School's Out

 

photo by Christina Blust - https://www.flickr.com/photos/17010235@N06/4630590630, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10401676

 This story was for the Furious Fiction contest for February. The criteria are as follows:

• Each story had to be set in a SCHOOL.
• Each story had to begin with the word THREE.
• Each story had to include the adjectives: MAGNETIC, UNCOUTH, SUSPICIOUS, FLOWERY
• 55 hours and 500 words or fewer
  

 

School's Out

 

Three, I though I saw three kids go into the school. Nothing suspicious about that, except that school has been abandoned since the fifties. The other odd part was they were there by the door and then they weren’t.

I was here for some urban exploration but it looked like I’d been beaten inside today. I went up to the door, but it was chained shut with an old rusty padlock. So they hadn’t come in this way. Maybe they saw me and ducked around the corner. I began to walk the perimeter of the building looking for any way in. Everything seemed to be boarded up tight on the first floor, but I found a loose grate that lead to a basement door. The door was ajar and so I went in. I shined my flashlight around but saw no footprints in the dust except my own.

There was the usual hodgepodge of stuff you’d find in a basement, some rusted tools and lengths of pipe, nothing of much interest. I found my way to the stairs. The first floor was darker and mustier than the basement had been. There also seemed to be a chill in the air, odd since it was the middle of summer. I’d come out on a long hall that I assumed stretched the length of the building. My flashlight could only penetrate a short way in the gloom. Each side of the hall had doors at regular intervals. There was also a clock in the hall stopped at three twenty eight. When I was a kid the bell rang at three thirty to let us out. *Two more minutes and the bell would ring*, I thought, but this moment was frozen in time, just like all the classrooms that lined the hall.

I looked in the closest room. The ceiling was falling in, desks and chairs were piled up haphazardly in the corner. The teacher’s desk was overturned and empty drawers strewn about. Across one wall was some graffiti saying some very uncouth things about my mother. I moved on.

It was much the same in the next few rooms, I don’t know what I expected. One room still had writing on the black board. I’m not sure if it was original or had been done after it was closed up. It was a flowery poem about moon and June and that kind of nonsense.

It was strange, I hadn’t heard or seen those kids. Maybe I spooked them and they didn’t come in. As I peered in the final room, I saw them sitting at desks, they looked more like holograms than real kids. Their gaze was being drawn magnetically toward the clock on the wall. It was the same time as the one in the hall, but this one was ticking. I stood transfixed as the second hand made two complete revolutions and then the bell rang. My heart was racing. I shone the flashlight on the kids as they evaporated.