"Great idea, Jack," Mike praised, almost whispering. "Park under the tree. It's a full moon tonight, so I don't think a cop will notice the car here in the dark shade."
"Dude, there's a neighborhood just a block behind us we just drove through," Jack reminded, as he parked the car near the curb under the tree, just like Mike suggested. "If a pig did see the car here, he'll assume it's owned by someone in one of the fifty houses there."
"You're right, man, but every action must proceed with every ounce of caution. We are on a mission, and none of us here want it aborted." Mike looked down Mendocino Drive where it ended at Victory Boulevard. He said, "Do you think this is exactly where Ronnie Filbert parked his car before he simply crossed that street?"
"No," Rose said from the backseat, "he actually parked on the other side of this street, the car facing away from the school, as if he were going to make a tire-screeching getaway."
Jack turned around to look at Rose, one eyebrow above the other.
"Why did we bring her?" he asked his girlfriend Tiffany, who sat between Rose and Jack's girl, Sharla, in the backseat.
"I told you, babe," Tiffany began to say, "Rose knows all about what happened at Victory High School twenty years ago. It's cool to have people who are knowledgeable around you, you know. You can't just walk into an abandoned building at midnight without knowing exactly where to go."
"Come on, man," Mike said. "Rose is the one who got the bottle of whiskey for us, anyways."
"Goddamn right," Sharla said to her boy, Jack. "I don't want to go in that dead place sober."
Jack turned his gaze away from the silent, timid Rose back to the old High School a few hundred yards away. His eyes went along the entire length of chain link fence bordering the parking lot and sidewalk.
"Okay, fine," Jack said with a sigh. "We're all here to have a scary, fun Halloween night. Booze and speaking to a dead monster."
"You didn't forget the Ouija board, right, Rose?" Mike asked.
Rose gripped the handle of her backpack sitting at her feet on the car's floor mat. She said, "It's with the bottle of whiskey in my backpack here."
"Mike, get the bolt cutter from the trunk," Jack said, reaching for the trunk release lever beside his left shin. But before he pulled on it, he stopped, and said, "How about you get that whiskey open now, Rose?"
Those about to get out of the car took their hand off the doorhandles.
"Now why the hell would we start drinking now, Jack?" Tiffany asked. "It's for the party in there, not in here."
"Well, I feel like a swig before walking over -- as a group, mind you -- and cutting a hole in that rusty fence," Jack said. "Any of you hear about how a little liquid courage can help along the way? Why do you think all those C.E.O's in New York have bottles of expensive booze in their office? It's to be gung-ho."
"Whatever," Tiffany said. "Rose, just get it out so we'll warm right up."
Rose zipped open her backpack, took out the bottle, and opened it. She held it up for Tiffany to swig first.
"No," Tiffany said, with a nod toward Rose. "You got it for us, you get first taste."
Rose took the first gulp before passing it along to Tiffany.
"I just hope none of you guys got Covid," Mike said.
Before Tiffany took her first swig of the whiskey, she said, "Alcohol kills the Covid virus, stupid."
"That's not what Fauci said," Mike pointed out.
"Wasn't he fired?" Sharla asked, taking hold of the bottle from Tiffany. "I haven't seen him much on X, or CNN lately."
"No, that's fake news," Mike said. "He stepped down so he can run for Governor."
"I thought it was because he got sued by like all of New York City," Sharla said, handing the bottle over the car seat to Jack.
"People, for fuck sake," Jack said, taking the bottle from Sharla, "this isn't the time for politics."
"But we're going into an abandoned High School that closed twenty years ago, because of a mass shooting," Mike said.
"Look, I'm not going to use the Ouija board in there so I can debate with that demon, Ronnie Filbert, about fucking gun control," Jack said, then took a big swig of the whiskey. After three good swallows, he held it in front of Mike. "Politics ain't no thing to get drunk to."
"What if Ronnie doesn't say anything to us at all?" Mike asked, taking hold of the bottle.
Jack wiped away the alcohol moistness from his lips left behind from drinking the booze, and then said, "If no one is willing to move that pointer thing to give us realistic fake answers, then we'll just finish the night getting shit-faced, and spend the rest of Halloween night looking for all the bullet holes. Don't forget the two flashlights in the trunk when you get the bolt cutter."
The group of five sauntered down Mendocino Drive to the crosswalk at the traffic light. The boys were in the lead, with the girls trailing behind. Sharla and Tiffany both walked side-by-side with Rose was last in line a few feet behind them, gripping the shoulder straps of the backpack she wore high between her shoulder blades. Jack had looked both ways before leading the group across Victory Boulevard. The traffic was basically dead that Halloween night; the only oncoming car had drove by them well after they had already crossed the street, and hid out of view behind bushes at the corner of the condemned high school property.
Jack sat on his haunches, and began cutting a hole in the chain link fence. Mike turned on the flashlight he was holding to help Jack cut in the right spot for a clean opening.
"Don't turn on the damn light, man," Jack demanded. "You want people to see us when they drive by?"
Mike immediately turned off the flashlight, and said, "Sorry. I just wanted to make sure you cut the fence right, and didn't cut your finger off."
"Don't worry," Jack began to say, "I've done this kind of thing plenty of times. I know what I'm doing."
"What if we're caught by the security?" Tiffany asked.
"Then we just take off running," Jack said, as he continued to cut the fence. "Just remember where the hole in the fence is here."
"What if it's a cop, and not security?" Mike asked. "And he pulls a gun on us?"
"Then I suggest you put your hands up." Jack was almost done cutting the hole. "Since we're all under eighteen years of age, the pig might just call our parents to pick us up, or just kick us out. Either way, I don't think he'd want to fill out paperwork over some drunk kids walking into this shithole school."
When Jack completed cutting the fence, he stood up, then kicked on it. The round circle of loose fence fell to the old pavement with a small crashing sound, not loud enough to cause a passerby to be curious. No one was walking near the property on the sidewalk, anyway.
Mike was about to bend down to move through the hole into the old parking lot of Victory High School, but Jack put up an arm to stop him.
"No," he said to his friend. "I think Rose should have the honor of going in first, and lead the way inside for us since she knows most about what happened here twenty years ago. What you think, Rose?"
"Okay," she said. "It'll be my pleasure to give you guys the tour of tragedy."
Rose moved passed the others, bent down to step through the hole.
When she stood up in the parking lot, she turned around to Jack on the other side, and said, "Good job cutting that hole. For a second, I thought I'd get something snagged on the fence going through."
"Thanks, Rose," Jack said, smiling at her.
"Well, is it ladies first, or dickheads second?" Tiffany asked, sounding somewhat peeved over Jack's positive reaction to Rose's compliment.
"Since a lady has already gone in, yes, us dickheads should continue our chivalry," Jack said, gesturing for Tiffany and Sharla to be next inside the high school property.
After all the ladies were in the parking lot, Tiffany went up to Rose as Jack and Mike were making their way through the hole in the fence.
"What was that?" she quietly asked. "Were you hitting on my man?"
Rose looked at Tiffany, taken aback by the accusation. She didn't know how to respond.
"You think you can steal him from me?" Tiffany sounded more fierce that time, like a cat snapping at its owner.
Rose finally managed to speak:
"No, Tiffany. Never."
"Keep that thought cemented like a tombstone in your mind," Tiffany said, pointing at Rose's head.
Rose nodded.
Sharla didn't even notice the conversation between Tiffany and Rose, she was simply waiting for the boys to get through the hole. When Mike's shirt was snagged by the fence as he went through, she thought Jack could have cut the hole just a little bit bigger.
"Goddamnit," Mike uttered. "Now I need a new shirt."
"You need a band-aid?" Jack asked.
"No," Mike replied, putting his finger in the hole of his jacket on the shoulder. "I just need a new jacket."
Jack looked over at Rose. He said, "Okay, Rose. Show us where Ronnie Filbert entered the building before he started killing students."
Tiffany was still looking into Rose's eyes with a furrowed brow. She said, "Yeah, Rose lead the way."
Jack handed Rose a flashlight. He said, "Just don't turn that on until we're all inside."
"Um, Ronnie entered the west side of the school building through the double doors," Rose told the group. "Then he went into the first floor bathroom, sat inside a stall until second period began, strapped himself with his weapons, then went into the hallway, and locked the double doors at each end of the first floor hallway with a chain and padlock."
Rose gestured for the group to follower her to the double doors she had mentioned Ronnie Filbert had gone through twenty years prior. Arriving at the doors, she tightly gripped the handle of the right side door, pulled it open, and then entered without looking at the rest of the group behind her. Jack turned to look at everyone else, shrugged his shoulders, then followed Rose into the darkness.
"I can't see a damn thing," Mike said, as he just passed the threshold behind Tiffany and Sharla. "Should I leave the door open?"
"No, dude," Tiffany said. "Make sure we can still open it from the inside."
Mike did as she commanded. He then tested the door to see for sure it did not lock from the inside.
"It's all good," he confirmed to the group. "We ain't trapped like sheep."
"Quiet," Rose said from farther down the dark hallway.
Sharla gasped, and said, "Don't do that, Rose. Not when it's totally dark like this."
There was a clicking sound that echoed down the hallway. It was Rose's flashlight turning on. The rest of the group looked down to see Rose standing in the middle of the first floor hallway, shining the flashlight on her face.
"You might be scared now," Rose said, "but not as scared, or horrified as the students were once Ronnie began shooting at them with a machine gun in this very spot. You see, he didn't go from room to room, picking off students as they sat, pretending to learn, he pulled fire alarm at the bottom of the stairwell behind me. He patiently waited until this hallway was sufficiently filled with living bodies before... turning them into fresh, bloody corpses."
"Shit, Rose," Jack began saying as he walked down the hallway to where Rose stood, "you're sounding creepy telling that story. Obsessive."
Mike turned on his flashlight at the end of the hallway where they had entered, shining it along the ground, walls, and lockers as he observed the surfaces, hoping to find old blood stains, or bullet holes. He found it odd how clean it actually was; there was hardly a full layer of dust.
"What's wrong with sounding creepy like any other narrator of scary horror stories that happen to be true?" Rose said. "It's Halloween, after all. Rather an appropriate time to experience something authentic."
Rose took off her backpack, zipped it open, and got out the Ouija board box. She said, "We should do it here, where the bloody horror began."
Jack made his way to where Rose stood, both Tiffany and Sharla close behind him.
"So where's that stairwell you just mentioned?" he asked.
Rose turned to shine the flashlight on it. The stairwell was about thirty feet behind her.
"At the last flight of stairs there's a short hallway beside it leading to a custodian supply room," Rose said. "Ronnie hid there until he started shooting his machine gun."
"We should use the Ouija board to speak with him here," Jack said. "Right in this spot."
"Seriously?" Tiffany said. "I'm not sitting on this dirty floor."
Jack turned to look at Mike in the dim light coming from Rose's flashlight, but he wasn't near them. He saw that Mike was still standing near the double doors they all had entered in from, his flashlight illuminating the palm of his hand as he observed its surface after rubbing it on a locker door.
"Hey, Mike," Jack whisper yelled from the middle of the hallway, "get over here. Help me move some desks in here."
Jack and Mike dragged out four desks from the nearest classroom. Rose stopped them from getting a fifth one for her.
"No need for me to sit," she told Jack, "the Ouija board thing is for all of you. I'll just stand, and help you out if you don't understand the answers it gives you."
"Hey, you got to sit somewhere if you're gonna keep drinking," Jack said.
Rose got out the bottle, took one big gulp, and then handed it to Jack.
"The rest is for all of you," she said.
"Cool," Jack said, taking hold of the whiskey bottle.
With the old classroom desks put together, and the Ouija board laying on the combined desks between the four of them, they began using it two at a time, passing around the bottle of whiskey as they took turns handling the planchette. The flashlight stood shining upward at the ceiling on Mike's table, illuminating the area so they could see the Ouija board enough for all of them to read the letters.
At first, no one bothered to move the planchette on purpose to answer their stupid, ridiculously juvenile questions. Rose knew these peers of hers would not take talking to the ghost of someone like Ronnie Filbert seriously with questions such as: How many inches was your dick? or Were there incels back in your century?
Annoyed with their dumbass questions that were obviously not being answered at all, Rose turned away, and walked to the stairwell where she told the others the mass shooting began.
"We're not getting one answer from the netherworld," Sharla said.
"That's because no one's moving the thing to give us one," Jack said.
"Where's the fun in that?" Tiffany asked. "We've got to take this seriously."
"Let's face it," Jack said, rubbing both hands over his face. "There is no afterlife, even on Halloween night."
"Wait, I've got a good question," Mike said. "Why isn't this hallway as dirty as you'd expect twenty years after it has been condemned?"
"What do you mean?" Jack asked, placing his hands on the table. He began feeling dizzy from the booze coursing through his veins. "Like with bloodstains. Those kind of go away over time, or crime scene cleanup people did away with them at the time."
"No, not blood, dirt. I rubbed the palm of my hand on a locker down the hall over there, and there was hardly a year's worth of dust buildup on it. I mean, look at this."
Mike rubbed the surface of the desk he was sitting in, raised it near his mouth, and blew the dust into the light of the flashlight. The fog of accumulated dust rose from the flashlight's shining light.
"See how it rises," Mike pointed out, "twenty years worth of dust would fall on the light bulb. Here, it rises. Why is that?"
"That's because Victory High School is still alive like any other haunted place," Rose said from the darkness.
"Bullshit," Jack said, chuckling. "Where's the heartbeat, then?"
Tiffany grabbed Jack's arm. He looked at her, and saw in the dim light, she was staring down at the Ouija board with wide, frightened eyes.
"The letters," she whispered, terrified.
"What?" Jack asked.
"They're moving."
Jack looked down at the Ouija board, and could see they were in fact moving.
"I see it too," Sharla said. "They're all moving together. Like forming into one single shape."
"What kind of shape?" Mike asked.
"A hand," Sharla replied, her voice shivering.
An arm burst from the Ouija board, with sharp, bloody claws for fingertips, dark gray skin, and wet hair growing from it. Tiffany and Sharla screamed, both jumping up from their desks. Jack found himself unable to move.
"Oh, shit," Mike yelled, moving to stand up from his desk and run away.
Before he could rise, the demon's hand grabbed Mike's entire head, palm covering his face. The others heard his muffled screams for a moment until the demonic hand crushed his entire skull in one effortless squeeze. Blood, and chunks of skull splattered on the horrified, living three.
Jack managed to finally get up from his desk, bumping into the combined desks, knocking over the flashlight. Tiffany went to him, took hold of his hand, and pulled him to run towards the double doors.
"Fucking run, Jack!" she yelled.
They made it five yards down the hallway before being stopped by the sound of heavy growling coming from the darkness.
"No fucking way," Jack said, his voice devoid of all manliness puberty ever gave him.
The growling of the unseen beast stopped. Heavy breathing commenced soon after. Tiffany felt the warmth on the surface of her exposed skin with each exhale coming from right in front of them.
"Where does my pain come from?" the beast growled.
The flashlight that Jack had knocked over rolled to a complete stop, illuminating what was speaking to Jack and Tiffany.
It was a Gargoyle standing ten feet tall, with a wingspan nearly reaching both sides of the hallway, blocking Tiffany and Jack's way out of the building. They both screamed, and ran into the nearest classroom.
On the other side of the desks, Sharla took off from the sounds of their screams. She saw Rose at the bottom of the stairwell, shining her flashlight upward as she began to ascend the flight of stairs. Sharla stopped beside her.
"Rose, we need to leave," Sharla said, grabbing Rose's arm. "Is there another way out of here?"
Rose did not respond, looking fixated up at the flight of stairs.
"Rose, what's wrong with you?" Sharla asked, desperate. "Mike just fucking died. I think Jack and Tiffany are about to be slaughtered by Ronnie. And you... you're going up the stairs like a moron in a slasher movie. For what?"
Rose finally turned her head to look at Sharla with glazed eyes. She asked, "Can't you see it?"
"See what, Rose?"
"Ronnie's Heaven," Rose responded. "Look."
Sharla looked up the flight of stairs, and saw orange light coming from the floor above. Then she felt immense heat. The light got brighter as it revealed its source. Lava. It began pouring down the stairwell, going directly towards them both. Sharla looked upon it with horror. Her life was going to end. Rose grinned as if she were relieved at the sight of nature's most deadly substance. She pulled her arm away from Sharla's grip, and took the first steps up the scorching lava.
"Rose, NO!" Sharla screamed as she began backing away, feeling the deadly heat upon her skin.
She saw Rose turn to flames as the lava made it's way to the ground of the first floor hallway. Sharla covered her eyes with her arm as she ran down the hallway. She opened the first door she came to, opened it, went inside a room, and slammed the door shut. When she opened her eyes, she realized the room was just a bathroom.
As she cried over her dead friends, there suddenly was the sound of a girl whimpering from one of the bathroom stalls.
"Hello," Sharla called out. "Who's that? Is that you, Tiffany? It's me, Sharla. Come out."
The female whimpering stopped. Sharla moved farther inside the bathroom.
"Where are you?" she asked.
"Sharla!" a wicked female voice screeched.
A bathroom stall door slammed open, and a figure dressed all in black appeared from inside it. Sharla spasmed at the sight of it. The figure was a woman with a veil obscuring her face.
"Your name is 'Sharla?'" it asked.
"Yes," Sharla replied, her body shaking.
The woman in black jumped at Sharla, knocking her flat on her back on the dirty bathroom floor. The face behind the veil so close to Sharla's that the smell of burnt coal burned her nostrils.
"That's my name too," the woman in black said.
The woman then screamed so loud, Sharla became paralyzed, her face stuck into contortion.
Rose found herself on the third floor, standing right outside the very classroom Ronnie Filbert held hostage over thirty students, and one corpse of a teacher twenty years earlier. She turned off the flashlight, and then opened the door.
Upon its opening, red light emerged from inside the classroom; Rose stood in the hallway, bathed in it, and pleased by the touch of it. She went inside where there had been a bloodbath twenty years before, only which she could imagine picturing in her mind, since no photos of the mass murder scene had been released to the public.
But in that moment, remaining still in the old classroom filled with red light like a darkroom for developing photographs, Rose found what she was not expecting at all.
Sitting at a lone desk in the middle of the room was a teenaged, brunette girl, her hands laid flat on the desk, head lowered, and her long hair covering her entire face from Rose's view. Across from her at the front of the class was a teenaged boy with a shaved head sitting on top of the teacher's desk, silently staring at the girl. Rose immediately knew who the boy was by how he dressed.
"Ronnie?" she said.
Ronnie turned to look at Rose with despairing eyes.
"Yes," he replied.
"If you're up here, then who is down there scaring them to death?" Rose asked, stepping closer to Ronnie.
She stopped when Ronnie hopped off the teacher's desk, and moved closer to her. He stood before her, staring at a stranger with an uninterested, blank expression.
"The innocent I took from your world, who are filled with so much hatred, are unable to move on to a better, more peaceful plateau of existence," Ronnie said, "so they remain down below, trapped, screaming and raging to bring vengeance upon me. That is their Hell. Those who come across their path will suffer a mere glimpse of the pain the innocent endure as long as they selfishly desire to achieve the pleasure in making me suffer."
"Why am I not afraid, Ronnie?" Rose asked.
"Because you're in love with me," Ronnie said.
Rose began to cry. She wanted to hug Ronnie, but knew that all she'd touch was only in her imagination.
"I love you so much, Ronnie," she said, wiping away tears with the back of her hand. "Ever since I read your words I've loved you. You're the only one in this fucked up world who doesn't make me feel all alone like those fucking morons downstairs. They could never be grateful for meeting the dead. Never."
"I know, Rose," Ronnie said. "You don't need them. You're a good person. You don't even need a bastard like me."
Rose continued to cry, and said, "I'm not a good person."
"Yes, you are, Rose. You didn't hurt anybody like I did."
"No, Ronnie. I did a bad thing. They didn't deserve it."
"It's okay, Rose," Ronnie said, leaning in closer to her. "Putting LSD into the whiskey is probably what they always wanted, anyway. Kids will be kids, especially when they're teenagers. They can handle--"
Rose heard a gunshot from outside the school building.
"What the fuck was that?" Rose blurted.
"Their Hell on Earth," Ronnie said, then took a deep breath. "While my Hell is up here in this terrible, dirty room."
"What Hell is that, exactly?" Rose asked.
Ronnie was back sitting on top of the teacher's desk. He said, "My one true love, Rosemary, won't simply just raise her head to look at me. If only she'd allow me to see her beautiful face just one more time, then I could be able to move on."
"My first name is Rosemarie," Rose informed the uninterested Ronnie.
"Tragedy and horror is not fair to those who suffer most from it," Ronnie said, staring directly at Rosemary.
Rose left the classroom. In the dark hallway she couldn't figure out what to do next, because for a moment she totally forgot about the gunshot. She was reminded of it when a man's voice called from the first floor of the building. She decided to take off to where she knew there was another way out of the building at the backside of the west wing, a way to go around to exactly where the hole in the fence was without being seen by anyone in the parking lot.
Sneaking her way around to the front of Victory High School, Rose crept to the corner of the building, and tactfully looked at the parking lot. She saw a police car and a security vehicle with their emergency lights on parked near the far end of the building from where she was. A police officer and security guard stood, leaning on the security vehicle, smoking cigarettes. Rose saw their head lights shining on two bloody, dead bodies. Even though Rose was tripping on LSD, she could tell one of the dead bodies was Tiffany. Her jaw dropped.
Unwilling to remain in the shadows any longer on school property, to maybe realize what she was actually seeing was part of a psychedelic hallucination, Rose made a run for the hole in the fence. She crawled through it without getting snagged. She then ran straight to Mendocino Drive where Jack's car was still parked.
Before even bothering to open the car door, Rose rolled her eyes, knowing Jack still had the keys on him -- probably all covered in blood, for all she knew. Those morons got caught, and for some ungodly reason, two were dead. So Rose decided to get an Uber ride back to the city. With her young LSD laced mind, she managed to successfully schedule an Uber to her exact location.
As she waited, she stood in the exact spot where she knew Ronnie had parked his car twenty years earlier on the day he committed the mass shooting inside Victory High School. Even though the cop and security guard could see her if they simply looked over at Mendocino Drive, Rose wanted to live dangerously in those last moments.
An ambulance drove through the open fence gates, and park near the cop's car. The paramedics went inside an entrance, escorted by the cop. Another cop car drove into the parking lot.
For some reason, Rose wasn't nervous at all; no one else would suspect she was ever their, because her backpack didn't have her name on it. Then she heard Mike's voice yell the words: "NINJAS! NINJAS FIGHTING!"
When the Uber was turning onto Mendocino, Rose's final thoughts as she looked at the abandoned Victory High School for the last time were that if Mike or Sharla said she was there with them, she'd simply deny it. They were hallucinating on LSD, anyway.
"You Rose?" asked the Uber driver.
Rose got in the backseat of the car. The driver drove off the opposite way from Victory High School.
"What happened at Victory?" the driver asked.
Rose giggled, and said, "Um, I have no idea. I guess bums smoking meth accidentally stabbed each other."
"I graduated from Victory, you know," the driver informed for conversation sake. "Class of '04. Did you?"
"No," Rose said. "I go to high school in the city."
"From the change of smell once you sat in the backseat, I could swear you went to college. HA! But don't you worry, you'll get home safe."
"Wait," Rose said, "did you say you graduated from Victory High in 2004?"
"Uh, yeah," the driver said.
"So, you survived Ronnie's Massacre?" Rose asked, excited, leaning forward in the backseat.
"The what-now?" he asked.
"The Victory High School mass shooting in 2003. If you graduated in '04, then you were there when it happened."
"There never was a mass shooting at Victory," the driver said.
Rose went silent, sitting back in the seat, confused.
She asked: "Then why is it closed?"
The driver replied: "Because the mold. It was going to be demolished about two years ago, but that goddamn mayor embezzled the funds, and gambled it away in Vegas. He's serving five to ten because of it. This town's biggest scandal in its history."
"Oh," Rose muttered, a bit disappointed. "That's interesting, I guess."
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