After hours in an empty wing of the old high school, Marek and Julia stumble on a hidden door under the floor and a sound from below that should not be there.
Friday had already thinned out the school. By 5:12 p.m., the corridors felt less like hallways and more like a body holding its breath. Most of the students were gone, the cleaners had not yet reached this wing, and the last orange light of the day slid through the open windows and stretched across the scuffed linoleum.
Marek and Julia were still in the biology corridor, turning the place upside down for a memory stick that should have been in Marek's bag but wasn't. It contained the final version of their project, the one their teacher had been warning them about all week. Julia had checked her pockets twice, then a third time, as if sheer persistence might make the thing appear.
"Maybe it fell near the cloakroom," she said, though her voice sounded unsure even to her. "Or in the lab. Or under one of the desks."
"I've already checked all of that," Marek muttered. He pushed a hand through his hair and glanced back toward the classroom door. "Unless the school decided to swallow it."
He was about to check the floor again when something caught his eye behind the tall cupboard where the biology department kept its dying plants and cracked trays. Someone had shoved a stack of old newspapers there, the sort of forgotten junk that collects in places adults stop noticing. One corner of metal was visible beneath them. Not a pipe. Not a hinge.
A doorknob.
Julia stepped closer. "That wasn't there before. Was it?"
Neither of them answered. Marek reached for the cupboard and shoved it aside. It scraped across the floor with a sound that made both of them flinch. The newspapers slid away with it, and behind them was a narrow door built into the wall, set low enough that it almost disappeared into the floor.
The air that drifted up from the seam between the boards was cold and stale, like a room that had been shut for years.
Julia stared at it. "You are not seriously opening that."
"We need the memory stick," Marek said, trying for a laugh and missing by a mile.
He wrapped his fingers around the knob and pulled.
The door gave with a long, reluctant creak, revealing a steep staircase dropping into darkness. No light. No sign of where it ended. Just the smell of dust and something older, damp and metallic, rising from below.
Then a sound came from the bottom step.
Not the scrape of settling wood. Not the drip of water.
Something moved down there.
Marek and Julia froze, staring into the blackness as a shape shifted across the narrow opening, and for one impossible second it looked as if someone beneath the school had just realised they were standing there.