangers. Certainly, though, attempts would have been made to run. I wonder about the resolutions of those instances.

  I lower myself down the other side as much as my arms’ reach will allow, then drop the remaining few feet. On the outside of the wall, my comparison of the facility to Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory is plucked away and replaced by that of Dracula’s castle. While not as immediate as described by Stoker, a steep and deadly drop-off chews hungrily at the landscape leading up to the north and west sides of the building, offering maybe fifteen feet of safety between the building and the inky black below. It’s enough of a berth to walk safely, but not without that bastard what if I fall? which is ingrained in human psyche.

  The dorm building’s northern wall has a degree of disrepair similar to the cottage I visited. Perhaps this side has just been exposed to much more weather. A handful of pipes and other various protrusions decorate the wall like a harshly pubescent teen’s face. However, none of them looks sturdy and accommodating enough to climb. There’s only one reachable window on this side, another grimy ground-floor pane so thick with dust that even with their face pressed up against it, one would have difficulty discerning any objects within.

  Ultimately, nothing useful on this side. No doors. I pick up a sizable stone and toss it back over the wall, into the courtyard, to use to smash the lock if I can’t find a less destructive strategy from this side. I proceed to the back side of the building.

  This wall is another with windows, and at last, my luck takes a turn for the better; one of the panes is missing, similar to the cottage and, in fact, just as cleanly. No jagged edges remain to tear up would-be intruders, no teeth of razor-sharp glass on this maw.

  I sweep into the black rectangle, a port to the unknown. Hopefully, some of that unknown can help me unravel this mysterious old case that my subconscious adopted without my permission. I’m working this case now, I think.

  The voice that plants it in my mind is foreign, forceful, almost unrecognizable, but I am indeed able to identify it as my ‘righteous vengeance’ voice, the one better suited to an obscure superhero exclusive to Saturday morning cartoons (but the five o’ clock ones, not quite worthy of the nine o’ clock primetime). This voice, while noble, is the one that gets me into trouble with startling and increasing regularity. Even so, whether symptomatic of my remaining OCD or a genuine wish to see penance delivered, I find myself unfailingly unable to resist these urges. It’s too bad these impulses don’t come with complementary superpowers. The ability to fly, turn invisible, or walk through walls would come in quite handy on nights like tonight.

  The main floor office, in direct contrast to the school building, looks like it has been meticulously, methodically picked through. The light from outside punches and kicks and slashes through the darkness on the walls and door, on its own sending the room into a disorienting, messy web of nuanced shadow. Distance and depth dance in an awkward foxtrot as my eyes adjust and, in time, manage to assign shapes and names to the various objects in the room. The dust on the shelves and desk is streaked and disturbed, waves and fingers and clumps of clean wood, in addition to the mostly geometric shapes where their objects originated.

  Virtually everything in this room has been rifled through, which doesn’t surprise me. What does confuse me are two things: First, that the streaks are fresh; barely any dust has settled in the tracks left behind by the stapler, the paperweight, the tiny stack of sticky notes. Second, that nothing of value seems to have been taken. There are only two reasons most people might break into an abandoned place like this: adventure or loot. But whoever came through here, or whatever number of people may have done so, left behind a couple of handsome bookends and their filling, a complete encyclopedia, standing together and presenting the alphabet on their outward-facing spines. The dust is thick throughout these artifacts, roiling off like tiny fireworks as I run my fingers along the volumes. Somewhere outside, a bird starts to chirp. I’m not familiar with the birds around here, but if their schedules match at all with those I am familiar with, I can’t have more than a couple of hours of darkness remaining. After the sun rises, I’ll run the risk of being spotted by hikers on my way back. I need to move fast and get back home. Surely, though, I have enough time to explore this building.

  A brisk wind sweeps in, as if in response to the bird’s call. It fills the room, dominant, like your classic high-school bully making his presence and superiority known, waiting for acknowledgment. The gust howls in the nooks and crevices, but this room has endured too many such gusts to take any more notice.

  A door occupies the space between a heavy bookshelf and the wall, on the north side. I suspect that it locks and, upon moving closer, find that it indeed locks from this side, and that the lock is not engaged.

  Six

  This building feels somehow more immersive, like I’m a scuba diver or an astronaut, drifting through an alien world and looking out upon previously undiscovered planets through a tiny window in the front of my helmet. It seems that this building itself was, more or less, the nervous system for the school’s operation in general. Sure, the other building had medical records, charts, and administrative offices, but this was where the students lived, where they could stop being students or patients or subjects or clients and just be people: Becky or Jennifer or Margaret or what have you.

  Certainly, this structure would have filled to the brim with emotion several times over on any given day. I picture what it must have been like in the strained stretch of time after Willa’s death: students wandering the corridors, not so much refusing to engage in their treatment as simply lacking the will or energy to make any sort of progress. Any kind of epipha
ny or breakthrough would carry with it the association of the oppressive melancholy permeating the very air. All but the strongest of friendships withered to the brink of death, due to the enigmatic answer to the question nobody could bring themselves to ask: “Is it okay to feel joy anymore?”

  A difficult question indeed, a tricky, complex bitch of a puzzle made only more confusing by the students’ own personal, emotional, mental issues, especially in learning to deal with past traumatic experiences. How can one expect them to deal with past trauma, after all, when there’s other trauma—present trauma—at the door, bearing a gift basket containing a slew of fun new emotional issues?

  The office door opens to a foyer area that looks quite nice; if it weren’t for the ever-present dust, one might look upon it and think it was used as recently as last week.

  Of course, the décor is a little dated. I can’t help but picture the decorator as someone who, try as they might, just couldn’t quite escape the seventies. Brown carpet bears the clawed feet of squashy couches; it’s hard to tell in this light, but it looks to be a dastardly mustard brown. A psychedelic-looking clock on the wall sits frozen at 10:47. I wonder how long after the school closed this clock continued to tick before the battery ran dry.

  While cozy, that’s the extent of what the room has to offer, aside from yet another door in the far corner. I make my way to it, stepping around the ugly couches. The door opens without creaking, which is relieving; though I’m confident that I’m the building’s only current occupant, the chance that another person—a fellow adventurer, or maybe even a squatter—is within earshot is enough for me to make as little noise as possible. Worse yet, there’s still a chance that my new acquaintance from the cottage in the woods was able to follow me here without detection. At this thought, my ears perk for any sort of movement they can pick up, but as far as I can hear, the building is silent save for the odd breeze whistling in the office where I entered. If another person is in an adjacent room, I’ll be able to hear if he has a loud thought.

  Although the door doesn’t creak, the smooth clicking and metal-on-metal of the handle and lock ricochet off of the walls and up to the high ceiling in this grand hall. In striking contrast with the side foyer, this hallway is extravagant. Without my calling them, words like fancy and exquisite swim to mind. A couple of seconds pass before the noise of the door closing behind me is finally swallowed by the void, and after that, silence moves back in. I stashed my flashlight before scaling the wall outside, but now I pull it back out. The click of my turning it on, normally quiet and forgettable, now bursts, slices through the air like a samurai’s blade cuts through a straw dummy.

  In an instant, the atmosphere feels tense. For no reason I can find or observe, the ambience has become brittle, precarious, and tightly wound, like an old bear trap found still taut, well into the following spring. A hushed breeze whispers through the grand hall, licking my ankles and pushing bits of loose dust around, bullying little balls of dust into the corner and tossing them about.

  The floor is sleek marble, and underneath the dust I can just see the remnants of its past, polished glory trying to push through, surely a gleaming sheen in its peak.

  The marble extends to the staircase, a gaudy, wide thing that splays out at the bottom. Oddly, it reminds me of the Hogwarts entrance hall from Harry Potter, and as I look up, I can see Hermione stepping down the steps in her new dress and new confidence.

  The stairs are to my right, my left bearing an expanse of wall with a pretty landscape portrait occupying much of the space. Long-withered potted plants sit in the corners and the small nooks to the sides of the stairs. One more door lies straight ahead, on the opposite wall, with a twin just a few feet to the right. The door on the right is marked as ‘Supplies.’ I almost dismiss it, but I remember the rumors of secret passages built by Eboncore and can’t resist poking around in there to see what I can find.

  I pull the door open and find a surplus of cleaning supplies, stacked neatly around the perimeter of the small room. I use my foot to shove pallets and boxes around, looking for a latch, lever, trap door, or seam of any kind, but I find nothing. I guess I didn’t really expect to, anyway.

  The other door is marked ‘Study Area.’ Using my key, I open this door and find several rows of desks, facing forward, organized in a near compulsively straight grid, four columns by three rows, facing the front with such an attentiveness that it almost suggests that their occupants are here, studying, entirely invisible to me.

  A small bookshelf on the left wall contains maybe fifty or sixty books; ten to fifteen copies each of four different titles, all academic. Each of the volumes has a barcode and a label with a number on it ranging from one to ten or fifteen—whatever number of copies that title reaches. I begin pulling them off the shelf, one by one, and checking out the names on the inside covers.

  Barbara Jensen was the last to possess this algebra textbook. Kelly Long’s US History textbook came back riddled with angry notes, made to seem even angrier by its bold red ink. Upon more careful inspection, the user of that particular ballpoint pen had pressed hard enough to indent the notes into the hard interior. Clearly, she was furious about the condition of the volume at the time of its return. “Ripped pages: 31, 39, 123-237, 341,” one note said. “Bent lower right corner of cover. Defaced p. 137.” Curiosity grips me. I turn to page 137. An imbalance of passion and creativity must have taken over here, heavily in favor of the former and equally lacking in the latter. Christopher Columbus, in comic contrast to his dignified portraits which are very much the norm, has a pair of penciled-in devil horns, an artificial goatee extending farther than his collar bone, and to wrap up the package and label it as the work of an adolescent, a gigantic, frighteningly detailed penis floats in front of his face without an attached body. A small, neat speech bubble next to Columbus’s head contains the words, “I suck!”

  While I recoil from the graffiti, I’m nonetheless impressed by the determined, focused dedication that this student had in her rage. Brava.

  The other books have their own varying degrees of damage, but none quite so fully (or artistically) as Kelly’s. As I continue my search, I find that one of each book is missing. Number eight, made easily evident by the books’ neat alphabetical organization, is absent from each collection.

  The teacher’s desk is what one might expect: more sticky notes, staplers, a tape dispenser. Near the edge of the surface stands an empty black cup, partitioned through the center a couple of times, presumably used for writing tools at one point. Perhaps the pen used to scribble out the angry red notes once resided in this semicircle. In one drawer, dust blankets a thick plastic bag of rock-hard sweets. Whether or not they began this hard is beyond me. I’m tempted to unwrap one and smell it, but the waxy wrapper has hardened in such a way that I could just as easily unwrap a heavy duty safe while wearing oven mitts. It seems as though someone dipped these sweets in cement upon the school’s closing, to give them a proper burial.

  Another drawer contains folder files organized as neatly as the desks in the room. These files are thin and labeled according to the student to which their contents pertain. Each is accompanied by a number. Nicole Connell—9, sits just after Willa Frye—8. I guess that a numerical system must operate independently from the alphabet, as the frequency of their admitting and discharging students would have made filing and organization a colossal pain in the dick.

  Willa’s file is disappointingly empty. Just to find out what I’m missing out on, I open Nicole’s file. Fortunately for me, it’s nothing of much import.

  One thing strikes me as interesting, though: Why keep an empty academic file of a deceased student around? Someone so meticulously organized must have seen it as excessive, unnecessary, inessential—as clutter. Maybe this teacher was simply trying to immortalize her. I slide the drawer shut and, perhaps it’s a trick of the light or of my imagination, but I’m almost certain I see a shadow flit out of the glowing square of light admitted by the western w
indow.

  In reaction more than response, I whip my head around to look through the window, but see nothing in it save for an abundant peppering of Wyoming stars, all packed up in the four little squares of late summer sky I can see through the window. I listen carefully, holding my breath, in case the shadow was not an illusion.

  Nothing befalls my ears but the breathy mountain wind pressing in against the window. That, and my own heartbeat.

  The building creaks abruptly and I nearly jump; my nerves are beginning to get the best of me.

  I breathe in as much as this altitude will allow, hold it for a few seconds, exhale. Willing myself into a calmer state, I resume my perusal.

  The third drawer is empty. The fourth opens with a clang and contains only one item: a nameplate. Mr. Arteno’s name glints up at me in bronze lettering, through the dust catching only the most tenacious of moonlight breaching the classroom.

  My work here is finished; this room has no more for me. I confirm this with one final visual sweep, then move on. The door shuts behind me with the same resounding, echoing clatter as when I entered through the foyer, but now some other sentiment hitches a ride on the acoustics, a coalescent fusion of longing and raw melancholy, like the ghosts and memories of this hall once again attempting to break through into this dimension. Having entered from this side, I spot a door on the same wall as the foyer, which evaded my notice before. It has a small square window about five feet up, and is without labels or signs. I open the door to find a small, empty room with painted cinderblock walls and a concrete floor. The probing beam of my flashlight tears away at the darkness, leaving naked and exposed a series of dents and obscenities drawn onto the wall with what seems to be crayon. These messages seem to echo the general sentiment of those spray painted onto the walls in the school area.