Copyright © 2014 by Ann Voss Peterson
This is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the authors imagination and are not to be construed as real.
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THE SCHOOL
A PARANORMAL ROMANTIC THRILLER
Ann Voss Peterson
You get out only what you put in…
Chapter One
“It’s in there. I swear.”
Josh Meier shot his friend Gertie a scowl, then glanced back at the abandoned school. Shadows from the building stretched along the ground as if reaching for them. And although Josh knew his fear was kind of dumb, especially for a third grader, he shifted his foot on the pedal of his bike, ready to take off at any second. “How do you know?”
“Saw it.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
“Last night?” He tore his attention from the school and stared at Gertie. “What… in your dreams?”
Her big, brown eyes darted to the ground, her black hair swinging forward to hide her face. “My dreams are true sometimes. You know it.”
Josh wanted to say she was crazy, lying even, but he kept his lips from moving. Hadn’t she told him two years ago tomorrow that his dad wouldn’t be coming home? Hadn’t she told him she’d seen his dad falling in her dream?
Josh remembered the heavy ache in the bottom of his stomach when his mom had awakened him that night and hugged him harder than ever. When she’d told him Daddy’d had an accident. That he’d slipped on the rocks at Devil’s Lake.
Josh had been mad at Gertie for a long time after that, even though he knew it wasn’t her fault. She’d just told him what she saw.
He stared at the school, not moving. “Ian went in, and he can’t talk anymore. He just stares at something no one else can see.”
“If you don’t want to go, don’t go.”
“Not saying that. But I can’t get in. Doors are locked.”
Gertie shook her head. “This one isn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Just do.”
Josh tried to swallow but his throat was sticky. He wished he had a piece of gum. “Didn’t they take the books out of the library when they closed the place down?”
“Nope. The school died. The books died.” Fat teardrops filled Gertie’s eyes and she brushed them away with the back of her hand. “But you can save them. That’s what I saw.”
“Why me?”
“Dunno.”
“Why not you?”
“Dunno. But I think it’s because of the special book. Your dad’s book.”
The special book. Gertie didn’t have to say which one. They both knew. The one dad used to read to him. The one with the stories and the drawings. The one that made his mom smile even through her tears the day his daddy was taken away in a box and lowered into the ground.
The one that might make her smile again.
“Okay. I’ll go.”
“You sure?” For the first time this whole afternoon, Gertie actually looked scared.
“What do you mean, you sure? You’ve been trying to talk me into it.”
“Have not. I just told you my dream.”
Josh gave her a look. Gertie didn’t play weird games like this. She was usually pretty cool, for a girl. “What gives, Gertie?”
She shook her head hard, the force almost knocking her skinny little body off her feet. “Nothing. In my dream, you saved the books. I just got a feeling. I… I don’t know.”
“That I’m going to end up like Ian?”
“It’s just a feeling.”
Now Josh felt more scared than before. But thinking of the book, thinking of his mom, he knew he had to do this anyway. “That book was my dad’s. We only borrowed it to the school. And then they closed the school down.”
Her shake turned to a nod.
“They should’ve given it back.”
Another nod.
“It’s been two years, you know. Two years tomorrow.”
He wasn’t talking about the book now, or the school, and Gertie nodded like she understood. She was good at understanding. “You miss him,” she said.
Now he was going to cry. He gripped his handle bars super hard and made the tears go back. “If it’s there, I need to get it.”
“Yes,” Gertie said, but she still looked worried.
No, not worried. Afraid. Sad. And when she lurched forward and gave Josh a big hug, her long hair tickling his nose, he couldn’t help thinking of the way his mom had hugged him when his dad died.
Awkward.
Clumsy.
Holding on as if he was the only thing she had left in the world, and she was afraid she’d lose him, too.
Josh swung off his bike and let it drop to the ground. He didn’t look at Gertie, not even a glance. If she knew how shaky his legs felt, she might hug him again, or tell him not to go, or say something that would make him cry. Scooping in a deep breath of fall air, he forced his feet to move in the direction of the school.
Ten feet from the door, he was trembling so bad, he was afraid he wouldn’t make it.
Five feet, and he almost turned around.
Then his fingers were on the handle, hot from the afternoon sun.
He pulled the door, and it opened, just like it had every day last year when he used to come here for school. He willed himself to step inside and let the thick glass close behind him.
The school looked empty, lonely even, and sounded quiet as anything Josh had ever heard. Not that he could hear much with his heart thumping so hard. He stepped forward into the darkness, his shoes scuffing and squeaking a little on the floor. The air felt super still and smelled like a wet basement and dust and… cookies.
He sniffed again, this time long and slow. It was cookies, all right. Chocolate chip. His favorite.
He took another step, then another. No one was in the school. The smell of cookies didn’t belong here.
He kept moving, even though every step felt so shaky he thought he might lose his balance.
He’d always liked his last year teacher who used to work in this school, Mrs. Edwards. She was a little weird, just like him, and wore funny t-shirts on Fridays. And sometimes when she laughed real hard, she made a funny, snorting sound.
Maybe Mrs. Edwards was the one baking.
He wasn’t sure that made sense, but he liked the idea. It made him feel less like turning around and running home.
Mrs. Edwards could be here, couldn’t she? She’d given him a homemade cookie once, when he’d forgotten to bring money for the library bake sale.
He kept his feet walking forward, concentrating on the memory.
The cookie she’d given him had been the best ever. It really had. And if it was her, she’d probably give him one now. Maybe even let him lick the beaters.
The deeper he went inside the school, the darker it got. Shadows cupped the wooden shelves stretching along the halls where all the kids had hung their coats. A tiny scratching sound came from his old classroom, and he jumped.
“Mrs. Edwards?” Josh called out, a little ashamed at the quaver in his voice.
No one answered. Nothing but the cookie s
mell, growing stronger.
By the time he reached the lunch room, he was more nervous than hungry. He peaked inside anyway, hoping to see Mrs. Edwards or even the lunch lady’s friendly face, even though he knew they probably weren’t there. But the room was as dark as the rest of the school, and as he got closer to the kitchen, the cookie smell went away.
The book. He needed to get the book and get out of here. Forget the cookies and stick to the plan.
But as he left the lunch room and walked back into the hall, the cookie smell came back. Except for the kindergarten classrooms, all that was left this way was the gym… and the library. Was that where the cookies were? Cookies and books, his favorite things of all.
Or would he find whatever it was that made Ian Buchner stare? That made him not able to talk?
He passed by the gym and reached the library’s big double door. Bracing himself, he leaned against one side and gave it a giant push. The door opened, and light streamed out.
Not just light.
Light, the mouth-watering smell of cookies, and a deep laugh. And then Josh saw who was there waiting. Not Mrs. Edwards or the lunch lady, but someone he thought he’d never see again.
Josh wasn’t even ashamed when the tears started streaming down his face.
“I’m so glad you made it, Josh,” his dad said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Chapter Two
“Gone?” Rachel Meier frowned down at the eight-year-old neighbor girl her son had befriended. “What are you talking about, Gertie? Where did Josh go?”
The girl twirled a hank of dark hair around her index finger. “It’s all my fault. I made him.”
“Made him do what?”
Her gaze dropped to the apartment hallway’s worn gray carpet. “Go in the school.”
For a moment, Rachel didn’t understand how that was possible. Both Josh and Gertie attended third grade clear across town. There was no way they could have ridden their bikes all the way there and back in the hour they’d been out playing.
“Our old school,” Gertie clarified before Rachel could ask. The girl peered past Rachel, focusing on the sliding glass window at the rear of the townhouse. Just past that window, through the postage-stamp yard and on the other side of the fence stood the kids’ former elementary school, closed the previous summer due to budget cuts.
“It wasn’t locked?” Rachel asked.
“Not the door by the swings. Last night I dreamed it would be open, and it was.”
“And that’s why Josh went inside? Because of your dream?” As strange as this seemed, it didn’t surprise Rachel. There was something… otherworldly about this little girl. And Josh had confessed that Gertie told him she’d dreamed Steven fell the day before the rangers had found his broken body on the rocks.
Gertie nodded, her dark hair swinging forward, curtaining her pixie face. “I didn’t know he would get lost.”
“How do you know he’s lost?”
The girl shrugged.
“Is there something you’re not telling me?”
Another shrug. “He didn’t come out, that’s all.”
“That’s all?” Rachel let a touch of sternness creep into her tone. Gertie was a nice girl. She and Josh had played together since they’d first moved in to the townhouse. If she felt guilty about something it was only a matter of time before she blurted it out.
“It was my dream,” she finally said.
“What about your dream, honey?”
“Nothing. A feeling he got lost for a little while is all. Before he saved the books.”
Rachel waited, although the thought of Josh lost and needing her had her heart pounding hard enough to crack a rib.
“But I’m kinda worried the faery got him.”
Josh’s favorite book had been a thick, leather-bound tome of faery lore he’d found in a box of Steven’s old things in the basement. Rachel had read it to him every night before bed, giving both of them a feeling of connection to Steven that had helped soften the pain of their loss. Gertie had been fascinated with the book, too, and last year, figuring he was getting too old for faeries, Josh had lent it to the school library to share with the other kids.
“A faery didn’t get Josh, Gertie.”
“It didn’t?”
“No. Why don’t I walk you back home, then I’ll go find him, okay?”
“I can help.”
Rachel smiled into those big, sincere eyes, even deeper brown than her son’s. “If I need you, I’ll send you a text.”
Gertie beamed. Her parents had just bought her a cell phone when her mother had returned to work full time, and the little girl was very proud. “Okay.”
Rachel grabbed her fleece jacket and her own cell phone, then stepped out onto the front step. She glanced to the left, focusing on her neighbor’s front bay window, hoping for a chance to ask him to accompany her to check out the school. His car wasn’t in the driveway, his black cat peering at her with yellow eyes. From all appearances, Nate wasn’t home.
“Are you scared?” Gertie asked.
Rachel gave a little laugh, even though the question wasn’t particularly funny. “Scared? Of what?”
“Faeries. They aren’t very easy to get along with sometimes.”
“Oh, I’m not worried about faeries. You know how many times I read that book? I think that qualifies me as a faery expert.”
“But you want Mr. Welks to go with you.”
Rachel held out her hand for the little girl. “We’d better hurry, Gertie. We don’t want Josh to miss dinner.”
She walked with Gertie to the unit next door, and Gertie stopped with her hand on the knob and glanced back. “Maybe you should take a nail.”
“A nail?”
“In case the faery is there. They don’t like iron and steel. They can’t put the come hither on you if you have a nail in your pocket.”
Rachel had forgotten that part. Some faery expert. She gave the girl a smile. “I’ll be fine, sweetie.” And as she watched Gertie let herself into the townhouse, Rachel couldn’t help but wish that something as simple as a nail would solve all the problems she faced.
It didn’t take long for Rachel to slip through the gap between fences and cross the weed-choked soccer field. The cool, October wind tossed her shoulder-length hair, the same wheat-brown shade as her son’s, although his was always unruly. She dug in her pockets for something to keep it out of her eyes but came up empty.
Josh’s bike was lying on the edge of the playground, as if he’d let it fall instead of taking time to prop up the kick stand. But even though he often abused it this way despite Rachel asking him to be more careful, he would never leave the playground without it. He must be still inside. She just prayed he was busy playing on the gym equipment or lost in library books himself and not lying somewhere hurt. A boy from down the street had gotten injured at the school just two weeks ago.
The late afternoon sun hunkered low in the sky, the days growing shorter and shadows longer as Halloween approached. She peered through the glass doors. The school was relatively dark inside, windows blocked with sheets of cardboard in an effort to discourage vandals. Rachel pulled her smart phone from her pocket and called up the flashlight app then grasped the door handle. It was unlocked just as Gertie said, and Rachel pulled it open and stepped inside.
“Hello?” Rachel called.
Silence.
“Josh? Are you in here? Anyone?”
Again, not a peep.
Unlike her son who was a great student, Rachel had never enjoyed school—not the academics nor the rule following nor the social jungle—and her stomach quivered a little as she stepped inside, memories of childhood torments clinging to the edges of her mind.
Since Josh had attended school here just last year, the building’s layout was familiar enough. The entrance led into one of the side halls that fed into the main corridor. A shelf ran on both sides, hooks to hang coats and snow pants underneath, a place to toss hats above. But even though
the surroundings were familiar, the air felt different. Dead and unused, it smelled of waxed floors that had grown dusty.
She took the tributary to the main hall, moving from memory as much as by her phone’s light and the slight glow from glass doors at the ends of the halls. The last time she’d been here the walls had been festooned with student artwork, positive motivational messages hanging from dropped ceiling tiles that were decorated with the handprints of each kindergarten class from the past thirty years. Now the walls were stripped, the ceiling tiles gone, only the motivational placards remained, their cheery memes feeling a little surreal in the abandoned halls.
BE A BUDDY, NOT A BULLY.
BELIEVE & ACHIEVE.
SCHOOL: YOU GET OUT ONLY WHAT YOU PUT IN.
Calling out Josh’s name, Rachel ducked in one classroom after another, sweeping her light under stacked chairs, tables, and desks. But though she was relieved not to find her son lying injured under a collapsed pile of furniture, she felt increasingly panicked over hearing no answer, not even the slightest sound.
She needed to check his classroom from last year, the gym, the library.
She walked faster, sweeping the hall with her light, the glow flickering as if her phone battery was running out.
She’d just charged it, hadn’t she?
She stopped in the middle of the hall to check, when a drop of something cold hit her face. She wiped her cheek then studied her fingers.
Water?
Another shot hit her, this time larger, splashing her shoulder, drenching her hair.
She spun around, zeroing in on the bubbler tucked into a side hall next to the girl’s bathroom. “Good one, Josh. You scared me. Now come on. It’s late. Let’s get out of here.”
Silence answered her.
“Josh? No more jokes. Let’s go.”
She saw the stream of water this time, arcing toward her. She jumped back, and it hit the tile short, splashing the hems of her jeans.
“Josh. Stop. Josh?” In the feeble light coming from the far door, she couldn’t see any sign of her son.
The School: A Supernatural Thriller (Val Ryker Series) Page 1
