The Haunted School
Trying hard to control your breathing, trying desperately to hear something in the silence, willing yourself to see in the inky blackness, you wait.
You hear your heart hammering in your chest. You can feel your pulse throbbing behind your ears. How can you hear anything over the sound of your own traitorous body?
You wait. And wait.
Which way is the door? You would give all of the money that you will make in your life to know the answer to that one, simple question. You imagine (or do you feel it) that some loathsome thing is creeping silently, inexorably toward you in the blackness. The thought paralyzes you.
So you wait.
It is then that you hear a soft, scraping, sound. a sound like a shoe might make on sandy, grimy wet, tile, the sound of grit ground between tile and shoe leather.
Someone (something) was hiding in the dark, incapable of standing still any longer, shifting its weight from foot to foot.
It was waiting, too.
You hear your heart hammering in your chest. You can feel your pulse throbbing behind your ears. How can you hear anything over the sound of your own traitorous body?
You wait. And wait.
Which way is the door? You would give all of the money that you will make in your life to know the answer to that one, simple question. You imagine (or do you feel it) that some loathsome thing is creeping silently, inexorably toward you in the blackness. The thought paralyzes you.
So you wait.
It is then that you hear a soft, scraping, sound. a sound like a shoe might make on sandy, grimy wet, tile, the sound of grit ground between tile and shoe leather.
Someone (something) was hiding in the dark, incapable of standing still any longer, shifting its weight from foot to foot.
It was waiting, too.