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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/StopMeBeforeIDream on 2024-10-25 20:47:52+00:00.

I wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with it.

Really. I mean it. I ain’t a detective. I wasn’t looking for answers. I kept to myself all my life; I just wish I could’ve been left alone in turn. Even when the bodies started going missing, I kept my head down. Grim stuff, for sure. But what was I supposed to do? 

I guess it’s old-fashioned now - maybe a cliche, but I’m a small-town guy. I go at a slower pace than most folks, I’ve never lived anywhere other than my hometown, and I’ve never regretted. At least, I didn’t before. 

Sure, I knew Dr Geller. We grew up just a couple of streets apart. Even if we were on the other side of the tracks, so to speak. He was younger than me, but we was in all the same classes. Me held back a year, him pushed forward. They kept pushing him forward. He was out of state and going to college by the time he was 16. Duke, I think it was? Yeah, Duke. He became the… oh, what was it?  The Dean of Surgery there. I saw that on Facebook once, before he came back. 

Makes sense he’d be a great surgeon. He was a smart guy, and he didn’t let blood bother him. I remember when Ernie Masters caught him right across the face with a lunch tray. There was blood all across the ground, but he didn’t seem troubled by it. You know, I think that was the only time we really talked as boys. After I pulled Masters off of him and took him to the nurse’s office. Maybe it’s cause of that, that I helped him out that once, that nothing happened to me. 

Outside of Facebook, I never heard anything else from him for going on twenty years. I got my carpentry apprenticeship and worked in Mr Henderson’s workshop in town for a couple years. Course, it went out of business when an Ikea opened twenty miles down the highway. I kinda scrambled around looking for work, and I just happened to get the custodian job at my old school. 

Can’t say it’s what I had in mind for myself. Cleaning up kids’ trash, and the boys’ bathroom is like the pit of hell. Still, I’m the only custodian they ever had who had carpentry training. The principal got me a cake when I repaired the basketball court floor. Saved the school an easy $3000! So it ain’t bad really. I know the grounds better than anyone, and I been here longer than almost anyone else. Seen three principals move along. Four now, I guess. 

Long as I’d been there though, never thought I’d see Dr Geller come back. Remember I said I’m a small-town guy? Well even before he was gone, Bill was for the big city. Feels weird calling him Bill, considering what I seen him do. Guess it ain’t right to call him doctor either. I didn’t know it at first, when he came back, that he weren’t a doctor anymore. 

No one knew what he’d done to get his license taken away. There was rumors, course. But I thought I had too much sense to listen to those. People said something about experiments. Blood taken from medical students or something. We never talked about it when he came back. Never talked at all. I can’t even say whether he even knew it was me who helped him out with Ernie Masters. Even when he became my colleague. 

Quite a change, going from the Dean of Surgery to a local biology teacher. Going all across the country back to his hometown. But I don’t think that’s any great mystery. Least weird thing about the story if you ask me. It weren’t no secret that his wife had died; cancer, of course. So now it were just him and Nina. 

Poor Nina. She was a real nice girl. Always cleaned up after herself. Even apologized when I had to clean up the mess her friends had left behind in classroom, and helped me tidy it up. See, it’s kids like her that make me have a little hope. I see the worst parts of kids doing what I do. 

Now I seen the worst parts of fathers too.

I was just as broken up as everyone else when I heard the news in the staff-room. That poor Nina had been hit by a car. Going trick-or-treating, I guess. Whatever high school juniors do on Halloween night. Course, they caught the guy that did it – drunk driving, bastard. I saw what it did to Dr Geller though. Just broke him apart. 

He was gone for months. Never saw him on the street or at the store. Some thought he might’ve left town completely. I know he did for a while, but he came back eventually. Even went back to teaching. But everyone knew he weren’t the same. 

He was snappish. Cruel, with teachers and students alike. Made Henry from Art cry once. Course, that would’ve gotten him let go, but what was the principal supposed to do? The man had lost his wife and daughter. How could he kick him out of his job too? 

Principal Harper quit recently, after it all happened. I seen him at the bar. He’s there most nights now. We both are. I mean, how was he supposed to know? I’m the one who should’ve known. 

So yeah, the bodies. 

I guess the first one was most shocking. Exhumation. I didn’t know the word before. Now it’s a part of the local vernacular. As common a saying as any. Wilbur Hutchings, an old man, dead a couple of months, was dug up from the local cemetery. And his body was missing. 

Cops were everywhere of course. It got a lot of attention across the state. We’d get a lot more of both in time. National press. Journalists swarming the graveyards, keeping a closer watch on the town than the cops and the sheriff’s department combined. The podcasters were the worst though. The “true-crime" leeches, and the paranormal investigators. I have a little sympathy for them at least. It’s all bunk what they say, all that yapping about vampires, but at least they’re barking up the right tree. 

Henry Ortega was next. Not a local boy. A young man, dug up from the nearest military graveyard. Veteran, dead from an Oxy OD, and not two weeks in the ground. And from there it only got worse. Cops hadn’t even taken the police tape down from the cemetery when the next graverobbing happened. 

It was Nina. 

Course the town and the school were abuzz. Horrified, afraid. And Dr Geller was in the midst of the it all. He looked as stern and hard as a statue. He didn’t take time off though. And he was meaner than ever. Never said anything to me though. 

And attention was only on him for so long, because the spree only went on from there. Just a week after Nina’s taking, bodies were going missing across the county. Just days apart, always just after burial. Cemeteries everywhere had police standing guard. Vigilantes too; bereaved family members standing vigil armed with guns and baseball bats. 

That poor guy, Chris Marsh? Got killed by a jumpy family. Just for walking his dog at night by the graveyard. 

Still, the bodies were going missing. Three of them. And the trend was obvious. All young women, like Nina. 17 to 20. There was awful speculation as to why, like you’d expect. God, how I wish I didn’t know the real reason. Worse than I ever let myself imagine. 

I guess I can’t blame those families or the police. They were trying to protect the dead. But surely they had to know that they were forcing his hand. That he’d had to make new, unguarded bodies. 

They said that Clara’s death was a suicide. She was Nina’s friend, and all this misery was around her. Nothing strange about it. But I know it wasn’t true. She was killed. Her body taken from morgue before they could find out what got her. 

And Becky. Poor Becky. Another student from my school. Attacked by coyotes? I saw the state of her. No dogs could do that. You know why she wasn’t taken? Why she stayed in the ground? Because there wasn’t enough of her left to take. 

I never wanted it to be me that found out the truth. There was detectives and feds from all across the state in town. It should’ve been them who went into the gym that night. 

Maybe it was always supposed to be me that caught him. It’s not like the clues weren’t there. And I was the one who had the best chance to spot them. There was the car parked in the school parking lot, even after I left after locking the door behind me. Who would be parking in school parking so late at night?  

Worst of all was the key. Yeah, I lost the key to the basement. I knew it was gone months before. And I didn’t tell anyone because I kept losing things and didn’t want to get another earful from the principal. And it’s not like there was anything there that anyone wanted. Ancient year books and long abandoned lost property. 

But it was from there that I heard the scream. 

I was cleaning the basketball court again, later than I normally did, and I almost missed it. A scream. A girl’s scream. I was sure I’d imagined it. But still had to stop and listen. I probably stood there for a full minute of silence, straining my ears. But when I heard it again, I knew there was no mistaking it. A girl in pain; and under my feet. 

I started calling to her, looking for a way to find her. I opened the old sports cupboard. All the gear and gym mats had been pushed aside, revealing the old trapdoor I hadn’t used in years. It was locked, like it was supposed to be, and even after what I’d heard that almost convinced me that I just hadn’t had enough caffeine. 

But then I heard the sound of the saw. That sound I know so well. And then the shriek again.

I’ve got a crowbar in my office, only for emergencies. But I wasn’t going to go running for it. I got a claw-hammer from my toolkit, jammed the hook under the edge of the door and wrenched it open. 

The stench was just awful. Blood and shit, covered up by that awful sterile hos…

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