It was a visitor, merely passing through town, who informed us that our schoolhouse is haunted. It is a thing we should have known. Deep in our bones, we did know, but we preferred to look away. We chose not to see.
Now that we are here, we cannot look away. We know, too, there is a place like this in every town — from densely packed city to tiny hamlet, forgotten and tucked away. The ghosts here are intangible, until all at once they are not. Until they lay chill hands at the nape of your neck and breathe cool words against your ear. It is a place that sends you running without being able to say to yourself precisely why. A place where bad things happen, and the darkness walks alone.
You carry it with you, if you are able to leave. And it compels you to stay even as your legs ache to run.
We are in mourning. That is our excuse for not coming here sooner. We searched everywhere we could for our children until we could no longer avoid the last place they were seen. Where we fear they remain.
In the brightness of day, the schoolhouse’s shadow is stark and within it, we are small. There is a steepled tower with a bell that makes us think of churches. The front doors are painted cherry red against fresh, white clapboard. The window boxes are planted with geraniums that almost seem to glow.
The doors are not locked. It is an easy and terrible thing to step inside. We remember being children ourselves as we do. We remember our own fears, called irrational by our parents, the places we knew down in the soles of our feet were bad, where we did not want to go.
The schoolhouse sighs as we enter. We sigh with it, a collective breath released. Our children are not here and for a brief moment, we are relieved.
We feared opening the door to see twelve heads, twenty-four eyes, swiveling as one to stare at us. Lantern gazes and silent, open mouths asking us where we’d been. A multi-limbed but singular creature grown strange here, become something we did not recognize. Something we didn’t know how to love, that would, rightly, assign us with blame.
A sound lies trapped behind our teeth, nervous laughter. To let it out would be to look at one another and say how silly we had been. We misunderstood. The traveler was wrong and we were right all along. Of course this place is not haunted. Of course our children are not really gone. Of course —
A breeze stirs through the schoolhouse, all graveyards and fallen leaves. It scrapes the laughter from our mouths, ruffles the pages of absent textbooks and swirls torn exercise sheets in drifts around our toes.
It bids us stay.
Look, it tells us. We are here.
We are here and She remains.
We want, as one, to crouch low and cover our heads. As if a dozen swallows launched all at once from the rafters to swoop through the air, we want to shelter, aching not to be seen. Our gazes are wild; they dart mouse-frightened throughout the room.
What is — ?
Did you — ?
Was there — ?
Sentences we cannot complete, too unsettled to give a name to our fear.
It is a one-room schoolhouse; there are corners, but no space is enclosed. There is nowhere that a body, even one as small as a child’s, could fold in upon itself to hide. There are cubbies, nooks, crannies, but no doors save for the ones we entered through. Daylight streams through the windows and catches in motes of dust swirling lazily through the air.
We know, without a doubt, that in this lonely place we are not alone.
We look, at last, where we did not want to look before. And then we see.
The Teacher is here. Her shadow is stretched above our heads and nailed to the floor.
Hands fly to cover mouths. Our eyes are wide above our fingertips pressed against our cheeks. Our lashes dampen as we blink away shock and fear.
Who could do such a thing? How could such a thing even be done?
It is undeniable that this is the Teacher. We know the shape of Her and understand this for Her remains. A dark magic, achieving an unspeakable thing.
We lower our hands and look at each other with stricken eyes. We must admit, though we don’t dare to say it aloud — we knew, but we pretended not to know. We must have known. How could we fail?
We did not want to come here; we did not want to look at the place where our children were last seen because then we would see how our children were forced to take matters into their own hands. How they battered their bodies against something so much larger than themselves, like moths crashing into illuminated glass.
We move in a cluster, bodies pressed close to those of our neighbors and friends. We cannot bear to look at the shadow stretched above us, but it touches us every place we stand within the room. The Teacher’s eyes are on us, baleful and burning, though she has no eyes, not anymore. Our children took them from Her, as they took everything else, piece by piece. As She took from them — our fragile, hollow-boned birds. She snapped their wings.
We want to beg forgiveness, but we have not earned that right. Our voices catch like brambles in our throats. No matter how we cough and spit, they only lodge deeper, sharp and drawing blood.
Our children, who are gone, demand witness. Look, they whisper, look where you left us. Come and see, come and see.
We look, as bade, and discover the room we believed empty is in fact crowded to the brim. The more we peer into every crack and corner, the more tangible echoes we find.
We are archeologists, unearthing small treasures, tiny, secret acts of defiance, components of an arcane spell. Here is an empty bird's nest, tucked beneath the potbellied stove. Inside are eggshells an aching sky blue, each one perfectly hollow and perfectly whole. There, stuffed between the floorboards, are torn fragments of scribbled notes, illegible and unintelligible to us but rife with meaning for eyes not our own. A wad of gum, precisely chewed, the teeth marks a secret code, stuck to the back of a cubby.
We find initials carved crookedly into the underside of a desk.
It is this last that breaks our hearts, letters we can almost understand, but as we blink and tilt our heads, we realize we can no longer remember their names. Even with the initials written clearly before us, we cannot guess whose child they belong to, what those deep-scratched letters mean and how the names they represent may or may not line up with our own.
Their names were the first thing She took from them and so they rebaptized each other with names we haven’t earned the right to know.
With frantic, shaking hands, we turn our pockets inside out. Nothing drifts free — no school portraits lovingly snapped, tucked into our wallets amidst credit cards and crisp bills. The camera reels on our phones hold sunsets and overpriced, artisanal meals, but our children’s faces are gone as if they never were.
How could the Teacher we ourselves chose for them could be so cruel? We looked into Her eyes, and though they were fathomless, we believed we saw wisdom there. The precise line of Her mouth promised discipline, but nothing untoward.
We admit, now, to excitement, the first time we laid eyes on Her. In our exhaustion, we craved quiet, a moment of peace all to ourselves. We loved our children, of course we did, but we also knew intimately the way their hands — sticky with juice and begged sweets — plucked and tugged, full of ceaseless demands. Would it be so bad, we asked ourselves, if their voices, rising with insistence bordering on a whine, were someone else’s problem for a while? Would it be so terrible if they were taught to hold their tongues?
After all, didn’t we ourselves grow beneath the maxim of spare the rod, spoil the child? Weren’t we, in our own time, taught to be seen and never heard?
They were unruly, we said, in our lowest moments, not simply curious, wild, and brimming with life. A firm hand would not go amiss, we thought, remembering the hands that shaped us in turn. We tucked them into their beds with sweet lies, telling them there are no such thing as monsters. We told ourselves the stories they came home were exaggerations and fabrications in the ways that children do.
We congratulated ourselves on a job well done for inviting the Teacher into our midst. We poured ourselves glasses of wine, zoned out on the couch, and binged the latest reality show. In the morning, bleary and hungover, we impatiently bundled our children out the door. We ferried them into the shadow of the schoolhouse, prodded them through the cherry-red doors, and refused to step through after them.
The first lesson our children learned, the one we unwittingly taught them, was that no one would come to their aid. We left them on their own.
And realizing this, too late and all in a rush, we are haunted.
Small bodies crowd around us, tiny hands press against our skin. Fingers no longer sticky with juice caress our ribs, apply pressure to our lungs, wrap lovingly around our hearts. We cannot see them, they are not heard, but our children are here.
With rapid, bruising jabs, they herd us into place and use sharp-nailed fingers to pry our lids wide.
See, they command us voicelessly, see what was done.
There are marks upon the floor. In the corner where the dust is most disturbed, we understand how one child, smaller and more frightened than the rest, was separated out. A tiny infraction, a trifling thing. Coughing while the Teacher wrote equations on the board, a stutter, a tripping word, an answer missed when their name was called.
Long drag marks left by their shoes remember where they were hauled from their desk, marched to the corner, made to stand with their toes flush against the wall.
______ is not here, the Teacher said, and our children looked at each other in confusion.
We hear the precision of Her voice, a razor, flaying away the chosen student’s name.
But T — our children started to protest, started to say a name forbidden to them, pointing at the one among their number who had been exiled, who they could see right before their eyes.
______ is not here, the Teacher declared.
Her voice trembled the rafters and shook dust to the floor. We see where it settled. We see where it did not. We see the outline of the child left standing in the corner, tears wetting their shirt, breath condensing against the wall.
Eleven desks turned around, ordered to face the other way, scraping and scratching and drowning out a muffled sob, leaving thin scars for us to read upon the boards.
______ is not here, the Teacher said a final time, closing Her eyes and savoring the words.
No other child dared to speak. They knew how She would strike, swift as a snake, descending upon them like a thunder cloud. We know, as they knew, how She would wield a ruler like a sword, bringing it down with the tipped metal edge designed to produce the straightest of lines turned ever so slightly in toward their flesh.
Who would design an instrument in such a way, if not for violence? What other purpose could it serve, when a wooden edge on its own would produce lines just as neat?
We remember the bite of that same metal and rub our hands, seeking the faint outline of ancient scars. We recall the sting, and how red blood leapt free when our knuckles split at last. We remember the Teacher’s terrible smile, how we too were disbelieved. We wonder if She is the very same one, called forth from our nightmares to serve once again.
We wonder, because we cannot quite recall, what horrible things we were forced to do. We ponder the question of how we ourselves managed to survive.
Perhaps we made ourselves small, folding away what was vital to become still and cold. We played pretend we were dead and we learned to endure, but our children, it seems, chose a different path. Where and how did they learn such magic? How did it come to them to nail Her shadow to the floor? To leave this schoolhouse haunted, their warning that this is a bad place where no one should ever go.
We imagine them tumbling like blown leaves through the streets of our town once the schoolhouse finally spit them out for the afternoon. Seeking out dusty, secret places, forgotten tomes tucked into the most arcane and neglected shelves of our public library. Did they teach themselves to spot fairy rings in the woods that hem us in? Mushrooms like white bones knuckling up through the earth? Did they learn to call the lovely ones, the good neighbors, or did they implore older powers still?
How might they have split their tongues to chant awful spells, contorting around words not meant for human jaws? What did they give to set themselves free?
Icy hands no longer press against our lungs. We crave the sensation of fingers curled around our bones, begging us to stay, asking us to call them home for supper and tuck them in again.
There are no hands here, no children left to call. They offered themselves, a bit at a time. A fingernail picked and raggedly torn, a tooth already hanging by a thread. The aftermath of a haircut, blood from a scraped knee. When it wasn’t enough, they gave more — memories of bright summer days, the tip of a left pinky, the entirety of a right big toe. They hollowed themselves out, became shades, until they were all but gone.
And in that time, they learned.
Guardians other than ourselves taught them to dig in the earth with fingers grown long and sharp like whittled bones, when they should have been asleep in their beds. They counseled wadded blankets left upon pillows in place of dreaming heads. Our children learned to muffle their footsteps across moon-wet lawns and sneak into graveyard to pry coffin nails from the resting places of the dead. Rusted with their tears, prayed over with bleeding tongues, cured over a dozen midnights while they bore split knuckles and their skin written over with an alphabet of bruises and scars.
The floorboards shake beneath our feet with each remembered hammer blow. Dust scatters from the rafters to land on our cheeks in place of tears. We shelter close and clutch at each other at the Teacher’s echoed screams — a single moment, stretched like Her shadow, going on and on and on.
This is what our children did, were forced to do, and when it was over, they too were gone.
Our children are never coming home. We would not recognize them if they did.
They belong to the lovely ones now, the eldritch ones. They belong to whoever came to their aid when we left them on their own.
We flee from the schoolhouse tumbling onto the bright lawn, but the haunting remains. The steeple juts through our ribcages, our hearts the tolling bell. Bright geraniums replace our eyes and our teeth are doors the cherry-red of new blood. We carry the Teacher with us, her shadow nailed to the floor.
We turn and look at each other, mournful eye meeting mournful eye. We do not have the right to apologize; we have not earned the right to grieve. We certainly have not earned the right to flee. As one body, we shuffle back inside. We step to the chalkboard, each selecting a broken piece the color of bone and begin to write the penance we cannot speak aloud. We must cast our own spell, learn lessons of our own.
Our fingers ache. They cramp. Our words overlap and collide. One hundred lines. One thousand. We do not know when — if — it will ever end.
We will stay here in the Teacher’s lonely winter shadow even as spring deepens outside. We will remain through summer as it marches into fall. We must not talk back. We must not complain. We have been wicked, but we have not learned how to be terrible yet. This is our punishment. It is exactly what we deserve.
