George the Janitor

By Christopher C. Page

Ever since GA Ratcliff High School closed in the eighties amidst the George Ross Scandal, local residents have been drawn back to the place, but not everyone who visits gets to leave. Urban explorers continue to roam its halls, some for sport while others seek the truth. Amateur ghost-hunters and television personalities go in looking for answers, but what they find lurking within is deadlier than any of them could have imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483573557

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Roxanne

Part 1: Harold

One

Harold didn’t believe in ghosts. As far as he was concerned, when you died that was it. The lights went out and they put you in the ground until there was nothing left but dried out bones that would snap like breadsticks if anyone touched them. There was no heaven. The idea of going on in another form for all of eternity seemed ludicrous. Even if there was such a thing, the place would be filled with every person that ever lived and died since the beginning of time, provided they believed in God, and that was one hell of a lot of people. And who was to say which God was the right one? Were there separate heavens for each religion or did they all go to the same one with their respective Gods working together like a corporation? Either way, it would be a million, gazillion times worse than China or any of those other places where people kept breeding like fruit flies despite the fact they were all starving to death. The idea that such a place existed, and you’d spend eternity there standing shoulder to shoulder with millions upon millions of other schlubs like you, was laughable. Even if it was possible, why would anyone want to go there?

Harold had no use for family and he had no children, no siblings, aunts, uncles or grandparents to speak of. His own parents had died when he was only ten and if there was a Heaven, neither of them would have made the cut. He’d grown up in various foster homes until the age of sixteen when he dropped out of high school and got a job washing dishes at the local pizzeria. The day he dropped out, the guidance counselor had promised him that he was making a mistake (a big mistake actually), and that without an education he’d never amount to anything.

Forty years later, Harold was beginning to suspect that she was right.

Just shy of his sixtieth birthday, Harold still hadn’t accomplished a thing with his life. He’d worked so many different jobs he could hardly remember them all, many lasting no more than a few months. He’d mopped floors and scrubbed toilets by the thousands, cut lawns, swung hammers, pushed brooms, tended bar, emptied bedpans and dug ditches. The closest he’d ever come to an actual career had been when he got his AZ license to drive tractor-trailers. That hadn’t lasted long. About a week into the job, he was on a long haul from Toronto to Vancouver when he fell asleep at the wheel.

The minivan he’d hit head-on was no match for Harold’s rig; it had practically gone right through it costing two adults and one bouncing baby boy their lives. They’d charged him with involuntary manslaughter, ending his career as a commercial truck driver, in fact, he’d never drive any sort of motor vehicle in Canada ever again. That suited Harold just fine. He just barely avoided going to jail because whenever someone driving a commercial vehicle of any kind is involved in an accident, they check the driver’s blood and make them blow into a breathalyzer. That was a problem for Harold because Harold liked to drink. Lucky for him, after the accident, he’d been delivered to the hospital unconscious and the doctors hadn’t gotten around to drawing a blood sample until several hours later. By then the alcohol had dissipated in his system and even then he’d just barely squeaked by with a 0.06. Had someone administered a breathalyzer test right after the accident, Harold would have done time, maybe a good deal of it.

The night it happened, he had just pulled off the highway and picked up a six pack of tall boys and a bottle of Jim Beam. His plan had been to get back on the highway and peg the throttle for another hundred miles or so, after which he’d pull over onto the shoulder, put out the cones, and get his load on. But plans can change. After travelling a few kilometers, he thought ‘What’s the harm in cracking a beer?’

Just one, to take the edge off.

Thirty kilometers later, he cracked another.

Then another

By the time he reached the eighty-kilometer mark he was flying pretty high and feeling pretty good about his place in the world. In fact, he was feeling so good that he moved his seat forward as far as the track would allow, grasped the bottom of the wheel through his legs and laid his head back against the headrest with the cruise control set at 110 kph. It was 3 am so the highway he was travelling on was practically deserted and as he cranked up the FM radio and enjoyed the buzz he had going, he knew his next exit was coming up in about another fifteen minutes or so. All he had to do was relax and enjoy the ride.

A song on the radio caught his attention; it was a simple acoustic set taken from a live performance, made evident by the eruption of cheers from the crowd at the end. Years later, he could still hear the tune whenever he closed his eyes and remember the lyrics that had distracted him that night. The DJ had said the song, Lake of Fire, was originally from a group called the Meat Puppets. But the version he was hearing was from that Cobain guy and was recorded not long before he blew his brains out. The chorus in particular seemed particularly significant to him though he could not say why.

Harold didn’t remember much about the accident. He remembered driving along, hearing the song, reaching for a beer … waking up in the hospital, with nothing in between. Had he not fallen asleep when he did, in all likelihood, the accident still would have happened, maybe just a little further down the highway with a different family behind the wheel, their eyes wide with terror as Harold’s rig crossed the center line and turned them into hamburger. Given the path his life had taken, it was inevitable. If it hadn’t happened on that night, it would have been the next night, or the night after that.

And more likely than not, his blood/alcohol level would have been way over the limit and shown on his tox screen even if they had waited a day to test him. If that had happened the charges would have been upgraded to three counts of second-degree murder, and that was no joke. Sickos like Paul Bernardo and Russell Williams were in prison for life for less. Harold had only lost his driving privileges meanwhile that family was still dead, and there was nothing anyone could do about that.

With no other real career options available to him, Harold had gone into security. Thirteen years later he was still making less than a teenager flipping burgers at McDonald’s, but that was okay. The gig allowed him to work at night and Harold liked that. He’d often go through entire shifts without having to deal with a single person.

He liked living like a vampire, waking up in his little fifteen-foot aluminum trailer around the time that most other people were getting ready for bed and returning home when those same people were getting ready for work the next day. He was normally assigned to office buildings in the area on the midnight-to-eight shift. The people who worked in those buildings had normally gone home long before his arrival and didn’t return until an hour after he’d left. All he had to do was make sure the doors on the ground floor were locked and take the occasional walk around to make sure offices weren’t being flooded by burst water pipes or being set ablaze by a coffee maker or hot plate that had been carelessly left on. It was easy work, the hardest part being finding new ways to amuse himself for eight hours every night.

Drinking and napping were his usual choices.

There were no buses running at those hours so he’d bought himself a mountain bike with aluminum fenders and a carrier on the back. For the most part, his employers sent him to places within biking distance of the storage yard where he lived, so it came as kind of a surprise when they told him he was going out to the old high-school.

G.A Ratcliff, or the GA, was named after the town’s founder and it wasn’t anywhere near the storage yard. It was way the hell out on highway 40, ten miles away. They knew he didn’t have a car and just how long it would take for him to get there and back. Worse yet, they also knew it wasn’t a flat ride, it was out in the sticks toward the borders of Ratcliff where the highway ran through the country in a series of steep peaks and valleys. 

They didn’t give a shit about Harold. The small outfit he was working for had only been in existence for a few years and they could care less about what Harold wanted. They didn’t care that he’d been doing security four times longer then they had been around, didn’t care that he thought he deserved better pay, benefits or respect. He’d either take the shifts he was offered, or he could sit in his trailer and screw himself.

The reason Harold was being sent to the long abandoned high school was ridiculous nearly to the point of lunacy. Two other guards had quit without notice within days of being assigned there and word had gotten around about the place to the point where people were refusing shifts by reputation alone. Ghosts. Of all the dumb excuses he’d come up with for refusing a shift, that was a new one on Harold. And all of the sudden it was Harold we need you, and Harold we need a real pro like you out there, and Harold, Harold, Harold. As far as he was concerned, the other guards were just a bunch of stuck up immigrants who saw every new assignment as an insult rather than an opportunity to work, almost like they thought the rest of the guards were all working in better conditions and the company was saving the really shitty assignments for them because the owners of the company were white, and they weren’t. 

Harold couldn’t care less. This place … that place … as long as his paycheck arrived on time he could give a flying fuck. If the ‘brown guys’ were willing to refuse work because they heard a noise or a voice coming from inside an abandoned high school (in Harold’s opinion) they had no business working security in the first place. The place had been closed up for so long that generations of kids would have already been through every nook and cranny to the point where it was no longer of any interest. Initially, there had probably been quite a few curious teens and alcohol-fueled adults looking to gain entry, some looking to re-live their adolescence, some wanting only to trash the place, even burn it. A quarter of a century later, what could there possibly be left to see? Now, it was nothing more than an old building that had no value and served no purpose (kind of like Harold).

The massive brick structure had been erected in 1936, back when the town’s founder had thought that Ratcliff was going to expand to three times what it eventually had. Big enough to accommodate two thousand students, attendance at the GA never broke half of that. In it’s time it had been a post-war symbol of growth and prosperity. Perched half kilometer back from the highway, the GA had been impressive to behold. The most striking feature was the ten thousand tile mural which dominated the view. Painted by a renowned German artist (who supposedly painted each tile one at a time on the roof before rappelling down the face of the school) the final product stood nearly five stories high and was a hair short of two hundred feet wide. Two hands (the size of swimming pools) reached out invitingly, as if pooling water from a stream, surrounded by perhaps a dozen other examples of higher education. A student in cap and gown standing at a podium, a young man preparing to throw a javelin, a girl leaping over hurdles on the GA’s own three-hundred meter track … a girl with almost no boobs leaping from the high-tower, all painted with eerie precision on small tiles and put together perfectly. 

After forty years of hard rain and harsh winters, there wasn’t any hope of saving the building anymore, so the town’s official strategy was to wait until the place fell down of it’s own accord. But the big mural? Oh, of course we have to save the stupid fucking mural! That was painted by some Kraut who died fifty years ago (probably of shame) and of course it’s worth saving! As for the building itself, who gives a shit? And who really did? Thanks to some shortsighted decisions made by the town planners, the school had been built way off in the sticks beside a cornfield, less than a hundred yards from the western town boundary line.

Kids had been going there for years. But not Harold, he’d gone out of his way to avoid the place for most of his life. Everybody in town knew about the place, and passed it down among the generations like an heirloom or a good fishing spot. In a town of less than twenty thousand, there wasn’t much else for the kids to do but get high and explore so for years people turned a blind eye.

Then the murders changed all that.

In the span of a month, five people had been attacked (four of them died) and the town had been put into state of Marshall Law. In the end, seven people had to die before it was over and the last two had died right there on the roof of the GA. As soon as that happened, public perception about the old school changed drastically and people wanted it gone.

Thank God for serial killers.

Now Harold would have a nice easy gig without having to worry about being caught sleeping on the video cameras installed by the ball-busting pencil pushers he normally had to endure. Although the ride out there wasn’t likely to be pleasant (the ride home even less so), he was fairly confident that he would be able to sit in the trailer and drink all night, maybe take a five hour nap as he often did, and nobody would be the wiser. 

- - -

The autumn nights were getting colder and colder and Harold could see his breath in the air as he huffed his way up the last hill and turned his bike into the long driveway leading up to the school. Having lived in Ratcliff all of his life, he knew it was there although he could not see it. It had been four decades since he’d set foot on the property and he had hoped to never come back, though he couldn’t say why. The once beautifully manicured playing field and track were now overgrown with tall grass and weeds. The asphalt was also cracked and heaved up in places causing Harold’s spine to get a good jolt every time he went over an unexpected hump or drop not visible in the darkness. The school loomed at him out of the night, a massive black structure barely visible by the light of the stars. A small construction trailer had been set in the parking lot behind hundreds of feet of six-foot high temporary fencing, as if that would keep people out.

As Harold climbed off of the bike, he nearly fell over. His knees throbbed and his lower back felt a couple of inches closer to his ass then they had been an hour before he set out. Following the light of the electric lantern spilling through the small window set in the door of the construction trailer, Harold pushed his bike through a gap in the fence and climbed the steps. Inside he found Raj (an Indian man a few years older than he was), sitting at a card table, finishing off his report from the afternoon’s shift. They’d met several times before on various sites as both of them got shuffled around depending on where they were needed most. Neither of them gave a shit about the job, they’d both rather be somewhere else. 

How’s it going, Raj? Harold said amiably, setting his bag down carefully as not to give away its contents.

Raj chuckled, continuing to print in a microscopic script that was nearly neat enough to be machine-made, he said, This place is fucking bullshit.

Harold smiled and filled a foam cup with coffee from a pot that had likely been put on sometime during the morning shift. You’re telling me. Twice on the ride over I saw my life flash in front of me.

Raj waved his hand at him without looking up from his report. Friendly as they were, he couldn’t care less about Harold’s troubles as he had problems of his own. First and foremost were the owners of the Security Company and their failure to realize Raj’s obvious and immense talent. He’d been an engineer (so he claimed) back in Pakistan or wherever the hell he came from, and when he moved to Ontario a few years before, he thought he’d just walk right into a six-figure salary, a four bedroom house and all the cable television he could shake a stick at. Things hadn’t worked out exactly how he planned and his wife took the kids back to … wherever, leaving Raj to make his own way, alone. So far, he hadn’t fared any better than Harold had, but then he’d only been here for a few years.

I told those fuckers, Raj informed him, speaking at a volume only slightly quieter than a passenger jet on take-off, "for ten-fifty an hour, no benefits, no nothing, not to send me places like this. This place is bullshit, I’m telling you. Fucking bullshit."

What have they got us doing? Harold asked, only half listening to Raj’s complaints.

"You kidding? They want us to walk around the outside of this place twice an hour! I told them, for ten-fifty, no benefit,