Dark Halls - A Horror Novel

by Jeff Menapace

  Can’t fucking blame the guy. Some kid stabs my foot then goes all Linda Blair on me, I’m swinging too. As a first-year teacher seated with the head of HR, Ryan thought it best to keep that last thought to himself.

  Hansen continued. “The boy’s eyes welled up from that punch, rolled from white back to their natural blue, and before you know it, there was just a plain old fourth-grader in the room, sobbing from a punch on the nose his principal had just given him.”

  “Jesus,” Ryan said. “So that’s why Mr. James left? Because he assaulted a child?”

  “No, no, no—the boy doesn’t even remember Ed hitting him. Doesn’t even remember how he got to the damn school in the first place. Much like the children who committed those murders over the years, the boy remembered nothing.”

  “And I imagine there’s a fleet of specialists willing to testify under oath to that,” Ryan said.

  Hansen’s eyebrows knitted, looking as though he couldn’t be sure whether Ryan was patronizing him or not. Still, he replied: “Yes—that’s right.”

  “How did something like this escape the media?” Ryan asked. “I admit it is small compared to the other stuff, but it’s pretty darn shocking, if you ask me.”

  “Ed buried it. The parents of the child were initially upset, of course, but agreed once they heard the details of what happened and got a good look at Ed’s foot. Pretty soon it was as good as fiction. Ed buried lots of stuff when he was there. The small stuff. But after this…after this, Ed was done.”

  Ryan was now at a crossroads. He wanted to leave. He had been here way too long, and knowing now that he had the job, he saw little point in continuing his chat with Hansen if all they were going to do was exchange ghost stories. The problem, however, was that Hansen had hooked him with the last story, the bastard.

  Still, Ryan could not be blatant about his desire for more; asking a storyteller like Hansen for more yarns was like asking a gun fanatic whether he wanted more ammo. Ryan needed to be subtle in his approach, squeeze out one or maybe two more quick gems if he was ever going to have that beer with his buddies tonight.

  “This small stuff you keep mentioning, Jerry—this small stuff that most are unaware of…is there something I should be aware of before attempting to do my job? Something that may prevent me from doing my job to the best of my capabilities?”

  Not bad.

  With both elbows on the table, Hansen interlocked his short, stubby fingers and rested his chin on them, hammock-like. He then frowned as though trying to figure out a riddle. After a substantial pause, chin still resting on his finger-hammock, jaw closed, answering through his lips only, he replied: “I don’t know.”

  Ryan wanted to laugh out loud. After all the man had shared, now he was at a loss for words?

  “No?” Ryan could not help but blurt.

  Hansen unlocked his fingers and lifted his chin. He sat back and breathed deep. “Nobody knows, Ryan. Nobody knows what to expect. Hell, if we had expected any of the prior tragedies to occur, we could have avoided them altogether, right?”

  Good point.

  “I will say this,” Hansen began. “Trust your instincts and grow eyes in the back of your head. A bit clichéd, I know, but it’s the truth. I would also suggest trusting no one in addition to your instincts.”

  “That’s…kind of unusual advice for a first-year teacher. I mean, I would imagine a rapport with my peers, and especially my grade-level team, is highly encouraged. That would be tough to come by without a little trust,” Ryan said.

  Hansen offered a little smile. “So give them a little, but not a lot. You seem like a good guy, Ryan. I’ll probably be fired for telling you this stuff.” He laughed at his own wit. “But the truth, at least as far as I see it—”

  (Grain of salt, anyone?)

  “—is that weird stuff happens in that school when your guard is down; keep it high and tight.”

  Hansen stood and held out his hand. The interview was finally done.

  “Welcome aboard, Ryan,” he said.

  Ryan took Hansen’s hand and gave it a firm shake. “I’ve really got the job? Just like that?”

  Hansen smiled and said: “Just like that. Pam—one of my HR reps—will have some paperwork for you to sign. She’s at the school now, waiting for you. She’ll be able to give you a brief look around, show you your classroom. The building officially opens this Monday. You can start setting up your room then. You’ll have until the 28th to get everything ready. After that you’ll have a week of orientation. Classes officially start on the 5th.”

  “Thank you, Jerry.”

  Hansen extended his hand again. Ryan thought it odd, but took it anyway. Hansen held the shake longer than before, smiling at Ryan like a parent might when their child boarded the school bus for the first time. It was a smile that held both well-wishes and worry.

  5

  Exiting the human resources building, Ryan cared little that he was back in the oven after being pampered by the building’s conditioned air—he had a job and was temporarily impervious to discomfort. And it was this imperviousness that kept him from doing the upper-body striptease en route back to his car that he’d promised himself earlier. After all, he still needed to meet Pam the HR rep at Pinewood. Job now secured or not, he figured it best to keep the straitjacket and noose on for professional appearance’s sake. The striptease could wait until he was on his way home.

  Ryan was seconds from putting his key into the driver’s side door of his car when he felt eyes on his back. He turned and found a woman staring at him. Her expression was an easy yet curious read. She looked disgusted with him.

  “Hi,” Ryan said.

  The woman said nothing, just fixed him with that look of disgust. Ryan shrugged, unlocked his car, and went to open the door.

  “Why would you work there?” she finally asked. Her voice was unsteady. The voice of a woman who’d recently been crying or was on the verge of crying.

  Ryan pulled his hand away from the car door and faced her. He guessed her at perhaps forty, her unkempt appearance making Ryan’s guess generous. Her posture was fidgety. Her face, her eyes in particular, dark and bagged—that of a woman who hadn’t known sleep for some time.

  “Work where?” Ryan asked.

  “Why?” she asked again. Her fidgeting grew. Ryan thought it looked as though she was trying to ignore a bug crawling up her leg.

  “I just left a human resources building,” Ryan said. “How do you know where I’ll be working?”

  The lady took a few steps towards him. Ryan felt uneasy as she approached. Surely he wasn’t afraid of this woman?

  Local loonies, dude. Can’t be too sure.

  “I know where you’ll be working,” she said. Her tone was harsh, the clear yet curious disgust for Ryan climbing with his tiptoeing around her query.

  Ryan placed his portfolio on the top of his car. “How do you know I got the job?”

  Two bugs crawling up her leg now. Blatant disgust now partnered with anger.

  “You got the damn job,” she said. “There’s a reason no one wants to work there, you know. A reason that no one wants to send their children there, too.”

  Ryan sighed. Hansen’s sister, perhaps? he mused. More story time ahead?

  “Well, apparently I’ll be teaching a full classroom in less than a month,” he said. “Go figure.”

  “You’ll never get that far,” the woman replied. “The district demands we build a new elementary school, but why in the name of God would they rebuild?”

  “Convenience, I suppose. Don’t have to search for a new location. Foundation is already built. It’s just a matter of putting the pieces back together.”

  “Some pieces don’t fit. Some pieces won’t fit.”

  Ryan sighed again. “So I’ve heard. Listen, I hate to be rude, but it’s got to be about a hundred and fifty degrees out here—if I stay any longer, I’m going to start seeing purple spots before my eyes.”

  Ryan flashed on an old Bugs Bu
nny cartoon. Elmer Fudd was freaking out after Bugs had convinced him he had “rabbititis” by painting the room with an array of spots, a sure symptom of the horrible disease. Spots! I see spots before my eyes! Dr. Killpatient! Dr. Killpatient!

  Ryan politely waited for a response. He also bit the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling, Mr. Fudd and Mr. Bunny tickling him as they always had. Figuring no response was forthcoming—only the constant, hateful glare—Ryan opened the car door, tossed his portfolio inside, and was halfway inside his vehicle when the woman finally responded. And Ryan was certain he’d heard her wrong.

  “My son’s a retard,” the woman had said, or so it seemed.

  Ryan froze, one leg inside the car. “I beg your pardon?”

  “My son is a retard,” she said again.

  He had heard her correctly.

  Ryan pulled his leg from the car and faced the woman again. He measured his response. What type of mother called her son a “retard,” for Christ’s sake?

  “I’m…not sure that’s a very politically correct way of stating something like that, ma’am,” he opted to say.

  The woman shifted continuously from her left foot to her right. Three bugs on her leg now. “Doesn’t matter what you say. I know how it is. My son is a retard. He’s a retard because of that fucking place you insist on working in.”

  “Retard” and now “fuck?” Classy lady, this one. Does this nut job really have the audacity to blame the school for her poor son’s misfortune?

  The woman read the skepticism on Ryan’s face as plain as if he’d spoken it.

  “I had a perfectly normal son until the day he entered third grade at that…that shithole you call a school.”

  “Shithole” now, huh? Very classy indeed. Also a little unnerving if he was being honest with himself.

  “Only one week after school had started, I get a call from the counselor,” the woman went on. “She claimed he couldn’t even write his own name anymore. Couldn’t even solve the simplest of arithmetic problems. He couldn’t even color a goddamn coloring book without making a mess of it!”

  He was drugged.

  “Did you have any pharmacology tests done?” Ryan asked. “Perhaps he ingested something toxic?”

  “Of course I did! They found nothing! The only thing those tests did find was that…was that his IQ had dropped fifty points.”

  The shock on Ryan’s face arrived before he could leash it.

  “Yes!” the woman exclaimed. “Fifty points! One minute he’s about to start learning multiplication, and the next minute he’s struggling to tell me what two-plus-fucking-two is!” The woman was crying now. A twinge of sympathy poked at Ryan’s heart. Still, he remained ever wary of the woman.

  “I’m so very sorry, ma’am,” Ryan said. “That’s very tragic. I don’t know what could have happened to your boy, I really don’t. However, I still believe referring to your son as a ‘retard’ is not—”

  “I know what happened! Everyone in this town knows what happened! And he is a retard! He’s a retard because he’s not the child God gave me! God gave me a perfectly healthy boy. The boy I own now is damaged. Something unholy in that school damaged my boy.”

  Ryan dropped his head and shook it. Time to squash this.

  “Again, I’m truly sorry, ma’am. I wish you and your son the very best.” He turned his back to the woman, entered his car, and shut the door as she started to speak again. He backed out of his spot, watching her talk—yell—at his driver’s side window as he did so.

  Ryan caught one last sight of her in his rearview as he pulled away. She was now roaring at the world in all directions. Roaring at the sky, to God, perhaps.

  Ryan still did not believe in ghosts or curses or witchcraft or whatever the hell the local loonies were currently settled on, but he did have to admit that the woman had one over on old Hansen. Hansen had him for an hour and had done little but strain Ryan’s eyes from rolling them so much after every melodramatic spin Hansen put on each of his—admittedly amusing at times—tales.

  This woman had had him for less than five minutes, and Ryan would be lying if he said he wasn’t pulling away feeling—admittedly, but with no trace of amusement this time—a little spooked.

  6

  Rebecca Lawrence poured herself a cup of coffee and sat across from her mother at their kitchen table. “Do you think I got the job because I’m your daughter?”

  Carol Lawrence lifted her own cup of coffee to her mouth and spoke a second before the rim touched her lips. “Does it matter?”

  Rebecca shrugged. “Maybe a little. I mean, it’s nice to have a job, but I was just wondering whether they would have offered me the job had I not been your daughter.”

  “Life lesson, my dear: sometimes it’s not what you know but who you know. Besides, you know how desperate we are for teachers.”

  “Gee, thanks, Mom. So, now I got the job because I’m your daughter and they’re desperate?”

  Carol laughed. “Whoops—guess that came out the wrong way.”

  Rebecca smiled. “Forgiven.”

  “What I’m wondering,” Carol said, “is if you’re going to be weirded out by having your mommy teaching in the same building as you.”

  “Doesn’t bother me in the slightest,” Rebecca said. “In fact, I’m sure I’ll be quite the popular newcomer when it comes to gossip time—being the daughter of one of the only remaining employees from Highland Elementary and all.”

  “You’re making me feel old.”

  “Revenge for the ‘desperate’ comment.”

  They shared a pleasant smile, sipped from their cups, and sat silently for a moment. Then: “Are you nervous?”

  “A little,” Rebecca replied. “First grade is a big jump from fifth when I student-taught.”

  “You’ll be fine. Just be sure to establish good structure and routine right from the beginning. Those first few weeks are crucial.”

  Rebecca nodded back, then dropped her gaze to her coffee and kept it there when she asked: “Do you believe any of the stuff that’s said about the school?”

  “What stuff is that?”

  “That it’s cursed or haunted or whatever.”

  Carol raised an eyebrow. “I would hope that I raised you well enough that you didn’t believe in those sorts of things.”

  “You did, and I don’t, but…”

  “But…?”

  “Come on, Mom, think about all the horrible stuff that happened there. You were there for it all. Are you telling me it didn’t make you wonder from time to time?”

  Carol laughed. “Wonder whether the place was haunted?”

  “Never mind.”

  Carol finished her coffee, stood, and went to the counter for a refill.

  “Do you believe in God?” Rebecca asked.

  Carol turned, coffeepot in one hand, empty mug in the other. Her eyebrow was up again. “How did this go from a ‘first day of work’ chat to an ‘is there a God’ chat?”

  Rebecca shrugged again. “I don’t know. Just kinda came out after all the voodoo talk about the school, I guess.”

  “Fair enough. I do believe in a higher power, but I’ve got no time for organized religion. And I always encouraged you to follow your own path; you know that.” She returned to her seat next to her daughter with a fresh cup.

  “Are you happy that I don’t follow an organized religion like you?” Rebecca asked. “That I don’t go to church?”

  “Not at all. But I am proud that you made up your own mind on the matter without others influencing you.”

  Rebecca dropped her gaze to her coffee again. “It does make you wonder, though, doesn’t it? All the crazy stuff that happened in that building? It’s like something out of a movie.”

  “It is definitely movie material, that’s for sure. I suppose I’m just happy they decided to rebuild and that I’ve got my old job back. Subbing during the interim was no fun at all.”

  Rebecca sat back in her chair and ran a hand through her l
ong blonde hair. “I still don’t know why they decided to rebuild,” she said. “After a vigilante act like that fire, you would think they would have left the school alone. Bulldozed it or something.”

  “There’s only one other elementary school in the district, honey. Couldn’t exactly pack all those kids in neighboring towns into one school. Would you want to teach a class with fifty kids?”

  To Rebecca, such a thought was more terrifying than the more immediate prospect of ghosts and curses. “Hell no.”

  Carol laughed. “Well, there you go then.”

  “But to rebuild,” Rebecca said. “That’s what the locals are still so upset about, isn’t it? Rebuilding instead of relocating?”

  “There was no place to relocate. Everyone seems to gloss over that fact, even though the multiple town meetings emphasized this truth over a dozen times.”

  Rebecca grunted. She’d attended a few of those town meetings with her mother and was guilty of forgetting this fact herself. She switched gears in her questioning. “I don’t think I ever asked you why you stayed on so long at the school. So many teachers left during the tragedies, but you never even considered it, did you?”

  “Of course I considered it. But then what type of example would I be setting for the children? ‘Kids, ghosts and monsters aren’t real, but I’m getting the hell out of here while the gettin’ is good’ doesn’t exactly reflect well on me, does it?”

  Rebecca laughed.

  “More importantly,” Carol went on, “teachers are informal parents to their students. We help raise them. They look to us for guidance, and support, and even love. To abandon them after such a traumatizing moment in their lives is just that: abandonment. I never want a child to feel such a thing during their formative years, no way. Not on my watch.”

  Rebecca all but beamed at her mother. She didn’t think it was possible to respect her more. “That’s awesome, Mom. It really is.”

  Carol gave a theatric bow of the head. Rebecca laughed again.

  “Enough crazy talk,” Carol said. “What activities do you have planned for your first day?”