The students always joked about the stairway to nowhere Obviously the stairs in Hullinghause had a somewhere to go, but the padlocked cubby door unlocked the imagination and created a multitude of possibilities. The century-old staircase once carried doctors and nurses up and down its flights, as well as ailing patients that may not make it through the night. The students speculated that those patients are the reason for slamming doors, footsteps above the second floor, and the mysterious wailing that skeptics call wind through a broken wall in the space behind the stairway to nowhere. Even the professors, even those that had been there as long as Dr. Whitlock, wondered about the stairway to nowhere, and the somewhere that it leads.
Jessie Belle James was not one of those students. She heard the fear in her classmates’ voices when the whispering would start, or a door would slam, in the former-morgue-turned-classroom in the back right corner of the basement. Bella knew there was evil in the walls, and she let her classmates believe it was the intangible kind.
What her classmates believed to be cold pockets where the ghosts roamed were just drafts let in by the building’s disrepair. Ivy crept in through the cracks between the windows and the walls, growing up the bookcases in professors’ offices, like Dr. Whitlock’s. Bella had grown accustomed to tracing the vines across the walls as she counted backwards, hoping that by the time she was done, her internship meeting would be over. Dr. Whitlock’s position as Department Chair and the administration internship in a college English department would catch anyone’s eye, especially those that fit the requirements needed for the job. One’s resume would be complete, along with receiving a spectacular letter of recommendation. Bella, being one of the top students in her major, fit Dr. Whitlock’s specifications perfectly.
The drafts in the building always got colder after winter break. It had been a longer one this year—a blizzard, the most intense storm since Hullinghause was built, had delayed the students’ return to school. Bella, though eager to be back on campus with her friends and professors, dreaded the start of her internship again.
She had heard the rumors about her, of course. The ones about an illicit affair with a professor. But those weren’t true. She should know. She knew the truth about what happens in his office during those meetings. Only she and the ivy she traced up the bookcase as she pretended to be somewhere else.
The stairs creaked under Bella’s footsteps as she approached the second floor. The stairway to nowhere greeted her like an old friend as she observed the scratches on the door’s padlock and inhaled the foul odor that seemed to ooze from beneath the cracks in the drywall. The custodian greeted Bella when she reached the landing, and she inquired about the smell.
“Seems as though an animal got into the attic space and couldn’t get out,” he said, examining a piece of fabric that was stuck to the unsanded door frame. “How’d you figure this got here?”
Bella startled at the sudden question, “I’m not sure. Maybe it was one of the ghosts.”
The custodian laughed, giving her a fist bump, and went on his way to call the exterminator, like he said. Bella recoiled at the fabric still attached to the door and pinched her nose, mustering the courage to take the material and shove it in her pocket. “Some animal is right,” she muttered, going back down the stairs to wait outside Dr. Whitlock’s office.
Sitting on the couch across from his office, Bella examined the darkened window and the cracks running up the glass. Too many slams had all but shattered the frosted window, cracking the fragile barrier between the outside world and the in. One more slam should do the trick; it would finally destroy the facade Dr. Whitlock had projected to the school.
A faint drip-drip-drip awoke her from her trance. The custodian, who had made his way back up to the landing, pointed up as she peered around for the source. Above her, the overhead light was darkening with some sort of liquid, a watery substance, but almost thicker. It pooled along the plastic, slowly reaching its tendrils across the space, almost touching the ivy that had grown into the
hallway from Dr. Whitlock’s office. The hallway darkened as the volume increased, casting a menacing shadow across Bella’s face.
“The offices have been experiencing leaks all break,” he explained, grabbing a trash can from the closet before placing it in front of her. “The pipes were already about to burst from weathering and age, but that damn animal that got in must have punctured it somehow.”
The ercolating liquid grew darker, and the drip-drip-drip became heavier and heavier. It sounded like the thud their bodies made against the bookcase, as the ivy watched. Over and over again. Too weak to stop it for herself. Too weak to say no. Over and over again. Drip-drip-thunk-drip. Over and over again.
Never again, she thought, looking up at the light as the custodian continued speaking, a cluster of gibberish that existed only to the speaker.
He stepped away from the bucket and couch as the snapping started. Bella pulled her legs up onto the couch, a sitting fetal position, and position of protection. The custodian stared up at the ceiling tiles with wonder, as the cracks became wider and wider. A gust of wind blew through, slamming Dr. Whitlock’s door a final time, shattering the glass at the same time the ceiling caved in.
The custodian looked down in horror before looking at Bella, who used a tissue to calmly wipe some flesh from her hand.
“Some animal is right.”