Chapter 3. THE REAL BEGINNING

The weeks passed.  It was quite a mundane job.  You opened up the school and you shut the school.  Anything that happened in-between varied, but not by much.  

There was the occasional fight between pupils, which lightened the mood, and the occasional problem that had to be dealt with but whoever was on duty during the school time hours had more work to do than the one opening and closing.  I started to feel inert. I always opted for the unlock and lock as it afforded me time during the day to do what I needed.  Occasionally I had to swap shifts one week but ideally, the early and late was mine.

I had been there for about a month when I arrived one morning at nine thirty to relieve Andy, who had opened up earlier.  I heard him talking to Jim in the Caretakers office.

“I saw it!” he said.

“Saw what?  Nothing!” Jim replied between coughs, “you saw nothing.  It’s your imagination.”

“You weren’t there!”

“It sounds like you weren’t there either, mate,” Jim replied, “you sound like you were half asleep.

“I wasn’t asleep, I know what I saw.”

“Excuse me?”

I turned around and saw one of the teachers walking towards me.

“Can I borrow a broom please? We have a bit of a problem in the art room.”

“Sure!” I said and walked into the office where we kept the brooms, dustpans and brushes and looked at Andy and Jim.

“Morning, ladies!” I said, trying to sound as jolly as I could.  I got the obligatory “Back later” response as Jim put his Parka coat on and walked off down the corridor as I picked out a soft bristle broom.

I turned to the teacher.

“I can come down and deal with it.” I said.

“I don’t want to put you out.  One of the girls has knocked over a jar of powder paint.  There’s powder paint and broken glass on the floor” She replied.

“Oh no!” I said to her, thinking “Little bastard!” to myself.

I continued. “Why don’t I go down and deal with it in the morning break?”

She was staring at Andy, who appeared to be in a world of his own, rubbing his hands together slowly as he concentrated on the floor. I didn’t let on that this was his normal ‘look’.

“Are you OK?” she asked him.  He either didn’t hear her, ignored her, hadn’t seen her or was in a semi-conscious state.  He could have been in any one or all four of those conditions but he very quickly put his coat on with a mumbled “Gotta get outta here.” and walked out quickly, then out the front doors of the school just to the right of the Office.

The teacher watched him leave and then looked back at me as if I had all the answers.

It didn’t take her long to realise I had none.  I only had questions.  No answers.

“That would be very kind.” the Teacher smiled.

“I will be down there in a minute, Miss….?”

“Johnson” she replied, “Karen to you.” but my mind started wandering, I couldn’t stop wondering what the hell Andy and Jim were talking about earlier.  

“I’m Dave” I told her.

“I know”, she laughed.  “Thanks Dave” she said and turned to walk off.   I was so engrossed in what it could be that was causing so much cloak and dagger between Andy and Jim I stood there, in a daze, watching Karen walk away.  I didn’t get the chance to hide or look away before Karen turned and looked back and saw me staring at her.  She stopped before turning the corner, laughed and waved at me. I was just lost in thought.

 

I went into the office and started work, which amounted to drinking tea and reading the paper.  I had a book with me too, Christine by Stephen King.  I had queued up the previous Saturday with a mate named Dave Ambrose to meet Stephen King in a science fiction horror shop called Forbidden Planet.  It was relatively new, situated in Denmark Street. We had always frequented a shop in St Anne’s Court off Wardour Street in Soho called Dark They Were And Golden Eyed.. A chap that worked there eventually started Forbidden Planet. Stephen King was a really nice man and took time to speak to everyone that had lined up from his desk, out the door, down the street and over the road.  

 

A caretakers life was reactionary.  Kid does something, breaks something, smashes something, injures themselves, spills something, breaks something or any other permutation we either seal off the problem or deal with it asap.  Kid gets into a fight the teachers try to separate them and if theres bloodshed we are concerned with the school property only and have no interest in the kids.  They can put each other in hospital for all we are meant to care, as long as they don’t cause us unnecessary work.  The day dragged towards 4pm when I was due to leave after Andy had arrived.  Whoever had been there during the day would detail all that had happened if it was needed and what was needed to be done if it couldn’t have been done earlier but I had done it so, there was nothing..

 

That particular afternoon I waited for Andy to come back into work.  All day the conversation he'd had with Jim that morning had played on my mind.

I was reading my book when he arrived at ten past four..  I had no reason to be there past 4pm but I needed an excuse to find out what was going on and thankfully it was raining heavily and I could blame it on that.  I heard the big front door of the School open and an umbrella being shaken and opened and closed very quickly.  The footsteps got louder and nearer.

“Still here?” he asked as he stepped into the office.

“No!” I replied.  “This is a recording!”

He put his umbrella in the stand and tried to take off his soaked anorak but couldn’t.  The hood was still up and not allowing him to remove the coat.  I watched as he jumped up and down in the corridor, bending over and shaking.  Eventually. something triggered in his head and he pulled the hood back  I almost clapped.

I looked at Andy, and pointed at the window.

“I’m in no rush to get soaked to the skin.” I told him.

He took his parka coat off and hung it up.

“The kettle has just boiled.”  I said.

“Oh great!” He replied cheerfully, “Lifesaver!”

He started to make a cup of tea.  I folded The Times up and slipped it into my bag.

“I had a weird experience today.” I told him.  He had been spooning sugar into his mug and stopped suddenly at the fifth spoonful..

“What do you mean?”  He asked, in a voice that sounded like it dreaded the answer to come.

“I thought someone was in the corridor outside here but there was no one there.” I said.

Andy turned and looked at me.  “Really?” he asked.

I nodded.

“I would have put money on there being someone in the corridor out there.  Three times I heard it.  Three times I looked.  Nothing!”  I told him.

He went back to making the tea as the kettle clicked off.

“I saw something this morning.” He said quietly, “when I opened up the hall over in the old school.”

“It was a Pigeon!” I told him.

“What?”

“A pigeon.” I lied, “It came in the front door I suppose when the teachers took three classes to the Big Library over the road.  God knows why they bother? There’s a perfectly good library there!” I said  pointing at the door of the school library to the left of our door, which even for those days was quite extensive.  “Bloody thing started walking around on the mat out there but it flapped its wings a couple of times.  Freaked me out, mate.  All the other kids and the teachers are over the old school so I knew there was no one else over here.”

Andy stirred his tea slowly and I waited.  After a minute I asked him, “What do you mean you saw something this morning?”

Andy stared at his tea.

I watched him as he looked at the mug,

“Saw…what?” I asked again.

He told me what happened.

That morning he had started to open the school up.  He had entered the old school from the exterior door at the base of the staircase.  He opened up the cupboard in the far corner and turned on the staircase lights.  This cupboard is in the exact mirror position of the cupboard in the opposite corner at the other end of the hall except it doesn’t have a staircase to a boiler room like that one.  He opened the hall door, turned the lights on and stepped into the hall.  He crossed the hall and opened the hall door to get to the Boiler room at the top of the link corridor and under the staircase to turn on the stair lights.  After they came on he closed and locked the boiler room.  As he turned he saw the face of a girl looking at him through the glass of the hall door. 

He was startled but wondered why the girl was there.

“I thought she had been dropped off early by her parents but now I realise that was stupid, it was 6am and I had to open the outer door to get in.”

She had stepped back from the door and her face faded from view.  Andy walked over to the hall door and opened it, saying something like, “You’re early!” but there was no one there.

“She was there mate!” he said, “I wasn’t seeing things, it was her.  She was there.”

“It must have been the light or just your imagination.”

Andy shook his head.  “It wasn’t my imagination.”

“Well the light plays tricks,” I told him, like I knew what I was talking about, “and we can see things that are not there.  These places are creepy when you are alone in them.  Every noise can scare the life out of you and the early mornings and late nights are the worse.”

“I know, but I know what I saw. No one can tell me otherwise, or make me think otherwise.”

“OK,” I said, as I drank my tea.  We sat in silence for a few moments.  He was a little shaken by it I could tell.  Even telling me about it had made him nervous.

It all sounded strange to me.  Andy was sitting there silently thinking about what happened as he drank his tea and I was thinking about what he had described.  I listened to the rain as it hit the window and heard the distant rumble of thunder.  I looked at him and he suddenly looked up, staring back at me.

“What?” he asked me. “I didn’t hear you.”

“’It was her?’” I repeated.

Andy looked at me surprised.

“You said ‘it was her’.  I explained, “You told me, ’It was her’. Who her?”

Andy bit his bottom lip for a second before telling me.

“The dead girl.  I’ve seen her before.”

Chapter 2. THE INTRODUCTION

 

The interview was merely a couple of questions about whether or not I would find the hours difficult and could I read as there were a lot of instructions on some of the cleaning fluids I would be handing out.

These days one needs a criminal check and a variety of tests that just fall short of a blood sample, DNA and an ancestry check into your family four generations ago.

I was asked to go to the school at 10am the following Monday and there would be an introduction and a walk through with the caretaking staff.  It was all very convivial, not like a job interview that I had known or would carry out in the future that’s for sure.  I assumed the induction was going to be a process going over different chemicals and staff management but actually, it consisted of lots of tea and biscuits and pointing at brooms and offices.

 

It was a cold and windy day when I first climbed the entrance steps to the school.  The sky was leaden and it looked like the heavens would open at any moment.  The main entrance doors to the new school were in Deanery Road and the entire reception hall was visible from outside.  Metal framed doors opened into the entrance hall with the school hall directly behind it. Looking to the right there was a corridor that contained the offices for the Head and the Deputy Teachers.  Next to them was a reception office, a store room containing a safe and some staff toilets.  At the bottom of the corridor there was a large staff room. Just to the left of the entrance as you walk in was the Caretakers office and next to that was the Schools Library.  It all looked like a large maze of long corridors to me.

“Hello mate,” said a guy about the same age as me.  He was dressed completely in denim and was wearing trainers.  He put his hand out.

“My names Andy, and this is Jim the caretaker. Fancy a cuppa?”

“Thanks, I could do with it, cold out there!” I replied shaking his hand.

I stepped into the office and looked at the man he had motioned to. 

“Alright mate? Jim Price,” Said the older man, coughing like a 90 a day smoker. He rarely moved out of his chair. We shook hands and he motioned me to a chair in the corner which was surrounded by brooms, buckets and mops, next to a very large stained butler sink with a dripping tap..

Andy was busy making the tea and I looked at Jim.  He didn’t look healthy to me at all, making me wonder if he had been cold in the ground that morning.  He looked so ill it was as if he had died and no one had told him.  He was around five foot six and couldn’t have been more than eight stone.  He had gaunt, drawn features and piercing eyes.  His hair was straight, jet black and slicked back off his forehead. He reminded me of Dracula, if Dracula had been extremely ill for a year and on 2 packs of cigarettes a day since he was 12.  He carried a strange expression, as if he was only breathing in.  His cheekbones stood out further than any I had seen before.

Jim gave me the official talk about times and hours and I filled out a form listing all my contact details and signed it.  That was it, induction was over.

I drank my tea while Jim and Andy discussed some issue regarding a night cleaner which I didn’t understand and then the time came for the grand tour. Jim asked Andy to show me around.  I thought he was busy but it became apparent that Jim didn’t do much walking as his lungs were not functioning properly. Andy told me that Jim was suffering from breathing problems and that he had not been a well man for quite some time. Unknown to us then, Jim would be dead within two years and Andy would have left suddenly vowing never to return.

 

“The corridors and the stairs work the same as the roads.”  He told me, “Keep on the left, especially when the bell goes.  You will be killed in the crush. Press yourself against the left wall and hold onto the stair rail. Don’t look at them and don’t talk to the little fuckers.”

  Andy and I walked down the corridor directly in front of our office door which ran along the side of the school hall.  I was starting to think that I was in St Trinians. We got to the end of the corridor and a T-Junction.

“This corridor” Andy said, pointing vaguely to the left, “runs the width of the new school. If you turn right here and follow it down there it turns right at the bottom of those stairs  back down to the corridor with the admin offices on the left and the right is the front entrance. Down here on the left are the science labs and offices either side.  The lab technicians have offices and store rooms down there.”

“Where do these stairs lead to?” I asked, pointing to the staircase to our left.

“They lead up to the next floor which is where the English and foreign language classes are and…the computer rooms!”

Computers were very new in those days and mostly if not all were using DOS programs.  A few more years had to pass before colour graphics and Windows made an appearance.  Computers held no interest to me in those days.

“We have to walk through here to get to the old school.”

I followed Andy into a long corridor, modern and very bright with windows on the left side of us, as we walked to the Victorian old school, from halfway up the wall to the ceiling. There we two sets of double doors locked open into latches on the walls.

“This is the only way to get to the old school from here and back without going outside.”

Andy picked up pace a little and we reached the end of the corridor.

On the right at the end of the corridor as we stepped into the red floor of the old school was a door.  This I discovered was the Boiler room for the old school.  We walked down a flight of steps and along a 20ft corridor when the space opened out and there were two enormous iron boilers, each over 6 foot tall and 6 foot wide.  The heat and power they were generating was amazing.  I worked out in my head that these were under the playground outside the building and that the chimney next to the waste bins near the road was the one from the Boilers.

We went back up the stairs and locked the door behind us.  Next to this, on the left, was a flight of 8 steps with small square rubber blocks running the entire width of each step. 

There were 12 of these 8 step flights to the very top of the building in this corner and again at the other corner across the hall diagonally.  The only difference being there was no boiler room over that corner, just a cupboard.

That was the tour over with.

We walked back over to the office where we found a note from Jim saying he had gone home and would be back for the letting that evening.

“And a letting is?”

Andy explained that a letting was a booking from an outside source or from a member of teaching staff or council for a meeting to be held in the school after school time.  Sometimes the lettings would be a meeting of Governors or a Karate or Yoga club in the hall. Dance classes and Keep Fit were all the rage.  Aerobics was the buzz word. Sports lettings and Parties would take place in the old school on the ground floor.  Jim was staying late to oversee the local Women’s Institute holding their quarterly meeting to discuss fundraising.

It sounded to me like Jim was having a quite night of it tonight.  

If this was the level of excitement to be had in this place then working here was going to be very boring unless I kept myself occupied? I hoped that something would enliven the working days or evenings in the future, but this was what I needed, a lot of free time during the day and a regular wage.  What could go wrong? I could never have guessed.

Chapter 1 THE OFFER

I didn’t believe in the supernatural.  I loved a horror movie as much as the next person, maybe more.  Now, as I look back at the events that led to me going from a total sceptic, to a Believer I cannot understand where the years went . My experiences and what I saw others go through, terrifying as they were, have never and will never leave me.  They were totally unexpected.

Back in 1984 I started a job as the assistant caretaker at one of those old three floored Victorian schools in East London.    I had been the youngest store Manager in the history of HMV, the record shop, having been asked to run the large store on the high street of Stratford when I was a 17 year old Saturday boy in 1976.  I went on to run what was known as The Battleship!  This was the four floor main store next to Bond Street Station on Oxford Street.  I eventually left there after I had turned 22 and travelled quite a bit through Europe working as a podium presenter for various Timeshare companies on the Costa del Sol.  When I got back after about 18 months I decided to start my own Management and Sales Training Company.  I was holding the occasional sales training workshop teaching salespeople to sell better in car showrooms, door to door and publishing companies, but getting the bookings was becoming difficult.  It was pre-internet and Social Media.  I needed to earn more money while I did that and I knew  I needed to do something to supplement my income.  A friend of mine, Colin, was a school caretaker and he suggested to me over a few drinks one lunchtime in the Spread Eagle pub around the corner from my home in West Ham that I should consider a vacancy that had arisen.

 

Colin was an ex-boxer, but had spent more time on the canvas than Leonardo Da Vinci.  He had a very badly broken nose to prove it too.  I think it had been broken three times and was almost flat to the point it was wider than it was long.  It seemed that whatever position he sat in, he was always in profile.  He was a very kind hearted guy and was already, at the age of 32, married to his childhood girlfriend and had four kids.  He was very conscientious at his job and had made a lot of friends in the council in the last six years as a caretaker.  Caretakers get a house as part of the deal.    He had a lovely three bedroom Victorian house a short walking distance from the school he worked in. Colin, as they say, knew what side his bread was buttered.

“It’s not like you need to do anything, Dave, it’s easy.  Unless you are a Caretaker like me when it’s a lot of responsibility” he told me.  Somehow I found it hard to believe.

“So what does it involve?” I asked.

“You go in at six in the morning and unlock, you let the cleaners in, they clean the offices and classrooms, and anything they need you get for them.”

I was still getting over the 6am start!  I sometimes got home at 6am…I didn’t fancy going straight to work 

“They leave at eight thirty and you leave when the Caretaker and the day assistant get there.  Then you come back at four o’clock and wait until the cleaners have done their dusting and emptied the bins , you lock up and leave at six o’clock.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“That’s’ it.” He told me.

I took a sip of my beer.

“AND!” he said, “You can make additional money doing lettings.” 

I didn’t ask what they were but it fitted my time frame, it didn’t sound like hard work, I could make extra money on top and it fitted all my requirements…it seemed too good to be true.  It was.

“Do I need to fill in an application and be interviewed?”

Colin winked.

“I know the guy that’s recruiting.  You will need to be interviewed but if you want the job it’s yours.  He trusts me.”

I turned it over in my mind for a while but realised I had already made my decision.

“OK, let’s do it.  Thanks”

“Don’t thank me, it’s your round!”

I picked up the two glasses and walked to the bar.  I was pleased that the next stage was sorted.  I had money coming in and the freedom to pursue my goal of putting a band together..  What more could I want for now?

"What can I get you?" the barman asked.

I asked for two pints of bitter and looked around.  There were a couple of guys next to me talking.

"I told you," the older one said, "It's not the dead that can hurt you, it's the living!"

They laughed.  It was a phrase I had heard many times growing up and I believed it. 

My belief would be shattered soon when I discovered it was completely wrong.