What follows is my best recollection of what Ellis told me that night. I want to be clear before I start that I truly didn’t remember anything more or different than what I told them or what I’ve written previously. And it wasn’t like I just had a giant blank spot from age 10 to 15 or 20. I have memories, plenty of memories, of both my time at Stonebrook and what came after. It’s just now I believe that I’m missing a great many things and that at least a few of the things I do remember never actually happened.
That’s the best and only explanation I have for my relative ignorance of our collective past. It scares me, at least in part because I now know that I’ve had one or more conversations with the rest of the Six…with my friends…about me not remembering things at all or correctly. This was before they realized how deep-seated my block was and gave up trying out of some combination of frustration and fear that forcing me to remember would do me harm. So not only don’t I remember the events themselves, I don’t remember them trying to remind me of them. It makes me feel that my memory lapses go beyond shock or trauma. More like someone or something intentionally fucked with my head.
Even now, going over what I’m about to relay in this writing, I don’t really remember it—at least not well. It’s like I saw a movie of a portion of my life and now I have trouble distinguishing what I actually remember from my life and what I’m just remembering from the movie. When I finish writing this I’m going to call Mills and see if she’s okay.
Again, below is my best recollection of one of the last times I got to talk to one of my best friends.
Alex, I know you say you don’t know what we’re talking about, and I—we—believe you. We do. But stuff like you mentioning the Stonebrook Six, your reaction when I mentioned the Professor…I think you still have those memories in there somewhere and have just blocked them somehow. Or maybe they’re being kept from you. Either way, I think it would be good for you, for all of us, if we explained a bit and see if it’ll stick with you this time. See if you’re ready.
Now as you know, we all transferred from Jackson Elementary to Stonebrook Middle at the start of fifth grade. The building was weird and kind of spooky, and we all mainly hung out with each other. Between classes we started out meeting up at the big oak tree that stood at the edge of the bus drop-off parking lot. But by seventh grade we were changing classes as much as the high school and started running into older kids that were pissed that we were crowding their secret smoking spot behind the tree. We looked for another good hangout spot for a couple of weeks, but then Thomas and Cassidy found us a way into the lower rooms.
You look a bit lost, so let me explain. The hallways of the school crisscrossed, with the vertical four halls being used for fifth through eighth grade, as well as special classrooms for things like music and clubs. The horizontal halls were used for ninth through twelfth grade, and had the administrative offices and the teacher’s lounge. But as we figured out over time, each of those halls had another floor below it that wasn’t connected to each other like the floors above. It gave each floor its own private basement, and while the rooms had been used for classes at some point in the building’s past, by the time we got there they were mainly for storage…or a secret hangout if you could find a door unlocked.
The door to the basement of six grade’s hall didn’t lock securely, and by the time October of our seventh grade year had rolled around, we were already hanging out down there regularly. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. There was electricity, and the space was surprisingly clean, though there was a certain air of decay and disuse that always hung in the stale air. It was a spooky place, and the few times I was the first one to arrive, I had to fight the urge to go back upstairs until one of you got there. I think maybe that’s what got us talking about ghosts.
“No,” I interjected. “I remember daydreaming in class about there being a ghost at the school. I was by myself and bored. I think I brought it up to the rest of you.”
Ellis frowned, glancing at Mills and Thomas. “Well, that could be right. Either way, it doesn’t matter who brought it up first. We were all talking about it, and we were all a part of what came next.”
At first it was us just swapping rumors and speculation we had heard about the school as a way to pass time during breaks or lunch. Truth be told, most of it was fairly tame. It seemed the place had been a college at one point, but nothing bad had ever happened there that we could tell. No grisly murders or dark rituals, no crazy people or monsters.
Of course, mundane fact didn’t satisfy us for long. We would talk about the school being creepy. About maybe having seen something or heard something one time. There would be passionate debates about how a place that old and creepy must be haunted by at least one ghost, despite the lack of any evidence to support it.
Then we turned to talking about what such a ghost would be like. Cassidy is the one that came up with the idea that it was probably the dead soul of a former college professor. The Professor, she suggested, had probably fallen in love with one of his students, and when his advances were rejected, he had killed himself at the school, possibly in the very room we sat huddled in between fourth and fifth period.
It was just a story, of course, and we all knew it. But stories have power. So does belief. I’ve been thinking a lot about that the last few days, and I think stories are living things. Whether you’re telling the tale or hearing it, you feed it with emotion and thought, with imagination and belief, and it evolves and grows. In time, a story can take on a life of its own.
Over the next few weeks, we added a great deal to the Professor. It became a kind of informal story contest, where we would all take turns creating stories that either plumbed some chamber of the ghost or school’s past or reported on some more recent indication of the Professor’s continued presence at the school.
Thomas was the first.
Thomas’ Tale
Thomas told us more details about how the Professor was seen lurking around the halls of the college in the months following his death. The girl he had been in love with had dropped out after his suicide, but returned the following quarter. She was one of the few women at the school at the time, and this combined with her prior absence caused her to redouble her efforts to catch up and surpass her peers.
One night when she went to leave the school library, she found that she was locked in and all alone. Well, except for the Professor. The next morning they found her bruised and bloody in a gibbering heap. She never returned to school and people say she died just a few weeks later of some unknown malady.
Millicent’s Tale
Mills added in how the building was actually built on the tribal grounds of the Arikara, a Native American tribe that once lived in the area. Or to be more accurate, she had added with dramatic flair, a banished offshoot of the Arikara that had been shunned by the tribe for their extreme cruelty and dark magic practices. They had used the location as a site for their black rituals, and when they were driven from the land, European immigrants found themselves drawn to the place as well.
A village had grown up in the spot in the early 1800s, being a prosperous trade hub for local farmers and distant merchants for nearly fifty years. Then, during the height of the Civil War, a small band of travelers had come to town to find every man, woman and child slaughtered. The initial reactions were to blame a rogue detachment of Confederate or Union soldiers, but closer examination showed that the townsfolk appeared to have all turned on one another until the last one died of wounds she inflicted on herself.
It was another thirty years before anyone dared to build in the area again, but people have a short memory where there’s money to be made, and by 1900 the current town had started growing in that direction and soon the school was being built. Some say the same dark forces that plagued earlier generations caused the Professor to commit suicide and may still stalk these halls today…
Ellis’ Tale
When they bought the closed down college and started renovating it into the middle and high school, they found all these weird lower floor hallways. Apparently they had been used for classes at one time—all except the one we were meeting in. That one had been a lab the college had set aside for faculty to use, though only a couple ever did. One of those was named Arthur Chester, a chemist that was known for his obsessive devotion to his research and isolated lifestyle.
When the school closed, everything was very chaotic, but they did try to make sure that everyone was out before they sealed everything up. They went into every underground chamber, calling out for people and checking for signs that someone was being left behind.
But Arthur had taken to testing his compounds on himself and lay passed out in a dim corner of a back room. He never stirred and they sealed him in with no idea at all. When he awoke, it was another two days before he even knew he couldn’t leave, and the theory was that he suffocated himself with gasses from a concoction intended to blow the door off its hinges. All that’s known for certain is that his face and hands were torn and broken from where he had frantically flung himself against the heavy metal door until his lungs or his heart finally gave out.
Cassidy’s Tale
A few years back, before we were at Stonebrook, one of the freshmen saw something moving in the woods near the school. They thought it was a deer at first, and they pointed it out to a friend, but the friend didn’t see anything. Intrigued and wanting to prove their friend wrong, they tried to get their companion to go with them to the woods’ edge, but they refused.
Determined now, they set off by themselves while their friend went off to class yelling a stern admonition that the teacher was going to skin them alive for missing class. When the freshman didn’t come home that night, everyone began to search for her. It wasn’t long before they zeroed in on her friend and what she might have seen.
This led them to the woods, and while they had brought ten people and a pair of dogs to search for her, it was unnecessary. She was hanging thirty feet up in the branches of a large tree not far in and along the main trail through the woods. Her skin had been flayed away and spread like ragged wings behind her, and her lipless mouth was held open by what they first took to be one of her own notebooks. However on closer inspection, they saw that it was actually an old essay blue book. Written on the inside cover was the name of the girl the Professor had loved.
These stories were told and retold over the course of several weeks, and every time that it would come to your turn, Alex, you would pass, saying you were still working on yours. We didn’t push you, but we were starting to get tired of just rehashing the same old material and for whatever reason we didn’t feel like we could move on to new stories or something else entirely until you were finished.
So we started telling the stories to others. I think we were all doing it on our own at first. I remember the first time I talked about it to any of you, about how I had told a couple of buddies in gym class about the Professor, I was surprised to find you had all been doing the same thing.
Stuff like that isn’t uncommon, of course. Every school or town or group of more than five people have rumors and superstitions. Most of the time they have their time in the limelight and then fade away. Some stick around long enough to become urban legends or folktales. But when we started telling people about the Professor, it spread quicker and more powerfully than any of us expected.
Part of it is that we were all telling it like it was true. We had taken to telling each other’s stories among ourselves, you included, so we were all practiced at telling details of the tales without stumbling or lacking confidence. Another thing was that even though we were all known to be friends, we were all telling different people who then spread it to others. Within a month, our versions of Professor stories had been told probably fifty times. That’s not even counting the mutated versions, the spin-offs, the rip-offs, and straight-up new stories other people were creating out of some kind of strange drive, whether it was just an urge to be part of the current trend or something darker pushing them to do it.
By Christmas, people were telling each other to “watch out for the Professor!” and “don’t go in the woods alone” during the holiday. We thought it was hilarious, and were more than a little proud that we had inadvertently created a school spirit, at least for a little while. We had kind of figured it would die back down when we came back in January, but that was before Jenna Hastings went missing.
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Credits
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