Four teenagers spend the night in a deserted school to find the source of the whispers and the lights in its windows, but the building seems to be waiting for them.
When Igor switched on his torch, the beam landed on the school door handle, buried under a crust of dust. They stood in the empty courtyard of a building that had once been full of noise, footsteps, and slammed lockers. Now it crouched in the shadows of overgrown trees, silent and decayed, like it had been left behind by time itself.
"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Ola whispered, tightening her grip on the old map she had brought with her.
Igor didn’t answer at once. He looked at Maja, then at Bartek, as if daring either of them to turn back. None of them had talked about anything else for days. The whispers. The lights in the upper windows. The stories people swore they’d heard after dark, when the school should have been empty. No one had gone in to check. That was exactly why they were here.
"If there’s anything to find, we’ll find it," Bartek said, forcing a grin that didn’t quite hold. "Maybe old registers. Maybe something left behind by the students who used to be here."
The front door gave way with a dry groan. Inside, the corridor stretched ahead of them, narrow and dim, swallowing the light from their torches. Torn notices peeled from the walls. Faded class photos stared back at them with blank, smudged faces. Every step echoed too loudly, as if the school were listening.
They stopped outside the biology room. According to the notebook Ola had found in her attic, that was the room where the strange things began. The note in the margin was barely legible, but one line had stuck in all their minds: do not listen after midnight.
Then they heard it.
A whisper. Low, dragging, almost too soft to catch. It came from behind the closed door, as if someone on the other side was reading from a book with a cracked spine.
Igor froze. "Is anyone there?"
Silence.
Then the whisper came again, closer this time.
Maja’s torch trembled in her hand. Ola reached for the handle, her breath caught halfway in her throat, and the lights all around them flickered once, sharply, as if something huge had just woken up inside the walls.
The door to the hall began to swing open behind them.