The Boy

I was a young boy at the time. No more than nine or ten, I believe. I lived a few blocks from an abandoned school, McCulloch Middle School, if I remember correctly.
I spent copious amounts of time playing inside there after-hours, messing around and whatnot.
One of the door locks was busted, you see. It was like my own fortress.

Now, it never struck me at the time, but for having been abandoned for such a long time, there was still a lot of junk lying around. Junk without any dust on it. And there were a lot of other little signs that people were in fact still using the school, although I'd never actually seen anyone going in or out, except myself.

I used to doodle on the blackboards, stack textbooks into little piles to sit on, rearrange the school desks into circles and pretend two of them were were boxers in a ring. Normal things that children do when left unattended, I suppose.
But there was one night that was different- one snowy night which I haven't told a single soul about until telling you now.

I was playing army, I believe- marching through one of the hallways on the first floor and giving commands to troops inside my head, when I heard an angry voice around the corner.

“Where's the boy?!”

I froze up, knowing that I had finally gotten caught messing around in this building where I had no business being.

Instead of someone charging determinedly around the corner to arrest me, as my imagination was predicting, I heard a different angry voice pipe up.

“Get out here and give us the boy!”

Then a voice that was too muffled to hear replied. It took me a moment, but I realized I might not be in any trouble at all. However, I was smart enough to know that if I kept standing in the middle of the hallway like a bullfrog in a flashlight beam, I would indeed be in trouble very soon. So, I pulled up against the wall, and cautiously peeked around the corner.

I wasn't prepared for what I saw, let me tell you.

In a building where I'd never seen so much as my own reflection before, now almost a dozen men and women were angrily buzzing outside an office door, shoving on it occasionally and trying to bust it open. To make things even more surreal, most of the men held guns.

Now, even if I hadn't been playing army and imagining people being shot left and right, the sight of those real guns would have turned my blood just as quickly to ice.

I pulled my head back instinctively, imagining they were already shooting at me. It was immediately apparent to me that if this angry mob was out looking for little boys, I needed to find a safer place to listen from.

Having played in this building for countless months, I knew some of the classrooms had doors to both hallways, so I started checking for one that was open in the safe hallway on the opposite side of the building.

I found an unlocked door door on my third or fourth try, and as I shut it quietly behind me and made my way nearer to the commotion, it sounded like things were escalating quickly. I put my ear on the closed door connecting to the dangerous hallway and listened.

“If you don't come out here this instant, so help me, I'm gonna shoot this damn door right off its hinges!”

Now I could finally make out the voice from inside the teacher's office. The door I was listening at was right opposite the door where all the action was taking place, you understand.

“It won't do you any good. The door's been sealed.”

The voice in the classroom sounded afraid. It wasn't angry like the voices of the mob, which suddenly erupted in a chorus of hatred.

“How could you put a monster like that in the same classroom with my little girl?!”
“Yeah! He oughta be locked away where he can't do anyone any harm.”
“Or destroyed! For his own good! For the safety of everyone!”

This last line was met with several cheers.
The voice in the office wavered a bit in his reply.

“You don't understand. There's nothing I can do. I have to help the boy try to live a normal life. I have to.”

“You had your chance. I'm comin' in there.”

With these words, a shot rang out, followed immediately by screams and another eruption from the crowd.

“What happened?!”
“The bullet bounced right off the damn wood!”
“Is everyone ok?!”
“How could that happen?”

The voice from inside the office wavered a bit now.

“I told you, the door's been sealed. It won't open unless I break the seal first. There's nothing you can do.”

“Well, we'll see how good that seal is when the whole damn school is burning down around it!”
“Yeah, open up!”

“The boy is very sad. He says no one needs to get hurt.”

“Yeah? Tell that to my son. He got chunks of his arm torn out the last time that kid in there had himself a tantrum!”

There was a brief silence, and the man in the office said something that to this day, still wakes me up ringing in my ears.

“If you don't leave now, the boy's going to kill you.”

There was a tense silence, then he finished.

“All of you.”

This seemed to have quite an effect on the crowd for a moment, but one of the braver, or stupider, men finally spoke up and re-envigorated their efforts.

“What's he gonna do? Make us all explode? Shoot us with our own guns? Poison us?!”

At this sentence, the mob and I parted ways.
As they re-doubled their efforts to get into that office, I turned on my heels and took off.
I'd heard enough horror stories from my father about the poison gases in the war trenches, and even though I had no idea what was going to happen, I wasn't going to stick around to see firsthand.

I headed straight for the end of the hallway and almost flew up the three flights of stairs, imagining poison gas and bullets coming up behind me; imagining death itself chasing me.

I went all the way to the top of the stairs, and out onto the roof, where it was still snowing, softly. Then, I shut the heavy door behind me and kicked a nearby wedge underneath it to keep back whatever was coming. Not turning away, I backed up as far from the door as possible, and found myself at the edge of the roof, overlooking the street. I think it was right then that I realized I was crying.

I wiped my tears away and stared unblinkingly forward, but nothing came out of that door. Instead, down behind me, the front doors of the school opened up and everyone in the mob walked calmly out one after another in a single-file line.

Then one by one, they collapsed out into the fresh snow. Some sat down first and fell over, some lay down on their backs gently, and some completely slumped down mid-walk into a crumpled heap.

From the few that were looking up towards the snowing sky, towards me, I could tell they were dead.
And I knew in my stomach that that boy had killed them, somehow.

It was like he just... put sleep into them, and never took it back out.