The Screaming Man
by C.M. Saunders
When you’re a child, you think that when you grow up, you’ll have all the answers.
Sorry to break it to you, but it’s not true. You will always have questions. The difference is that when you’re a child, you want to know everything about everything, but the older you get, the less you care about extraneous shit. You begin to realize that expending time and energy worrying about things that don’t directly affect you is a pointless exercise. Either it will rain tomorrow, or it won’t, and nothing you can do will change it. All you can do is react and choose whether to wear a raincoat or not.
However, that flame of curiosity still burns, and sometimes you can’t help but think about it.
Will it rain tomorrow?
That was how I found myself outside the long-abandoned St. Kenneth’s comprehensive school one autumn afternoon last year. I’d heard through the community grapevine that the plot on the edge of town containing the crumbling red-brick faux-Victorian-style buildings had finally been sold to developers, so this visit might be my last opportunity to see the place as I remembered it.
I was never a pupil at St. Kenneth’s. By the time I reached eleven, all the pupils who would ordinarily have gone there had been re-routed to other schools. Nobody was quite sure why. It’s likely that the council earmarked the plot for sale a long time ago, but rumours persisted that the school had been built atop an old abandoned mine shaft or was unsafe in some other ambiguous way. And so it stood derelict, slowly decaying year after year and strictly out of bounds.
When we were kids, our parents told us never to go to St. Kenneth’s. For one thing, it was dangerous. It would also be trespassing, which was technically breaking the law, and we could get in serious trouble if we were caught. The main reason, however, was the Screaming Man.
That was what we called him.
A lot of places have a resident ghost or two, and that was the name of the one that haunted St. Kenneth’s.
We might’ve been kids, but we weren’t stupid. We knew our parents made the stories up just to stop us going to St. Kenneth’s. But if anything is guaranteed to tempt kids into doing something, it’s telling them they can’t do it. Even if the Screaming Man was real, we would go there hoping to catch a glimpse of him.
That flame of curiosity.
Which was precisely why the abandoned school was one of my childhood stomping grounds. Even after it stopped being used sometime in the early eighties, my friends and I would sneak inside. Sometimes we played hide and seek. Other times we ransacked the classrooms, most of which were still filled with wooden desks, blackboards and discarded textbooks, and we ran through the empty corridors in a high-octane hunt for the Screaming Man.
If you don’t see him, you’ll hear him, was the common refrain.
Obviously, we knew that if we went to St Kenneth’s and heard someone screaming, the sound didn’t have to come from a ghost. It could be anybody. It might even be one of us, and it wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility for some weirdo to just hang out there, screaming, to frighten away people like us who shouldn’t have been there anyway.
But I knew different.
I knew the Screaming Man was real because I’d met him.
I might even have been responsible for starting the whole thing. It was a long time ago, and that part of my memory is foggy. The passage of time has a way of distorting things.
As I approached that grey afternoon, I saw that the school gate was locked, as it always was, and fitted with a new oversized padlock. Maybe the rumours about the developers moving in were true. But the gaps in the fence were still there.
Once inside the grounds, I realized how little the place had changed in the thirty-odd years since I’d last been there. The main building was a little more decrepit and forlorn, a few more windows were smashed, and a bit more graffiti was scrawled on the walls.
I walked up to the main doors and gave them a tentative shove. I didn’t really expect them to open. I momentarily considered crawling in through a window. But I wasn’t twelve anymore, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get away with it. The authorities would certainly not look on it kindly. A middle-aged man is given a lot less leeway than a child because, let’s face it, he should know better.
Something else that changes as you get older is how you see your own mortality. You become more careful and start avoiding potentially hazardous situations. The caution comes from seeing your friends and family around you die off, each one a sharp jolt to the gut. When you’re young you think you’re going to live forever, and then you realize you won’t and spend the rest of your life struggling with it. If I managed to find my way inside St. Kenneth’s, I might fall through the floor and break a leg, or the roof might fall in on top of me. I might even get stuck in the window whilst trying to crawl through it and slowly starve to death. Unlikely, but possible. It wasn’t worth the risk. Plus, there was something else I wanted to do more than explore the main building.
The real reason I came back.
I don’t know when St. Kenneth’s was originally built, but it was old enough to have outside toilet blocks. Divided into two sets positioned on either side of the playground like sentries, one for boys and one for girls, when I was a kid, they were an endless source of fascination. I just couldn’t get my head around the fact that people, children, had to go outside to pee. And how bad must pooping be in winter? Like the school itself, the toilet blocks were a relic of a bygone age. Nothing to admire, but something to be respected if for no other reason than they showed us how far we’d come.
Slowly, methodically, I began making my way around to the back of the school. When I rounded a corner, and the decimated one-storey brick shells slipped into view, an involuntary shudder racked my body.
There they were.
My mind was cast back to the day I came face-to-face with the Screaming Man.
My friend Andrew and I had been playing hide and seek, and I was winning. I was sure of it. I’d been in one of the stalls in the disused toilet block for what felt like hours, trembling with excitement even as the stench of old piss threatened to overpower me.
It had been a long time since I’d heard anything. Andrew could be anywhere by now. He might even have gone home and left me. His idea of a joke. Straining my eyes, I peered through a crack in the door and saw nothing.
I began to feel uncomfortable. The light was failing, and my dinner would be ready soon. I didn’t want to miss it. Finally, I decided to forsake my hiding place to find Andrew and claim victory.
Breathing a sigh of relief that my ordeal was finally over, I pushed the heavy wooden door.
It wouldn’t open.
I didn’t know why. The lock had long since been kicked into submission but for some reason the door just wouldn’t budge. Later I thought maybe the wood had swelled shut or the remains of the lock had jammed, but in the heat of the moment it felt as if someone was holding it closed.
“Andrew?” I said, shocked by how small and feeble my voice sounded. “Are you out there?”
There was no reply and no tell-tale sniggering.
This was bad.
Very bad.
Panic suddenly washed over me like a cold wave. I yelled at the top of my voice and pounded at the door.
Nobody came.
This was long before the advent of mobile phones, so I couldn’t call anyone. Nobody knew where I was, not even Andrew. I was completely alone and convinced I was about to die in a derelict toilet block.
Then something moved outside, momentarily filling the crack in the door I’d been peering through. I took a deep breath to yell, but something stopped me. I should be happy at the thought of being released, but this didn’t feel right. Something was wrong.
What I felt is difficult to put into words. It was a kind of displacement in the air, and the temperature seemed to drop a few degrees. The skin on my bare forearms became peppered with goosebumps, and I began to shiver.
Taking care not to stumble over the shattered remains of the toilet bowl, I backed away from the door as much as the confined space would allow and pressed my back against the cold brick wall trying to make myself as small as possible. I knew trying to hide was futile. Whatever was out there already knew where I was.
The door suddenly flew open and there, silhouetted against the clouds in the afternoon light, was a figure towering over me. My eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom of the toilet cubicle, forcing me to squint and shield them with an open palm.
Then something fully unexpected happened. Instead of reaching in and grabbing me by the throat like I envisioned, the figure that had struck such fear into me suddenly dropped to his knees, put its hands to its head, and let out a shrill, inhuman wail making my blood run cold. I skirted him as widely as I could, then broke into a desperate run. I didn’t even look back. I was bemused but happy to be free. I couldn’t wait to tell my friends about my experience, and when I did, I obviously elaborated a little, and the legend of the Screaming Man spread.
I was surprised to find that all this time later, the toilet blocks were still there. I thought they would have been torn down years ago.
They will be soon, I thought to myself, remembering St. Kenneth’s imminent fate. The demolition might be exactly what the area needed. The abandoned school, though beautiful in a forlorn, eerie kind of way, was not just an eyesore but a safety hazard. A block or two of posh new apartments might be just the thing to raise the standard around here and give it a new lease on life.
I began crossing the playground, making a beeline for the cubicle I’d been trapped in as a kid. I knew exactly which one it was. Sixth from the left. It was imprinted on my brain.
En route I half-expected someone to challenge me and ask me what the hell I thought I was doing. But it didn’t happen. As far as I could tell, I was completely alone.
A heavy silence had settled over the playground, and the faint stench of piss and excrement began to fill the air. How could the stench still be there after all this time? Beneath that was another smell. Something nearby was dead and rotting. I hoped it was an animal, and I wasn’t about to discover a body. That would ruin my whole day.
Suddenly, the sound of knocking broke the hush. The first few thuds were tentative and unsure, building slowly in intensity and volume.
What the heck?
It must be the breeze catching one of the doors, I told myself, slowing my pace even as I registered the lack of wind.
Then I heard the voice.
It was faint and distorted, as if coming from a long way away, but the terror was unmistakable. As I listened, the pitiful, hitching sobs were punctuated with words.
“Let me out! Please!”
I froze in my tracks. The voice had to be coming from the toilet block. There was nowhere else it could be coming from. High-pitched and whiny, it sounded like it belonged to a woman or a child. Someone must be trapped in one of the stalls, just as I had been all those years ago.
History was repeating itself.
Knowing how awful it was to be shut in there, I quickened my pace, anxious to free the poor soul. Who knew how long they’d been trapped. Hours? Days? They might be close to death.
By the time I finally reached my destination, the thumping had become a desperate hammering.
“Help me! Someone! Please!”
I looked down the line of toilet stalls. The block was in such a state of disrepair that the walls were crisscrossed with cracks, some of the roofs had fallen in, and all the doors were lying on the floor or missing altogether.
All except one.
That had to be it.
I hurriedly stepped over litter, broken glass and lumps of crumbling concrete, and despite twisting my ankle and almost falling over, I managed to fight my way to the closed door. By now, the pitiful crying had stopped, but I could still hear a faint wheezing, almost as if the person locked in the stall was having a panic attack.
The door handle had long since disappeared. Only a rusted metal rod remained. I gripped it and yanked it as hard as I could.
The door came open.
Inside the cubicle was a young lad of around twelve, holding his hand up to shield his eyes from the light.
Wait.
The realization hit me like a fist to the jaw, hard enough to make me sink to my knees amidst the rubble.
The boy trapped in the cubicle was me. I realized what cubicle this was. The only one with a door was the sixth from the left. The very same one I’d been trapped in.
I knew it couldn’t be happening. It was impossible, the laws of science and physics said so, yet here I was in the midst of it.
Somehow, I’d rescued myself.
Not only that, but I’d rescued myself from myself.
I was the Screaming Man.
Unable to comprehend how it was happening, I sank to the ground, put my hands to my head and howled as my own tiny footsteps hurtled past me.
As I said, when you grow up you don’t have all the answers. Sometimes, you just have more questions.