Spring of 1977. I was in fourth grade at Roosevelt Elementary in Cedar Rapids. I've carried this memory for over thirty years now, and I still can't make sense of it. Our school was old. Built in the 1920s, red brick, three stories with a basement that ran under the whole building. The basement was off-limits to students. They kept maintenance equipment down there, old desks, broken things. There were stairs at the east end of the building that led down to it. The door was supposed to be locked, but it never was. Kids would sneak down there sometimes on dares. This was late April. I remember because we were getting ready for the spring concert and I was supposed to practice my recorder part. Instead, during lunch recess, my friend Sarah said she'd heard something weird coming from the basement door. A humming sound. I told her she was making it up, but she insisted.
We went to check it out. The door was at the end of a hallway near the gymnasium. Nobody was around, everyone was outside for recess or in the cafeteria. Sarah was right. There was a sound. Low and steady, like an electric hum, but deeper. You could feel it in your chest. The door wasn't locked. I pulled it open and the sound got louder. There were stairs going down, concrete, painted green. The light switch was at the top but when I flipped it, nothing happened. The bulb must have been dead. It was dark down there. Not just dim, dark. The kind of dark where you can't see your hand in front of your face. Sarah said we should go get a teacher. But I don't know, I was curious. I started down the stairs. Felt my way along the wall. The humming got louder with each step. My heart was pounding [ hard I could hear it in my ears.
When I got to the bottom, my eyes started to adjust. There was a faint glow coming from somewhere deeper in the basement. Bluish-white, pulsing slightly in time with that humming sound. The basement was one long room with support pillars every twenty feet or so. Shelves along the walls, boxes stacked up, old equipment covered in dust. The glow was coming from behind some shelving units near the back wall. I walked toward it. I should have been scared, if that makes sense, but I wasn't. I was just focused on seeing what was making that light. When I got around the shelving, I saw it. It was small. Maybe four feet tall, crouched down between two boxes. Gray skin, not like ash, more like wet clay. Smooth. The head was too large for the body, shaped wrong. And the eyes. They were huge. Black, like polished stone. No whites, no pupils. Just black, reflecting that blue light. It was looking right at me.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]