Creepy - Day 7 - Skeleton Key

Episode Date: October 7, 2019

School daze...***Written by Marcus Damanda***Subscribe to the Kill by Kill podcast at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/kill-by-kill/id1124379551***See your donation rewards podcast at patreon.com/creepypod***You can also subscribe to us on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ3SrH_3fsROXFAjomKcUtw***Produced by Steve Blizin***Title music by Alex Aldea***Intro/Outro Narration by Joe Stofko Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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creepy pastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happen, or not simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Creepy presents the 31 Days of Horror. Day 7. Skeleton Key

written by Marcus Demanda. I parked at the end of the bus tunnel. got out of the car. For seconds, I just stood there, admiring my old stomping grounds through the window wall at the first floor. By dim light, I could see the freshman locker hall. The double doors to the lowercase cafeteria,

the water fountain where I'd asked out my first girl. In 1984, the place where I stood, the unloading zone for kids young enough or unfortunate enough to have to ride the bus to school, doubled as a smoking court. times had changed, but the place for me basically the same. I sighed, reached back into the car, hauled out the backpack that had everything I'd need for the night, and for many nights to come.

I slung it over my shoulder, went to the door, fished a skeleton key out of my pocket. It was 7.55. If I didn't get in there and typed the magic number and it's secured a keypad within the next five minutes, I'd likely find myself out of job just as quickly as I'd gotten. I was one of only three people, the others being the head custodian and principal who had a key that could open every door on campus. It was one of the smallest keys in my keychain, just a little piece of aged tarnished brass. But it pushed the tumblers over with a loud click that produced an echo I could still hear as I pushed through the door. The motion sensors picked me up right away.

The beeping echoed too, reminding that I had 30 seconds before the alarm automatically summoned the police. I found the keypad and punched in the code. Quiet settled in. The silence so omnipresent and complete that the slightest huff of my breathing seemed to travel the entire length of the hallway. Lake Ridge High had been built in the days of open schooling. That meant no doors on the classrooms

and walkways so wide you could have run a football scrimmage indoors. The craziness had run its course before my time there. The classrooms were secured. here and now, but the layout of the halls remained the same. Even the stairs seemed to rise over empty space like an M.C. Escher drawing. Between the steps and over the railings, kids on the upper floor could see through the gaps to the lower floor and vice versa. I wouldn't need to worry about the upstairs for a few hours.

My job description included exactly two complete walkthroughs before five in the morning, and I could do them any time. My first stop was quarters, where there was a desk, and great a surveillance. surveillance monitor is a computer, a landline with a red button linked directly to the police, and my bed. But standing in front of the old locker rows got me feeling nostalgic. I couldn't keep myself from getting a closer look. The first locker I'd ever had in school had been number 186, combination 15, 5, 50.

When I was 14, I worked so hard to burn those numbers into my memory that they continued to glow at age 49. The lock was right there where I remembered it too. I could almost see Mike and Eri walking alongside me as I approached it, each of us wearing our torn jeans and denim jackets and checkered vans. Mike with his studded van braces and Everett's hair gelled with aqua fresh toothpaste. I tried the combination and it didn't work. Not surprising. Most lockers had three or four combos rotated year by year to prevent tampering when the assignments

changed. I wasn't hopeful when I tried the skeleton key on it. That thing was for doors, not lockers. But oddly enough, it slid right in and turned easily. I said opening it. Next to me, I could almost hear Everett say, Cha. No way, dude, you got like full access. The locker was empty. There's almost July in school had been out for weeks. The locker had belonged to no one. wouldn't again until September. I imagine my books at the bottom of it, under my beeper and cigarettes. The sigs weren't a problem. I was one of the lucky kids with the smoking pass,

but the beeper would have gotten me suspended for five days, if I'd ever been discovered with it at school. Looking in there, I could see, could remember, one of the seniors coming up behind us and shoving little Mike inside. He was so small for a ninth grader. He fit right in the thing. Then the nameless 17-year-old douchebag at shoulder the locker shut and put his back up against it, blocking me an effort from opening it and letting Mike back out.

I closed the locker, shutting my eyes against the memory. I ran my hand over the ventilation slats at the top. Fucking asshole. I said to no one. That was when it grabbed me. I tried to. Fingers coming straight through the slats. lats grasping with my hand.

I jerked back and saw them, four of them, each with black nail polish. And I saw the van braces, too, right at the base of those fingers. Mike? I thought. But they were gone as soon as I blinked. I retreated, walking fast but not running out of the locker hall past the cafeteria. Quickly I turned the hall to the first classroom corridor. Halfway down it was my little control center in sleep space.

It was time to set up camp, do something productive, and forget. It wasn't good, thinking about Mike and Everett. I hadn't spoken to Everett since Mike killed himself in 1985. It was supposed to be the easiest job in the world. My hours were 8 p.m. until 5 in the morning. Hell, I'd spend more than half of it asleep. The surveillance cameras were automated on timers, and so was the computer video archive. all I'd have to do is show up,

walked a place twice during the night, log anything out of the ordinary, and call the real police if any serious shit went down. I'm not a cop and never have been. For most of my life, I was a copywriter for the local paper. Then an IT guy when the newspaper went chapter 11. What can I say? After a few years at that stress,

I got to where I was just tired of working with people. Probably wouldn't have gotten the job if I wasn't late quick. Bridge alumnus, or maybe no one else had applied. Since school let out for other people had taken the job and then quit. Is it true, Mr. Banks? I asked, signing the contract. Is it haunted? And if it is, the principal had answered,

be a good soldier and leave it out of the morning report, right? Right. At 8.10, I set my backpack down on the caught banks a call to bed, reset the hall alarms, and sat down at the surveillance desk for the first time. There were five screens, each divided into six camera angles. On the first one, I could monitor both the upstairs and downstairs cafeteria, the upper and lower main entry hall, the gymnasium, and the front office. On the next, I can keep an eye on the English and history pods, the student parking lot, an auto shop room. There's enough to make a guy instantly sleepy.

i stifled a yawn made myself give at least a cursory glance to each individual square on the desktop i found a schematic of the building with the routes i was supposed to walk highlighted with the red marker mr jarvis the head custodian had been as good as his word and left it out for me to find hell yeah it's haunted he'd say but so what what old place doesn't have a ghost or two plenty of them i couldn't help but then but then i'd say but so what old place doesn't have a ghost or two plenty of them i couldn't help but then But I'd like the old dude instantly. He spoke the truth as he saw it. He did the things he said he would do. He was far from alone in his opinion. The ghosts of Lake Ridge High have been subject to idle speculation in diners and barbers' shops for quite a few years. Even before the...

Incident in 2009. Ten years ago, I thought, checking the screens again, noticing the inactivity at the auditorium, the pool, the electronics lab. Has it really been that long? But even before then, my old high school, I had an unusual history. The chatter picked up lately, a lot, and four different night watchmen didn't all quit their jobs within a month for nothing now, did they?

Also, they've been quite a jolt that I'd felt in the locker hall earlier. I drew my phone from my pocket, checked my messages, social media. Nothing. Unsurprising. I'd never been married, didn't have kids. Friends were few and mostly lived far away. I didn't have much of a life. But I thought that maybe, just maybe, my old girlfriend, Brandy,

the one I'd asked out by the water phone, might have wanted to check up on me. She was still local, and she'd been the one who'd initially steered me toward this job. No such luck. Leaving my backpack buckled shut. Instead, I hooked my phone. to the charger, opened a more or less random game on it. It started whiling away the hours.

9 o'clock came and went. Then 10.11. My eyes got something on the center monitor screen. One of the upstairs locker halls by family and consumer science, a class we used to call Homeback. Nothing horrifying, just a flicker memory rekindled. I barely noticed it. There, rather blurry over video and seen from an awkward angle was a wall mural I'd recognized.

It was 1130. Might as well take my first tour of the building. Memory's a funny thing. It changes over time, interjecting little bits of fiction that accidentally stick and make your life more interesting than it actually was. But I remember that mural, and the boy who painted it, just as it was. I'm sure of it. Justin wasn't what I'd exactly have called a friend, but he was definitely a person in note.

At the time, it was my job to know persons a note and to write about him. Justin called the figure in the mural, Neville, after the school mascot. It would take him a few nights yet to finish, or so he said to me, the thing looked damn near perfect as it was. Lord Neville, the Lake Ridge Knight,

was positively fearsome, all in shining black armor, rearing back with a glimmering silver blue sword. Purple thunderheads, rich with gold and spouting white lightning, served as his backdrop. Justin's work was so layered, so textured, but the figure seemed to be leaning out of the wall, as so lunging forth from it into battle.

Justin only worked on him at night, but that part of the hall had been cordoned off during the day, nevertheless, not only because of the paint fumes, but also presumably to protect the work. And it was worth protecting. It was awe-inspiring. I remember telling him how impressed I was, how he definitely had a future in art.

I took a whole roll's worth of pictures and scribbled down everything he said to me, letting a camera dangle around my neck. Just another night getting the scoop for the school presses. I last. Like Justin, I was a senior, already planning the rest of my life. He was going to be a comic book artist, he said.

He wasn't sure yet whether it would be DC or Marvel that received the benefit of his services. He told me he'd consider graphic design for video games too if the money was good. He said he was glad to leave something behind a Lake Ridge High that he'd miss coming here every day. He asked me if I felt the same. Oh, hell no! I remember answering with a laugh. When I'm done here, I'm fucking gone, dude.

Writing for the Lake Ridge Ledger, I'd been my first job in the doomed world of printed press. I'd gone journalism instead of the creative route. Probably a bad move, I thought in retrospect, clicking the flashlight in the 11th grade locker hall. As for Justin, life didn't work out according to his plan either, lest I knew he'd taken his talents with a brush and bucket and applied them to painting houses. Good money, no doubt, but definitely not what he'd had in mind for his future when he was 18. The wall was...

Blank. Plain, unadorned concrete painted over with a coat of soft beige, and muttered to no one. My memory was clear. It was definitely this hall. The camera that had caught it was behind me, looking down over my shoulder. I showed my light on it to confirm, and there it was, plain as day. The little red record light was on, too. A whistling noise, distant and faint, and outdoors by the sound of it.

I turned back to the wall, and instead of that wall, I was looking back out into the world, till house was scaffolding along one side of it. At the top of it, painting and whistling was good old Justin. And from this distance, I said to myself, Even if you could see through that wall, all you'd see was the insides of classrooms, and then general parking, I could see the bald spot that had taken over the back of Justin's head, developed a bit of a beer gut. I didn't even need the flashlight.

In Justin's world, it was the middle of the day and sunny. One sneaker slipped over a paint spill at his feet. A distant curse, a gas. And Justin went over the side, face-planting on the steel rod before flooding back to Earth. He lay on the ground and didn't move, I thought. Justin's dead. When did that happen? The outdoors darkened, the image sped up.

So on time-lapse camera, people seemed to pop out of nowhere and attend to Justin's own fast motion. An ambulance zipped into frames of blur of white light. Paramedics got out of it almost too quick to make out. In a moment they were gone, and so was Justin in the ambulance. Cloud zipped over the darkening skies, the sun visibly lowered, and then it was night. The wall reasserted itself, but I stood there, transfixed. It seemed to bleed fresh paint, not beige, but a host of darker colors, midnight blue, deep purple, and black. In the center of the wall, an outline began to take shape.

It was Lord Neville being reborn when he was done, but he emerged from the wall and tapped away from him, even as his hand was. Even as his hair started to come into focus and eyes opened in his otherwise unfinished head, I turned from him and bolted back the way I'd come. That took me out of that FACS pod in the 11th grade locker hall, then passed the front office on the way to the upper main entry hall. There I was met by a crash of doors being clung open at the lecture hall, and kids came bearing out into the hall shrieking the actual fuck. There were dozens in that leather.

the sound, but I only saw a few of them. The ones I could see were injured badly. One 16 or 17-year-old girl with dreads in an M&Mshire, holding a loose eyeball and its slash socket ran straight through me. Then at the open doorway, a boy lurched out of the lecture hall on his hands and knees, coughing up blood. When Hand went to his stomach as another boy came out after him striding with confidence, brandished and a knife. He took the boy by the hair and yanked. his head up exposing his neck. No, stop! I called out to them as if it would do any good, but I was watching.

No, stop. Another voice echoed. A voice with authority. Not my voice. He jammed the knife in, gashed the boy with it. Even his gunfire echoed in the hall. There was no gunmen, no cop to be seen. Only the attackers had erupting in a fountain of gore,

broken skull. More screams behind me, this time from the classrooms. More ghost feet pounding the halls, begging and pleading from around the corner. Jesus Christ! I whispered under the den, turning circles, taking it all in. The only ones I could see were the dead ones. The attackers and the victims from ten years ago, from the Friday of five knives. Lake Ridge High School's claimed to,

fame. Three of the five attackers and six of their victims had died that day. Every one of them kids, every one of them students. Of the two assailants who had survived, only one had been willing to talk. They had a coming, he'd said.

They were asking for it. Ten years later, it remained the most elaborately coordinated attack ever to take place on school grounds in the United States. In the subject of all kinds of speculation, not only in town, but all over the national media.

How five young kids have been pushed so completely over the edge. How they'd managed to prepare in secret, none of them backing out of the plan, none of them blabbing to an adult before it could happen, nor to any of their fellow students. The video footage had never been seen by anyone other than the police and the people in the courtroom. It had been preserved but confiscated. One day, when all the legal business was finally over, it would be destroyed. It was playing out, though, right where I could see it.

A full reenactment performed only by the dead. I slumped back into my chair in front of the surveillance cameras. This time I looked them over carefully. My finger shaking as I traced them over the screen one at a time. Call Brandy, I thought, you have to call her right now, but I waited. I didn't buy into the idea that the cameras could not see this, couldn't record. it. The eye is the recording device for the mind, after all.

The memory is the hard drive. If the ghosts were there, they should see them. It's automated, Mr. Banks had said. The system archives at all. Don't touch it. If there's a problem, report it. Maintenance will fix it before the next shift. The camera was still showing the wall mural, which I knew wasn't really there except for when

it played the virtual reel at Justin's demise. The real mural had been done thirty years ago. No way it had been maintained all that time. Under the surveillance deck, my toes were propped right up against the computer tower. There were cabinets on either side, too. I got down on my knees and opened them. The one on the right of the box with the surveillance camera controls. And even though the cameras were set to record, the monitor screen was set to play and repeat.

On a loop, I presumed. Mr. Banks, I said to myself smart. You sly, secretive son of a bitch. God knew how far back banks had to go to get a clean, unhaunted recording in this fucked-up place. Must have been a good while, though. Unless you believe the mural hadn't been painted over until recently. He probably had to transfer the footage from VHS. It did look rather grainy.

Hell, in 1988 it could have been Betamax. I fiddled with the settings. I could always click them back to defy-hast. fault later. What old place doesn't have a ghost or two? Mr. Jarvis had asked. He'd be the one to know. He'd been cleaning up after these kids since, well, since forever as far as I was concerned. He'd been working here when I was a student and Mr. Banks taught freshman and senior PE back in those days. Mr. Banks was known to go up on the building's roof with a pair of binoculars just to catch kids skipping class. He didn't hold well with rule breaking.

The mere existence of ghost was evidently against the rules, and Lake Ridge High had more than its share. There in the auto shop room, one could watch the hydraulic lift fail under a car with no wheels, instantly crushing young Sal Pinino. In the nurse's office, there was poor Martina Flores, asphyxating from a peanut allergy reaction brought on by a cupcake during a homeroom birthday celebration. where she Phelps in the swimming pool, Arnie Booker in the science lab, Jania Brown outside on the track field, and in every place where the Friday of five knives had left a body.

The building's memory of that nightmare, it seemed, was as omnipresent as the earlier silence had been. A silence I would learn. They tended to end at 11.20 and asserted itself at around 110 in the morning. I have no idea why. All the dead were well known. Their names came up at the barber shops and the diners all the time, just as I've said. The ghosts of Lake Ridge High were talked about by many and believed in by more than a few. Banks must have known I'd come into contact with them.

He certainly hadn't denied them. I can only imagine he was waiting for a night security guy who wouldn't mind their presence. Someone like Jarvis, or perhaps a little better at least. keeping secrets. For nearly an hour, I could only sit there at this surveillance deck and watch them transfixed, mesmerized by the enormity, the importance of what I was watching. But before it ended, that first night, I came back to myself and remembered my backpack. I unzipped it, and dumped its contents out onto the cot. One digital EMF reader, a couple of small infrared lights, a full-spectrum camcorder, and a clip on

EVP recorder. The basics. Oh, and my lucky rabbit's foot. I bring in the rest little by little over the next several days. I caught my chest, steady my breathing. I simply beside myself with excitement. It's probably nothing, Brandy had said. Just your typical small town superstition.

But you never know. I was eager to call her, give her the news. But on that first night there was no way for me to know how long I had had before the apparitions retreated, back into the walls or wherever they hung out when people couldn't see them. And I didn't want to wait until tomorrow night to capture them on film, which is a much higher quality than the shitty surveillance cameras. My fortune, waiting to be made.

Brandy could wait a bit longer. I had a skeleton key. I had the alarm code. I could go anywhere and do anything I wanted. The secret wouldn't keep. Not forever. I was just glad I'd be the guy to break it. For more information, including pictures and videos of the stories told on this podcast,

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