29 Mar Locker 119

Part I

The lower levels of Ashford High had been sealed off years ago, after a pipe burst during a particularly harsh winter and flooded the basement with rancid water. Mold took root, the ceilings sagged, and several classrooms on the lowest floor were condemned. Since then, the district made only halfhearted efforts to renovate. New paint and fluorescent bulbs were slapped onto the upper levels while the old stairwells leading to the basement were cordoned off with caution tape and brittle metal signs warning students to keep out. Most did. But like any school with a locked door and a few decades of history, Ashford gave rise to its own urban legend—one whispered through locker cracks, scrawled on bathroom stalls, and occasionally shared on ghost story subreddits with just enough local detail to make it believable.

They called it Locker 119.

Riley Montgomery had heard the story a dozen different ways. In some versions, the kid inside was a freshman, pledging to join a now-defunct wrestling team, and had been forced into the locker as part of some twisted initiation rite. In others, he was a loner with no friends, shoved inside by bullies who didn’t realize the door had rusted shut until it was too late. But the core of the tale never changed. He’d screamed for help, and hours passed. When they finally pried it open, he was gone—not dead, but vanished without a trace. There was no body or blood, just deep gouges on the metal interior, as if something had used its fingernails or teeth to try and claw its way out.

Tyler mentioned it again over lunch on Thursday, the way he always did when he was bored or had a Red Bull on an empty stomach. “We should go see it,” he said, grinning across the table at Riley and the others. “Seriously. It’s still down there. Padlocked and everything.”

“No, it’s not,” Jules muttered, eyes flicking up from her phone. “The whole basement’s sealed. That area was condemned, like, ten years ago.”

“That’s what they want you to think,” Tyler said. “But my cousin knew a guy who worked maintenance back in the day. He says the old locker’s still there, covered in warning labels. The school welded it shut.”

Casey scoffed, rolled her eyes, and tossed a grape at him. “You sound like a Reddit thread. ‘My cousin knew a guy.’ Come on, Tyler. Give us a break.”

Riley didn’t say anything. He just leaned back and let the argument bounce around the table. Tyler loved this kind of thing. His favorite pastime was finding a creepy story, making it personal, and daring everyone else to disprove it. Two months ago, it was the story about the dead girl in the mirror who only appeared if you said her name at exactly 2:03 a.m. He’d stayed up all night in the bathroom with a mirror and a GoPro. The video showed nothing, but he swore the footage had been corrupted and that something scratched him while he slept. Riley hadn’t believed a word of it. Still, part of him appreciated the enthusiasm, if for no other reason than that it spiced up an otherwise uneventful senior year.

Jules pushed her tray away. “If it’s welded shut, there’s nothing to see.”

“That’s the whole point,” Tyler said. “It’s not welded shut. Not anymore. They tried sealing it, but it always reopens. Every time. People hear noises from it when they walk past the basement stairwell. There’s, like… breathing. Or crying. And if you scream while you’re inside—”

“Let me guess,” Casey interrupted. “It eats you.”

Tyler leaned forward, eyes wide. “Exactly!”

“That’s so dumb.”

“It’s a legend trip!” he said. “You go to the haunted spot, bring a flashlight, and see what’s real. Urban explorer stuff. One of us goes in. We keep the door shut for like sixty seconds. We film it and debunk the whole thing. That’s it.”

Jules was already shaking her head. “I’m not getting detention for your stupid YouTube clout.”

“No one’s getting caught,” Tyler said. “We wait ‘til Friday night. Riley’s got the master key from his uncle.”

Riley sat up a little straighter. “I said I saw the master key, Tyler. I didn’t say I was taking it.”

“But you could,” Tyler said, grinning. “Right?”

Riley hesitated. The keyring had been hanging on a wall hook in his uncle’s garage for months, ever since he’d retired from the district’s maintenance crew. The tags were worn, but some of them still listed building codes. He knew at least three of them opened doors at Ashford, and that one was labeled “BL-STAIR,” which had to mean basement-level stairwell.

“I don’t know, man,” Riley said. “If we get caught down there, we won’t just get detention. They’ll suspend us.”

“Only if we tell someone,” Tyler said. “But we won’t. It’s just us. Friday night. In and out.”

Jules folded her arms. “I’m still not going inside that thing. No way.”

Tyler raised his hands. “Fine. We’ll draw straws or flip a coin. Whatever. But come on—it’s senior year! This is our last shot to do something that people will actually remember!”

Riley looked around the table. Casey was pretending to be annoyed, but wasn’t leaving. Jules was anxious but intrigued, and Riley could already tell she’d cave by tomorrow. And as for Tyler, there wasn’t a force on Earth short of the apocalypse that would stop him once he latched onto something like this.

“What time?” Riley asked, sighing in resignation.

Tyler’s grin widened. “Meet behind the gym. 11:30. Don’t be late.”

* * * * * *

Friday came faster than Riley expected. The school day dragged by in slow, syrupy time, each class a countdown to whatever waited beneath the building. By the time he got home, his stomach was already in knots. The key had been easy enough to pocket. His uncle wouldn’t miss it for a night, and Riley planned to return it first thing Saturday morning. Still, holding it in his hand gave him a strange feeling, like he was about to unlock something meant to stay closed.

At 11:26, he met the others behind the gym. The building loomed above them, black and foreboding in the late March gloom. Casey wore a hoodie pulled tight around her face. Jules carried a duffel bag with flashlights and a phone tripod. Tyler, of course, brought nothing but his phone and an oversized grin.

“Ready to make history?” he asked, slapping Riley on the back.

“No,” Riley said. “But let’s go anyway.”

They circled around to the old service entrance. Most of the doors had been rekeyed over the years, but the one near the boiler room still matched the “BL-STAIR” key. It clicked after two tries, and the metal door groaned open with a sound that echoed down into the dark.

A set of narrow stairs descended into the belly of the building. The smell hit them first, one of wet mildew, stale air, and the faint bite of chemical cleaners left to rot in closed spaces. They clicked on their flashlights and moved in.

The basement hallway was worse than Riley imagined. Water stains marred the ceiling tiles, and a tangle of exposed wires hung like vines from broken fixtures. The walls bore remnants of the school’s past, including outdated posters for blood drives and chess tournaments and a faded banner welcoming the Class of 1998. Beneath it all, graffiti was scrawled in frantic, angry strokes. Most of it was nonsense, but one word appeared again and again in black Sharpie:

DON’T.

The locker stood at the far end of the hallway. Even in the flashlight beams, it looked unreal, as though it had not been installed but grown from the wall itself. The metal was warped and blistered with rust, its door bent slightly inward. Across the surface, dozens of stickers and paper signs had been affixed over the years. Most were yellowed with age, their edges curling.

SEALED FOR SAFETY.
DO NOT OPEN.
DANGER – CONDEMNED.

A thick metal padlock hung from the latch, its shackle snapped.

Tyler stepped forward first, scanning the locker with his light. “See? What did I tell you? It’s real.”

Casey shivered. “This doesn’t prove anything.”

Jules stayed back, her arms crossed tightly.

“So,” Tyler said, turning. “Who’s going in?”

No one answered.

Riley’s fingers curled around the key in his pocket. A part of him wanted to speak up, volunteer, and get it over with. But something about the locker made his throat tighten.

Tyler clapped his hands. “Fine. We’ll draw. The short straw goes inside. Sixty seconds. I’ll keep time.”

They drew, and Riley didn’t draw the short straw—Tyler did.

He hesitated, just for a second, then puffed up his chest and stepped toward the locker. He wedged himself into it, adjusting until his back hit the far wall and his knees drew up against his chest. It was a tight fit, but he didn’t seem fazed.

“You better be filming,” Tyler said, smirking. “I want slow-motion reactions when I start screaming. Start counting!”

Casey held up her phone and Jules aimed the flashlight. Riley did the same, though his hands felt less steady than before.

“Sixty seconds,” Casey said. “Starting… now.”

Tyler gave a mock salute, leaned back, and pulled the door closed with a metallic clang.

The latch clicked shut.

Part II

Riley stared at the locker in silence. His phone was still recording, but he’d forgotten all about it.

For a long while, no one said anything.

Then, somewhere deep inside the locker, metal shifted. A soft knock echoed out, followed by Tyler’s voice, muffled, casual, and slightly amused.

“Okay,” he called out, “it’s tight in here! You guys better be counting!”

Casey checked her phone. “Fifty-eight, fifty-seven…”

Another knock came, a little sharper this time.

“Alright,” Tyler said, “that’s hilarious. Which one of you locked it?”

No one answered.

“You guys seriously didn’t lock it?” Tyler asked.

Casey turned to Riley. “Did you touch the latch?”

Riley shook his head, eyes fixed on the door. “Of course not. I didn’t even bring the lock.”

“I’m not kidding!” Tyler cried. “Let me out! Come on, you guys! This isn’t funny!”

Casey stepped forward and gave the handle a quick tug. It didn’t budge.

“It’s stuck!” she said. She tried again, harder this time, to no avail.

Tyler’s tone sharpened. “Okay, joke’s over, you guys! Knock it off! Open the goddamn door!”

“Hold on, we’re trying!” Jules said, stepping in to help. She gripped the latch and pulled with both hands, planting a foot against the locker bank to brace herself.

The handle refused to budge.

Tyler pounded on the inside. “Open it!” he screamed, his voice cracking, rising fast and thinned by panic.

Casey turned, looking back down the hall. “We didn’t do anything! Just hang on!”

Another blow landed from within, harder. Then another. Riley moved to the side of the door and grabbed the edge with both hands. The metal was cold, far colder than it should have been. He tried pulling it open while Jules kicked the front panel near the bottom.

Tyler screamed, not playfully or for show, but from the gut, his voice filled with raw, unfiltered terror.

“Help me!” he shouted frantically. “Hurry! Something is coming!”

And then, from behind Tyler, there came another sound. At first, it was hard to separate. Tyler’s voice was still there, but it was layered with the sound of something wet sliding across metal. It moved behind him, deeper than the locker should allow, dragging its body—its limbs—against the steel.

The locker vibrated.

It was subtle at first, a low-frequency hum, like that of distant machinery, which passed through their feet and up their legs. As they listened, it grew stronger, filling the hallway and setting the air around them into motion.

“Tyler!” Casey shouted, banging her fists against the door. “What’s in there with you? What do you mean? What are you talking about?!”

Tyler’s screams tore through the corridor. He shouted their names and screamed to be let out, shrieking words that made no sense.

And then everything… stopped. The pounding. The screaming. The vibrations.

The hallway went still.

Casey reached for the handle again. This time, effortlessly, it moved. The latch came free with a tired metallic snap, and the locker door swung open.

Riley stepped back instinctively.

It was empty.

Locker 119 showed no sign of damage. There no blood. There were no dents.

And there was no trace of Tyler.

The inside looked just as it had minutes before—narrow and dark, lined with scuffed steel and preexisting scratches.

Casey leaned in. “Tyler?”

There was no answer.

Jules turned slowly to look back the way they’d come. The corridor beyond the flashlight beams remained dark and unmoving.

“He didn’t come out,” she said. “There’s no way. He never passed us. He couldn’t have.”

Casey moved the light across the inside of the locker. “There’s nowhere for him to go. It’s a locker. It’s a goddamn locker!”

Riley felt himself drifting forward. His light followed hers, sweeping across the narrow walls. Something about the space felt distorted. The interior looked wrong. The shadows didn’t fall evenly, and the back of the locker seemed deeper than it should have been. He tried to follow the contours of the metal, but the further in he looked, the more the space seemed to stretch, until at last it no longer reflected the light.

He stepped away, shaking.

“We have to go,” Jules said.

Riley nodded and shut the door. The click echoed down the hall with finality.

Jules led the way out, moving quickly but carefully, flashlight never wavering. Casey followed close behind. Riley lingered only once, halfway up, glancing back over his shoulder into the gloom below. The air smelled faintly like burnt plastic, and the stairwell was empty.

“Tyler,” he said under his breath, before turning back and making his exit. “Where are you?”

Part III

The four of them didn’t stop moving until they were well past the side lot, where the edge of the school grounds blurred into the tree line. There, under the thin sodium-yellow glow of a streetlamp, they finally paused, their breath clouding in the cool night air.

Riley didn’t remember unlocking the exterior door, scrambling up the final steps, or pushing the handle with shaking hands. His flashlight was still in his grip, beam flickering weakly across a patch of dead grass.

Jules, who had practically sprinted ahead of everyone, stood still, facing away from the group.

Casey was the first to break the silence. “We don’t talk about this,” he said. “To anyone.”

Riley looked at her. “He’s gone, Casey.”

“You think I don’t know that?!” she snapped. “We’ll say he left, that he ran away. We don’t tell anyone we were there! That place wasn’t supposed to be open. Do any of you want to explain to the school how we got in? What we were doing?”

“What we were doing?” Jules barked, turning to Casey. “You make it sound like we shoved him in there!”

“I’m just saying,” Casey said, quieter now, “that we didn’t do anything! Not really. We didn’t force him!”

“He volunteered,” Riley said, though the words felt hollow once they’d left his mouth.

“Exactly!” Casey replied. “We didn’t even touch the lock! It just… stuck.”

No one argued with that.

Eventually, Jules nodded. “We go home. We don’t say anything. We wait.”

They all agreed. Not because it felt right, but because there was no clear alternative.

* * * * * *

Riley lay in bed until dawn, not sleeping so much as enduring the night. His window overlooked the side yard, where the trees had long since grown too close to the house. Each creak of the siding, each gust of wind brushing against the glass, made him tense. He kept replaying the moment the locker opened—the perfect emptiness, the way it seemed almost smug in how ordinary it looked.

By morning, he hadn’t received a single message from Tyler. Against all hope, he had hoped his friend had somehow made his way back home, that this was all some sort of elaborate ruse, another of his pranks. But when he checked, there was nothing on Discord, and he had no unread texts, and no new Snapchat messages.

He waited until afternoon before reaching out to Tyler himself.

You good?
Just checking in.
Say something, man.

Every last message went unanswered.

He told his parents that Tyler had blown him off for a late movie. They bought it, and didn’t press him. He spent the rest of the day on edge, checking his phone every few minutes. Occasionally, he thought he heard footsteps on the front porch or the back steps, but each time, when he investigated, the yard was empty.

At school on Monday, Tyler was marked absent. By Tuesday, people were talking.

“I heard he got suspended.”

“No, he totally ran away. He hated his stepdad.”

“He got arrested. His cousin said he punched a teacher.”

Each theory seemed plausible enough on its own.

As for the school, they made no announcements. Teachers said nothing. Attendance staff only noted his name on the list and moved on. Whatever had happened, the institution itself seemed eager to look the other way. And if Tyler’s parents reported him missing or did anything about his disappearance, it certainly didn’t show. Riley found it unsettling how quickly Tyler had been wiped from existence.

Jules caught up with him during lunch and slid into the seat across from him. Her tray sat untouched, and her eyes were tired.

“Still nothing?” she asked.

Riley shook his head.

“He’s not answering me either,” she continued.

Casey joined them a few minutes later, pretending not to notice the silence. “I heard someone saw him in town yesterday,” she said, absentmindedly peeling the label off a water bottle. “Like, near the gas station.”

Riley looked up. “Who said that?”

“Some freshman,” they replied. “They said he looked… weird.”

Jules rolled her eyes. “Great. Creepypasta nonsense already.”

“He could’ve made it back, you know,” Casey said.

“Then why wouldn’t he text us?”

No one had an answer for that.

* * * * * *

Two nights later, the noises started.

Riley had stayed late working in the computer lab. It was nearly seven when he finally stepped into the second-floor hallway and began walking toward the main stairs. The school was mostly empty at that hour, with just a few maintenance carts left out and a custodian’s radio playing somewhere in the gym.

As he passed the north wing lockers, he discerned a faint, hollow thud—the sound of metal on metal, not far ahead. He stopped and listened. Again, he heard it.

He moved cautiously, trying to pinpoint the source. The hallway was lit only by emergency fluorescents, casting a dim blue haze along the walls. The sound repeated, louder this time—a sharp bang, followed by three rapid knocks.

Riley stepped forward again—and it stopped. He turned his light toward the locker bank, but there was nothing there. The hallway, however, felt colder than it had earlier. He left quickly after that, telling himself it had been the building settling, one of the custodians, or something falling in a supply closet.

Anything but the truth.

When he returned the next day, one of the lockers across from where he’d been standing had been scratched. The damage was unmistakable. Four thin lines, roughly vertical—like jagged nails dragged slowly downward—had been carved deliberately into the metal.

Even then, Riley preferred to ignore what was happening—but not for long.

By Thursday, all three of them were showing signs. Jules had developed a habit of glancing over her shoulder every few seconds in class, as though expecting someone to be standing directly behind her. Casey jumped when the intercom buzzed, and she flinched whenever someone shut a locker too hard. Riley had started sitting with his back to the wall at lunch.

They avoided talking about it during the day, but every night, their group chat filled with fragmented reports. A door opened by itself. Footsteps had been heard in an empty stairwell. Lights flickered at just the right moment to make them feel watched.

Then, Friday morning, Jules sent a message that stopped Riley cold:

I heard him. In my locker.

He called her immediately.

“What?” he asked. “What do you mean, you heard him?”

Jules sounded rattled. It was clear she hadn’t slept. “I opened my locker this morning, and something was wrong. It felt… off. There was an echo, but I hadn’t said anything. I know that sounds crazy.”

“An echo?” Riley asked.

“I leaned in,” she replied. “I don’t know why. I just felt like something was in there. And then I heard Tyler whispering.”

Riley stayed silent.

“He said my name,” Jules continued.

“You’re sure?” Riley asked.

“I’d know his voice anywhere, Riley.”

“Was anyone near you?”

“No. This was before first bell. The hall was empty.”

Riley didn’t doubt her. He hated that he didn’t.

That night, Casey called too. She said she’d seen something near her back porch, a figure standing motionless beneath the trees. But by the time she got her dad, it was gone.

Riley didn’t sleep that night. None of them did.

By the following week, everyone was paranoid. Casey started carrying pepper spray in her jacket. Jules switched lockers and began arriving late and leaving early. Riley stopped using the upstairs bathrooms, preferring to walk the extra distance just to avoid the hallway where he’d heard the knocks.

None of it helped. No matter where they went, each of them felt the sensation of being watched. Behind locker doors. Through keyholes. Reflected faintly in dark screens and mirrors.

Tyler wasn’t just gone, Riley feared. He was somewhere else. Though he tried over and over to convince himself otherwise, he knew—Tyler wasn’t alone.

And whether they wanted to admit it or not, the three of them worried that whatever had taken Tyler…

It would come for them, too.

Part IV

Casey was the next to vanish.

It happened on a Wednesday, just before sixth period. She left her geometry class and told someone she was heading to the nurse. She never arrived. Her backpack was found in the main stairwell, zipped and intact, slouched awkwardly against the wall like she had set it down mid-step. Her phone was in her jacket pocket, still turned on, still logged into their group chat.

No cameras had caught her leaving the building. No witnesses saw her exit through any door. One moment she was among classmates, walking a hallway crowded with voices and movement, and the next she was gone.

The administration assumed she’d followed in Tyler’s footsteps, left school, and skipped town. Maybe, they figured, it was some sort of pact between two troubled kids. That explanation took hold fast. Teachers mentioned counseling resources. The principal made a statement over the intercom that afternoon about safety and compassion. Posters went up in the lobby. Riley passed one on his way to third period the next morning and had to look away.

Jules didn’t come in at all.

Riley found her just off campus, behind the strip of dead trees near the faculty lot. She was sitting cross-legged in the grass, staring at the fallen leaves.

“She’s not coming back,” Jules said, before Riley could speak.

He sat beside them, legs stiff. “No.”

“I think it was waiting,” Jules added.

“For what?”

“For us to break,” she said. “To see who’d crack first.”

“Well,” Riley said, looking at the dirt, “it doesn’t have to wait anymore.”

They stopped pretending after that.

That night, they met at Riley’s house and combed through everything they could find. Old posts on local message boards. Archived pages from paranormal sites. Urban legend aggregators with grainy images of the school in the background.

Most of the stories were inconsistent, offering contradictory timelines, different names, or locations that didn’t quite match. Even then, a pattern emerged. Other students had gone missing from Ashford before, and not just recently. Over the years, a handful of disappearances had been recorded quietly, each one resolved unofficially with excuses or conjecture—the students had run away, been expelled, or transferred. There were no official alerts, no press releases.

Besides the alarming lack of attention or public outcry, all of the incidents had one thing in common.

They were all tied to the same place:

The basement level of the school.

Locker 119.

The oldest mention they found was buried in a post from 2003, long before anyone had labeled the story an “urban legend.” The author claimed their brother had attended Ashford in the late 1980s. He’d been hazed by upperclassmen and locked in a basement locker for hours. They said his screams were heard all night, but when a janitor finally opened the door the next morning, the locker was empty.

What stood out wasn’t the story itself, but what came after. The author mentioned returning to the school years later. They had found a maintenance worker cleaning graffiti from the hallway near the gym. When asked about the locker, the worker turned pale and told them not to speak of it again. He told them he’d once heard a voice down there at night—the voice of a boy calling for help, repeating the same phrase over and over: “Let me out. Please. Let me out.”

Riley printed the post, Jules highlighted the dates, and they kept reading.

They found a local news story from 1996 about a student pulled from school grounds in a “dissociative state.” The piece was brief and vague, but the boy had been discovered just outside a set of rusted double doors near the boiler room entrance. He was described as “unresponsive and murmuring incoherently.” According to a follow-up from a community blog years later, that boy never returned to school. He spent the rest of his adolescence in a long-term care facility.

They both knew what the doors led to.

Jules clicked off the screen and pushed her chair back. “Whatever’s in there, it doesn’t end at the locker doors.”

Riley looked at her.

“It’s not the locker,” Jules continued. “Not really. It’s what’s in it. Or what comes out of it. It follows. Once someone hears it, once it’s been fed, it—”

“It remembers.”

Jules nodded.

They were quiet for a long time after that.

Jules was the one who finally broke the silence. “We can’t let it keep doing this,” she said.

Riley stared at the printout in his lap. “What do you expect us to do?”

“I don’t know,” Jules said, “but we have to go back.”

“Oh, hell no!” Riley protested. “We’re not going anywhere near that thing again!”

“What about Tyler? We can’t let his… let him…” Jules said, looking at him, stumbling over her choice of words. “If we don’t put an end to this, then who will?”

Riley didn’t answer. He opened his mouth to say something, but allowed the words to die on his lips.

Jules stood a moment longer, then gathered the papers and flashlight and left without waiting for him.

* * * * * *

When Jules stepped through the threshold of the basement that night, alone, the beam of her flashlight dimmed noticeably.

The smell hit her halfway down the corridor, an overwhelming odor of sour ozone, decayed insulation, and scorched electronics. In addition, the basement hallway felt colder this time, the rust had darkened, and the ceiling tiles, already swollen with moisture, sagged even lower than she remembered.

And there, standing at the end of the corridor, was Locker 119.

It hadn’t moved an inch, and yet, Jules couldn’t shake the feeling that it was lying in wait.

She approached slowly, her footsteps muffled by the damp, aging linoleum—and found the door ajar. The gap was narrow, less than an inch, but noticeable. Jules stepped closer to inspect it, her flashlight shaking, certain it hadn’t been open before.  No sound or movement came from inside—just the faint suggestion of depth beyond the crack in the door.

Jules hesitated, then gripped the edge and pulled it open fully.

Darkness greeted her. It curved inward, pulled at the edges of the light, absorbed instead of reflected. The interior of the locker should have ended in steel a few feet in. But what stretched before Jules looked vast and impossible—a chasm lined with corroded panels and exposed wire, replete with ribs of hollow metal bending inward like the throat of a machine.

Hesitantly, Jules stepped forward. She didn’t remember deciding to. Didn’t remember lifting a foot or shifting their weight. But the blackness reached for her just as she leaned in—and the light died.

She fell forward, not onto tile or into a locker as expected, but into space.

The walls flexed around her as she fell, the air burning with static. The sound of grinding gears roared from all sides. And beneath it all, she heard a cacophony of whispers, overlapping voices drawn from her memories and twisted into new shapes. Tyler’s voice called her name. So did Casey’s. So did her own.

Then Jules screamed, just once—and she vanished, dragged into the shadows.

Part V

Riley stopped going to school the day Jules disappeared.

There was no point anymore. His parents thought he was grieving, which was close enough to the truth that he didn’t bother correcting them. The school didn’t call. No one came by. Ashford had always been good at letting its stories go quiet after the initial excitement passed. No one asked where Jules had gone, just like no one asked where Tyler or Casey had gone. They were already fading into obscurity. Again, he was struck by the absurdity of it all. Even his friends’ parents moved on with alarming rapidity, as if it had been some acquaintance, rather than their children, that had gone missing.

They could forget, perhaps, for some reason beyond his understanding—but Riley couldn’t. He kept seeing Jules at the edge of mirrors, in the reflection of bus windows that passed the house without stopping. He heard Tyler’s voice in the dead hours of the night—not calling to him, but conversing with something, as if mid-dialogue.

Riley did his best to stay strong, but over time, the gravity of what had happened—not to mention the fear that he was next—weighed him down, pulling harder each day.

He lasted until Sunday.

That day, he went to the garage and packed a crowbar, his grandfather’s hammer, and a portable camping lantern into his backpack. Then he tucked a small crucifix into his shirt pocket for good measure, not because he was particularly religious, but because it felt like the kind of thing you brought when you were out of options.

That evening, at midnight, he stood again at the rusted service door of Ashford High.

* * * * * *

The school welcomed him in silence. The interior lights were off, and the hallways carried the faint smell of wax and dust. His footsteps echoed faintly across the linoleum as he made his way through the staff wing, then down the back stairwell to the basement.

The door opened with a low creak, just as it had before. Below, the air wrapped around him, damp, uninviting, and far colder than he remembered. He clicked on the lantern and held it ahead, letting the white light push back the gloom.

The basement had changed.

The hallway still sloped downward, and though it still bore the familiar scars of age—crumbling tile, flaking paint, and warped doorframes—something about the angles felt different. The walls seemed slightly farther apart. The ceiling arched overhead, higher than it should have been. Even the graffiti had shifted. The warnings scrawled in black marker had multiplied, curling up from the walls like veins.

And, ever-present, at the far end of the corridor, was Locker 119.

It was already open.

Riley stopped and swallowed hard. The door hung ajar, no more than a hand’s width, and swayed gently in the still air. He hadn’t touched it. To his knowledge, no one had.

He approached slowly. With each step, the hallway narrowed—or maybe the locker widened, it was difficult to tell. Its door seemed taller, stretching toward the ceiling. The stickers and warning signs were nearly gone, stripped away as though peeled from the surface by unseen fingers.

Riley reached the threshold and looked inside. He was met with darkness, just as before.

Mustering all the courage he could, he took another step forward. The moment he crossed the plane of the door, the lantern’s light flickered and died, and a voice echoed from within.

“Riley,” it beckoned.

He stepped back.

Another voice, sharper and higher-pitched, followed. “Help me.”

Then another cried, “Don’t leave me here!”

They overlapped, calling his name in alternating cadence. Tyler’s voice. Casey’s. Jules’s. Each one was clear and intimate, but decidedly wrong. They weren’t begging—they were smiling. He could hear the curvature of teeth behind the words, the suggestion of a grin wider than a human’s.

He dropped his backpack and pulled the crowbar free.

“Come in, Riley,” the voice cooed, this time resembling his own.

He took a step forward and raised the crowbar, ready to slam the door shut— to seal it, bend it, and break it—but before he could, the air around him shifted. The hallway expanded, groaning softly, and the floor rippled beneath his feet.

He stumbled momentarily but regained his composure, and before he could second-guess himself, he swung hard, striking the edge of the locker with a deep metallic crack. A shockwave reverberated outward, hurling him backward. He struck the opposite wall and collapsed, his vision blurring.

The locker door creaked open further. From within, the void pulsed. Voices rose again, chanting in a language he couldn’t hope to understand. There were other sounds as well—wet, rhythmic grinding and static pressure, accompanied by ragged breaths, shrieking metal, and groans of hunger—all layered atop one another in a nightmarish symphony.

Riley pulled himself up and staggered forward. “I’m never going in!” he shouted. “This ends tonight! I am the last!”

The locker responded with a maddening screech, a piercing wail that threatened what little was left of Riley’s fleeting sanity.

For a moment, Riley’s resolve wavered, and he nearly bolted, but as he stared at the locker, crowbar in hand, he thought of his friends, and everyone before them that had been lost, too, and of the memories that faded with them.

He couldn’t stop. Now now, not ever.

With a scream of his own, Riley swung the crowbar like a man possessed, slamming the door shut, and then jammed the tool against the lock, embedding it deeply in the metal. In the sparsely furnished expanse of the basement corridor, the sound echoed like a gunshot.

The locker’s shriek cut off abruptly, its connection to the basement seemingly severed—and Riley collapsed to the basement floor, heaving, in disbelief.

Was it over? he wondered. Was it really over?

He wasn’t about to wait around to find out. He scrambled to his feet, picked up his bag, and bolted for the stairs.

Riley Montgomery never looked back.

And he never spoke of the locker or his missing friends again.

* * * * * *

The school didn’t report anything unusual the next day.

No one reported any signs of a break-in or any missing items. The janitor paid no attention to the gaping hole in the door of Locker 119, or the crowbar lying beside it. He didn’t so much as cast a glance at it, and he never would.

By the end of the week, however, in spite of everything, someone else was telling the story again.

The story of the haunted locker.

A freshman dared his friends to go to the basement. They laughed about it in the locker room, then dared each other to get closer and closer to the stairwell door. They swore they saw the knob turn on its own. One of them said they heard something low, mechanical, and wet breathing behind the door.

They told the story to friends after class. Someone dared someone else.

By the following Monday, new rumors had started—that it’s not just locker number 119 anymore. Sometimes it’s 120. Sometimes it’s 117. Sometimes, even the lockers in the main hallway were known to make noises late in the day—clicks and pops and faint, rhythmic knocking. Not loud enough to alarm anyone, but enough to notice. Just loud enough to wonder.

They say that whatever was inside it has started to move, locker to locker, whispering its way down the halls. But so far, no one’s been able to prove it.

It all sounds ridiculous, and maybe it is—or maybe it isn’t. Only a few students discovered the truth, and they’re long gone.

They say if you stand too close to your locker and listen—really listen—you’ll hear voices inside, crying out for help, begging you to open the door.

But if you ever hear a knock from the inside—don’t open it.

Just… don’t.

And whatever you do, if you ever find yourself on the wrong side of the door, no matter how badly you want to—

Don’t scream.

Because that’s exactly what it wants.