Only Darkness. Danuta Reah

       5

      Tuesday morning, Debbie, who had woken up at about half past five and had been unable to get back to sleep, caught the seven-twenty train and was actually in college by quarter to eight. She had planned to spend an hour catching up on her marking, but as she sat at her desk sipping a cup of bitter coffee, she realized that she wasn’t going to be able to concentrate. Right. Something else then. She had her GCSE English class at nine that morning. They’d been looking at ghost stories – it was a topic Debbie always did at Christmas, and she was trying to get them to write stories of their own. They had trouble with writing horror, because the model from their own experience of books and film was fantasy based and excessively violent. The idea that their own world of the everyday could be far more horrific was alien to them. Debbie decided that today she would show them ghosts.

      The Broome building offered an excellent venue for a ghost story. Debbie went roaming, trying to remember the best stories, find the best places. The high-ceilinged corridors were shadowy, brown, grey and black, the brighter colours on the paintwork long since worn off. Ghosts could easily walk here. Debbie went on up the stairs to the top corridor – there was a story here – and began a narrative in her head in which someone was standing where she was standing, her back against the window, watching through the crazed glass in the swing doors, the shadow of something stalking her, knowing she was trapped in a dead end with no way out but the eighty-foot drop through the window behind her.

      Footsteps beyond the doors brought her back to earth – the sound was heavy and solid. A man, then. She peered back down the corridor into the shadows, and saw a shape loom against the glass. The door opened, and Les came through, carrying a bunch of keys. He looked at Debbie.

      ‘Morning,’ he said. Should she explain what she was doing? He didn’t seem curious, but he must have wondered. As he came towards her, she said, ‘I was just looking at those places that you tell the stories about, you know, the ghosts.’

      ‘Not me.’ Les looked dour. ‘It’ll be one of those young ones telling you a lot of nonsense. I’ve worked here near on forty year, and I’ve never seen any ghosts.’

      ‘But they’re good stories. I was trying to remember that one that was supposed to have happened one Christmas – I’m sure it was you that told me.’

      ‘Oh, you mean the footsteps on the long staircase.’ Les seemed reluctant to tell the story at first, but Debbie had remembered it as soon as he mentioned the staircase.

      The long staircase was originally a fire escape. It ran in a spiral down the inside of a tower-like structure built at the point where the corridors ended. An external fire escape now served the building. The doors that led on to the long staircase were nailed up and had been since before Debbie started work at the college. The only way on to it now was through the IT resource centre. At the back of the room was the old fire exit with a push-bar handle. Students no longer used the long staircase which led out into the lane behind the college, and now it was mostly used for storage. It was dark even on the sunniest day.

      The story that Les was telling was about a caretaker who had gone down the staircase one night to check that the outside door was locked. He went down the stairs and checked the door. He didn’t check anything else, because there was nothing else to check. As he was climbing back up the staircase, slowly, because it was late and he wasn’t a young man, there was a sudden draught, the door above him slammed shut and the light went out. He stopped, because it gave him a shock to be suddenly in the dark, then went on, a bit more quickly now. It was cold and somehow unpleasant, at night, on the stairs, in the dark. Then he stopped again. Down below him, on the stairs he’d just climbed, he could hear something, something that sounded like footsteps coming lightly and quickly up the stairs behind him, from where there had been nothing but an empty staircase and a locked door. He didn’t wait. He ran as quickly as he could in the dark, up the last two flights to the door that was hard to open from the inside. As he struggled with it, he could hear the footsteps getting closer and moving more quickly as they came towards his landing. He managed to get the door open, was through it and had it shut and bolted behind him more quickly than he thought was possible. He was leaning against the door getting his breath when something struck it with such force he was knocked to the ground. But nothing was ever found on the staircase to account for it.

      When Debbie had first heard the story of the footsteps that came from nowhere, pursuing their victim in the dark, the hairs had stood up on her arms. That would be an excellent story to tell the students. She could take them on to the stairs, show them.

      The double doors were pushed open, making them both jump, and Les fumbled with his key ring as Rob Neave came into view. ‘On the warpath today,’ he muttered.

      Neave saw Debbie, and made some attempt to hide his irritation. ‘I want you down with the delivery van,’ he said to Les. ‘Get Dave or someone to open these rooms and for Christ’s sake don’t take all day.’ His face was white and he looked ill, as if he had a serious hangover. Debbie remembered what Louise had told her the other evening.

      ‘That was my fault,’ she apologized for Les. ‘I was getting him to tell me his ghost story.’

      Neave looked at her with a faint smile and shook his head when she asked him if he knew it, so she told him the story she’d just heard from Les. He didn’t seem too impressed. ‘You don’t believe all that, do you?’

      ‘Of course not, but it’s a good story. Don’t you think so?’

      He smiled properly this time, and she felt a small sense of triumph. ‘No, I just see Les coming up the stairs with his head tucked under his arm.’ She laughed, and then he said, ‘I need a word with you. Will you be in your room around five?’

      The ghost tour of the Broome building went down very well. Debbie wondered, only half facetiously, if she should suggest it to the college marketing forum as a money spinner. Despite the success of her class, she felt uneasy. That feeling of foreboding was back, and she was glad that the college was bustling with pre-Christmas activity. She felt better in the crowded corridors. As soon as she was on her own she had that feeling of eyes on her, a sense of cold and menace. She cursed Tim, and she cursed herself for thinking about ghost stories – especially college ones.

      It didn’t help when, at coffee break, her head of department summoned her to his office to discuss the newspaper article. Peter Davis listened to her explanation, but his concluding, ‘Well, we’ll let it go this time but don’t let it happen again,’ served to fire up her anger. It was hard to pull her mind away from it and concentrate on her class. Anyway, she missed coffee.

      At lunchtime there was a union meeting. City College was in trouble. Falling student numbers and financial constraints meant that the college was losing money, and the college management were planning cuts. The union was fighting for its members’ jobs, but the staff were divided and undecided. The meetings were usually acrimonious or inconclusive.

      The room was filling up as Debbie arrived. She’d meant to give herself time to buy a sandwich before the meeting started, but she’d stayed behind to talk to two of the students, and had had to come straight along. She saw Tim Godber indicating an empty seat next to him, but ignored him – Why is Tim trying to be friendly again? – and found a seat at the other side of the room. The news was all bad. City College was running more deeply into debt, and the management were looking for savings in the staffing budget. Nervously, Debbie thought about her overdraft and the money she needed each month just to pay the mortgage.

      She had to leave before the meeting was over, and go straight to the classroom for her afternoon session with another GCSE group. They were a particularly lively group – standard euphemism, Debbie thought, for difficult and obnoxious – and she didn’t feel up to controlling them through a trip