Horror - Novelette

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. Class of Memory Lane Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

CLASS OF MEMORY LANE

8:52 PM – Seven Minutes Late: Denise and Glenn

“What are we doing here anyway?” Denise asked.

She and her boyfriend Glenn were in the basement of the long closed elementary school, catching vibes of yore, stomping down memory lane on a flashlight glow. They were on their way to the classroom where they’d all first met, feet smacking on a spilled sticky liquid left by the main entrance.

Back before the north side caved in, there was another door that put half of the basement on the ground level, right by the doors to the kindergarten class. That side was no longer accessible, but someone before them had peeled back the boarded doors of the main entrance. They’d also spilled that damned tacky mess.

And of course, the others arrived before Denise and Glenn.

Glenn was a man who did not leave the house without his hair and clothing coming correct. Leather jacket, tight Guess jeans, N.W.A t-shirt, ankle-high brown leather boots, and his hair tight at the sides and puffed up top beneath a mousse shell.

Upon meeting Glenn, most people assumed him gay.

He took it as a compliment.

It was too dark in the dusty old school to see his attire and he’d become pouty about Denise’s mood. Annoyed boredom was catching.

“Just a little bit, okay? Those were five pretty informative years for all of us,” he said.

Denise held the flashlight. The old wax on the stone floor had only a modicum of luster left in its finish. It banked the glow in a soft yellow swatch. The door to the kindergarten classroom yawned ahead about twenty feet away.

“I hardly remember anything before the fifth grade,” Denise said.

He didn’t either, but he loved nostalgia, loved how cool it was to be nostalgic about the ‘eighties. There were three Stranger Things t-shirts in his closet and he didn’t really like the show that much. He’d never admit that because it was cool and fun. And he’d bought that book, Ready Player One, and fully intended on reading it, eventually. Maybe even before the movie came out. Once, he even sought out a used copy of It, but decided against reading it since it was so damned big. It was before his time anyway.

“So, history remembers you.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Oh get over it. We’ll have a few beers and head out for something a little livelier. Just play along for now,” Glenn said, hushed as they came to stand only a few feet from the door.

Through the halls, blown debris and loose sheets of paper collected at the edges where walls met floor. The walls were soft stone and barren. The cork ceiling was off and on gone, animals and dampness deteriorating in a strangely particular manner. Wires like veins came and disappeared overhead. Denise didn’t shine the light up there after the initial look.

The wires seemed to move in the shadows and something moving aside from their party was not something she cared to consider.

Glenn was no better. Three times already, a shadow brought a scream to the base of his throat. Luckily, it had yet to leap free.

“To hell with livelier, after this I’m going home, sitting in the tub, watching something featuring Yummy Gosling, Yummy Hemsworth, or Yummy Idris. Might even lock the door.”

“Girl, you nasty,” Glenn said, sassy. There was a time not so long ago that he’d have promised to break down the door and be all the Yummy that she needed, but relationships changed and sparks quieted. Sometimes it was just easier to let doors close and lock.

Denise snorted, withdrew nothing.

They rounded the doorway and stepped in. There were candles at the center of the room, but no other people.

The room itself seemed so very much smaller. A four-tiered down-step separated the toy area from the learning and nap area. The big blocks, the toys, and every little chair was gone. The teacher’s desk remained against a far wall, bare, unlike every active kindergarten teacher’s desk in the history of kindergarten teachers’ desks.

“Hello?” Glenn said. “Robbie? Vin? Sarah? Susan?”

“Anybody here?” Denise shouted. A tinny, dull echo surrounded them.

They stepped down and to the center of the room where the candles sat as well as a cooler and then a grocery bag of beer cans. The beer was Moosehead, meaning Vin was somewhere near.

“Where are they?” Denise asked.

Glenn understood then. He whispered, “Be ready. They’re gonna scare us, pop out of nowhere, grab us, try to get us shitting our pants.”

“Hmm.”

Denise waited a moment longer and broke into a driven jog. There were washrooms in the kindergarten room, reasonably so. They had tiny toilets and short sinks. She swung open the girls’ room. It was empty. She crossed the seven-foot gap and swung open the boys’ door. It was also empty.

“Hmm,” she repeated. Glenn was on her heels, following the swath of light.

“Where else?” Glenn whispered.

Denise paused, swinging the light over the big, mostly empty room. On the far side was another door. A closet if she recalled correctly. Being back in the room didn’t trigger forgotten memories as Glenn had suggested it might. Maybe the darkness held them prisoner, but probably they were gone, like so many other meaningless days.

“That’s a closet?” she asked.

“It’s the boot room where the hooks are, don’t you remember? Brad Macklin told me Santa wasn’t real in there and I lied and said Santa was real because I’d seen him. Brad said it was my dad. That was wrong because I made it up in defense of my beliefs, hadn’t seen a thing.”

“The way your mom gets about Jesus?” Denise said and started across the room.

“Something like that, I guess, but different. Jesus and Santa Claus aren’t quite the same thing, are they?”

“Aren’t they?”

“Ugh, I’m not getting into this again.” Glenn clung to a minor belief in Christian lore, while Denise, though raised neck deep in it, scoffed outright at the notion of anything omnipotent, especially a power using humanity like playthings.

“Text your mom and tell her to ask God where everybody is,” Denise said.

“No, thanks.”

They took the four gentle steps up to the toy level. The floor was hollow and thumped as they walked, despite cautious feet. Denise tried to turn the handle; it wouldn’t move. She smiled and knocked.

“You in there, Little Pigs?” Denise said.

Down the hall, footfalls charged towards the room. They squeaked wet, rubber voices.

“Hey!” Glenn shouted.

The door opened.

“Get in here and shut the fuck up,” a voice hissed.

Denise shined her light. There was blood on Robbie’s cheek, running freely from a gash beneath his right eye, the red a stark contrast to the chalk powdering his flesh.

 

8:20 PM – Twenty-five Minutes Early: Sarah and Robbie

“Why are we here so early?” Robbie asked, annoyed by the silly idea of paying homage to their collective kindergarten classroom. Sure, there were some good times in elementary school, but who even remembered kindergarten?

Sarah and Robbie were an item in middle school and then high school, split once Robbie went to college and Sarah stuck around town to wait tables and procreate with an older man named Gus. Gus was gone, with the kids, and Sarah reverted mentally. She looked to take back the years lost to mothering and Gus, boring turd that he was.

Robbie came back to town after his job at the Yellow Pages moved to Texas, as well as his co-worker girlfriend. He wasn’t interested in anything with too long horns or hip holsters on civilians. He and his girlfriend were more a relationship of convenience, so there were no tears when she stayed on.

It left him an unemployed technical writer and editor, renting a home not far from where he grew up, taking in his options, freelancing contracts from folks all over the English-speaking parts of the globe. It also let him re-spark an old flame.

He foresaw regretting this in the future but was having too much fun to focus on that now.

“The basement, remember?” Robbie said as Sarah took a turn toward the sixth-seventh-eighth grade wing.

“We’ve got time, come on,” Sarah said and pouted out her ass as she turned up the shadowy corridor, cellphone flashlight app shining the way in a great swatch of blue. She wore a skirt perhaps a half-size too tight for her frame. Still, she had a great bod for a woman who’d pushed out three kids, great bod for any woman in her mid-thirties. “I want to take a trip down memory lane.”

Robbie had no idea of what she was talking about. He followed nonetheless. Sarah entered the second to last room on the right side of the hallway. It was a former eighth grade homeroom.

“Coming?” Sarah said as Robbie cleared the doorway. She was in the office and supply closet at the front of the room. This was one of the few rooms with a teacher’s office and that was because it was also the senior science room. There were gas hook-ups at the two-seat tables and three sinks up the center aisles.

“Remember that time?” she asked and then disappeared.

Robbie did not recall at all.

Through the door, into the moldy, chalky atmosphere of the office, Robbie felt hands dig fingers into his hips.

The flashlight app pointed at the ceiling from a shelf against the wall. The room was no more than five feet across and double that long.

Robbie turned as directed and his ass planted on a desk. His pants came open and he got the just of it then, still did not fully understand. His cock came out and Sarah’s tongue entered his mouth. His hands found flesh beneath her shirt and bra, rubbed the hard pebbles at the center of areola fields. She then backed up, crouched, and did what she did: wet vigor, spitting often, squeezing balls, tracing edges, and constantly in multiple directions of motion.

The first time she’d done this, he came in forty-nine seconds.

He was more seasoned now. Plus, she knew when to stop so they could continue rather than leave her damp and unfulfilled with a mouthful of salty man-milk.

“Remember yet?” she asked.

Robbie said nothing.

“This isn’t quite as hot. Remember how we waited till Mr. McGuinness left and we came in here. We could hear everyone in the hall and teachers talking through the wall and I sucked you and you came everywhere.”

Robbie still didn’t say anything.

“Remember, baby?” she said.

He laughed then. They were dating when she was in Mr. McGuinness’ class and there was a rumor that his girlfriend blew a couple guys over the years, but this was the first time he really believed it.

“What’s so funny?”

“That wasn’t me.”

“What?” She sounded hurt and suddenly uncertain.

“That. Wasn’t. Me.”

“Ah, fuck. You sure?”

“Yep.”

“Oh, sorry,” she said and slipped his cock back into her mouth to mount a full-on apology blow.

Playfully vindictive, every time he got close, he thought of the poster for the film Bowfinger. It was a trick his buddy used in high school when he didn’t want to seem like a premature ejaculator. It made him smile and shake with every remembrance of Eddie Murphy’s spectacled eyes and upturned lip revealing braces. It was more the memory of his pal than the image that kept him from release.

Finally, after enough time for the flashlight app to drain the battery, he let his mind and body meld. His fingers twined into Sarah’s hair, directing the rhythm before exploding into her mouth. Worm-like, his slobbery, quickly receding erection slid free as Sarah began shaking and kicking.

Objects fell from the shelves. Something warm splashed over Robbie’s bare thighs. He hopped down from the desk, yanked up his pants, and pulled his phone from his pocket.

“Sarah?” he said, shining a touch screen in her direction.

The glow illuminated a figure hunched over Sarah, the chalk dust on the air, and the reflective blood spilling onto the cement floor.

“Holy shit!”

An arm came up and struck Robbie in the face as he charged forward. Something hard sliced into his cheek. The pain had him jumping sideways, sending more chalk and bug-eaten textbooks toppling. A chalk box broke open over his head.

The arm slashed out again and Robbie felt a burn seep out from his thigh as the blood oozed. He reached blindly for the door. His cellphone was somewhere on the floor. Hand found knob and he was out.

There was more crashing behind him. There was no time to stop and the heart wasn’t there to fight. He broke down the hall toward where he’d entered and where he’d parked the car.

Footfalls clapped on the stone floor behind him, matching his pace. He turned to the door and a figure illuminated from behind the glass swung the door outwards. Terrified by this silhouette, Robbie turned down the hall. Being away from town for so long, he had no idea the north end had collapsed and he was effectively cornering himself.

Upon discovery of the collapse, he entered the kindergarten room to seek assistance from his friends. There were candles illuminating the center of the floor. There was a grocery bag that appeared to house beer cans. But there were no people.

 

8:31 PM – Fourteen Minutes Early: Vin

Parked two spots down from a late model Buick SUV, Vin licked his lips, glanced at the clock, and decided he’d best have a toot before entering. It had been a while since he’d known these people and wasn’t sure what they’d think of him powdering his nose.

Bump tapped onto his hand, he snorted. Magic exploded on the front of his mind for about two seconds. He tapped a second bump, freshened his second nostril.

He looked at the baggy under the streetlights and decided to pocket it. The original plan had been to go in clean, have a few beers and pretend to be a happy, adjusted adult. Maybe they weren’t squares.

He grabbed the bag of beer from the passenger’s side floor. He’d purchased a six-pack and one tall can but drank the tall can on the way to the school. It was absurd how nervous he was to be around these people again.

The school was dark, something he hadn’t expected. He lit a cigarette with a scuffed Zippo lighter and left the flame dancing to lead the way. The school was a place he’d never forget. His favorite times occurred at school, back when he was better than normal and cool as Alaska. From kindergarten all the way to grade thirteen, he was one of few kings. The big fish in a little pond notion died in college. He dropped out after the first year, but life at home had changed, people were disappointed and unfriendly. Thankfully, his inheritance allowance was enough that he’d never need for anything so long as he never needed for anything too extravagant.

Staying in a cozy level of inebriation was well within his snack bracket.

The school was quiet as his feet carried him, without fail, to the place where life was first good. He opened the wooden door and closed his Zippo. There were candles in the middle of the room on the low portion of the floor. He took the wide steps slowly.

“Hello?” he said, smile widening. It felt like magic to be back.

A full three-sixty suggested at least temporary aloneness. He withdrew the paper packet of white powder from his pocket, tapped a bump onto his hand and snorted. His head rocked back. The bump had been more of a mound. Still, despite a natural blockage in his left nostril, an anatomical function beyond his knowledge, he liked symmetry and snorted another helping.

This time when his head rocked back, it did so at the exact moment a weighted noose swung and encircled his throat. Vin was too high to understand for the first five seconds as his feet rose from the floor. As the high settled into the norm, his swinging body lashed and writhed. He was suspended no more than a foot high. Muscle pounding overtime, cocaine-assisted cardiac arrest set in long before the snapping bones in his neck mattered to his airways.

His bowels rushed into Calvin Klein boxer briefs via a relaxed sphincter. The rope let go, and Vin dropped like a released marionette. The tall figure in a black hood dragged the body into the hall and then a closet next-door to the kindergarten class.

 

8:45 PM – On Time: Susan

Honda Odyssey parked next to what had to be Vin’s Cadillac coupe. A pain to get a sitter for the kids since it was Saturday and her husband had men’s league bowling followed by men’s league drinking. In the end, she paid the neighbor kid, a nerdy computer whiz who wore Star Wars shoes, thirty bucks for the night. This was not the prime choice for the informative ages of five and six, she didn’t want her kids believing in all that crap, but she was out of choices. They were naïve and had trouble separating realistic TV from the nature of the world. Besides, all that space stuff and science fiction stuff and horror stuff was garbage.

She had her purse and in it, among forty-nine other objects, was a flashlight on a keychain. She fished it free as she stood just outside the doors. She dressed in blue jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, both from Old Navy.

It was a bit of an annoyance to be out of yoga pants on a Saturday night.

Through the doors, she saw a man running in the dark. Sprinting as if being chased. Susan shined the light to her right and then left. She saw nothing and then rolled her eyes. This was a thing, that man was one of the party and it was his job to give rise to her hackles. Well, good luck. She wasn’t a child.

“Nice try!” she shouted.

To her right, footfalls approached. She turned the light again. There was a tall figure, shadowy in a black shroud. Thin shoulders suggested this could be a man or a woman, though the height certainly suggested a man. In the shrouded individual’s hands was an archaic fire axe. There were a handful of them in the school, stuck behind glass, ready for an emergency since the ‘sixties.

“Ooh, scary. Who is that?” Susan said.

The figure drew closer, cocking the axe like a baseball bat, ready for the pitcher’s goods.

“Grow up,” Susan said. The axe swung into her chest. The shrouded figure drew tight as the blood drained, pinching the flashlight pointed to the ceiling. “Who are…who…?”

Susan wheezed and pawed at the gaping wound over her chest even as the figure dragged her body into the shadows of the long hallway.

 

8:58 – Underway: Denise, Glenn, and Robbie

“You’re fucking kidding,” Denise hissed.

“Shh!” Robbie said, fingering his wound. It was like a giant canker sore, impossible to leave alone.

“No, but for real?” Glenn whispered, terrified.

“For real. I assumed it was you who set this up, but was it?” Robbie asked of Denise.

“I didn’t even wanna come!”

“Shut up!”

“Calm down,” Glenn said.

Beyond the closet door, a tinging rang out. It sounded like a hammer, but the acoustics of the hallway and then the tiered room made it seem much softer and yet vaster. The trio kept quiet while the noise polluted the horror with impending dread. That hammering was akin to Death knocking on the door and all felt it.

It stopped.

Denise said, “Who else said they were coming? I talked to Vin and he said—”

“Why did you talk to Vin?” Glenn asked, his attention peaked. Denise and Vin had a fling a year before Denise and Glenn married. It was a subject they’d pretended to forget over the years.

“Now’s not the time,” Denise said.

“Are you fucking him?”

“Jesus Christ,” Robbie said.

“We’ll talk about this later.”

“Now!” Glenn shouted.

The drop ceiling fell apart above them, showering chunks. Denise spun the flashlight in that direction. A figure fell into the closet with them. Glenn screamed a high and wild cry as he pawed into the dark for the door handle.

Robbie grabbed onto the arms of the tall figure, pushing hard against a wall where coat hooks jutted out at three feet. The figure grunted, dropped a heel onto Robbie’s toes. This released the hold and the figure lifted a hand.

The tip of a plastic clay knife broke through the cotton of Robbie’s shirt, the flesh of his chest, and then between his ribs, into a lung. He coughed. The short knife jammed in again. Blood erupted with the next cough.

Robbie latched onto the figure. It was all he could do as the knife slammed in and out, sounding much like a wet zipper rising and falling.

Glenn stumbled and Denise passed him, shining light toward the mostly closed exit. She arrived first, swung it open, and eyes gawked at her. Glenn screamed again seeing the faces of Vin and Susan. They’d been pinned at the shoulders, conjoined. Each had one arm stretched and tacked at the wrists. The same went for their feet, one ankle each nailed in place. Meaty roadblock.

“Who would do this?” Glenn said, his voice was so high and unsteady that Denise wanted to kill him her damned self. “What’re we gonna do?”

“Shut up, you pussy! You wonder why I fucked Vin? Listen to you!” She charged into the bodies. They budged. She backed up and went again. The flesh tore and the bone crunched, the corpses leaned like a hammock. She reared again, ignoring a fresh banshee wail from Glenn.

Through the ceiling, the body of a woman fell. Her skirt rode high and her blouse flapped loosely. The weight of this carcass toppled Denise. Glenn recognized her immediately. It was Sarah Jones. She’d once given him a ham-handed tug that lasted for nineteen minutes and amounted to nothing more than a blistered knob and balls so blue they’d strike jealousy in Caribbean waters.

The flashlight was on the ground. Denise began to whine.

The shrouded figure dropped. Glenn jumped, crawling toward the light. He grabbed it, swung it around, and watched the shrouded figure pound a brass doorstop in the shape of a greyhound into the head of his wife.

Another shrill scream left his lips. Blood danced on the light like rubber boots in a rain puddle.

“Why are you doing this?” he wailed, backing up to a wall, skidding his ass on the dusty carpet. “How could you do this?”

The figure stopped and turned. Lowering the hood, the figure revealed her face. It was vaguely familiar.

“How could I do this? You all did this to yourselves,” the woman said.

Her voice linked two memories, much more recent than anything that went on at school. It was a self-help seminar he’d gone to a year earlier. The host was a man named Kane. He had salt and pepper hair, wore a headset, designer duds, Rolex watch, Prada loafers, and spoke with the authority typically bellowed by autocrats and mayoral offspring. Kane said the only way to be anything moving forward was to conquer everything holding you back.

This was the same hocus pocus junk he’d heard before, but it always puffed up his mental well-being for a couple months after the fact. Kane had held a question session and this lanky woman named Elizabeth stepped forward and asked how one goes about conquering when the demons holding her back had been there since she was very small. His answer was loud and unwavering.

“Exorcise those demons at any cost!” he’d shouted, shaking this Elizabeth by the shoulders.

“You’re name is Elizabeth, right?” Glenn asked.

The woman stepped closer. “You’ve never called me that before. Never!”

“I’ve never spoken to you. You’re nuts!”

“How dare you.” She withdrew a cross from the folds of her robe. The long end came to a point like a double-duty vampire hunter’s stake. She lifted the weapon over her head in a two-handed grip.

“No, wait. You, can’t! Who are you?”

“You don’t remember me?”

“I do, but it’s only because I saw you last year at Kane’s seminar!”

“Monsters never recall their prey. What if I said the name Lizard Breath?”

“Lizard Breath?”

The woman’s voice took a teasing tone. “Lizard Breath smells like poo. Lizard Breath drinks her pee. Lizard Breath has a dink.”

“What in the hell are you talking about? You’ve lost your mind.” Glenn had no recollection of chanting those very words to a girl named Elizabeth who had to be homeschooled after kindergarten because a small group of children drove her to the five-year-old equivalent of suicidal with their relentless taunts.

“No, I’m just getting it back. I will conquer. I will exorcise! Demon be gone!”

The cross stake drove down into Glenn’s head. The crunch was mighty and the flow of blood pumped like a geyser for two heartbeats. Soaking Elizabeth’s already damp and sticky robe. The flashlight rolled from of the shaking hand of the fresh corpse.

 

8:59 AM – Two Days Later: Elizabeth

“You’re right on time,” the smiling woman from behind the glass said.

It was raining outside and Elizabeth had taken the bus across town to get to the high school. She’d recently passed a train-from-home course in first aid and medical treatments designed for those looking into becoming a nurse or a paramedic someday, or if more school was too much, a first defender in public health for youths—school Nurse being the colloquial title.

The class president of the thousand head high school was in the office dropping off an envelope to be sent to the Prime Minister, demanding the banning of oil use by 2025 (petition signed by eight hundred students). She looked at Elizabeth and smiled.

“Everybody, this is Elizabeth Soames. Our new nurse,” the receptionist said to those over her shoulder.

“Lana, you’re down that hall, walk with Ms. Soames to the nurse’s office, would you?” the principal asked, popping her head out of an office doorway. “Nice to see you again,” she added to Elizabeth.

Lana skipped out from behind the desk and stood next to Elizabeth. “Shall we?”

Elizabeth wore a warm glow emanating from within. This was new. This was different. People were never nice, this felt like a…a rebirth.

Lana asked four bored questions about Elizabeth’s post-secondary education. Elizabeth answered and stopped once at the open door. The janitor was inside leaning over the sink, looking down the drain.

“Nice to meet you,” Elizabeth said.

“Nice to meet you too,” the president said, grinning the kind of smile that offers teacher an apple and finishes the year valedictorian. She stepped away but stopped and turned. The smile on the class president’s face widened as she looked at the rain-doused woman. “Frizzy Lizzy, ‘cause your hair. That’s a fun name.”

Elizabeth’s cheeks burned. She touched her naturally curly hair, made a mess by the rain, thinking that it wasn’t a fun name at all, not even a little.

“That’ll stick, for sure,” Lana skipped away.

Elizabeth watched her movements, etching everything about this demon to her memory.

XX