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Drainage

For Paul, who wanted to hear one of the stories I got in trouble for. 'The Rumour' in this tale was one of those, and genuinely resulted in some strange happenings later on. I'll leave it to you guys to guess which parts hold the nugget of truth.


Every small child secretly believes that their school is haunted.

Ask, and they'll tell you that the PE cupboard, or the toilets, or that one corner of the Art Bay, has a spooky story associated with it.


Generally, of course, these stories can easily be attributed to a childish fear of the dark, or being alone.

Or, equally as common, a phenomenon known as kenopsia.

If you've ever been in a place that is normally saturated with life once the crowds have dissipated, you'll have felt it too. That strange, lingering feeling that something is amiss, that something is inherently wrong.

I've always thought that's the reason why schools, hospitals, theatres and the like seem particularly prone to tales of hauntings. The contrast between the daily bustle and the sudden absence of it unnerves us. It's almost like we're looking at the negative of a photograph of the place...we know people should be there, but instead we are painfully aware of the space they no longer occupy.


So, yes, stories of haunted schools are not uncommon. The difference is that my story is true.

I know that lots of my friends who attended different educational establishments have their own stories, urban legends associated with their schools, but they'll happily admit to never actually having seen the spook themselves.


What happened to my friends and I when we were just nine years old is a little different from most typical school hauntings, firstly because there were multiple witnesses, but also because of the unusual way that it all began.


Let me give you a little background. Our school was a Catholic Primary school in the Midlands. It wasn't one of those creaky old Victorian places, it had only been built a couple of decades previously.

I've recently read up on its history and nothing bad had ever happened there- no tragic deaths, no violence or sorrow beyond what is normal in a playground full of youngsters.


Until that year when we were nine.

Up until then I had really enjoyed my time at the school.

It was a cute little place, cheerfully decorated, with big windows through which you could see the school playing fields. It was all on one level, with the classrooms open plan. Curtains separated the "bases" of each individual class, but there were no rooms with doors, and none without windows. Except one.

The cloakroom had no windows, because that was where we changed for P.E. and so privacy was essential

It was a small, stuffy room with one of those bumpy, non-slip floors like you find in public swimming pools, and around the perimeter were low wooden benches and coat hooks, all varnished orangey-brown. There was a small space beneath the benches so that you could put your bags neatly underneath.


Our teacher, Mr Thripp, repeatedly warned us against leaving our bags in the middle of the room, or leaving the handles dangling out where people could trip over them.

Most of us were fine with that, though of course you always got one or two people who would place their bag on top of the bench rather than below it, for ease of access.


At the far end of the room, there was an area for showering; a large, white-tiled rectangular prism that blocked your view of the back wall, and around it on three sides, shower heads fitted halfway up the walls.

Apparently, years before it had been used for post-PE showering, but for some reason the school had decided to let us sweaty pre-teens go unwashed following our sporting exertions, and instead used the space for storage. There were balls, hockey sticks, knee pads, cricket stumps...all manner of sports-related paraphernalia lay higgledy-piggledy on the floor on the two sides nearest our changing area.


I can still remember how the once brightly-coloured plastics were faded, and in many cases, cracked or caked in mud. I don't think anyone had done a proper sort-out of the equipment in a long time. I certainly can't remember us ever using any of it, only prancing around in our squeaky plimsolls doing what was loosely called "country dancing," or humiliating ourselves trying to leap over the bulky wooden horse or drag ourselves, arms trembling, up the chafing ropes that hung from the ceiling of the gym.

I can also remember the smell of the place- a strange combination of sweat, stale vanilla body spray (thank you, late 1980s!) dust and plastic- and the way the fluorescent lighting cast a strangely dull and sickly glow over everything.

It's weird the things that stick in your mind. I can recall it all so vividly that I'm not entirely convinced that when I lay on my deathbed, I won't briefly find myself back there one last time before it all goes dark.


But anyway, the thing about this shower block was, if you managed to climb painstakingly over all the sports equipment, you could get to the very back wall. And there, right in the middle, behind the central rectangle and so completely hidden from view if you were in the changing room, was a drain.

Just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill, unremarkable circular metal grate, where once water would have spiralled its watery way into the sewers. As no one ever showered there anymore, it had been unused for years. We weren't sure if the showers still had a water supply or not- we used to dare each other to turn them on, but no one was ever brave enough to risk the wrath of Mr Thripp if we got caught.


There was a girl in our class called Clare, who was unfortunate in that she became the victim of a nasty little game. Looking back, she really didn't deserve it, but children can be cruel, and I'm ashamed to say I played quite a large part in what happened next. I started The Rumour.


I wasn't a bad kid, in fact I was a classic teacher's pet.

Mr Thripp adored me and I delighted in coming top of the class in every subject and having my work used as an example to the other students.

I was a shameless brown-nose (still am, if I'm honest) and hated doing anything that might get me, or anyone else, into trouble. So you see, my part in the whole thing genuinely wasn't out of any spite or malice, I didn't have a clue what was going to happen.


Clare was a short, skinny, odd-looking girl who spoke with a slight lisp. Her clothes never quite fitted properly, and she suffered from a number of skin conditions, the most noticeable of which was a constant and uncontrollable case of herpes. Her lips, chin and nose were always covered in cold sores, in various stages of developing or crusting over.

The rest of her skin had a dry, cracked appearance, and flaked to the degree that she looked like a fine layer of dust was resting on the surface of her arms and legs. It was so dry that she looked oddly wrinkled, too, as though someone had pressed 'fast-forward' on the ageing process.


As you can imagine, the other kids delighted in teasing her. But we weren't going to do anything obvious, like call her names, oh no. We were in a Catholic school, remember? We were told over and over that calling people names was a sin. The threat of Hell felt all too real, so we became far sneakier than that. We devised a hundred little ways to torture poor Clare, none of which could ever be traced back to anyone, and most of which she'd be too embarrassed to report anyway.


The Rumour wasn't originally intended to be part of it, but things have a way of escalating and taking on a life of their own.


One break time we were outside, sitting in the concrete yard and idly drawing with some rocks we'd found, chalky white outlines etched onto the surface; stars, circles, names scrawled large and crooked on the grey background. We were chatting away, like normal, and started telling scary stories.

Despite the warm day, I could feel the goose flesh prickling over my forearms, and the sounds of the other children running about whooping and laughing faded into the background as story after story tumbled from our lips.


My friend Elena had just told us the classic urban legend about the babysitter getting murdered by a serial killer hiding in the children's bedroom, and we were all feeling suitably freaked out.


And then, my turn.

I didn't want to recycle the ones we all knew, the guy with the hook for the hand, or the weird doll that couldn't be destroyed. Instead, I made my story up as I went along, deciding that the scariest thing of all would be if something scary had happened right there, in our very own school.

So I told the tale of the hand in the drain.


"Years and years and years before we were even born, children at this school used the shower block every day after PE. Don't you think it's strange that we're not allowed to use it anymore? Well, I know why.

It's because of the ghost!

There was a group of boys who decided they hated being in a Catholic school, and tried to summon the Devil with one of those...whatchamacallits...where it says Yes and No and all the ghosts can talk to you?"

"Weegee?" Elena supplied.

"Yeah, I think that's it...a weegee," I continued, enjoying the rapt attention of the other kids.


"So they started playing, and they thought it was just a game and it didn't work or anything, but then the next day they went for a shower and all the lights went off and they were there in the dark and they heard laughing, but it was evil laughing, and one of the boys screamed and the lights came back on and he had a big scratch down his back, like an animal had attacked him!"

"He never!" my audience breathed in unison.

"He did," I said, playing it up for dramatic effect, " and they knew then that they made a big, huge mistake because the Devil had really come and he marked that boy for his slave.

They told the teachers but the teachers didn't believe them and just told them off and gave them loads of extra maths homework that was mega-difficult as a punishment.

So the boys they just have to hope that if they pray hard enough, they'll be ok.

And that's what they do, next time they're in the shower and the lights start to go on and off, they start praying the Our Father like we have to do in Mass, and for a minute it looks like it'll be ok, the lights come back on and they think they've beaten the Devil, except the boy who got the scratch was reeeeeeally crap at RE and couldn't remember the words to the prayer.

And the devil reached up his hand out of the drain and grabbed the boy by the ankle and pulled him down through the drain and there was lots of blood and screaming and then he was gone forever."


A moment of shocked silence, then- "How's a boy going to fit down a drain?!" One of the boys said. "Sounds made up to me!"

"It's absolutely true," I insisted, "I heard some parents talking about it, they said the boy with the scratch was a friend of their parents, so it must be true!"

"But how'd he get down the drain?" my critic persisted.

"Well, d'uh, the Devil can do all sorts of evil magicky stuff, maybe he made him smaller... or the drain bigger... or something."

I widened my eyes and stared at him. "I wasn't there, was I? I only know what I heard the grown-ups saying."

He was about to interrupt me again, so I said: "Anyway, that's not even the scariest part."

"It's not?" asked Elena, her face pale.

I shook my head. "The Devil's hand is still there, in that drain. That's why they had to stop using the showers, and why they tell us not to go back there. He's waiting to drag more children down the drain...and into Hell."


I paused as the bell rang, signalling the end of break. No-one moved.

"I've seen it," I said, "I went back there one day when I was late for PE, and I saw it, reaching up out of the drain and feeling around for an ankle to grab."

"What'd it look like?"

"Gross. The skin was this off-white sort of colour...you ever seen a maggot? Like that! And it was sort of fat-looking, but the fingers were crazy-long and thin, with jagged yellow nails. There was all blood and black slime on the hand, and it was scraping it's nails along the floor all scary and evil. I didn't want to go to Hell, so I ran away."


"Come on, you lot, everyone else is going back in!" Mr Thripp's voice cut into the silence that had descended upon us, making us all jump.

We trooped back inside, the spooked feeling quickly dissipating as we settled in to an afternoon of learning about Egyptians and how to write our names in hieroglyphics.

But the idea had been planted.

And some of the kids had come up with an ingenious new way to mess with Clare.


It started that very afternoon. We went to get changed for PE, and just as I was stuffing my shirt back inside my drawstring bag, I noticed that Clare was just standing in the centre of the room, completely still, and wearing her uniform.

"Hurry up and get changed!" I said, "Thripp'll go mad if you're not ready when he knocks." She remained silent. "What's up? Forgot your kit? You'll have to do it in your vest and pants then, like Izzy did last week. Good thing it's not cold!"

"Dint forget nuffink," Clare mumbled. "Bagth dithappeared."

"Oh no!" said Elena, "Was that your bag, then, Clare? The blue one?"

Clare nodded. "Why, what's happened to it?" I asked.

Elena looked grave. "It's....back there." She gestured towards the shower block.

Clare looked over to where Elena was pointing. Still she didn't move.

If anything, she somehow became even more still, like the air around her had become syrupy-thick. "B-but how'd it get there?" she asked.


I knew in an instant. The other kids had thrown it back there for a joke, so Clare would be late for PE and get in trouble. Poor Clare was so sweet, it never crossed her mind that anyone could do something that she would never do herself. I expected Elena or one of the others to start laughing and 'fess up, but instead, Elena said "There was this....hand. The arm was crazy-long, I don't know how but it stretched all the way in here and then dragged your PE bag round the back."

"It was the Devil!" Matt, a skinny, bespectacled boy with a constant sniffle, chimed in, "The Devil from the school legend!"

"Yeah!" Izzy said, "I saw it, too, I was so scared I nearly did a wee in me knickers! It was just like in the story, all gross and covered in goo!"

"What story?" asked Clare, who unsurprisingly was looking somewhat alarmed. Before anyone could answer her question, there were three loud raps on the cloakroom door.

The spell was broken. Mr Thripp was expecting us for class.


Of course, poor Clare got in trouble. She didn't say a word about what had happened, instead saying that she'd forgotten her kit.

That was a big mistake on her part. Now everyone knew that she wouldn't snitch, she was fair game.


Bit by bit over the next week or so, she was drip-fed the story of the Devil in the Drain.

People took it in turns to steal small items from her bag and throw them behind the shower block, occasionally pretending that our own possessions were going missing, too, to lend the tale authenticity.

"The Devil's looking for his next victim," we told her. "He's back there, in the drain, waiting to drag one of us in there with him!"


The story took on a life of its own. Soon everyone had their own report of hearing a scratching sound from behind the block. One boy said he hadn't heard scratching, but nails tapping on the floor, as thought the Devil was becoming impatient with waiting for his next victim. People started to say they personally knew of other deaths and disappearances, or people who'd had close encounters but somehow lived to tell the tale.

Of course, being kids with overactive imaginations, no one ever thought to ask how come the school was still open if there had been so many murders!


Each time a new strand of the story was added, I have to admit I felt a bit of a thrill.

My story, my creation, had the whole playground buzzing! We swore each other to secrecy where older kids and adults were concerned, but we told all the younger ones; sadistically savouring their yelps of fright as we told them what they'd have to deal with when they moved "base" in a year or so.


After a couple of months, something changed.

Maybe it was some sort of mass hysteria, but the atmosphere in the cloakroom...altered. Where before there'd be the traditional whipping with towels, running about, whooping and joking while we got ready for PE or collected our things at the end of the day, now a loaded silence descended like a thick fog. We rushed to be dressed, none of us wanting to be the last out of the door.


Poor Clare had been given at least three detentions by this point. Her parents were getting angry about the amount of school supplies she was "losing" and so her tactic had been to stop bringing her things to school. Of course, Mr Thripp was less than impressed, and because she was so damn loyal, she never said a word, just took her punishment. Her cold sores were getting worse, and her eyes had taken on a haunted look. If I'd been an adult and not a self-involved child, maybe I'd have realised that she wasn't sleeping.


Actually, I hadn't been feeling all that rested myself. Maybe it was guilt at how mean we were being to Clare, but I'd started having bad dreams about being in the cloakroom at night, after the school was closed. Nothing bad would ever actually happen in the dreams, but I'd just be there, unable to leave, staring at the shower block as the light overhead flickered sickly. When I woke up, I'd think that I heard the scraping of nails across the wooden floor of my room.


So: after the third detention, Mr Thripp had called Clare's parents, who had supervised her very careful packing of her bag for the day. Nothing was forgotten, and they'd given her a stern warning to bring everything back with her that night.

She'd told us about it in the morning, nearly in tears before we'd even got to Registration.

"If the Devil taketh any more of my thuff, Mum'll kill me!"

That was all the encouragement that was needed. I still don't know to this day who did it, but I pray to god every night that it was just one of the kids taking the joke too far.


We finished PE, a very long and dull game of Rounders, and wearily trooped back into the cloakroom. I was just pulling on my coat when I heard a whimper from beside me. Clare. "Oh, no," I said, genuinely aggrieved on her behalf this time, as I'd seen how upset she was in the morning. "Another pencil case gone? Are you going to get grounded?" S

he shook her head furiously, tears trailing over her flaky cheeks, scabby lips trembling. She wiped a hand across her nose, streaking snot but hardly noticing. "Worth," she croaked, "Much worth than any thupid penthil cayth."

"What?" Matt asked, coming over. One by one, the kids collected their bags and came to form a circle around the sobbing girl.

"Yeah, what?"

"What'd you lose this time, Clare?"

"Did He take something important?"

"M-m-mum let me borrow thum earringth, I had to take them out for PE!" she wailed. "That's not so bad," I said, awkwardly patting her on the back.

"You d-don't u-u-underthand!" she said, "They were th-th-thpethial! They were a prethent from my grandma and if I don't get them back Mum'll never forgive me!"

Knock knock knock! "Home time!" bellowed Mr Thripp through the door.

In an instant, the class scattered. Only Clare, Elena, myself and Matt remained.


"We should go," said Elena, "our parents will be waiting."

"Not mine," said Matt, proudly, "I've got a key."

"Me, too," whispered Clare, her shoulders still shaking as she tried to get her tears under control. "Can't you thtay one minute?" she pleaded, looking at me and Elena.

"I have to get thoth earringths back. If we all go together..."

I took a deep breath. My hands were clammy and I felt sick.

There were just the four of us in that room, with the sounds of the other children and teachers fading into the distance as everyone made their way outside.

Behind us the shower block loomed, silent and threatening.

I gave myself a mental shake. What was there to be scared of? After all, I'd made the story up myself. I knew it wasn't true. There was no Devil hiding in the drain. We'd just got carried away.


We'd done similar things before, getting swept up in a bit of make-believe, though on a much smaller scale.

I remember one time someone accidentally stood on a spider on the playground.

My initial reaction was "Good!" as I hate those spindly-legged creeps, but then something happened. One of the kids decided we should play at Funerals, giving speeches in memory of the deceased arachnid. And before I knew it, I was grief-stricken and crying along with everyone else. A kind of mass hysteria, I guess. So a part of me knew that must be what was happening.

The change of atmosphere, the bad dreams...we'd all just got too wrapped up in a silly story, and now if we just faced our fears and proved there was nothing there, it'd all be over and we'd move onto our next silly phase.


"Let's do it!" I said, and Matt nodded agreement. "Elena?"

"I don't know, I think I just want to go home..."

"Elena!" I scolded, in a rare moment of maturity, "Come on, this is getting silly. Clare, someone hid your earrings as a joke. I'm sorry. We've been messing with you, it's all just been a big..." My voice trailed off as I heard a scraping sound from behind us.


We all turned as one, slowly, muscles knotted in anticipation of an attack.

For a moment I really expected to see the Devil's hand on the floor, dragging itself towards us. That's not what happened, but what did was enough.

To this day, Elena and I still swear it happened exactly like this:

On one of the benches, on top of one of the benches, someone had left their bag.

It was a big, oblong sports bag. Green, with a zip, and a logo that was a popular brand at the time- three gold stripes, and three gold letters that said HEAD. We'd all seen the bag before. It belonged to Nazarene, a Nigerian girl who'd joined us quite late into the autumn term. We used to laugh at her, because she was a tiny little thing with wild, fuzzy hair, and the bag was big enough for her to fit inside it. Watching her heft it about every day provided almost as much entertainment as picking on Clare.


The scraping was coming from the bag. Not from inside it, but from it. It was sliding, very slowly along the bench towards us. The hairs on my arms stood to attention and I swallowed, hard. It stopped about a foot away, and then slid toward the front edge of the bench, before toppling off and landing on the floor directly in front of us. For a moment none of us breathed.

Then Matt started to giggle nervously. "We're such idiots," he said, "scared because a bag fell off the-" SLAM! The door to the cloakroom rattled in its frame as it closed, and at the exact same moment, the bag slid- no- was shoved- under the bench, where it hit the back wall. All of us screamed and clung to each other as the lights started to flicker. I thought I was going to be sick. All of our eyes were fixed in the bag, on the now-still, green bag with the gold writing which now said- I shit you not- DEAD.


Well, that was it, we hightailed it out of there as fast as we could, colliding with Mr Thripp on the way out of the door. "Where have you been?" he called after us as we raced out of the school, "Your parents have been waiting!"

I didn't tell my parents what had happened, but that night I slept with the bedroom light on.


This was on a Friday, back in the late 80s when there was no Internet or mobile phones so news travelled slowly. The call came to the landline early Monday morning. The school was closed until further notice. There'd been some kind of incident.


It wasn't until it hit the papers that we found out what had gone on. Apparently, a couple of hours after we left, the caretaker had been doing his rounds and was surprised to find the cloakroom door locked. As he was the only one with a key, he was a bit confused, but thought maybe he'd somehow gone on autopilot and locked it without realising. It was only as he went to leave and stepped in a small puddle that he realised something was wrong.

Water was running in a steady stream from the shower block. All of the shower heads had been turned on full blast, which was a surprise to him as he'd thought the supply had been disconnected. What was really weird, though, was that the water wasn't just flowing down the drain as normal. So he went back there to investigate.

God, I still shake thinking about it even now. Poor Clare. We thought she was right behind us, really we did. We didn't think for a second she'd be brave enough after what we'd seen, to go back and look for those earrings. But she did. She was wearing them when the caretaker found her.


She had been so afraid of upsetting her mum and getting into trouble, when really what she should have been scared of was waiting for her in that shower block.

The caretaker, a man by the name of Joe Lees, was quoted in the paper as saying he'd never seen such a disturbing sight in all his life. Clare was just lying there, surrounded by all the bits and pieces we'd thrown there over the past couple of months; bags, socks, stationery, homework sheets, all torn to pieces and scattered around her like confetti.

The water was cascading down from the shower heads, soaking everything in icy liquid. The drain covering lay to one side, the metal strangely twisted "Like that Incredible Hulk bloke off the telly had ripped it out," Joe said.

And there was Clare, lying face down in the shallow pool, unconscious, the water just beginning to come up over her mouth and nose. Her arm was wedged tight into the drain, right up and ever so slightly past the shoulder. It took Joe a great deal of effort to pull her out. "She were stuck tight, like- I honestly thought her arm might come out the socket." There were bruises and deep scratches all up the length of her arm, "Like someone took a rake to her or something," Later, the surgeons who operated on her couldn't figure out how she'd managed to injure herself so badly, and when she finally regained consciousness, she wouldn't tell them anything.


The school reopened after a few months, just in time for us to move "bases" so I never had to go near that room again. But the stories were still circulating. And the thing was, now I believed them. Some of those kids were genuinely terrified, you could see it. I was so glad when they bricked up that shower block, and even more so when I finally moved on to secondary school.


I don't know how to explain any of what happened all these years ago. I only know what I saw, what we saw. Something moved that bag and changed the logo. Something was in that shower area, something bad, something that hurt Clare. What I'm not sure about is whether it was there all along, or whether we somehow gave it life.


All I know is that I'm more careful with my stories now.

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