I Quit Teaching Because Of This Terrifying Incident. I’ve Never Told Anyone About It Until Now. (Part II)

I found Oscar waiting for me at the top of the stairs.

“What the hell is that?” I demanded. I was still shaking from the experience.

He held his hands up in a defensive posture. “Hey, relax, man,” he pleaded.

That’s when I noticed my hands were balled into fists and I suddenly realized how close my face was to his. I stepped back and focused my energies on calming down.

“You’re just the messenger, right?” I asked.

“If you think I had anything to do with that, you’re nuts,” he said. “That’s been there a long, long time. Everyone knows about it.”

“Then why hasn’t it been taken down? Why hasn’t it been cleaned up?”

He looked confused.

“Cleaned up? They said they pumped out all the water already.”

It dawned on me that he only knew half of what I was talking about.

“The room,” I began, “You know? That tiny isolation chamber.”

“I’ve never seen it, but yeah, I heard about it.”

“Wait. You’ve never been down there?” I asked.

He laughed. “Why would I go down there? I’ve heard enough about it from the guys. Freaks the crap out of everyone. I’ve been to the bottom of the stairs and that’s enough for me.”

“Then why haven’t they torn it down?” I asked.

“I heard it’s a structural thing. It’s all concrete and holds up part of the gym in the middle of the school. That’s a lot of solid block to remove.”

He could be right. I’m no engineer, but it sounded true. And why would I expect a temporary custodian to know anything more than rumors about our school? Why would I expect him to know more than me?

“But why hasn’t anyone cleaned up the graffiti?” I asked.

“What graffiti?”

I held my tongue at that moment. I suddenly remembered that I was talking with a stranger. Why reveal too much to him?

“When does Manny return?” I asked.

Oscar looked at me, surprised.

“I guess no one told you,” he began. “He transferred to another school.”

I let that play in my head. Manny loved our school. He knew most of the kids by name and they would call out to him since he had been in our community a long time. He even lived close to The Drive.

I coaxed Oscar into telling me where Manny now worked — an elementary school just a few minutes drive away.

“One more thing,” I began. “What’s this family you keep talking about?”

“I only know what everyone knows. Except maybe you.”

“Tell me,” I said.

He shifted uncomfortably.

“Okay,” he began, “but I don’t know how much is true. Back in the 70s and early 80s, there was a teacher here named Connors. He lived in the area alone and taught here. English, or history, I think. He was a quiet man. Kept to himself mostly. But everyone was scared of him for some reason. Even the principal. I’ve seen old photos of him. He was a small man, but very intense. Everyone said there was something off about him.

“But what all his students remember is that he would start every class by reading out loud from this book. It was always the same book. Had this black cover without any lettering on it. But it was in another language. None of his kids could ever figure out what it was. Some said Hungarian, others said Arabic. But it was decades ago, so who knows? If it wasn’t English, Italian or Chinese, it was a strange language around here. Students started spreading rumours that Mr. Connors was trying to cast a spell on the kids, or that he was performing some kind of ritual chant to prepare the kids for something. You know kids. They came up with some crazy stuff.

“But there was something else. Strangers used to visit him in his classroom after school. Always different people. Usually, with anyone else, that’s no big deal. But to the teachers here it was, because Connors was so antisocial.

“Then the rumours started to fly. About his classroom light being on late at night. About the neighbours seeing the people in robes standing in his classroom window. Some of the ones in robes looked like little children. The neighbours started believing there was some type of cult in their community, and they started to suspect each other. There was no way to know if the family next door was involved or not. The police never caught anyone trespassing. And some teachers came into the school early in the mornings to see strange symbols drawn onto walls all over the building. This led to more rumours that a small group of families were scouting the school for evil purposes. But no one ever went missing except for the Waller girl. Well, as far as I know.

“Then, one day, it was announced that Mr. Connors was fired. No reason was given. But it had something to do with the custodians finding something in the basement.”

Oscar took a deep breath, almost relieved to have unburdened himself of such salacious neighbourhood gossip.

“What did they find down there?” I asked, almost impatiently.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But it had something to do with that little storage room.”

“So, what does any of that have to do with the box found in the basement?” I asked. “All that business with Connors was over 30 years ago.”

“Oh, I keep forgetting you don’t hear any local gossip,” he said. “They say that the cult is still here, and their children go to this school. That box is theirs.”

I nodded my head.

“Thank you, Oscar,” I said, before turning and walking down the hall. Not to the parking lot, but to my classroom.

I climbed the stairs to my floor and walked to my room. I opened my door and looked at my desk. The red ribbon was gone.

I reached into my pocket and took out the lock of hair, the ribbon neatly tied to its end. I opened my desk drawer and placed it gently in my index card box. I sat there for several minutes, thinking of what to do. A part of me wanted to drop it all, to just erase my mind of everything that had been going on, to hit delete and carry on as things were before the earthquake.

But there was no such start over button. We were nearing the end of the second term and too many students were counting on me to be at the top of my game, especially the seniors. I looked at the back wall where all the Literature 12 textbooks stood side by side in neat rows. The green spines of the large textbooks were getting dull with age but there were still a few years left in them. I was staring at the shelves, thinking how far we still had to go to cover the curriculum when I noticed something.

On the row of Lit 12 textbooks was a small space. I only noticed it because that shelf held exactly twenty-two textbooks with no space left for even a pamphlet to squeeze in. But even seated across the room, I could see there was a narrow dark space of an inch or two. I got up to inspect it and as I neared the bookcase, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks.

In the shadow of the space between the books, there was an eye. It was floating in the darkness, staring at me. It took me a moment to figure out what was going on. Then the realization hit: someone must have placed a fake eyeball or cow’s eye from our biology lab on my shelf. The pranking continued.

I started walking towards it.

And then it blinked.

I jumped back towards my desk. I may have even screamed because a bunch of students came running into my room.

“Sir, are you okay?”

I assured them I was fine, taking deep breaths. They hung around concerned for my welfare until I insisted I was okay. They left, returning to their homework club down the hall and I walked to the shelf. I lifted the books, inspecting each one, and then looked over the shelf itself. There was nothing there.

I needed answers before I completely lost my bearings.

I gathered my things, rushed to the staff parking lot and drove to Manny’s new school.

As soon as I parked on the street, I could see him in the front foyer mopping the floor. The door was locked so I knocked. He was surprised to see me.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, shaking my hand with vigorous enthusiasm.

I don’t recall the small talk that was made, but I quickly broached my subject.

“Why did you leave us, Manny?”

The smile disappeared from his face. He looked down at the floor, his furrowed brow signaling his predicament: does he tell me the truth or lie? His fingers started playing with a small gold cross hanging from his necklace. I felt awful for placing him in what was clearly an ethical dilemma for him. Who knows what he heard or saw to make him quit our school? And how much trouble could he potentially get in for telling my anything?

“I learned a lot about our school’s history,” I began.

I wasn’t sure if anything I said could sway him, but I pressed on.

“I know about the old rumours, Manny. About Connors. About the weird neighbourhood cult. About his strange classroom chanting.”

He looked at me, somewhat bewildered.

“Chanting?” he asked.

“Yes. Your replacement. Oscar. He told me everything.”

Manny’s expression turned sour, as if bothered by the thought of Oscar.

“That dude’s an idiot. No one tells him anything. He’s just a nosy SOB who knows nothing about nothing.”

I was confused now.

“Then why’d you leave?”

He was biting his bottom lip, shifting back and forth on his feet, weighing the various outcomes of the next words out of his mouth.

He took a deep breath.

“That last time I saw you, you asked about the Bible they found in the basement,” he began.

“Yes.”

He continued. “Just before that, I was downstairs in the office with the school engineer when the police came to take away the metal box. And I heard Lorna tell them what she found in the Bible. It had Connors’ name in it.”

His words fell on me clumsily, or that’s the way I received them, as if I had trouble grasping their meaning.

“Wait,” I stammered, “the police took away the metal box?”

“Yeah.”

“With everything in it?”

“Yeah.”

“The Bible, the hair, and the ribbon?”

“All of it.”

I turned away for a moment. I needed to think things through, to let the ideas settle in me to weigh their import.

“Manny, was the metal box found near that small room in the basement?”

“You heard about that, too?”

“I went down there.”

He looked at me as if crushed with disappointment.

“Did you go in the room?”

I nodded.

“Why? Why in the world did you go in there?”

And for the first time in a long time, I was at a loss for words. I suddenly realized I could not explain with any rational weight why I descended those stairs that day, or why I walked to the back, or why I walked into that mysterious room.

“I…I don’t know,” I said. “I just had to.”

Then he said something very strange, something so cryptically compelling that to this day, it still rings in my ears.

“You shouldn’t have gone in there. That’s what they want. They’ve been waiting a long, long time for someone to go in there.”

Now, I pride myself in being a relatively logical person. I am never one to give in to irrational phobias. I regularly go camping by myself for several days at a time, spending nights among the trees and nocturnal animals, never for a second giving any thought to creatures of the imagination.

But I found myself suddenly giving in, swept up in the deluge of this stuff of nightmares.

“How do you know this, Manny?” I could hear my voice quaver like an unsure note.

“Because I was taught by Mr. Connors,” he said. “I was in eighth grade, and he would read from this strange black book. Every other morning, I would go to his English class, and sit there as he read in this weird language that wasn’t a language. I’ll never forget it. It was so messed up.

“But then when the police came for the box, the engineer gave it to them, and I saw them open the box. And that was the book. I had no idea he was reading from the Bible the whole time so long ago.”

“Wait,” I began, “you said he spoke in a weird language.”

“Yes,” he said, “and that’s when it hit me: all that time, all those days and months and years, he was reading the Bible backwards.”

I found myself getting cold. It was as if the stuff of reason were a hearth and I was being dragged further from it.

“You ever hear a record played backwards? That’s what his reading sounded like. I didn’t put it together until I saw the thing in the office.”

I went quiet as I tried to piece it all together, standing before Manny like a man suddenly exposed, made naked and vulnerable. I could feel the tangible, logical, material world starting to crumble around me.

“But what does any of this have to do with me?” I asked.

Manny looked at me, his gaze suddenly turned sympathetic.

“Oh my god,” he said. “You don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?”

“Your room. That was his room. You’re in Connors’ room.”

I am hard pressed to remember with any significant detail what happened during the next few days after that. I found my grasp of reality becoming tenuous as I tried to jigsaw all the pieces together to at least create a plausible picture in which I was merely the victim of a mean-spirited prank. But I failed in that attempt. I even went to the public library to search their databases to hunt down Mr. Connors since our school district told me he was “excused” from their employment several years ago and had no idea where he went.

And reports started coming in from our school’s neighbours of strange sightings coming from within our school after hours: beams of flashlights scanning the darkness at midnight; sudden howlings and screaming emanating from our building in the dead of night; and a long-haired figure barely visible walking around a classroom shrouded in darkness.

My classroom.

So, a few days later, I found myself explaining everything I knew about the basement to Lorna as she was required to make a police report about the strange, late night goings-on. Nothing had turned up on any of the security cameras so they could only rely on eyewitness reports from the neighbours. And it turns out she knew about the tiny room in the basement. She explained that it was used for storage in the old days and not used now. Simple.

I then told her about the girl I kept spotting, how I saw her walking into the basement, how I found the lock of hair tied to the pull chain. When she asked me to show it to her, I brought her to my room and opened my desk, took out my index card box, and showed her its contents: index cards. The piece of hair and ribbon were gone. I took great pains to explain it all to her as she quietly, patiently nodded.

She then recommended that I take an immediate short-term stress leave — advice that I took.

I used those days to reexamine everything in detail, replaying all the strangeness and visions. And I reached no conclusions, though I did finally manage to get some sleep.

I returned ten days later in fine enough condition to finish off the year with mild success. My students were laughing at my jokes again and learning in my classes. And best of all, there were no more reports of strange sightings in our school. All work on the basement had been completed and the door to the downstairs boiler room was locked again.

Near the end of that year, Lorna thought it would be a good idea if she placed Amy Waller in my English 9 class the following year. She thought it would be healthy for me, to help me heal from my experience, to put a real face to otherwise horrific theories and innuendoes. I wholeheartedly agreed.

I was called down to Lorna’s office to meet Amy and her parents. I turned the corner by the receptionist and entered her office.

And before me stood three people I had never seen before in my life.

“Mr. Bae, this is Amy and her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Waller,” said Lorna. They smiled and shook my hand.

These were not the people I had seen at the parent-teacher conference. I had never laid eyes on these individuals. I had never met this family.

The room began to spin as I replayed the night of the parent-teacher conference. The river of possibilities came rushing upon me: that there was at least one family in the neighbourhood still involved with dark activities, impersonating other people to access our school; that these families may be looking for an offering to someone or something; and that I was still being observed.

And then there are other families, Oscar had said.

I submitted my resignation the next day. I felt awful about it, leaving my classroom and students with very little notice. I considered just changing schools, but I knew this would follow me. My view of the material world was now skewed, bent by terrifying potential and the knowledge of dark rituals. The human character, brave and noble in its most perfect form, is also capable of dark degrees of wretchedness, and it was best if I spent some time away from young minds while examining and healing my own.

I spent the next eight years traveling, writing for radio and television, doing things I could not do as a public school teacher due to the demands of the job. In that time, the police eventually arrested and convicted a 57-year-old man of the murder of the Waller girl, though they were never able to find her body. He had confessed to the crime while being charged with the murders of three other girls out in the suburbs. Fortunately for the Waller family, he confessed, so they found some semblance of closure.

And as the years passed, and as I came to better grasp my strengths and failings, my dreams and capabilities, and most importantly, the things that brought me joy, I stunned myself by coming to the conclusion that I was beginning to miss the classroom. I was never comfortable with the way I left the profession that I loved.

So, in 2010, I returned to teaching. I restarted my career as a substitute teacher. And in my first month back to the profession, I found myself at my old school by The Drive. It had changed, though many of the same teachers were there.

And at the end of the day, I was glad to run into one familiar face: Oscar.

He recognized me immediately. We caught up, made several minutes of small talk, and laughed at the fact that over those eight years he had been promoted to head custodian.

And then, as I was about to leave for the staff lot, I turned and asked him, “Do you have a key for the downstairs?”

“I can’t,” he said.

“Actually, head custodian, you can.”

He shook his head and then said in a plaintive voice, “I wish you could just put it behind you.”

I reached for a rag off his cart and a flashlight.

“May I?” I asked.

He checked down the hall. Then, slowly, reluctantly, he opened the door to the basement. He propped it open with his cart. Going ahead of me, he turned on the light.

“I’ll wait for you up here,” he said. “Just so no one closes the door. Hurry up, though.”

I nodded before leaving him at the top of the stairs, and headed down into the black void of the large room where I felt my way along the walls. I reached the middle of the room where the light met darkness. I reached up and pulled on the chain, turning on the bulb.

Everything looked exactly the same. And in the far corner of the basement under a low ceiling, I could see the small room.

After a few hesitant steps, I found myself standing in front of the familiar brass knob. I steeled myself and opened the door, pushing it into the room.

I turned on the flashlight and saw the same low bench to my left. I then removed my shoes and placed it in the door frame so that the door couldn’t close on me completely. I carefully fit myself behind the door and shone the flashlight on it.

The symbols were still there: the circle, the pentagram, the goat’s face.

I balanced the flashlight on the bench facing the ceiling, got down on a knee, and with one hand holding the door and the other on the rag, I started rubbing out the symbol. The graffiti had been there a long time so it took some effort. Then, my ears picked up strange clicking sounds just on the other side of the door, but I was too afraid to stop working, too afraid to shine my light on what waited for me in the shadows. My mind was just toying with me again.

I felt the sweat forming on my brow but I finally succeeded in cleaning off the door. I picked up the flashlight and shone it over the door, inspecting my work.

And I saw what I came to find. Near the side of the door by the latch. Barely visible in this light, but clear enough for me.

Scratch marks. The wood of the door was heavy, yet it had been slightly chipped away near the latch. I moved the light around the door and began noticing other scratches in the wood.

And that’s when I noticed it. I felt it below my right foot. It was so subtle, so faint that I wouldn’t have noticed it with my shoes on. I bent down and shone my flashlight on it and carefully picked it up. I focused the light on it, holding it gently in my palm.

It was a fingernail.

I felt my eyes well up at the discovery, at the confirmation of the evil in the room. Here was a place on earth with a total absence of human goodness.

And to this day, whenever I close my eyes, I have to summon all my strength to hold the nightmares at bay.

Because the truth is, even though I may not believe in God, I sometimes fear the devil.

And it horrifies me.