Chapter 10: Descent

Chapter 10: Descent

The abandoned Blackwood Elementary school was a black hole against the bruised purple of the night sky, devouring the starlight. It didn’t look merely empty; it looked erased, a monument to a past so toxic the town had tried to pretend it away. Every cracked window was a vacant eye, every strand of overgrown ivy a grasping claw. The feeling of being watched hadn’t left me since the night before. Now, standing at the edge of the property with Detective Harding, I knew the feeling wasn't paranoia. It was an invitation.

“Stay close. No heroics,” Harding grunted, his voice a low rumble in the oppressive quiet. In his hands, he held a heavy, four-foot crowbar and a large, industrial flashlight whose beam cut through the darkness like a solid pillar of light. My own flashlight felt like a child’s toy in comparison.

We didn’t approach the main entrance. Harding, guided by a grim familiarity, led us around the side, through tangled weeds and the skeletal remains of a swing set. He stopped at a boarded-up window on the ground floor.

“Maintenance access,” he muttered. “Boards have been loose for twenty years.”

He wedged the crowbar into the seam and pulled. The shriek of rusty nails being torn from weathered plywood was obscenely loud in the dead silence. It sounded like a scream. For a moment, we both froze, listening. The only answer was the whisper of the wind through the tall pines that encircled the school, standing like silent, complicit sentinels.

Harding pulled the last board free and pushed the window open. A wave of air washed over us from the dark interior. It was the school’s foul breath, a smell I remembered with sickening clarity—a foundation of damp decay and chalk dust, layered with the sharp, chemical tang of bleach and something else, something cloyingly sweet and rotten, like forgotten meat.

“After you,” Harding said, his gaze fixed on the black rectangle of the window.

Climbing through that window was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Every instinct, honed over four years of dedicated cowardice, screamed at me to turn and run. But the image of Jacob’s face, twisted in pain, was burned onto the back of my eyelids. I pushed it down and clambered through, my feet landing on the dusty floor of a forgotten classroom.

Inside, the darkness was absolute, a physical presence that swallowed the light from our flashlights just a few feet from the lenses. The building wasn’t just abandoned; it felt actively malevolent, as if the structure itself had absorbed decades of fear and was now radiating it back at us. The silence was a living thing, heavy and watchful. Every creak of the floorboards under our feet was a profanity in a sacred, terrible place.

Our beams sliced through the gloom, illuminating scenes from a nightmare. Desks sat in neat rows, coated in a thick blanket of grey dust, as if the students had simply evaporated mid-lesson. A faded map of the world, its colors bleached to pastel ghosts, peeled from a wall. We moved down the main hallway, a place that had once echoed with the shouts and laughter of children, now a tomb-silent corridor.

My light swept past the door to the coach’s office. I froze, my breath catching in my throat. I could see it all again: the ruffled sleeping bag, the half-full mug of water, the dawning horror that we were not alone.

“Leo,” Harding’s voice was sharp, cutting through the memory. “Keep moving. Eyes forward.”

I nodded, my throat too tight to speak, and forced my feet to move. We passed the double doors to the gym, and I instinctively glanced toward the far wall, toward the supply closet where my life had fractured into a before and an after. The closet where I had found one victim and created another.

That’s when I heard it.

At first, it was so faint I thought it was the wind whistling through a broken pane of glass. A thin, high-pitched, melodic sound. I stopped, straining to hear.

“What is it?” Harding whispered, his light freezing on my face.

“You don’t hear that?”

He fell silent, tilting his head. And then I saw his eyes widen slightly. The sound grew, not in volume but in clarity. It was a tune. A simple, aimless, seven-note melody, hummed with a breathy, childlike innocence. A phantom sound with no discernible source, echoing softly through the dead halls.

My blood turned to ice water. The flashlight slipped in my trembling, sweating hand. I knew that tune. I knew it better than my own heartbeat. It was the melody Jacob used to hum, over and over, when he was lost in thought, drawing in his notebook or trying to beat a level in a video game. It was the soundtrack to my entire childhood.

“Jacob…” I breathed, the name a ragged tear in the silence.

This wasn’t a memory. It wasn’t a trick of the mind. Harding heard it too. It was a taunt. A welcome. Silas was here. He knew we were here. And he was using the ghost of my best friend to lure us into his web. The sound seemed to be leading us, a siren song of the damned, pulling us deeper into the school’s decaying heart.

We followed it, our footsteps now slow and deliberate. It led us away from the main school building, down a dark, narrow service corridor I never knew existed. The air grew colder, the smell of damp earth intensifying. The humming was clearer here, seeming to emanate from the very walls around us.

At the end of the corridor was a single, heavy metal door, painted an industrial grey now flaking with rust. A thick, ancient-looking padlock, the size of a man’s fist, held a heavy hasp in place. The humming stopped. The abrupt, total silence that followed was more terrifying than the sound itself. It was the silence of a predator that has stopped moving, that is now simply waiting.

“His workshop,” Harding said, his voice a low growl. He wasted no time. He braced himself, jammed the tip of the crowbar into the lock mechanism, and threw his entire weight against it.

Metal groaned. For a second, nothing happened. Then, with a deafening crack that echoed like a gunshot, the rusty hasp snapped in two. The sound reverberated down the hallway, a formal announcement of our intrusion.

Harding pulled the heavy door open. It scraped against the concrete floor, the sound grating on my raw nerves. A blast of frigid, foul air rolled out of the opening, a noxious cocktail of wet soil, iron, and the sickly-sweet rot of a slaughterhouse. It was the smell from the closet, magnified a thousand times.

Our flashlight beams pierced the blackness beyond the door, revealing not a room, but a steep, narrow flight of concrete stairs descending into the earth. It was a throat, leading down into the belly of the beast.

There was no hesitation. We were past the point of turning back. Harding went first, his heavy boots thudding on the concrete steps. I followed, my hand brushing against the cold, slimy wall. The stairs went down further than I thought possible, deeper than any normal basement.

We reached the bottom and stepped out into a space that was not a boiler room. The air was thick and cold, and the ground was packed earth. Our lights revealed a junction of narrow, hand-dug tunnels branching off into the oppressive darkness. It was a labyrinth. A tomb. He hadn’t just occupied the basement; he had carved his own world out of the dirt and rock beneath the school.

As my light swept across the nearest wall, I stopped breathing. The damp earth was covered in drawings, scratched into the dirt with a stick or a shard of rock. They were crude, rendered with the clumsy, simplistic style of a very young child.

But the subject matter was a Boschian hellscape.

Stick figures—small ones—were being led by the hand by a tall, impossibly thin shadow-man into forests of menacing, claw-like trees. There were animals with too many legs and screaming human mouths. And there were faces. Hundreds of tiny, terrified faces, their eyes wide circles of white, their mouths gaping O’s of silent, eternal screams. Each one was a trophy. A soul he had ‘tended’ to.

My beam landed on one drawing, slightly larger than the others, near the entrance of a tunnel. It was a stick figure of a boy with messy, scribbled hair. One of his legs was bent at a horrifying, unnatural angle.

My stomach heaved. This wasn’t a lair. It was a sanctuary. We were standing in the heart of Silas’s temple, a cathedral of stolen children and unimaginable suffering, built right under the feet of the town that had chosen to forget.