During physics night at Wanda Rutkiewicz Secondary School, Alicia and her friends hear something moving on the long-sealed top floor and decide to go looking for it.
The storm slammed against the windows of Wanda Rutkiewicz Secondary School hard enough to rattle the glass. For a second, the hall lights flickered, and Professor Baek paused in the middle of his lecture on black holes, waiting for the restless laughter to die down.
Most of the students seemed relieved by the interruption. Alicia was not. She had been listening to something else entirely: a slow, uneven creak somewhere above them, deep in the part of the building that had been locked for years. The top floor.
She leaned toward her friends. Michal, who could turn a broken chair leg into a ghost story, had already gone pale. Susie was gripping the torch she always carried as if she had expected to use it all evening. Dominic only looked annoyed, which in his case usually meant he was ready to do something reckless.
"You heard that too," Alicia whispered.
The storm eased, but the sound did not stop. Another creak rolled through the ceiling, followed by a faint thud, as though someone had crossed the corridor above them and bumped into a wall.
Susie’s eyes sharpened. "If everyone has been calling that floor haunted for years, then tonight is a very bad night to pretend not to care."
They slipped out before anyone noticed, through the cloakroom and up the narrow stairwell that led to the third floor. The air changed as they climbed. It grew colder, dustier, almost stale, as if the upper levels had been sealed away from the rest of the school for more than just practical reasons.
At the end of the landing stood the door to the abandoned floor. Locked. Dominic gave it a quick, doubtful look, but Susie was already kneeling by the frame, sliding an old key from the ring she kept hidden in her sleeve. The lock turned with a dry click.
The door gave way slowly, releasing a breath of air that smelled of paper, rust, and something else Alicia could not name. The corridor beyond was dim and narrow, lined with peeling posters and warped display boards. Their torchlight cut across old maps, faded notices, and a row of classroom doors that looked untouched for years.
Then Dominic froze.
At the far end of the corridor, something moved.
Not a person, not clearly. Just a dark shape, half hidden behind a stack of broken cabinets, shifting once in the beam of Susie’s torch before slipping out of sight behind the biology room door.
Alicia’s pulse kicked hard against her ribs. Michal caught her wrist. Nobody spoke.
A sharp clatter rang out from behind the biology room, as if something heavy had fallen over inside.
Susie lifted the torch higher. The light trembled across the locked doors, the cracked tiles, the thin line of shadow under the biology room. Then, with a slow, deliberate groan, the door began to open from the inside...