DAYLIGHT [COMPLETE]

The Final Report of Agent #66

DATE: 10.31.2015

TIME: Unknown

SUBJECT: Final Report

This is the final report of [REDACTED], officially known as Agent #66. This will be my final communication.

I was assigned to investigate the old school at [REDACTED]. WPRS had received reports of strange activity, day and night, almost as though the school was still in session. We knew this to be impossible as the school had closed following a tragic fire in 1982. Since the school is located in my old neighborhood, I was dispatched to the scene.

I arrived at 7 am, bright and early, just as a tinny school bell rang out. I don't know what I expected. Cinders? Ruins? Not an intact building. Not a smiling cross guard. Not queues of laughing students in their superhero backpacks and My Little Pony shoes. They were singing; I smiled when they sang The Itsy Bitsy spider.

I shouldn't have let my guard down. But they seemed so harmless.

I don't know why I went inside. Nostalgia? Curiosity. Blind optimism, it must have been.

I shouldn't have gone inside.

The doors locked behind me with a final sort of thud the moment I entered the front hall. The lines of children were gone though I could still hear their song growing ever more distant. The walls of watercolor self-portraits I had been able to see from the courtyard were singed and yellowed, some smeared crimson with what must have been but could not have been blood.

The floors were mottled, dusty and rife with debris. The baseboards had that look of water damage that follows a flood or a desperately hopeful effort by firefighters gone awry.

Inside it was dark despite the morning hour. The long hallway flickered before me, dawn and midnight vying for dominance. One moment the smell of charring flesh would threaten choke me and the next fresh Pine-sol and crayon scent filled the air. Above the archway that demarcated the administrative offices was an analog clock. It was square and yellow, featuring a teasing grin that seemed to welcome me in behind a glass face. The time read 2:34.

2:35.

In the belly of the school, deep within the very bowels of it something yielded with a great boom, one so loud, so fatal the building shuddered around me.

The singing was gone now, replaced with sounds of confusion readily identifiable as coming from students. Faculty and staff stepped out of their classrooms, their offices. The fire alarm suddenly began to blare overhead, like a storm klaxon warning of an oncoming disaster. Only they were moving too slowly because they didn't know what I knew.

I stepped forward to catch a passing teacher's arm, but my touch missed her. My hand, it went right through her. She looked right through me.

I began to smell faint traces of smoke rising from the floor.

2:36

Another rumble unseated the school from its foundations, another quake rippling from the boiler room like a destructive tide. I knew that, I remembered reading that in the papers. I lunged for another fire alarm and an ungodly crack reverberated from the kindergarten wing as a portion of the ground floor plummeted into the basement below. 54 souls.

2:37

The screaming started. The running. The trampling. People shoved at the entry doors and half of them were rusted shut. Budget cuts, you see. I was hauled into a corner, unable to help others or help myself.

The air grew thick and burning.

2:38

Something went wrong. The doors failed, clamping shut, trapping the remaining souls inside, stuck between a fire and firebreak. The end...the end came.

+++

2:34

I stare up the clock again. I wait.

2:35

I know the truth now.

Boom.

2:36

The school is always burning, will always be burning.

And just like those students, just like those teachers in 1982, I know there will be no leaving for me.

Magistra, Agent #2, don't send anybody else. It's a trap.

This is Agent #66 signing off...

END REPORT

+_+

© 2015 Idris Grey

All rights are reserved to me, the creator. No portion of this entry may be reproduced, re-distributed, translated, or transmitted in any form without express permission from the author. Rights to the images used in the cover and additional media belong to their respective owners. Inspired by John Murphy's In a House, In a Heartbeat. No copyright infringement is intended. All characters and events depicted in this story are fictional. Any similarity to real people or events is purely incidental.