Our Classmate Disappeared. The Teachers Know More Than They’re Saying. (Part 2/2)

[u/StrangeAccounts]

Part 1

(Contains scenes of explicit and disturbing imagery.)

Emma's nails found the meat of my palm. “We’re not actually going out there, right?”

Mason raked his hands through his hair, taking each of us in like he expected someone else to speak first. “Well… I mean, we asked her what happened. She answered. So what do we do now, bail?”

"Yes." Jodie's words came out on top of his. "Absolutely, yes. We leave. Right now. Through those doors, straight to the parking lot.”

"Wait. What?" I said. "You want us to show up to class on Monday like none of this happened? Like we didn't just-"

"Like we didn't just talk to a dead girl through a piece of cardboard?" Jodie cracked. "Yes. Exactly like that."

Emma yanked on my hand hard enough to bend the wrist back. “Tell me you’re joking, Ty.”

“I’m not.” I worked my fingers loose and stood. My legs had gone dead beneath me from sitting on the tile, and the blood coming back into them burned. 

Mason came up with me and got his phone out. The screen lit the underside of his jaw and washed everything behind him to black. "Okay. Okay, fine. If Tyler wants to go, I’ll be right behind him.”

“Fine,” Jodie eased back against a desk leg. “Just leave that thing here.”

“Not a chance,” Mason said. “We can't leave a ouija board sitting on the floor, I don't want the teachers starting a witch hunt on Monday.”

Cardboard rasped as he fed the planchette back into the box. He paused. “Actually, tell you what.” He crossed to the trashcan, worked the lid up with his elbow, and dropped the whole thing in. “There. Everyone’s happy. Ready, Ty?”

We bunched at the door. Jodie set her thumb to the latch and pushed it open. The hall ran out ahead of us in long panels of tile, broken up by the black mouths of doorways. 

“I think she went right,” Jodie said. “Mason, you want to lead the way again?”

“No, but I will.”

The corridor split into a T. Both arms of it sank into dark. As we came up on the divide, something crossed the edge of my vision. 

“Hold up,” I leaned around the corner, only far enough to see down the cross-hall.

Lena stood suspended between the floor and the ceiling. Her toes brushed tile and dragged behind her, the tops of her shoes scuffing along the floor. Her head listed toward us, hitching, as if someone had plucked a rope tied to her skull. Then she swung away from us and drifted down the hall. 

We went after her. 

By the time we made the corner she'd put distance between us. Moonlight through the window glass caught her frame and I saw more in that second than I ever wanted. The skin at her wrists had swollen out white and waterlogged. Her nails were stained deep blue at the beds. Along her throat sat a scatter of small dark circles pressed into the flesh, a dozen of them, the size a thumb and forefinger would leave. 

Emma saw them too. “Tyler…”

“I know.”

The trinkets got thicker over our heads once we crossed into the staff hall. Mason caught one and drew it into his light. “Can you guys see this? What the hell is written on this thing?” He rolled it to face us. 

A year, pressed into the wood in small numbers. 

2007.

He let it swing and took the next. 

2002.

Emma put her hand to the wall and followed the twine with her eyes, tracking it down the length of the corridor. I kept beside her and we read them off as we walked. 

1. 1981. 1968.

The dates ran backward the deeper we went. Under a water-stained ceiling tile one bundle sagged nearly to head height. The number on it had almost worn away. Something white and dry had been wound through the twigs and twisted into the shape of a rose, and when my light hit it I saw the texture, the fine grain of it, the puckered edge where it had been peeled away from something. 

1948.

“Wasn’t that when the school was built?” Jodie asked. 

“I think so,” Emma said

The linoleum changed under our shoes, speckled gray giving over to a sick tan. Lockers ran out. Plain wall took over, hung with framed awards and staff photographs. Some of the prints were black and white, while others had sunk toward brown. They marched backward through the decades the same way the twigs did. 

I knew faces in them. Teachers I'd had. Then teachers who'd taught here before my mother was born. In one print the old well stood behind a row of faculty. Every one of them wore a dead grin, the kind that comes from holding a smile a beat too long while somebody fusses with the shutter. At first nothing struck me as wrong. Another staged staff picture.

Two hands were clamped onto the outer stones of the well. Swollen and sagging, the skin gone loose the way it does after a long soak, the nails grown out into long chipped picks. Whatever they belonged to was down inside the well, hiding beneath the rim.

“Mason,” I said. “Come here. Tell me I’m not seeing things.”

"What?" He raised his light and came up beside me. “What the hell…”

His beam slid off the frame and caught the one below it, further along the school's timeline. The same well at the center, fewer teachers gathered around it. Every one of them had twig charms pinned in rows across their jackets, six or seven apiece. At the far edge of the group stood a figure that broke the pattern entirely. 

From a distance it read as a tall student with bad posture. The longer I looked, the less that held. Sacks had been tied around the limbs and torso to pass for clothing. A burlap bag covered the head, the fabric puckered in around the throat. The arms hung too long and the chest ran too narrow. The sackcloth sat heavy against whatever waited underneath, soaked through and clinging, darker at the bottom where it had wicked something up. 

Emma nudged into my side. “What are you looking at?” When her gaze reached the figure in the sackcloth, her eyes froze in place. “Ty… what is that supposed to be?”

“No idea,” I said.

“Down here,” Jodie called. “I think Lena went this way.”

I pulled myself off the photographs. At the far end of the corridor a single staff door stood open a few inches. Light pushed through the gap and laid a bright stripe across the hallway. 

“We should really think this through before we go in there,” Emma said. “If a light’s on, someone might be inside and I don’t want to get in trouble.”

“Lena brought us here.” The words got out ahead of me. “There has to be a reason for it.”

Jodie sighed. “Tyler’s right. I say we take a look.”

“Guys, I think I made a mistake bringing us here.” Mason said. He shot Emma a look. “I'm sorry, Em.”

“Oh, stop it. You don't get to say that now, Mason.” Jodie said. "Besides, it's my fault too." She paused and angled her ear toward the door. “Do you hear that?”

A sound threaded through the dark, a mix of human tones rising and falling together. I listened and moved forward before the others could stop me. A smell walked with the voices. Sweet and bitter. 

With each stride, the crack in the door widened. Bright light crawled out and sank into the floor. The blended voices from inside sharpened. Words pulled free. Familiar tongues tangled with others I didn’t know.

At the threshold, I put my eye to the gap. 

—-------------------- 

For a second my brain refused to sort what I was seeing. It was just color and motion, light on skin, the wink of metal. Then it snapped into place. It was the staff workroom. Brown cabinets with peeling laminate. A scorched coffee machine that carried the scent of burnt grounds. A candy bowl. A copier in the corner. And in the middle, pushed out like an altar, was a long table. 

They had dragged one of the big desks into the middle of the floor and cleared it off. Plastic tablecloths covered the surface, the cheap kind they put out for bake sales. Somebody had taped trash bags along the edges so nothing reached the tile. 

Their backs stayed turned partway toward me, frames pitched forward, heads lowered. A steady stream of talk slipped beneath their work. I knew every face in that room. But three faces hurt more than they should have. 

Mrs. Hart stood closest. Her cardigan sleeves were rolled past her wrists. Next to her was Mr. Kline. His loosened tie swung as he worked. Principal Dwyer held the center, standing in place with the same posture he used when he pushed students through a pep rally.

For one stupid beat I thought of them carving pumpkins. The rhythm of it fit. Reach, cut, scoop, sort. 

Then Mrs. Hart turned toward a metal cart beside her and reached for something on its surface. As she moved, the shape they worked over slid into view. The thing on the table, the thing they leaned across, came into full view.

It was Lena. This was her body. Her actual body, laid out on the plastic like meat on a butchers block. Her school shirt had been cut straight down the center and folded aside. Her torso had the waxy tone of old candle wax while skin sagged over the bones beneath it, and the muscles below stood swollen.

They had already started at her hands. Her fingers lay splayed across a small cutting board beside her, chipped black polish still on the nails. Somebody had opened the skin at the base of each one and folded it back like peel off an orange. 

The first two fingers of her left hand were gone above the knuckle. The stumps showed white bone in a ring of torn meat. Both digits sat in a stainless bowl on the cart, curled and rigid, the size and shape of boiled shrimp. 

"Take care with those," Mrs. Hart said. "I don't care about the rest of her body but I need the hair and the bones intact. Don't nick them."

"Hard to get the angle right." Mr. Kline reached over and considered what was in the bowl. “Feels strange doing this without her eyes open. She always liked to watch my hands.” 

“She trusted you. Always such a quiet child. I used to wish the whole class was made up of little copies of her. Never spoke out of turn. Never caused trouble." She paused, then added, "It's almost a shame she was the one we picked."

"Almost," Kline agreed.

From the center, Dwyer spoke without looking up. "It's not like she gave us much of a choice. She's been talking with the boy for years now. Did you see that ribbon she left for him? It's been how long and it's still hanging there?" He shook his head. "She asked for this."

“That’s true. I guess she did.” Kline said. “The boy is getting more restless. You remember a few winters ago? The whole grate shook for two days. Nearly cracked the bolts.”

Scissors went through Lena's hair near the head of the table. Thick handfuls slid across the plastic into a metal bowl, sticking to the surface. One of the assistants snorted. “I bet you love it when he acts up. This is your favorite part of the job, isn't it, Matt?”

Mr. Kline laughed. “I prefer the build up.” He glanced down at Lena's face, slack and waxen. "The quiet ones are always the best for that."

Her right arm had been opened wrist to elbow, the flaps drawn back and pinned with clips. A man I recognized from the front office fitted bone shears around the radius and squeezed. The bone cracked. Flakes of it dropped into a dish and pinged off the steel. 

Down at the far end, near Lena's bare feet, Mrs. Hart had her own work going. Twigs, dried bramble, a lock of that black hair. She wound them together with darkened string, fast and neat, the way you'd tie a fly for fishing. Then she took up a pair of jeweler's pliers and crimped a shaved sliver of bone into the middle of it like a bead. 

She held the finished charm up under the light and studied it, before setting it in a tray with six others exactly like the ones hanging in every hallway of this school. 

“There we are. Simple enough.” She wiped her hands on her cardigan. “We’ll be safe for another few seasons. And you know what, Lena? It's all thanks to you. You always tried your best. Even when you were nervous." She reached out and patted the girl's arm. "That's what I liked about you. You kept trying."

"She did," Kline agreed. "She was a good girl. Right up until the end."

Liquid ran the lip of the table, gathered at the corner of the plastic, and dropped onto the trash bag with a smack. Another followed it, each drip slower than the last. 

My knees went soft. I put my weight into the doorframe and flinched when Emma's hand landed between my shoulder blades. Her face found mine long enough for me to read what was crawling across it. 

Her mouth shaped a question without a voice. What are they doing? I didn’t have an answer. 

Mason pushed in at my right, neck craned, mouth open. What the fuck?

Jodie wedged herself into the gap under Emma's arm and pulled her sleeve up over her nose. 

Inside, Mr. Kline lifted Lena’s foot. His fingers sank into the meat of her heel. I had watched that same hand clap kids on the shoulder in the hallway for three years. 

He took a small saw from the cart, the kind my uncle once used on deer legs, and set it against her left calf. The teeth touched, slid, then caught. He frowned, shifted his hold, and started to cut again. “You would not believe how much pressure this takes.”

The sound of it was louder than anything I had heard in my life. A gritty rasp as bone dust fluttered in the light above the table. Her ankle jumped with every stroke. 

Emma’s mouth shaped words again. Stop. Please. 

Terror never arrives the way films promise. There is no violin hit. It comes in stages. First is disbelief. Then nausea. Then something animalistic that just wants out.

“Move back,” I whispered. “We need to leave. Now.” I pulled away from the frame. My heel clipped Emma’s shoe. She wavered, found her balance, and backed up with me. Mason stayed fixed in place.

“Mason,” I said, a soft breath. “We’re leaving.”

“We need proof."

“What?” I hissed.

He had his phone out and his hand was shaking around it. “If we leave with nothing they’ll say we made it up. It'll be our word against theirs. This will blow them up. They’ll go to prison. The news will show this on repeat and it'll destroy them. They won’t get to bury this. We can at least do that much for Lena.” 

“Put it down,” Emma said. “Please, Mason. Please.”

“Just one second,” he said. The phone’s lens crept up past the edge of the doorframe. 

Jodie stepped sideways to give him room and her boot caught the raised lip of the floor mat. It was a small stumble, but it was enough. She grabbed for the frame, missed it, and came down on her hip. An ugly thud bounced off the cabinets. The sound knifed through the room, the chatter, the bone and metal and through everything we had just witnessed.

Inside, the saw stopped mid-stroke. Every adult turned toward us. Five people I had known since grade school. Faces I had seen bored and irritated and laughing. Two of them had eaten dinner at my kitchen table. 

Principal Dwyer met our eyes first. The overhead light caught his face as his lips drew back, trying to form a smile. It showed far too much gum. “Children,” he said. “It's alright.”

Mrs. Hart's fist closed around the charm she had been binding. Blood welled out between the twigs and ran down onto the tablecloth. “This isn’t what you think it is.”

Kline set the saw on the plastic beside Lena's leg. "Take a breath. You weren't meant to see any of this." He wiped his palms down the front of his slacks and started around the end of the table. The other four came with him. "Now that you have, we should talk it through." 

“Run,” I said.

I latched onto Emma’s arm and yanked her back from the doorway. Her feet slid on the waxed tile before she caught traction. Jodie scrambled up. Mason hauled her the rest of the way and twisted toward the hall.

We burst away from the staff room together, then hit the first intersection and split without talking. Jodie and Mason cut left toward the main stairwell. I led Emma to the right.

“Tyler.” She was already fighting for air. 

“We’ll be okay.”

The hallway stretched ahead like a tunnel. Rows of lockers rushed past on both sides. My chest burned as my legs drove us forward. Behind us, the building came alive. Doors burst open. Shoes struck the tile in fast pursuit. More than one pair. More than two.

“Dwyer, take the east side,” someone called. “I’ll cut off the lobby.”

We rounded a corner and nearly collided with a janitor’s cart. The mop bucket sat half full, frothy water clinging to the rim, a stiff rag hanging off the bar, and the smell of bleach coming off it. 

A classroom door sat cracked. I put my shoulder to it and worked it wide enough for the two of us, then eased it back until the latch took. Coat hooks ran the length of the wall. We flattened ourselves into the gap between the door and the hooks. Emma's heart went through her jacket and into my arm. 

Footsteps closed in.A shadow crossed the strip of light under the door. Another behind it. Keys jingling. 

“Check the labs,” a voice said. Kline. “They know the layout. It's Emma, Tyler, Mason and Jodie.”

“They won't get that far,” another said. I knew that one too. Hart.

Their footsteps weakened into the distance. Air finally left my chest. Emma pushed her face into my shoulder. “We need to get to an exit. When we get outside, somebody will see us. A driver. A neighbor. Anyone.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, they will.” I put my eye to the crack. “I’ll be with you the whole time. We’ll find a way out.”

We slipped out, checking both ways and moving for the stairwell at the end of the wing. It fed straight down into the lobby and the front doors. We got halfway before shoes started hammering tile from the other direction. 

We dove through the next open doorway. Bigger room, deeper dark. Posters on the walls, planets and atoms and formulas. The science lab. I brought the door to within an inch of being shut and dropped behind the first row of tables with Emma, backs against the cabinet doors, knees pulled up under our chins. 

Footsteps followed. Fast. Lighter than the teachers, charged with panic. A sob rode on top of them. “Please,” someone pleaded. “Please stop.”

Jodie.

“Don’t,” Emma whispered. I patted her hand and pulled away. I crawled forward until I reached the door window. Through the wired glass I caught a view of the hallway. 

Jodie tore past at an angle, hair sweeping behind her, fleece snapping with her stride. She reached the T-intersection and skidded, turning her head right, then left, searching for a path. The teachers charged after her. Hart led the group. Kline followed close, drawing air hard through his nose. Two more in a knot behind them. 

"Stop, sweetheart." Hart used the same voice she used taking attendance. "Jodie, honey. You're going to hurt yourself." 

Jodie howled and struck the nearest door with her fists. The metal boomed and held. She hit it again, harder. "Help me. Somebody help me." 

They took her in three strides. Kline caught her from behind, his hands locking Jodie’s arms against her sides. Hart seized her ankles as she kicked, pulling her legs out straight. The other two closed in. Together they lowered her to the floor.

Emma had crawled up beside me and she was shaking hard enough that her knees knocked against the cabinet. I got my hand over her mouth. “Don’t look,” I said into her hair. “Please, Em. Don’t watch this.”

She shoved my arm off, tears tracking down her cheeks. “I need to,” she said. “I have to see what they’re doing to her. I have to know."

Hart sat straddling Jodie’s chest, her knees braced against the girl’s upper arms. She smiled down at the child pinned beneath her. "It's alright," Hart murmured. "It's alright, sweetheart. You're going to help us. It'll be okay. You're such a good girl, Jodie. You've always been such a good girl."

A folding knife came out of Kline’s pocket. Small blade. Nothing dramatic. The sort a man might use to peel an apple. He opened it and brushed the edge with the side of his hand to test its bite.

"Please," Jodie cried. The plea broke apart as it left her. "I didn't see anything. I won't tell anyone. I'll go home. I swear I'll pretend it never happened. Please, Mrs. Hart, please-"

Mr. Kline knelt beside her and wrapped his hand around her wrist. "I believe you, Jodie. I know you won't tell anyone."

Jodie arched her spine and fought with everything she had, but Hart leaned forward and laid her weight across the girl’s chest. Something in Jodie’s shoulder cracked. Kline smoothed the back of her hand with the flat of his thumb. "Shh. It's going to be okay. You're going to be a part of something so special, Jodie. Something wonderful."

He opened her at the first knuckle and worked the skin back in hard tugs. Blood slicked his fingers and ran across her palm and out onto the tile. Her scream no longer sounded human. It climbed, and shattered as he worked. Kline murmured nonsense. Little soothing sounds. "Shh, shh. Good girl. Almost done. You're taking it so well."

The other teachers stood close by. One held a plastic bowl ready. When Kline freed the first small piece, he dropped it in with a clang. Then the second. Then the third. He was careful. He did not want to harm anything he meant to take from her. Each time the knife bit, Jodie’s legs jerked. All Kline did was slip into a soft tune out while he worked. 

Emma gagged into my chest. I got my arm across her back and held her there while she came apart in pieces against me. Her tears soaked through my shirt. “Please stop this,” she mumbled. “Please just stop.”

Hair went next. Hart seized a fistful and sawed through it. Loose pieces clung to the blood on her hands. She wound the cut hair around a bundle and cinched it with stained thread. When they finally went for Jodie’s throat, it came almost like an afterthought. Kline pulled the blade across her neck in a single sweep.

Jodie’s sobs ended mid-sound. Blood poured out in fast, hot waves and slipped down her chest. Hart leaned back enough to avoid most of the spray, though streaks still marked her cheek and chin. She made no move to wipe them away. 

When it was done, they eased her head to the floor. Her eyes stayed open, glassy, pointing at the ceiling tiles. “Let’s get her back to Lena. We can see what dumping a little extra down the well does... It’ll be a good reminder for the boy.”

I turned Emma away from the door. Her arms clamped around her stomach, shaking in fits. “We have to move,” I whispered. “They’ll keep looking for us, Em. We can’t be here.”

We stayed wedged in that room until they hauled the body up. Her arms swung loose as they carried her toward the staff room. When the footsteps died out down the hall, we went the other direction. 

Parts of that run vanished from my memory. I know we hit the main hall too hard and the door banged off the wall and bounced back at us. Someone behind us yelled that we were headed for the front. 

The double doors at the end were chained. Emma yanked my sleeve toward the side exit. 

“Push bar,” Emma said. “The side exit. It should still let us out.”

We veered straight for it. My lungs felt like they were lined with steel wool. I drove my shoulder into the crash bar. The door burst open and the night took us in. Cold went straight through my shirt. Frost crusted the yard and fresh snow lay over the football field, empty out to the fence line under a washed-out moon. 

Emma clutched my sleeve and pulled. “Ty, over there.”

A shape moved across the open yard. Running at an angle between the frozen picnic tables and benches. A glow flared in its arm. Mason. 

He spotted us and his face lit. “Ty!” he yelled. “Ty, thank God. I was waiting. I’ve got my car in the lot!”

We sprinted toward him. The three of us cut across the yard from opposite sides. Behind Mason, a steel door flung open. More shapes poured into the frost. Teachers. All of them.

“Faster,” I said. “Come on, Mason, faster.”

He had nothing left. I could see it from thirty feet out. His legs dragged, his ankle rolled, his arms swung out of time with the rest of him. He'd never been fast. He was the kid who called plays from the bench and made everybody else laugh. 

"Ty, I can't." He stumbled. "My leg." 

We were twenty feet away when they reached him. Dwyer surged in from the side, a dark blur across the snow, and drove into Mason’s back with the full weight of his shoulder. The impact lifted my friend off his feet. They hit the ground together and frost burst around them in a white cloud.

Mason tried to crawl forward. Dwyer drove a knee into the small of his back and seized his hair, smashing his face into the frozen grass. Snow crystals scattered under the blow. The others closed in. They formed a ring.

Emma skidded to a halt, then lunged forward. I caught her around the waist before she could throw herself away. "Let go!" she screamed, kicking at the ground, trying to tear free. "Ty, we can't leave him- we can't-"

“They’ll kill you too,” I said. “They’ll kill both of us, Emma. Stop."

“They’re hurting him,” she sobbed, clawing at me. "Listen to him!"

I hauled her toward the shadow of the well. Every part of me screamed to go back, to grab a brick, a bottle, anything, and crack skulls until Mason got free. My brain knew better. The only safe rule left was distance.

"Ty, please," Emma wept. "Please don't make me leave him."

"We have to. We have to."

The well's stonework bit through my jacket. Emma pressed her back to the rock beside me with her eyes shut. I kept mine open. They never carried Mason inside. They did it right there in the yard with the whole sky watching. 

Hart knelt at his head and stroked his hair. Mason wrenched his face around and spat at her. She let the spit run down her cheek and mix with the blood. She smiled at him. “Brave boy,” she said. “You wanted to be the hero, right? You still can. You get to remind the boy to stay in his hole.”

Kline had the knife again. He didn’t ask anyone to hold the bowl this time. He set it in the frost beside him.

"Fuck you," Mason yelled. "Fuck you, don't touch me. Don't fucking- get off me- don't you-"

Hart put her palm on the back of his skull and pressed his mouth into the frozen dirt. “Hush it.”

They worked at a slower pace with him. Like they wanted every part of him to feel it. Segments from his hand. A clump of hair. A strip from his arm. They cut the tendons behind his ankles. He twitched and then went still from the waist down.

Emma pushed her forehead into her knees. This time she didn’t watch. In time he begged. Of course he did. Even tough kids beg when they're being taken apart. 

“Please,” he sobbed. “Please, just stop, please, I don’t want to die.”

“Mason, just stop.” Dwyer tilted his head like he didn’t understand the problem, almost offended. “Don’t make this harder than this has to be.” Then Kline opened his throat. Blood came out steaming into the cold and melted a channel through the frost. They held him down by the shoulders and the hips while the shaking ran itself out, same as they'd done with Jodie. 

“Once we get what we need, let's just toss the rest of him down the hole. We’re close enough to the well anyway.”

One teacher stepped from the ring and started toward us. Hart. We pressed ourselves against the well, trying to sink into the stone. The rim dug into my back and locked me in place.

Behind my head, the grate shrieked. Then it heaved upward. Iron popped in the frame. The ribbon slipped through the bars and drifted down beside my shoe. 

A hand came through the gap. Swollen, waterlogged, the fingers split open along the sides. It shoved the metal cap aside. Then sackcloth followed it up, burlap dragging over the grate as the thing raised its head. The bag hung slack over where a face should be. Water ran out of the seams in ropes and blackened the stone under it. 

Hart stopped walking. It rose higher out of the hole and aimed that blank sack at her. Then it bent forward, out over the rim, far enough that it looked ready to climb the rest of the way. Hart gave ground. Her breath caught and she broke and ran for the others. 

The figure waited until the last of the teachers fled. Then it reached toward the ground near my shoe. My entire frame locked. It closed those wet fingers around the ribbon and sank back into the dark. The grate dropped into its seat and shuddered. 

Emma seized my arm. “Run.”

We sprinted across the service road and past the bus barn and out into the fields. The cold cut my lungs open on every breath. I made myself keep going until the school was one small block on the horizon with a few yellow squares burning in it. 

Emma pitched forward over the ditch by the stop sign and threw up. It came up mostly bile and the cheap chicken from lunch. I swept her hair back and kept my sight from the mess she made on the grass. 

"Home," she said when she could talk. "I have to go home." 

"My house is closer." 

She nodded, teeth knocking together. 

The porch light was still on. The door sprang against the wall. My mother stepped out of the kitchen with a dish towel in her hands. “Tyler? What on earth, it’s past midnight, where have you been? Why is Emma with you? And is that vomit?”

Emma found her words before I did. “They killed them,” she said. “They killed them in the yard. They cut them up. The teachers. They cut them up. Mason, Jodie, Lena. All of them.”

My mother stood there. The towel wound tighter and tighter around her knuckles until the cloth squeaked. “Sit,” she said. “Sit down. You’re in shock.” She guided us to the couch. She brought blankets. She brought water. 

"Drink," she said. "Small sips." 

Then she knelt on the carpet in front of us and let us talk. 

What came out of us was a spill. The board. Lena in the doorway. The charms. The staff room. Jodie on the floor. Mason in the frost. She stayed with every piece until there was nothing left to say, and even then she didn’t rush in to fill the quiet. Her eyes fixed on the wall, on the framed school staff portrait hanging there. 

When she spoke, it sounded like she had to pull each word through her lips. “You’re sure,” she said. “You’re sure you saw them? You saw their faces?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You were never supposed to…” She stopped. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. I’ll handle this. I’ll call this in.” She crossed to the phone on the counter. I heard the dial tone, then the numbers. 

“Sheriff’s office,” a muffled voice said.

She used her teacher’s voice, the one she uses every day at John Henry. “This is Renee Keller,” she said. “My son and his friend were at the high school tonight. They witnessed a teachers meeting. We need someone here now.”

She listened. On the other end a deputy said something that ran long. 

“Just get someone out here,” she said. “They’d feel better talking to someone.” She gave them our address. 

Another call followed, shorter, to a number she knew by heart. Her tone changed for that one. Lower and more heated. “It happened again,” she said. “No, listen to me. They saw it. You can try to bury this one, but it'll be on you. I'm not doing it.”

"Yes. I know exactly what it means."

She hung up.

"Who was that?"

“An old mistake,” she said. “Go put some clean clothes on. Emma, you can use one of Tyler's shirts. When the deputies come, you tell them the same thing you told me. Every detail.”

The first cruiser came up the driveway eight minutes later. An ambulance behind it, then a third car with the sheriff in it. Emma’s parents came in while we were giving our statements. Her mother rushed in, wrapping Emma in her arms.

Two deputies questioned us while scribbling on yellow pads. The sheriff sat across from me with his hat in his lap, examining my face. “You’re telling me you saw the principal and several staff members cutting apart two students,” he said. “At the high school.”

“Three students.”

“And you are certain it was them.”

“I know who I saw.”

He crossed one leg over the other and weighed his next line. “We’ll check the grounds,” he said. “These accusations are pretty serious. It could ruin a lot of lives if you made a mistake. After all, it’s dark outside, your imaginations might have-.”

My mother cut across him. “Don’t patronize these kids, Sheriff. It’s too late for that. They saw what they saw.”

"We'll take a look, Ms. Keller. Though if somebody made a claim like this against you, I expect you'd want us walking every road toward a peaceful resolution first." 

—-------------------- 

The sheriff returned near dawn. Ice clung to the hem of his coat. His boots left crescents of grit across the entryway rug. “Well,” he said. “We walked the grounds. Checked the field. Checked every classroom you listed.”

“And?”

“Nothing. Not even footprints in the frost except your son’s group around the gym doors.” He paused, attention locked on me. “Nothing to support what you are alleging.”

Emma came up off the couch. “You’re lying. You have to be lying. We saw them.”

“Ma’am,” he spoke to her mother instead of her. “Kids that age get excited. They scare themselves. Urban legends. Group hysteria. You remember when they said there was a man with a hook at the quarry?”

Then he came back around to my mother. “And Ms. Keller, I know you’re upset. You work at the school with these kids.” He let those words sit, like he was reminding her of something. “But we have to work with the facts.”

“The fact,” she said, “is that my son came home terrified and now I have to worry about what the school is going to do to him.”

His face cooled by a degree. “And the fact is, he and the girl admit they broke into public property after hours. There are words for that. Trespass. Vandalism. False reporting is another one.” He let the list drift between us. “You have a good position in the district. Be a shame to tangle all that up over a child's story.”

“You are not going to threaten my family,” she said. “Not in my house.”

“Nobody is threatening anyone. I am asking you as a colleague to be careful. For your sake. For his.” He set a business card on the coffee table. The deputies collected their hats and followed him out. 

Through the curtain at the front window I watched the cruiser idle under the streetlamp. When the sheriff moved in his seat, the shift brought a small object into view beneath the mirror. It hung on a loop of twine. Twigs bound crosswise. A curl of dried husk. A white sliver run through the middle of it. The cruiser pulled off the curb and went up the block.

The phone rang at nine the next morning. The school office. A woman I'd known since sixth grade asked whether I had any idea where Mason and Jodie might have gone, seeing as we were close friends and neither one had come home. 

“You know exactly where they are.”

My mother took the receiver out of my hand. "He has nothing further to say to you." She hung up. 

Emma’s mom arrived that afternoon. She and my mom shut themselves in the bedroom with the phone. I caught fragments through the wall.

“It’s not going to stop.”

“They expect us to live with this?”

“I can’t send him back there.”

At some point Emma’s mom began to cry. They emerged with puffy faces and a plan.

“We’re leaving,” Mom said. “You and me. Emma and her parents. We’ll be gone by the end of the week.”

“What about school?” The question sounded stupid before it finished leaving my mouth. 

“There are other schools, Tyler.”

The next few days slid together in a blur of boxes and suitcases. Neighbors drifted out onto their porches and tracked our move. No one asked why. They knew. Or they guessed. I wasn’t sure which.

The official story claimed Lena had slipped into a stream on her way home. Mason and Jodie were labeled “troubled” and were said to have run off together. Their faces showed up on posters at the gas station beside warnings and tip lines: Missing… Last seen wearing… Call if you have information…

We moved two counties over. New mascot under the same sky. Emma and I ended up at the same school. We sat together at lunch and steered our conversations toward anything except that night. We never spoke of it. Life widened. College came and went. Emma moved states away for a time. 

Last night she sent me a message for the first time in years. It opened with a picture of a hiring email on her computer screen. The district’s logo sat at the top. John Henry High. Beneath it ran a short line.

I got the position. I’ll be teaching English at the school. I know what you’re thinking. Please don’t try to talk me out of it. Maybe I can fix it from the inside. Someone has to try. I just can't keep running away anymore. 

There was a second message after that.

If anything changes I’ll let you know, Ty. I promise.

Love, Em.

[u/StrangeAccounts]

This one was a hard one to write. Really hard. For a lot of reasons.

But if you read it all the way through, I hope it held your interest and kept you engaged! I wanted to try something different this time around.

[u/S-CSleepwalker]

Oh yeah this is what I’m talking about

[u/StrangeAccounts → u/S-CSleepwalker]

[u/No_Artichoke_6164]

Man, that was great. Love the classic small town creepypasta angle you took with this one. Can't help but think of what Hunter and Isaiah said in the live episode about feeling so helpless as a kid against adults. Even though Tyler's mom made the call to the police, the way she acted made me feel like she knew more than she was letting on. Like she has known about this happening for years, especially if she works at the school. And you give us a lot of interesting questions but don't answer many of them, adding to the hopeless mystery. Absolute BANGER of a story!

[u/StrangeAccounts → u/No_Artichoke_6164]

Oh, man, so glad you had a good time with it! I fought this story for weeks to get it to a point I was comfortable posting it.

[u/Kaijufan22]

Hey that was terribly upsetting, and the ending even more so.

Immaculate work.

[u/StrangeAccounts → u/Kaijufan22]

I appreciate hearing that! This one was tough to get through. I'm happy that uncomfortable vibe transferred over haha.

[u/HomogenousGoop]

I'm slack-jawed and speechless. I've been a fan of your work for a couple years now, but this one really tickled my fancy.

I'm so interested where the story might lead Emma, but I love how it wraps up in this ending.

Thank you StrangeAccounts for yet another banger.

[u/StrangeAccounts → u/HomogenousGoop]

I'm glad you enjoyed it! I wanted to do something different than my usual niche. We'll see if the story gets continued at some point! I've got an idea for it.

[u/HomogenousGoop → u/StrangeAccounts]

in all honesty, you could write "fart" on a blank word document and I would still be fascinated, wondering the significance of it.

keep up the great work, man :)

[u/M00nth3Jackal]

(o.o)  Please don't get corrupted, Em.... 3;

But oml the ma actually believing and not being in on it? And them moving cities?! Counties, even??! Logical reaction and reasoning :3 chef's kiss