I’ve never told this story before. I’m not sure I’ve ever even talked about it. After everything happened, I think Joey and Tristan and I just felt like it was something that shouldn’t be talked about. That maybe by just avoiding the subject we could pretend it never happened. That maybe we could forget. It didn’t work. At least not for me. I don’t know. Maybe Tristan and Joey have forgotten—like I said, we haven’t talked about it. But something is happening, and I feel my story should be recorded, just in case.
The whole thing happened while they were building the new high school. This would have been sometime in the summer of 2000 or 2001, I think—near my 6th grade year. Joey and Tristan and I had been hanging out at my house (I think we were hanging out by then and no longer playing—one gets to an age where one feels sensitive about the terminology of such things). At any rate, we were at my house, no doubt climbing trees, fighting with sticks, and doing whatever else that boys of that age are wont to do. We had dinner at my house—probably pizza from Luigi’s—and Tristan and Joey were spending the night. (Thinking back on it, this seems a little odd—I rarely was one for sleepovers. In fact this may be the only time one happened in that era of my life.)
Sleepovers, of course, are rarely about sleep, and Tristan, Joey, and I talked until late into the night. I don’t remember the thread of the conversation. What I do remember is that it had been dark for quite some time, with everyone in the house asleep save the three of us, when Joey said, “Hey, let’s go check out the new high school.”
I was puzzled. “What are you talking about? The high school isn’t even finished yet.”
Joey looked at me like I was an idiot. “Yeah. That’s why we should go look. Haven’t you ever wanted to explore around an abandoned building before? When the school’s finished, there’ll be all sorts of places we can’t go. But right now, we can go anywhere!”
I have always been sort of afraid of authority. I never liked breaking rules or getting in trouble or in some way not living up to the version of me I felt like I was expected to be. But at the same time, I spent my youth desperate to have people like me, and I was constantly worried that I wasn’t cool enough for Joey, one of the few friends I had. So it was with great relief that I heard, “Uh, I don’t know about this.”
It was Tristan. Sensible, reliable Tristan. My relief was tangible. Tristan would be the voice of reason, Joey would back down, we would go to bed, and no one would get in trouble. I wouldn’t even have to be the uncool one for stopping it from happening. Tristan’s intervention was a gift from God.
Joey shrugged. “Okay.” I relaxed. “I guess I can just go to the high school myself.”
“What?! Wait!” But by that time, Joey was out of the room. “Tristan, we gotta go with him!” My mind was running through scenarios: Joey falling from some scaffolding, hitting his head on the floor, and dying; Joey stepping on a nail, getting tetanus, and having to get his leg amputated; Joey stealing something, getting arrested, and winding up in jail for the rest of his life. In all these scenarios, I could hear my parents asking “Why weren’t you there with him to keep him from doing stupid stuff?” I was in full-blown panic mode.
I think Tristan was probably more clear-headed. Nevertheless, he agreed with my assessment that we should probably not leave Joey to his own devices. So we both followed Joey outside.
If you go to the River Falls High School, you may notice that unless you come either at the beginning or end of the school day, the road it’s on isn’t particularly busy. Not that any place in River Falls could be properly called busy, but Cemetery Road, the location of both my family’s house and the high school, is a little out of the way. Before the high school was built, though, the road was even emptier. I don’t remember if, at the time of this story, there was still a copse of trees across the street, but I’m pretty sure the hockey rink hadn’t been built yet and there was still farmland. And, of course, the cemetery.
The cemetery wasn’t particularly old, with polished new headstones laid out in a neat, orderly manner, and a convenient path to drive one’s car through, should one feel so inclined. The only thing to lend it an air of mystery or melancholy were the pines, reaching to the height of telephone poles and letting through only slivers of light.
There had been talk, when they first considered building a new high school, of changing the name of the street from Cemetery Road to some cheerier appellation. Adults, clearly too far from high school themselves, talked with grave (hah!) concern about the effect the name of the street might have on the psyche of the poor students who would have to study there. But presumably more sensible minds prevailed, because the name never wound up being changed. No one I talked to ever seemed to care. Certainly I didn’t.
And yet, whether this is a true memory or the coloring of my recollection by the events that happened subsequently, I have a distinct impression that as we walked down that thoroughly ordinary, almost empty street, I felt a chill entirely distinct both from the night’s breeze and from the fear of the forbidden. And I was struck, as we walked in silence those few blocks to the high school, that there were eyes that watched and ears that listened and breaths that held themselves in some place just beyond this mortal realm.
The high school was dark and looked empty. It appeared to be nearly finished, to my untrained eye, at least. There were doors, windows, everything. Tristan and I approached to find Joey standing at the front doors. We all stood, just looking at the building in silence for a minute. Then I spoke up. “Okay. Well, we’ve seen it now. Let’s head back.”
Joey looked at me as if to say “Really?”
I sighed. “So do you have any plan for getting in? Because I’m definitely leaving if your plan is to break a window.” I had broken two windows in my life at that point and had no interest in adding a third one to the list.
Joey shrugged. “I’m sure there’s some way in. Maybe someone left a door unlocked.” Joey walked over to the nearest door.
Tristan shook his head. “They’re not going to leave a door unlocked. Look, we should just—”
“Got it!” Joey held the door open.
“I stand corrected,” Tristan laughed in disbelief. “All right, then.” And he walked through the open door. I followed him in, and Joey took up the rear.
I realized when we entered that there was a lot of work left to do. The bones of the building—all the structure—had been built, but there was a fair ways to go before the building would be ready to have students in it.
We had come in through the front entrance, next to where the principal’s office is today. Walking through, we were inevitably drawn to the commons area—a wide open space with high ceilings. Light filtered in through the windows, and the columns supporting the ceiling cast deep shadows across the floor. We looked around a bit. I remember Joey having some fun jumping off the staircases that led to the second floor from the commons area. Then, just as I was thinking that this all wasn’t so bad, and that maybe this wouldn’t end in disaster, we heard a loud crash.
“What was that?!” I asked my companions, heart pounding.
“I think it came from over there.” Tristan gestured to the far end of the commons room where some stairs led down to a lower floor which we had yet to explore.
“Dang it! Do you think someone knows we’re here?” I asked, worriedly. “Maybe we should leave.”
“No way!” Joey said, full of bravado. “We have to go check this out.”
“I’m with Nathan on this one,” Tristan said. “We could get into serious trouble.”
“Come on, you guys! It’ll be fine! Just—” At this point, there was another crash, and I saw a flash of purple light downstairs. Joey noticed it, too. “Now that is something you have to see! Don’t you want to know what that is?”
“Well—” My resolve was slipping.
“If we don’t go look, we’ll never know what it was.” Joey looked back and forth between Tristan and me. Tristan turned to look at me and shrugged.
I sighed. “Okay. We’ll go look really quick, but then we’ve gotta get out of here.”
Joey grinned and nodded. “Let’s go, then.”
We walked down the stairs. “Over there.” Tristan pointed down the hall to a faint, glow, flickering in deep reds and purples. We made our way towards what we discovered to be an open door to what would become the gym, and crouched, looking in through the doorway.
There was a man. I couldn’t make out his features in the dark, but I could tell that his stance was one of confident defiance—the stance of a man who is facing a formidable task, but is secure in his victory. And yet the thing he stood in defiance of—
I find it difficult to describe exactly what the creature was like. I can say that it was tall, though I couldn’t tell you how tall—it seemed to be larger or smaller from moment to moment. Likewise, I can say that it was roughly humanoid, though the number of limbs and their configurations seemed to be in constant flux as well. Indeed, this being—this writhing, shifting mass of shadows cloaked in burgundy flame—seemed to have no fixed features at all. And then it turned its gaze towards me.
It was then that I knew I had been wrong. For the creature did have one fixed aspect: its eyes. I will never forget those eyes as long as I live. They were a hunter’s eyes: hungry, but patient, glowing with a seemingly-inextinguishable golden flame. They held me paralyzed with fear. I tried to draw my own eyes away but found myself incapable of doing so.
The terrifying being slipped around the man, coolly as a cat, and began making its way towards us. And as it approached, its eyes ever held mine. As it drew nearer, its eyes widened, and I saw death.
The death I saw was my own, reflected a thousand times over, in different circumstances and in different personages. As one sometimes in a dream finds that one is playing a character not oneself, I found myself in this being’s eyes playing a myriad of different roles, dying in each. As I found myself trapped in the creature’s monstrous gaze, I knew that role I was currently playing—the 12-year-old with his two friends in the basement of a building they shouldn’t be in—was about to come to an end. With what energy I could muster, I started a silent prayer. And then I saw a bright light, and I passed out.
It was still night when I awoke. I was lying on some grass near the high school, and Joey and Tristan were sitting nearby, on opposite sides of me.
“Hey,” said Tristan. Joey nodded.
“Hey,” I said back.
A man walked over to us from a black car parked nearby. Though I hadn’t seen a clear glimpse of him, I knew he was the same man that we had seen in the gym, and I knew that however it had happened, he had saved my life. He crouched in front of us.
“You’ve seen something crazy today. Something no one your age should see. Maybe something no one should see.” He glanced over to the high school and back to us. “You should head home. Try to forget this ever happened. And don’t worry. The seal should hold.” He stood, nodded to us, and walked over to his car. As he drove away, we slowly got to our feet and started walking home.
We walked in silence, each of us wrapped in our own thoughts. I looked over to the troubled faces on my friends and wondered what they had seen, if they had looked death in the face as I had.
As I said, we never talked about that day, and maybe that’s as well. Still, Joey and I drifted apart sometime around then, and occasionally I wonder if maybe the events of that day played a part in that. On the other hand, people go their separate ways all the time for no reason so dramatic as an encounter with a man-eating demon, so I don’t worry too much about it.
Each of us did, of course, wind up going to the local high school when the time came. I never was particularly fond of the gym, but that probably had less to do with my unfortunate encounter and more to do with the fact that it was a gym, location of pep rallies and physical education classes. All in all, my high school experience was entirely normal. In time, I thought about the events of that summer less and less, and life went on largely as normal, as it tends to do after big, dramatic events.
Which makes this a fine place to end my story. Or rather, it would, if it weren’t for recent events. For just this June, on the penultimate day of school, I returned to the high school to say hi to various teachers. The building was largely the same. There were, of course a few minor changes, and some teachers I had known had retired and been replaced, but all in all, it was a very familiar experience. When I went to see Mrs. Loney, the choir teacher, she told me the school was being shut down for the summer. Some pipes hadn’t been installed correctly, so now they needed to be replaced.
I wasn’t surprised. All sorts of things were screwed up when the school was first built. That the pipes would be messed up as well came as no surprise. And yet, as I walked around, visiting various teachers, there was a certain strange tension in the air that I found all too familiar. Wherever I walked, I felt a silent, watching presence and some ancient instinct warning me of danger.
When I was done, I exited the high school and stepped out into the bright summer sunlight. As I did so, I felt a weight I didn’t know I carried lift from off my shoulders. And though I could feel the shadows of the school reach out to me, I knew I was safe for the moment. I walked home down the old bike path to my house and saw a black car drive past in the other direction. I didn’t much feel like following.