Chapter 8: The Boiler Room

Chapter 8: The Boiler Room

The photocopy of the staff photo lay on the scarred table of my motel room, a grainy black-and-white ghost staring up at the water-stained ceiling. Silas. Maintenance. A name. A face. It was more than I’d had an hour ago, but it wasn't enough. A monster with a name is still a monster. I needed to know his story.

My laptop glowed in the dim room, the only light source. My fingers, so used to the mindless rhythm of data entry, flew across the keyboard with a newfound purpose. I cross-referenced the other names from the album—Henderson, Gable, Thompson—with online directories, obituaries, and social media. It was a grim, digital séance. Henderson, the gym teacher, had died of a heart attack in 2010. Thompson had moved to Florida and fallen off the face of the earth.

But then, a hit. Gable, Evelyn. The stern librarian with the tight bun in the photo. An entry in the directory for Willow Creek Gardens, a retirement community in the next town over. It was a fragile thread, but it was the only one I had.

Willow Creek Gardens was a world away from Blackwood. The lawns were a vibrant, manicured green, the flowerbeds bursting with color. It was a place of forced cheerfulness, a clean, well-lit waiting room for the end of life. I found Evelyn Gable’s apartment in a quiet wing overlooking a small pond.

The woman who answered the door was a fragile, bird-like version of the woman in the photograph. Her sternness had softened into a web of fine wrinkles, her hair a soft white cloud. She was surrounded by towers of books and two plump, sleeping cats. She smiled kindly when I introduced myself, her eyes clouded with the vague politeness of old age.

But the moment I said the words “Blackwood Elementary,” the smile vanished. A shutter came down over her eyes, the friendly old woman replaced by someone guarded and afraid.

“That was a very long time ago,” she said, her voice thin and reedy. She started to close the door.

“Please,” I said, my voice cracking with a desperation I didn’t try to hide. I held up the photocopy of the staff page. “I just need to ask you about one of the janitors. It’s about Jacob Vance.”

The name landed like a stone in the quiet room. Her knuckles went white on the edge of the door. Her gaze dropped to the photo in my hand, and her eyes, magnified by her thick glasses, widened in recognition. And in fear.

“Silas,” she breathed, the name a poisoned whisper. She looked past me, down the empty, brightly lit hall, as if expecting to see him standing there. She pulled me inside and shut the door, locking it with a decisive click.

“We weren't supposed to talk about him,” she said, wringing her hands. “Even back then. Principal Thompson said he was… troubled. That it was best to just leave him be.”

She led me to a small, overstuffed armchair. “He wasn’t from town,” she began, her gaze distant, fixed on a past she had clearly tried hard to bury. “He just… appeared one day. Lived in a shack deep in the woods, even in winter. He kept to himself. The only job he could get was working nights at the school.”

She shuddered, a tremor that ran through her entire small frame. “He was a strange man, Mr. Miller. Unsettling. The children were afraid of him. He’d watch them on the playground with this… blankness. No expression at all. And he talked to himself. Or not to himself. He used to say the woods spoke to him. That they were old and had a… a hunger.” She looked at me, her eyes wide. “We all thought he was just a harmless crazy. A town eccentric. But there was nothing harmless about him.”

My own memory surged, the image of those flat, black eyes, devoid of all emotion. Not crazy. Not angry. Just empty. Predatory.

“Was there a place in the school he spent most of his time?” I asked, leaning forward. “An office? A storage room?”

The question seemed to unlock a deeper, more specific fear in her. She hugged her thin arms to her chest. “The other janitors, they complained about him constantly. They said he was territorial. He’d claimed the old boiler room for himself. The whole sub-basement complex.”

My heart began to pound a slow, heavy rhythm. A sub-basement.

“He called it his workshop,” she whispered, her voice trembling now. “It was off-limits. He kept the door locked with a big, rusty padlock he’d brought himself. The principal didn’t care; it was an old, decommissioned area, and as long as the main school was clean, he left Silas alone. But the other staff… we heard things.”

“What things?” I pressed, my voice barely audible.

“Sounds,” she said, her eyes unfocused. “Late at night, if you were there grading papers. Faint hammering. And scraping. And the smells… Sometimes a sharp, chemical smell, like bleach, would come up through the vents. Other times…” She trailed off, swallowing hard. “Other times it was something else. Something sweet and rotten. He would bring things in from the woods, too. Animal bones, bundles of sticks tied with gut, strange-looking rocks covered in moss. He’d take them all down to his ‘workshop.’”

I stood up, my mind reeling. The chemical smell from the closet. The sickly-sweet odor from the coach’s office. It was all coming from below.

I thanked her, my voice hollow, and left her standing in her doorway, a ghost revisited by a nightmare she thought she’d escaped. As I walked back to my car under the impossibly cheerful sun, the pieces of the puzzle slammed into place with a force that buckled my knees.

The boiler room. The sub-basement.

The coach’s office, where we found the sleeping bag and the fresh water, was on the ground floor. The gym, where we hid, was part of the main building. The closet where I found the small, mummified body…

It was all directly above the school’s foundation.

Right beneath our feet.

The realization was a physical blow, a punch of ice-cold horror to the gut. We hadn’t just stumbled into an abandoned school. We had been walking on the roof of the monster’s lair. The whole time, while we were laughing and daring each other, filled with the thrill of transgression, he was down there. In the dark. Listening. The sound of our footsteps on the floorboards above must have been an announcement. Dinner knocking on the door. Our childish adventure wasn't cut short by his arrival. He had been there all along, waiting for us to come to him.