Hallway

“Looks like any other hallway to me,” the girl said, not seeing any reason to be in that hallway anyway. Her classes weren’t over that way and she’d never really had reason to go that way otherwise, yet she was standing there now with her friend. That same friend was the one who’d dragged her over there.

“It’s got no lockers though,” the second girl said, making her friend stop to ‘observe’ the hallway.

“Who cares?” the first girl asked for she couldn’t see anything wrong with that. There were a few hallways in the school that had no lockers, so what was the big deal?

“It doesn’t have any rooms either…” the second girl stated and looked to her friend to see the reaction.

“Again, I ask the question,” the first told her. Okay, so it was the only hallway without any rooms or lockers in the entire school. Did it really matter?

“It’s creepy!” the second girl finally said, louder this time as if making a point.

“It’s a hallway,” as she said this, a look of pure disbelief crossed the first girl’s face.

“Haven’t you heard the rumours of disappearances in this hallway?” the second girl inquired, also bearing a look of disbelief, though hers was there for a different reason. She was finding it hard to believe that her friend couldn’t see her way of things about the hallway. It was creepy, and that she’d decided the first time she entered into the hallway after hearing about it.

The first girl’s attention was drawn to something else though; a sound. That sound being the sound of scoffing coming from someone else in the hall. She noted that this passerby was one of the guys from a grade lower than her friend and herself, which seemed to tick her off. For a moment, she only glared, wondering if there were going to be words to go with that scoff.

“Problem, midget?” she snapped in retaliation after that moment, which had actually been quite a short time span.

The boy looked at her in alarm, as if surprised that he’d been heard. Holding a dumbfounded look on his face at first, he stared, though then he regained his composure. The smug-like appearance returned to his face and he shot her a glare.

“What if I do?” he snapped back, creating an implied challenge as well.

“You should keep it to yourself. No one cares about your problems,” she told him. She guessed by his surprised expression that he’d been expecting a violent comeback.

“Just leave him alone,” the second girl piped up again after a moment of silence on her part.

“Little midget should mind his own damn business,” the first girl snapped again, disregarding looks from other passersby in the hall.

Before anyone could say anything more though, there was a large bang, causing each of them to jump, even if it was just a bit. The source of that bang though would become the least of their worries.

††††

“You want to know what I heard about this school that’s pretty cool?” one amongst a group of girls asked, looking at her friends and eager to tell the story.

“Sure, why not?” one of the others replied. She figured that it was the stupid story about someone who wrote graffiti on the wall or something. They’d all heard that that had happened a couple of years ago; the grade twelve’s of that year being the culprits. They’d written some pretty nasty, though quite funny, things about the principle and vice-principle on the walls and windows outside.

“Someone told me that there’s this one hallway in the school that has no lockers and no rooms down it at all. It actually exists, too! It’s upstairs and there are only doors on either end of the hallway,” the girl told them, pointing to the ceiling when she explained that it was upstairs.

“Hooray?” the second girl replied, not finding this story all too ‘cool’ or amusing at all.

“Shut up, Christa! That’s not the point of the story!” the first girl, the one who was telling the tale, snapped, waiting for her friend to shut up. Once she had, she continued. “Anyway, the person who told me this said that the creepy thing about the hallway was that there are disappearances in there sometimes. There haven’t been for a while, but it’s supposed to happen again in a few years or something!”

“Really?” another girl inquired with a look of interest upon her face as she asked. Stories such as that fascinated her, though she hardly believed they could be true. She wanted to see this hallway for herself though.

“If that’s true, then how come the teachers don’t close off the hallway?” Christa demanded to know as she saw many plot holes in that story.

“How would I know? Do I look like a teacher?” the first girl retorted, pretending to be a teacher afterwards.

“Yes, the perfect example of a teacher!” Christa took off her glasses and put them on her friend to complete the stereotypical teacher look.

“Ah! I can’t see!” the girl complained, squinting and widening her eyes behind the glasses as if that would help. It only proved to hurt her eyes though as she continued to stare through them. “You must be blind!”

The girls all laughed, forgetting about the story for the remainder of the lunch period. Their attention was easily diverted to other things, such as how Christa was apparently blind and how she’d gotten to be blind. Other subjects even branched off of that one, like how teachers who wore glasses were blind too and that’s why some of them couldn’t teach properly. That of course would lead to complaining about the teachers they disliked and so forth. The chain of topics flying around just continued to lengthen as the lunch went on.

It would be a few days later that the story would pop into the mind of the one girl once again. She happened to notice that if she went a certain way to get to her locker upstairs she walked right by this hallway with no lockers or rooms. And when she thought about it, she realized that she’d seen it a lot before, but it just never really clicked in that there was anything abnormal about it.

She chuckled slightly as she passed by it, seeing others stopping and ogling at the hallway. It seemed that the story had gotten around rather quickly. It wasn’t too much of a surprise really, because the one who’d told the story, Sylvia, loved to talk. She probably told the story to anyone who would listen, no matter who it was.

A slam met her ears though as she was about to go further down the hall, and she leaned back to peer down the strange hallway again. A grin crossed her face this time, as someone had apparently dropped their books all over the floor, which included one of the science text books and a huge binder. Without further delay, she just continued to go on her way, disregarding any further noise that came from the hallway.

††††

“You idiot! You scared the crap out of me!” the boy snapped at the other male, watching as he apologized and picked up his books.

“It seems that Sir Scoffs-A-Lot has a problem with people dropping their books,” the girl who’d been dragged into the ‘creepy’ hallway by her friend whispered to that friend.

Her friend nodded, glaring at the first boy and watching as the second picked up his books. He adjusted them in his arms before starting to walk down the hallway again, this time with a quicker pace. The one who’d yelled at him, who was going the opposite direction, continued on his way as well. Neither of them made it very far before there was another loud bang.

“How many times are you going to drop your damn books?!” the boy yelled at the other, but he noted that it wasn’t the books dropping this time that made a noise, it was something else.

The door on the other side of the hallway had slammed shut, yet there was no one there to do said slamming and it had been open only a moment ago. When there was a third bang, just as loud as the second one, he instantly looked to the door in the direction of the hallway that he’d been heading. He saw that it had been shut as well.

“What the hell?” one of the older girls, the one who’d called him midget, demanded of anyone who could give her the answer.

The boy ran to the door, pushing on the handle to try and open it. It wouldn’t open though, as it was locked. From the outside or from the inside, it didn’t matter, it was locked. How it got locked was the question because those doors were always left open except for when the school was closed.

“Hey!” he started banging his fist on the window, to try and get someone’s attention from outside the hallway that now seemed more like a room.

“I don’t think they can hear you, midget,” the girl called from down the hall, looking at the others as well.

There were maybe eight of them in the hall all together (she didn’t bother to count) and she was waiting for one of them to start having a panic attack. The one she expected to have a panic attack the most was her friend, whose name was Kayla, but the contrary seemed to be taking place. Kayla seemed completely calm in the situation, but maybe she really wasn’t. She didn’t think her friend would be calm, considering how she was just mentioning that the hallway was really creepy.

A shriek came moments later and she thought that someone was starting to panic, but when she turned in the direction of the shriek, she saw that they had damn good reason to do said shrieking. From what she and the others in the hallway could see, there was now a red liquid, which looked disturbingly like blood, flowing down the wall panel near where the shrieking one was standing. Their eyes traveled though, noting that the blood-like substance was now trickling down all the wall panels and even down the windows on the doors.

“What’s going on?!” the boy asked the classic question no one could answer properly as he backed away from the door.

No one even tried to answer him, all of them now too preoccupied with backing towards the center of the hallway. A few of them jumped as they ran into someone else in the hallway, but no one jumped away from where they were standing. The books had fallen once again, but it had been so unimportant that no one had heard them fall.

The blood flowed thicker down the walls and windows, blocking out the outside world of the school completely. As it hit the floor, it splashed and made its way towards the huddled group of students trying to get away from the situation they couldn’t even understand.

“Nadia?” Kayla asked in a quivering voice.

“Yeah?” the girl answered her friend, who was now obviously panicking as much as any of the others in that room.

“Now do you think this hallway is creepy?”

There was no reply that came though as the ceiling tiles began to fall upon them, bringing mass amounts of blood through the holes they left. The thick liquid poured down upon them like a waterfall, pushing them all to the floor and drowning them in its substance. No matter how hard they tried to push themselves off the floor, they just got pushed back down. At one point, it even felt like they were passing through the floor.

No one came to their aid. No one seemed to be even remotely aware that anything was going on inside the hallway with no lockers and rooms. When anyone even glanced down that hallway, all they saw was just an empty hallway. When they tried to go through it, they found the doors locked. To them, it was impassable. To them it was empty.

Later that night, when all the students had gone home, the janitor was doing his rounds with mopping the floors. He wheeled the big cart along the upstairs floor, coming to the hallway with no rooms and lockers. He tried to open it, and when he found that he couldn’t, he merely unlocked the door with his key so that he could mop the floor within.

When he got in there, he saw what looked like paint or juice stains on some of the floor tiles. He sighed in exasperation, thinking to himself that the students shouldn’t be allowed to go there during lunch because they always made a mess. It didn’t even cross his mind that it could have been something else. It didn’t even cross his mind as he mopped the entire floor that students had disappeared.

END