n and Quickly Out
Mark Petersen
Copyright 2010 Mark Petersen
Quickly in and quickly out. That was the plan. It had been over an hour.
It was his fourth year at college and his third year living in his own condo. His parents were fairly rich, his father a hardworking career Marine with a job in the Pentagon and his mother a partner of a successful law firm in McLean. They bought him a brand new GTO for his seventeenth birthday (his father didn’t want to spoil him, so he drove the family’s old LeSabre for a year before he got his own car), and they had bought him the condo after he had lived his whole freshman year in a dorm. He had a job at the local gym where he worked weekends and Tuesdays Thursdays before class in the morning. His parents paid for the car, the condo, the insurance, his food, clothes, even the X-Box the PS3 and the new laptop each year. The money he earned was spent mostly on drinking, his father never drank and threatened to take the car away if he saw any alcohol on the Visa bill. He cashed his check from the gym at the pawn shop every two weeks for booze money.
The condo was above a strip of shops on Main Street, right next to the abandoned middle school. The condo was part of two or three nicer looking, brand new buildings in town, painted white with a balcony and a two story family room with a loft where he slept. The bedroom was kind of a den, wide flat-screen TV, a dry bar, and some beanbag chairs. He didn’t know what to do with all the space at first and his friends helped him lay it out as a hangout place. The view from the family room was of the middle school, always dark and empty. Sometimes, when he didn’t have company or go out partying he would turn the TV on and crash. Soon enough though he would lose interest in the program and his thoughts would turn to the gaping brick building just beyond the TV through the windows on either side.
It was a massive building. Always empty, dark, cold. It escaped notice mostly since it was about a hundred feet from the road, tucked away from the bars and restaurants that almost touched the street. It may not have been noticed anyway though, as there were plenty of empty buildings in town. The parking lots were around back, so during the day one would only realize it was abandoned if they looked real close or if they passed it on a backstreet and saw the other side. At night it blended casually into the black sky.
He would sit there on his sofa and stare into its black windows, straining to see a desk or chair, wondering why it was abandoned when it was closer to the heart of town than the new school, and it looked just as big as the new school too. Was there something wrong with it that couldn’t be fixed? Or something that would cost so much to fix that it was actually cheaper to build a new school?
Now he sat crouched in the corner of an empty classroom, farthest from the door. His flashlight was off, clenched in his white knuckles, the moon through the dusty windows provided a subtle, dull grey glow that faded to black if you stared in one place long. His eyes were fixed on the doorway, peering into the black hallway as his vision swooned in the dim light. A glint off the tile floor would fade and then suddenly reappear as his eyes desperately tried to adjust and readjust to the dark. His ears strained, and the silence screamed into them making his head spin.
He longed for his sofa by the TV, where he could simply close the blinds and forget.
But he was stuck here, now two hours since he entered. His legs were sore from crouching, the pins and needles feeling in his frozen ankles came and went. He had to get out, to stay until the sun rose would be an eternity.
He had started that evening with a beer on the sofa, gazing into those black windows, perhaps into the room he was in now. He didn’t dare to look out the window and see, that would mean removing his gaze from the door. Just one beer was enough courage that night. One beer and he felt man enough to try windows on the side of the school away from Main Street until one opened. Just one beer and he had decided to climb up into that window. Not all the beer in the world could give him that same courage now.
His feet had made a solid thud as they hit the tile floor when he had jumped through the window, it was the tenth or so window he had tried. He was about to give up and was surprised to actually find one unlocked. It was a math classroom, there was still writing on the chalkboard. His heart raced as he listened to the echo of his jump bounce down the hall and back. Soon, just silence. Not even the gentle hum of an air conditioner, nothing. Even the air tasted like nothing, a little stale perhaps, but not old, not like the air in a basement or garage, just empty, untouched…nothing. He looked up to make sure the window was still open, he would get out through the same window. ‘Just a quick look around’ he reminded himself. He carefully tip toed out of the room and down the hall, to the gym, locker rooms, cafeteria, theater, in fifteen minutes he had seen most of the main floor. Around every corner an endless dark hall, silence pounded in his ears.
As he climbed to the second floor the adrenaline wore off a bit and he began to collect his thoughts. How long had it been since anyone else had been here, in these rooms? A chalkboard in a French classroom also had writing, and date from seven years earlier adorned the top corner. Seven years…and just like that, everything left as it would have been for class the next day. And he had been the only visitor since as far as he knew. It was a free domain, all his, empty. No one would ever know he had been there, no one would know if he took something, moved something. He could-
A door creaked below him.
He jumped to the corner of the room by the end of the chalkboard and crouched, hidden by the teacher’s filing cabinet, peering around the corner at the hall. Footsteps, very faint footsteps, then silence. He waited, waited to hear an indication that whoever was there had left. His heart raced, beating as if it were in his ears, not his chest. Finally, his heart slowed to normal, and all he could hear was piercing silence.
It had been two and a half hours now, and still no more noises. His legs were numb and had fallen asleep several times. He had to go, he had to get back the math classroom, back to the window he had left open. He figured the door the sound had come from was near the theater, and the footsteps were somewhere between the theater and the cafeteria. He could take the upstairs hallway the other way towards the gym and there would be stairs somewhere on that side that would put him near the math classroom. After gathering up the strength, he stood up slowly, his knee cracked and sent a chill up his spine. Was it loud enough to be heard downstairs? He had heard the footsteps, but only faintly. He was certain the crack could be heard throughout the whole building, it probably echoed down the tile and concrete halls. He convinced himself otherwise though, lying to forge necessary courage. The footsteps had been in a hall probably, and he was in a room, much less echo, the solid walls hopefully constraining most of the noise within. He moved stealthily towards the door and peered down each end of the hall. To the right and to the left the hall seemed to terminate into and endless cloud of dark nothingness. He slowly moved out, becoming even more vulnerable, staying close to the wall and low to the ground as he crept towards the gym, away from the theater downstairs.
At the end of the hall he found stairs as he expected. It was an eternity to get down them, each footfall was despairingly slow as he silently transferred his weight from one leg to the next. Somewhere in the middle of the stairs a joint cracked, an ankle it felt like, and it echoed all through the stair well. He froze for what could have been an hour, not even daring to raise his arm and read his watch. It had probably been only ten minutes, but felt much longer. His ears strained for a retort. Nothing. Finally he made it down the stairs and out into the hall of the first floor.
He peered down the hall, seeing nothing but the now familiar infinite dark. He took some comfo
rt in knowing that if anyone was down there looking towards him they would see the same blank darkness. He wondered what another person would look like walking towards him, slowly emerging from the dark like a shark fading in from a field of blue. He felt goosebumps run all over his arms and legs and pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind, focusing on the goal. The math room, he was close, which room was it? He knew it would be on the left, he walked slowly down the hall, looking in each classroom for an open window. Soon, he felt he had gone too far, he looked down the hall and saw a poster on the wall he recognized from three hours ago, he was getting close to the theater. He had gone too far, but how? He froze again, the theater?!? He suspected he was now close to the noise he had heard before.
Whatever made that noise had to be gone, it had been more than three hours. He told this to himself over and over silently as he regained his courage and picked up his foot again. He slowly made his way back along the wall, looking in each classroom again for an open window, assuming he had somehow missed it in his panic. He again checked one room after another, until finally he felt relief, a familiar room. A math classroom. The chalkboard had writing on it, the same writing he had seen before. Trig functions had never brought such joy to his heart, he was almost free!
He looked up at the window, excitement building up in his weary heart.
It was closed.
But not just closed, it was padlocked closed. The padlock shone in the moonlight, spotless, brand new, its metal case reflecting slivers of the moon on the floor and ceiling. It hung there, so beautiful, so innocent, yet so condemning.
The window had been padlocked…
…from inside…
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