CHAPTER 8 THE CALM BEFORE THE CHAOS.

The teachers and children were due to return to the school after the holidays.  There always seemed to be a holiday going on.  Fortunately, not as many as now.  Since we had decided to leave the corridor locked after seeing the handles turn of their own volition we had witnessed no further incidents.  The only time the corridor was unlocked was to allow the painter to, rather quickly, finish the painting and when the teachers arrived the day before the children did and we let them all make their own way through to the old school.  They were our unwitting canaries in the coalmine and I thought whatever happened was their lookout.

I bumped into the Head Mistress in the corridor as she was making her way out and suggested we meet to discuss an issue that was causing us concern.  She said she could meet with me in her office at 11am on the following Monday, the day before term started.

That Monday I went into the school office and told the secretary I was there for a meeting with the head and she replied, “I have it in the diary Dave, go through they are all waiting for you!”

As I crossed the room and reached the connecting door I thought “They? Who else is here”

I opened the door to see the Head sitting behind her desk, all three deputy heads and four heads of department sitting in armchairs and on chairs.  They all stopped talking immediately and looked up at me at once. “Thanks for meeting us.” The Head said, as I sat in an armchair  the facing everyone. 

I had the impression they’d think I was either drunk or off my head but I was wrong. 

I outlined in great detail my concerns.  I said reports had been made to me by various caretaking staff, cleaners and workmen about events that we have no rational explanation about

They asked me questions about what had happened and sought assurance that what I was saying was right and I told them what I thought about it. 

They in turn told me about doors opening and locking on their own, items disappearing and then being found somewhere else, odd noises and a smell of burning in isolated areas.  A couple of them had seen shadows on corridor walls. One of the Deputy Heads told me that she and one of the HOD’s sitting opposite were standing at the bottom of the large stone steps in the new school talking to another teacher during the lunch hour and she put her leather key pouch on the top of the stone stair post less than two feet away to get a file out of her bag.  After she handed it to the teacher she went to pick up her keys but they were gone, they were nowhere to be found.  After a few minutes of them checking around them she walked back to her office only to find them on the seat of her leather desk chair.

The Head Teacher looked at me, trying to guage what my thoughts were.

“As you can tell, Dave, we have had some strange experiences that none of us can explain.”

It was clear that they were uneasy and looking for answers but, to their horror, I went into great detail about the events we had experienced, with the shaking doors, the taps in the washroom, and the electrician on the ladder.  Each event making the faces staring at me go from interest to fear.  The Piano tuner event seemed to take it to a new level for them and then my staircase incident in the dark tipped them over the edge.

I looked around the room at the faces of 6 women and two men. Their faces were blank, in shock. There were shocked glances between them and the Head, who looked like she was about to pass out.  Her eyes bulging as she stared at her deask. If this was a game of Top Trumps, I was the unanimous winner!

Two common threads had appeared. A tall jet black shadow and a little girl in Victorian clothing.

“So,”I said to all of them but directing it to the Head, “When were you planning on sharing all of this with the caretaking staff?”

They all shifted a little with discomfort.

“I am sorry, we should have voiced all of this sooner but we did not know how to broach the subject with you. There have been things happening but we ignore them, especially in front of the children. We don’t want a panic on our hands.  All it takes is a wrong word to the wrong parent… they would be up here looking for trouble or a fight.   Things have gone missing, things seen and heard.  Have you noticed that no teachers stay in their classrooms after the school bell now.”

I hadn’t taken much notice but thinking about it I could tell she was right.  The room was silent.

One of the male teachers, Rob, raised his hand and gave a slight cough. 

“I teach PE and English, as you know.” He said in a booming voice scaring the life out of all of us. This nugget of information answered the question the caretaking staff had as to why he always seemed to be wearing shorts.  Even in winter.  Those ‘very very’ short shorts worn in the 80’s. The ones where, if you cross your legs quickly you didn’t only cut off your circulation.

“I was in the English class on the top floor of the old school after the bell had gone one afternoon.” Rob said, as he rubbed his hands together. “I was sitting at my desk; the classroom door was open on my left.  All the cleaners had gone and I remember seeing John and I told him I would let him know when I was leaving.  He went out the door and I heard him going down the stairs.  I only had ten books to mark and I could have taken them to the Staff room down this corridor from here but decided to plough through them.

It was total silence.  I heard a noise like something rolling on the floor.  I ignored it.  It suddenly stopped.  Then it started again.  I didn’t move.  I hate to admit it but I was a bit freaked out by it.  As I listened I looked to my left at the open door.  Nothing.  No sound or anything.  As soon as I looked back at my school book it happened again.  I got up and made a lot of noise with my chair and walked to the door as loud as I could making my footsteps audible.  I even shouted “Is that you Sue?”  I looked out into the hall both ways, and said, “Who is it?” but there was no one there.

I went back and sat down, marked the book with a BPlus and decided to leave.  I took my zip-up jacket off the back of the chair and put it on, picked up my keys and a book I was reading lunchtime and turned to the door and froze.  There was a basketball where I had been standing in the doorframe. I just stared at it for a few seconds.  Eventually I walked over and stepped over the ball and left through the stair door and ran down the stairs.”

“When was this exactly?” I asked him. 

“The week before end of term.  I saw you when I got over here.” He said,  “You asked me if I was OK, as I looked white as a sheet.”

I remembered.  I thought at the time ‘He looks like he’s seen a ghost!’

 “We need serious, professional help, maybe the religious kind, but, not amateur ghost hunters”.  The Head suddenly announced.

I raised a hand as everyone started to mumble.

“I know you’re concerned about publicity, and some parents looking for a fight, as if that will solve it but, involving the Church shouldn’t be a problem.  They would probably be discreet.  I don’t have much kop with the church myself but the risk of parents picketing outside while the pound signs cloud their eyes and getting the press involved, just so they can make a few quid, or involving a Pound stretcher version of Scooby Doo would be fatal!,  We don’t want the Mystery Machine pulling up outside.”

They laughed and the tension seemed to ease.  They raised the matter of the Board of Governors being told but it was agreed to do nothing in that regard.  We were dealing with something we had no idea about and that the Board should be involved if anything definite was proven.  At the moment it’s just the caretaking and cleaning staff that are aware of it, plus the occasional workman, and of course these 8 members of staff.

 She said she had put ‘the conversation’ off until I had raised the matter with her, as I was doing now.  She asked me to lead the way forward and would make an appointment with her friend, the local Vicar at the church the school choir sang at, for me to lay our cards on the table and determine what he could do, if anything.

The two Deputy Heads left and when we were alone the Headmistress asked me for the full story about the incident on the stairs and the sink taps in the linkway toilets.  I told her in very clear terms what had happened.  Every step, every noise, and every impossibility.  She looked visibly shocked. 

She pressed the button on the internal phone and asked for a jug of water to be brought through.  Within minutes her PA appeared with a tray.  She placed it on her desk as the Head poured a glass and drank it down. The PA looked at me with a quizzical look and left.

“That must have been terrifying!” she finally said, “My hands are shaking! I am meeting our Vicar on Thursday evening at a Parent Teachers meeting and I was going to raise the subject then, discreetly of course” she said, her voice a little shaky, “but I think I will call him now and arrange an appointment for you to meet him.” 

I left her to her phone call.  20 minutes later I was standing looking down the linkway corridor reliving the taps incident in my mind. I looked through the glass panels in the far end doors and stared at the point where I was rooted to the spot awaiting whatever it was that had come running down the staircases two steps at a time.  I suddenly felt like I was being watched, and not alone. I spun around only to be confronted by a very shocked headmistress wearing trainers.  My appointment was made for the following Wednesday, 11am, eight days away.  Eight days…’How busy were the church?’ I wondered.

CHAPTER 7 SHAKING

 

In 1987 it was decided that during the six week holiday from July through to the end of August that the corridors including the Link Corridor would be repainted by a firm of decorators under contract to Newham Council.  During this time the cleaning and caretaking staffs were on site to oversee the cleaning and repairs needed in the building and the hours worked were between 8am and 5pm.  The night cleaners were not required and were on a retainer for the period.

Three painters arrived the first day.  One was assigned the link Corridor which was over 50ft long and had a double wooden door with clear glass panels at each end. The two other corridors were in the new school and over 120ft in length each.  My first thought was that they were intent in making the job last. 

The cleaners very quickly covered their areas and all the offices in the new building as well as the old were pristine.  During the holiday period, the cleaners worked in a pack, all 10 of them so the chances of hearing or seeing anything untoward were minimised, though during term time they were separated into their own areas.  After a fortnight there was no need for them to keep coming in so they were allocated the remainder of the holiday period off.  It just left the caretaking staff and the painters.

It was really a case of being there in case of deliveries and to let the painters in and out.  Their vans were parked in the front of the school and the caretaker office was next to the entrance so, all exterior doors were closed.  There was only one way in and out.

Two days after the painters began I took two days off as I had secured a training session for a timeshare company in Gants Hill, around 5 miles away.

The original caretaker, Jim had, by this time, died and I had been assigned as the Caretaker but I had a deputy caretaker and he was in charge for the next three days.  After a full day of training on the final day in Gants Hill I got home around 8pm and found a message on my answering machine from John, the Deputy.  He had left the message at 4 pm asking me to call him as soon as I got in. This was 1987 so unless you wanted to carry a very expensive house brick around with you or a small briefcase that looked like a phone the army would use on manoeuvres, a land line was what we used if a phone box wasn’t available or had been smashed up..

I started to make a cup of tea when I called him.  John told me that the painter in the Link Corridor had seen something. 

‘Can you be a little more specific?’  I laughed.

‘A girl.’

I stopped what I was doing and sat down as the kettle clicked off.

I cannot remember the conversation in detail.  What I can remember is that the painter saw a girl, around twelve years old, standing on the other side of the locked link corridor door at the bottom of the stairs where my incident had been.  I remember John saying that he had left and wouldn’t be back.  One thing I do remember as clear as day is what he said next.

 ‘He didn’t even stay to put the lids on the paint or take his brushes or anything. Not even his flask and radio.  It’s all still there.’

This was the same as the Electrician who fell off the ladder before. Even with a fractured ankle, he had left immediately.

‘What time are they coming in tomorrow?’

John told me the two painters would come back at ten in the morning so I asked John to meet me there at 930 and we would take a look at the work in the Link Corridor.  The teaching staff were due back in ten days. 

John was already there when I got there next day.  We walked along the corridor to the Link corridor and looked down it.  I know he had some reticence like I did as we always expected to see something since my incident with all the taps. I don’t know what we expected to see but the mind plays tricks and all manner of horrible things can be conjured up in the imagination.   It was only natural.  It was overcast outside but we didn’t need to put the lights on.  One whole side of the corridor was clear windows from four feet height to ceiling. He had done an excellent job on the one side that had the door into the Washroom where the taps had been turned on, but the half height wall with windows hadn’t been touched, the ceiling had been painted first.

On the floor were sheets and down the corridor were four cans of paint, some paint trays and some rollers.  There was a flask, a radio, paint lids and a baseball cap.

I suddenly heard a noise behind us and there were voices getting nearer.  The two painters had arrived earlier than expected, and called out to us.  We shouted out to them telling them where we were and they stepped into the corridor with a quick ‘hello’ and a nervous glance around.  They told us that another painter would arrive tomorrow and that they wanted to get on with painting the two corridors in the new school.  This was what I expected.  I asked them what the painter had told them and they just said ‘not much’ or something like that.  They walked off and I could hear them making a noise setting up a short distance away but out of our site.  I got the feeling it wasn’t that they didn’t want to tell us what they knew, but more likely they didn’t know what to believe.

I asked John if he had ever had any weird experiences recently in the school and he said he had but nothing major.  He hadn’t mentioned them because he couldn’t say anything for definite.  He always thought he was being watched in the evenings when sitting there in the office waiting for some keep fit class or a meeting to finish so he could go home. He started to tell me about his wife who was really into the occult and how they had had a séance in their house and used a Ouija board but it was fun and nothing happened.

I think I heard it first.

It was he was talking to me but eventually he heard it too.  It was a rattling noise, like something being shaken.  Not all the time, just every few seconds or so.  Not too loud, just lust loud enough to be heard.  I stepped around the corner and looked at the two painters.  They were minding their own business and seemed to be miles away stirring paint.  I looked back at John who was watching me intently.  The rattling noise had stopped.  My mind went back to the night cleaners first night and how the doors had rattled.

John laughed and as he did so the shaking sound happened again.  This time there was no mistake.  John turned around and followed my gaze down the Link Corridor.  The locked double doors at the far end were being shaken as if to see if they would open.

This one event, in itself, easy to explain away at any other time with just the basic facts, could not be explained away easily to us, there in the moment.  For one thing there were no windows open anywhere and no doors unlocked anywhere so it wasn’t a draft or the wind.  It was evident to us that there was a major problem in this school and professional help was required.

Our conclusion was based simply on the fact that even if there was any wind, it wouldn’t normally make the handles of the doors turn downwards.

CHAPTER 6 A STUPID DECISION

 

We reached the end of term a few weeks later and the six week holiday period began.  This was when major cleaning, painting and decorating happened and any other remedial work was taking place. A team of contracted electricians came to rewire that old school.  After about a week there was an incident on the top (third) floor hall of the school where an electrician was on top of a tall ladder on his own checking live wiring against dead.  He felt his ladder shake and looked down to find no one there.  The metal ladder would make a loud cracking noise that echoed around the empty hall like it did when he climbed the steps to go up it.  This happened 2 or 3 times when he suddenly looked down and found himself staring at a child of around 12, in old style burnt and smouldering clothing and with burnt features standing at the base of the steps.  The ladder fell sideways and his right leg slipped between the rungs and his foot twisted as he hit the ground. He got up and staggered limping from the hall and down all the flights of stairs.  He never came back, refused to work there again and eventually had to go on one of the electrical companies other jobs in Newham.  
I went to visit him in hospital to find out what he actually saw but he wouldn’t speak about it. Eventually he did, that’s how we know about the burning girl. He looked terrified and had left the school and got one of the others to take him to Newham General.  He had suffered a Potts Fracture, quite a serious injury to the whole foot area.
And then it happened.
One night I had a booking for a football team to use the floodlit play area for training.  I had to be there from 6pm until 10pm to activate the floodlights from inside the school and to be there if anything was needed.  I stood in the corridor of the school that linked the old school to the new.  The doors were all locked in the school.  No one could get in or out without the keys I carried in my pocket.  At 630 the players arrived and looked over towards me and I waved.  I turned on the floodlights and would return at 10 to switch them off.  I went back to my office and watched the portable tv.  At 10pm I went and opened the door to get in the corridor and looked out at the floodlit area.  Empty.  I turned off the floodlights but became aware of water running.  I had stood here earlier for ten minutes in total silence. I walked over to the door of the toilet block, opened it and stepped in.  The noise was really loud.  In the block were about 30 toilet cubicles around the edge and at least 30 sinks in a centre reservation with a central wall with mirrors above the sinks.  EVERY sink had its taps turned on full. 
The room was filling up with steam as if it had just been done.  The taps were difficult to turn off as they had all been forced.  I turned them all off and the silence was deafening.  There was no way into this washroom other than the locked door I came through. 
 
Back in my office I considered waiting for the Night cleaners to tell them what had happened but I didn't think they would appreciate it.  I drove to the pub instead and met up with a couple of friends.
"Cheer up Dave, it might not happen!"  Darryl told me as he brought me out of my thoughts about the evenings activity.
"If I tell you something, do you promise not to laugh or tell me I am losing my marbles?" I asked him.
"No!" he replied.
I spent the next 30 minutes telling him about all the things that had happened since I started work at the School.  Every detail.
After I had finished he sat there for a few seconds staring at me.  
"Well? I asked.
“Fucking hell!” he blurted out, "I didn't laugh, and I know you haven't lost your marbles.  If I was you I would get out of there like a shot and never go back!"
I nodded.  It was the logical thing to do, but life isn't logical and we make stupid decisions sometimes. 

CHAPTER 5 NIGHT CLEANERS

 

The night cleaners would be working from 10pm till 6am and they would be polishing the floors of the new school and the Link corridor with big electric machines that were fitted with large round, disposable, polishing pads.

I got back to the school at 9:45pm and with a certain amount of trepidation I let myself into the front doors of the new school and opened the door of the office.  Thankfully, Andy had laid out all of the things they would need, cloths, cleaning fluids and sprays, the polishing machine and the floor pads.  Good Man! I decided to sit and wait for the cleaners as I hoped I would only be here for 20 minutes or so.

I had locked the front doors behind me so they would have to knock to get in.  I had a set of keys for each of them which they could use to open and lock the areas they were going to work and a key for the front doors so they could let themselves in each night.  

I looked at the newspaper that had been left on the desk from earlier in the day.  The crossword was half completed by Andy.  I started to look at the clues.  I thought I would see if I could finish it.

I studied the clue: ’12 down: Area of ground where soldiers drill, six letters.’ Parade! I was sure that was right but the answer Andy had given to 8 across crossed it.  There was an ‘R’ but it was in the wrong place.  Clue, ‘8 Across Supreme, 9 letters’. ‘That’s Paramount I thought.  Then I saw what Andy had written for supreme 9 letters!.

‘Diana Ross’! 

I threw the paper in the bin, laughing….then I heard a door rattle nearby.

I got up and stepped out into the school foyer and walked to the door with my keys but when I looked up I saw there was no one there.  I looked through the glass panels into the front entrance area but there was no sign of anyone.  I could see the cars parked in the street and to my left I could see the cars that had stopped at the traffic lights in Water Lane as it crossed the Romford Road.

I went back to the office and picked up the newspaper.  After a few seconds I heard the door being shaken again.  I stepped out of the office and looked at the doors.  Again, there was no one there.  As I turned to go back into the office I heard the doors rattle again.  I span around and could see that there was no one standing outside the front doors.  I walked towards the entrance and could see there was no one around outside.

Suddenly the doors rattled again but this time they rattled very hard but, from where I was standing, I could tell it was the doors to the corridor on the right of the Hall.  These were internal doors and I was alone in the building.  This wasn’t the wind making them rattle, everywhere was shut.  They rattled again as I tried to make sense of what was happening.

What the hell was causing this?  The doors were rattling every five seconds or so.  Someone was shaking them from the other side of the door.

I listened to the sound as it echoed around the building.  When the school was empty every single noise, no matter how slight, was magnified.  This was echoing like thunder.

Then it stopped.  I stood still and listened.  There was no sound, no rattling, no shaking, nothing.

I noticed a movement out of the corner of my eye and immediately there was a loud knocking sound behind me.  I spun around and saw the two night cleaners standing outside.  I unlocked the door and let them in.

“Thanks Dave,” Derek said as he stepped back allowing Jill, the other night cleaner, to step in first.

“What a Gentleman!” She laughed.

“Have you just got here? I asked, locking the door.

“Yeah, I picked Jill up and parked outside.  Will I be OK there?” He asked pointing to a Ford Sierra parked in the street right outside the front gate that hadn’t been there before.

“Yeah, no problem.” I told him.

They told me that they had both been to the school and spoken to Jim who, in a break with tradition, had given them a tour of the premises himself!

“It’s the corridor floors and surfaces mainly isn’t it” Jill asked, “Machine wash and polishing??”  I agreed.  Having the 8 cleaners arrive at 6am until 8am and 3.30 pm until 6pm every day seemed to make these night cleaners a waste of time and money but, it was not my problem.  The machine polishing was needed but I still couldn’t figure out what was going to take 8 hours five nights a week??

I was still thinking back to the door rattling.

I almost asked them if they had tried to get in through another entrance but it was pointless.  They had no keys and they had been told to come to the front doors.  Whatever it was that had shaken the internal corridor doors wasn’t trying to get in the building.  It was already in the building and I had the uneasy feeling that it had been here a long time: and it was going nowhere.

 

There were two parts to the school, the old Victorian part and a more modern part which was linked by a corridor that had a large toilet and washbasin block housed in it.

A month later I went in one morning at 6am to let the regular cleaners in and the night cleaners were still there about to leave.

Derek  said to me, ‘Dave was there some fancy dress party in the old school last night?’  the school was always being used for parties, wedding receptions etc.  I told him there was nothing going on and asked why.

It transpired that he had seen a child of about 12 in dirty smeared Victorian clothing that kept running around the corridors and looking around the corner at him, and he and Jill had searched all over the new school and the corridor linking to the old school but to no avail, they didn’t find her.  I couldn’t explain it.

CHAPTER 4 ANDY'S STORY

It was like one of those situations you see in the movies.  You only
find out about something a few weeks after you are there.  You spend a few weeks or months in total oblivion of something that happened and then, BANG, the starting pistol is fired and a catalogue of stories come flying out of the woodwork. 

It happens a lot in American horror movies.  They seem to portray Americans as people who are willing to buy a house without ever having seen it, and who know nothing about it.

Then you, as the new owner are told by someone something they thought you knew, but you didn’t and then it’s too late.  Like a realtor not telling you that someone had their throat cut in the kitchen by a burglar of the house you are thinking of buying and you move in, happy and blindly oblivious to the carnage and you have a welcome party or house warming party with your new neighbours only for a few of them to ask you, “What happened here doesn’t bother you then?” or “Have you seen the headless woman on the landing?”

After choking on your beer you shout. “WHAT?” and they say, “Oh sorry I thought you knew’ with some inane smile on their face. 

 

There had been rumours that the place was haunted because many years earlier one of the pupils and a boiler engineer had been killed in a fire in the old school. 

No one told me that.  They didn’t mention THAT! I overheard that when at the council picking up my wages, which we did every Friday morning in those days.  A little brown envelope with a payslip and cash in it.  I had heard a few of the assistant caretakers say they were asked to cover an absence at the school in the past but had decided to take time off through ill health.  I suppose it wouldn’t be good for morale if the story was widely known and in the few weeks I had been there I had heard of no issues until that morning..  It’s not something they would put on the job description, I suppose.  I could have been a sceptic, and it wouldn’t have bothered me.  I was, and am, an inquisitive person and I am open to anything.  I prefer fact to supposition but I trust my own judgement. Even though I never believe anything like this unless I experience it myself, I knew that I was sitting with someone who was absolutely terrified, and he really believed.

The Lady who ran the Library in the school knew the history of the school and told me a few months later that the fire had broken out in the Boiler Room at the foot of one of the two staircases in the old school. The staircases had acted like a chimney and very quickly the fire had reached the top floor.  It then started to burn through into the Hall on the top floor.  For some reason a few of the children had hidden from the fire on the landing of the top floor but they had become cut off from any hope of escape.

All in all, two people had been killed in the boiler room and three on the top floor before the fire had been brought under control.

It was a very sad day in the school’s history and it was quite a few months before the school opened again and it resulted in the new school building being added to the old Victorian one about 30 years ago.  This had enabled the school to take more pupils.

I didn’t believe the stories of seeing a girl or other girls all in burnt clothing that obviously dated from the Victorian era, yet, here I was sitting talking to someone who really believed he had seen this girl.

“What do you mean you have ‘seen her before’?” I asked.

Andy continued to stare into his mug of tea.  He looked up at me and appeared to be trying to decide if I was going to laugh, or worse, make fun of him.

“Come on, you may as well tell me everything.  You said ‘It was her’ and that you had ‘seen her before’.

Andy leant back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, exhaling a loud sigh .  He leant forward again

“A few months ago I saw her in the window of the ground floor hall when I was looking out of the window upstairs above here.  You know the corridor that faces the old school upstairs near the computer rooms?”

“What time was this?”

“During the summer holidays we were cleaning this side of the school and I was having a cigarette.  I went to the window and looked out at Stratford and the buses going past.  I opened the window to flick the ash out and I saw her.”

I stared at him.  He really believed it, I could tell.

“She was looking at me and not looking at me, if you know what I mean.”

I nodded in agreement, not having a clue what he meant.

“She was looking through me, like she was looking at something behind me.  I could hear Jim downstairs from me; he was banging and crashing around.  One minute she was there, I looked away when I heard a loud bang downstairs and when I looked back…she was gone.”

“Did you see her disappear?” I asked, trying to make it sound like an everyday, run of the mill, question.

“No, she just wasn’t there anymore.  I just couldn’t see her anymore.”

He said it in such a matter of fact way that it kind of made sense to me. 

We both sat there drinking tea for a minute, in
silence.  The rain was still hammering down but I decided that I had to leave.  

I had agreed to drop into the school at 9:45 that evening as I was passing through as the new night cleaners were starting and I was going to show them where everything was and ensure that they had everything they needed.  Another little job that Jim had delegated through ill health and, thanks to my conversation, it didn’t seem like a good idea to me now.

I felt a little disturbed by what I had heard.  Not so much the content, but the fact that he appeared to believe it with every fibre of his being.  

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.