“Let Me In”

Part I 

I work nights at our old middle school. It’s a small place—two floors, one gym, a cafeteria that still smells vaguely like canned green beans even when it’s spotless. Budget cuts mean the day crew leaves at five and I handle the late shift alone. I don’t mind. No kids. No teachers. Just me, a rolling cart, and the hum of lights that were the cheapest the district could buy.

That night the snow had started early, the kind that drifts sideways and fills in footprints thirty seconds after you make them. The district robocall said classes were canceled tomorrow. Good for families. Bad for me, because an empty building somehow collects more mess than a full one. I was halfway through buffing the east hallway when the radio clipped to my belt coughed out a little burst of static, the kind that sounds like someone tapping the mic with a fingernail.

“Custodian,” I said, mostly out of habit. “Eli here.”

Nothing back. Just the tone of the emergency system doing its idle check. I went back to the buffer. You learn to tune out the building’s noises the same way you tune out your own fridge at home.

I made another pass, parked the machine, then grabbed a bag of trash and cut down the stairwell. My footsteps sounded too loud. I told myself it was the waxed floors.

The first knock came while I was tying off a liner in the faculty lounge. Three light raps. Not the slam of a kid in a rush, not the pounding of someone in trouble. Polite. It took me a second to place where it came from because it didn’t belong to the room I was in. Sound carries weird through those halls. I stepped out into the corridor and listened.

Nothing.

I should have kept working. Instead, I headed toward the back of the building, out by the gym. There’s an exit there with two big panes of reinforced glass. Beyond them is the loading area and a stretch of parking lot with a single light that flickers when the wind is high. It was doing that now—on, off, on—making the snow look like TV static.

From halfway down the hall I saw a shape standing at the door. I thought my eyes were playing with the reflection, but no. There was someone outside. Tall. Still. Head tilted slightly. I couldn’t make out a face, only the outline.

I took a few steps closer. Ears. The shape had long ears, rounded at the tips. A costume. I actually laughed, a short, nervous burst that felt stupid as soon as it happened. Halloween was months ago, but a few of our high schoolers have a thing about messing with the middle school. Put on a mascot head, knock, film it. Get likes. That sort of thing.

“School’s closed,” I said through the glass, already annoyed with myself for walking all the way over. “Come back during daylight and use the front like a normal person.”

The figure didn’t move. Snow coated the shoulders, but there wasn’t any on the footprints behind them. Because there weren’t any footprints. The lot was smooth.

I set my palm against the glass, thinking maybe I’d see fog on their side when they breathed out. Nothing.

Another laugh—this one not mine—came through my radio. Small and tinny. I glanced down at it, then back up at the door.

“Let me in,” the figure said. The sound didn’t come from outside. It came from my radio. A soft voice, level, a little too even. “Let me in, please.”

I took a step back. The radio crackled again, normal this time, and then my phone vibrated with a text. District Alert: LOCKDOWN. Do not open exterior doors. Shelter in place. That happens when there’s a police situation in town. They ping all the schools in a radius, just in case.

I looked down the empty hall, then back at the shape. “Sorry,” I said, out of reflex. “Can’t. Policy.” I pointed to the phone to make it clear, like whoever it was needed to see the proof.

No reaction.

I walked away. I wanted to say I did it calmly, but I didn’t like turning my back, so I kept my head on a swivel and my pace a little faster than normal. I told myself I’d loop through the front office, check the cameras, then call it in if I still felt jumpy.

The front office is one of those glassed-in cubes with monitors no one ever bothered to replace. I jiggled the mouse, woke up the feed. Four exterior views, four interior. The gym exit camera—Camera 3—was black for a second, then flickered to a picture that looked like it had been through a blender. Digital smear. The other three exterior feeds came up fine, and on Camera 1—the side door by the cafeteria—I saw a dark silhouette standing at the glass.

I squinted. Same height. Same tilt to the head. Same ears.

The gym exit is at the opposite end of the building from the cafeteria. I hadn’t heard any door open. I hadn’t heard anything at all. I tried to convince myself it was a lag in the feed, some kind of time stamp issue, or maybe I was looking at a reflection. But the snow on the parking lot outside the cafeteria door wasn’t the same as the snow out back. The drift patterns weren’t even close.

The radio on the desk—the office has one—blurted again and I nearly knocked over a stapler. Two words, clear as day, like a recording: “Let me in.”

My thumb hovered over the call button. I wanted a second voice, a living person, to give me something normal to bounce against. The principal goes home by five. Our SRO is off shift at nine. The only other adult on site should’ve been the security contractor who stops by twice a night to walk the outside. His logbook said he’d come through forty minutes earlier.

I pressed the button anyway. “Eli here. Anyone copy?”

Silence.

I stared at the cafeteria camera. The silhouette didn’t get bored. Didn’t rub hands to keep warm. Didn’t shift weight. It just stood there, patient.

I thought about calling 911 and then pictured the conversation: “Yes, hi, there’s a person in a bunny suit at the door.” I put the phone down. Walking over and telling a kid to get lost seemed easier than explaining any of this.

I took the service corridor. It runs behind the auditorium and the band room, all cinder block and gray paint. There’s a spot where the HVAC makes the floor vibrate a little, and you can feel it in your ankles. As I passed it, the intercom popped. Usually that system only does the morning announcements. It shouldn’t do anything at midnight. The speaker gave a quick hiss, then a child’s voice—grainy, like it had been taped off a TV years ago—said, “You forgot me.”

I stopped. The hall seemed to recede a few feet, a trick of perspective I get when I’m too tired. I told myself the message was an old recording breaking through. Maybe they were testing the system earlier and left a clip on the server.

“Knock it off,” I said, to the empty corridor. “Very funny.”

I reached the cafeteria and peered around the corner toward the door. The glass was clear. Outside was empty. No figure.

“Great,” I muttered, ready to chalk the whole thing up to the cameras being junk. I pulled the panic bar and cracked the door an inch to look down the jamb for any tape or gum in the latch—kids love that trick.

Cold air knifed in. I leaned out a bit, checked the threshold, checked the lot. Smooth snow from wall to curb, no marks. When I pushed the door shut again the metal made that hollow boom that echoes off everything, and the sound bounced away down the hall.

I locked it, tugged twice, then turned around.

There’s a glass panel in the cafeteria that looks back into the dark of the kitchen. For half a second I saw my reflection there, pale in a blue hoodie, wide-eyed and stupid. And behind that reflection, where the kitchen door leads to the back hall, I saw the outline of a person with tall, rounded ears.

I didn’t turn my back on it this time. I edged away, keeping it in view. The figure didn’t come closer. It waited, like before.

The intercom clicked again. Same flat tone, then that even voice, not a kid this time, not an adult either—something in between. “Let me in, please.”

Something loosened inside me, the way it does when somebody uses a polite tone in a situation where it doesn’t fit. It wasn’t begging. It wasn’t threatening. It was asking the way you ask a neighbor for a cup of sugar at nine at night.

“No,” I said, out loud. “Not tonight.”

I backed into the hall, fumbled for the keys on my belt, and locked the cafeteria door from the outside. Then I went fast, not running, but close to it, back toward the front office. I wanted all the lights on. I wanted screens in front of me. I wanted the number for the non-emergency police line pulled up and ready.

When I reached the office, Camera 3—the gym exit—finally came back from static. The image rolled once, stabilized, and showed the back doors with snow piling up outside. A tall black shape stood dead center, turned slightly sideways, head tilted at that same wrong angle. Ears, rounded. No footprints again, though the drift against the aluminum threshold had lines cut into it like something weightless had pressed there.

The radio on the desk woke with a rustle. A whisper, close enough that it sounded like it came from just under the plastic grille.

“You promised,” it said.

I didn’t remember promising anyone anything. I picked up the handset anyway, just to have something in my hand.

“Who is this?” I asked, and felt stupid the second it left my mouth.

Static. Then, measured and soft: “Let me in.” A pause. “Please.”

Part II

I didn’t sleep the night before, and I sure as hell didn’t after that.

When the radio went dead again, I sat in the office trying to convince myself what I’d just heard was feedback, maybe an old loop from the system testing itself. But that voice—the tone—wasn’t mechanical. It was too… aware.

I finally forced myself to check the monitors again. Every exterior feed was empty except the one by the back gym doors.

The thing was still there.

It hadn’t moved an inch. Not in the way a human would, anyway. The camera picked up just enough light to define its outline against the snow—shoulders slumped, head cocked, ears upright. What got me, though, was that it looked like it was facing the camera, not the door. Like it knew I was watching.

My chest went tight. I killed the feed.

For a while, I tried keeping busy—grabbing my mop bucket, checking the cafeteria sinks again—but every corner of that place seemed wrong now. Every sound echoed too long. I caught myself glancing at the windows every few seconds, expecting to see that silhouette pressed against the glass.

Around one, I started hearing the doors.

Soft thuds, spaced apart—thump… thump… thump. Not fists. More like palms. Or maybe the heel of a hand.

I walked the halls, tracking the sound like a dog chasing a scent. It moved when I did, always one door ahead, always the same rhythm.

When I rounded the corner to the front entrance, the noise stopped. The doors stood still behind their metal crash bars, black glass reflecting the hallway light. Nothing outside.

Then my radio popped again.

Not a voice this time—music. A faint, scratchy tune like something off an old cassette. I leaned closer, and I swear I recognized it. The pep-rally jingle they used to play over the PA when I was in seventh grade. The one for our mascot: Hoppy the Hare.

The one who burned.

I froze. My mouth went dry.

The story was old news—one of those small-town tragedies people turn into ghost stories for Halloween. The kid’s name was Calvin something. He’d been wearing the Hoppy suit at a rally in the late ’80s when a pyrotechnic caught a backdrop curtain. People said he panicked and couldn’t find the zipper. The costume melted before anyone got to him.

Nobody ever wore it again. They locked it in the storage room under the gym, or at least that’s what we always said.

And here I was, staring down an empty hall, listening to that jingle hiss through a radio that wasn’t even tuned to anything.

I tried shutting it off. The switch didn’t work. I pulled the battery out entirely—and it kept playing.

That’s when the lights started to flicker.

First in the office, then down the hallway like a wave. Each bulb buzzed, dimmed, and came back brighter. I could hear the ballast hum in the ceiling tiles.

Then the intercom clicked again.

A faint shuffle. A breath. Then a whisper, so clear I could feel it in the base of my skull: “You promised you’d let me in.”

I froze. “Who is this?”

No answer—just a gentle tap tap tap from down the hall.

I turned toward the sound, already knowing what I’d see.

There he was again, framed by the blue metal of the gym doors. Same silhouette. Same tilt of the head. The light from outside had changed—the snowstorm must have slowed, because a gray wash of dawn was starting to bleed through the glass.

That’s when I noticed something new.

There was condensation on the inside of the door. Just above the push bar, right where a face would be if someone had pressed against it.

Something had breathed on the glass from inside.

I took a step back, every instinct screaming not to blink. The shape stayed still, but I could see faint movement—ripples across the silhouette’s chest, as if it were breathing with me.

I said, “You’re not supposed to be here.”

The voice that came back didn’t use the radio this time. It came through the door itself, like the glass vibrated to carry the sound.

“Cold out here.”

I should’ve run then. Should’ve gone straight out the front and into the storm. But I needed proof—something that said this wasn’t just a trick of light and fatigue.

I reached for my phone, raised it, and snapped a picture.

The flash went off, lighting the hallway for a split second. When I looked at the screen, the shape was gone.

I dropped the phone.

The lights went out entirely.

For a heartbeat, the only sound in the building was the low whine of the wind pressing against the old windows. Then—somewhere behind me—a set of heavy, deliberate footsteps echoed across the tiles.

I turned slowly.

Down the hall, the emergency exit sign over the far door flickered green. In its glow, something stood just past the glass, hands flat against it, head tilted like before.

It whispered again, barely audible through the layers of metal and snow: “Let me in, please.”

Part III

By two-thirty, I was past pretending this was anything normal. I’d locked every door I could find, cut the lights in half the hallways, and holed up in the janitor’s office with a folding chair jammed under the knob.

The building didn’t feel empty anymore. The silence had a pulse to it, like the hum of the lights had learned how to breathe.

I sat at the desk, flashlight in one hand, radio in the other, flipping through the old binder of maintenance reports. Something—anything—to keep my mind busy. When that stopped helping, I reached for the shelf behind me and grabbed one of the old yearbooks left over from a cleanout.

1986.

I don’t even know why I opened it. Maybe to prove to myself there was a rational explanation for all this. Maybe to confirm that what I’d heard through the intercom hadn’t come out of nowhere.

About twenty pages in, there it was.

A photo spread labeled “Pep Rally Traditions: Go Badgers!”—the usual smiles, streamers, and a blurry shot of a kid in a rabbit suit leaping across the gym floor, mid-jump. The caption read:

Calvin Dorrance, our beloved Hoppy the Hare, bringing the spirit!

Two pages later came the “In Memoriam” section. Calvin again. No suit this time, just a senior portrait—the old kind, faded at the edges. His eyes looked directly into the lens. The text below was simple:

He died doing what he loved—making kids laugh.

A drop of water hit the page. For a second, I thought it was from the leaky ceiling tile above the desk. Then another fell, landing closer to my wrist. The air was dry.

I looked at my hand. It wasn’t rainwater. It was condensation.

The radio on the desk hissed softly, then broke into faint static. I raised it to my ear. Through the noise came children laughing.

Dozens of them.

It was distant, warped, like a recording being dragged underwater. Mixed in with it—metal scraping concrete.

I stood. The laughter stopped. The scraping didn’t.

It came from the hall outside, then from the next one over, traveling along the lockers in slow, deliberate sweeps. I killed my flashlight and listened.

The sound paused.

Then: step. scrape. step. scrape.

It was heading toward me.

I turned the lock on the door handle until it clicked. My reflection in the narrow office window caught the dim glow of the exit sign beyond. And in that red half-light, I saw movement—something tall, crossing between doorways.

A shape.

I ducked under the desk, barely breathing, eyes fixed on the crack of light under the door.

The steps stopped just outside. A shadow fell across the floor. Two thin shapes extended downward, and I realized they weren’t ears—they were the tips of something longer, bent forward, brushing the door.

Then came a soft, dragging whisper: “You said you’d help.”

It was right against the door now. I could hear the sound of fabric shifting, like a costume rubbing against itself, damp and heavy.

I wanted to scream. Instead, I crawled backward until I hit the filing cabinet. Something rattled above me—keys, swinging gently from their hook.

When I dared look again, the shadow was gone.

I waited another minute before unlocking the door. Every instinct told me to stay put, but the noise hadn’t come back, and the silence was worse. I needed to see where it went.

The hallway outside was empty.

But down by the gym, the exit door was open. Not wide—just enough for snow to drift through in a thin white line.

I approached slowly. My shoes squeaked on the tiles. Cold air poured in, carrying the smell of wet fabric.

Footprints marked the floor—bare, human, and small. They led away from the door, across the hall, and into the cafeteria.

I followed them.

When I reached the doorway, I stopped dead.

The figure stood by the serving counter, back turned. Steam rose faintly from its shoulders, and beneath the blackened fur of the costume, something pulsed—too slow to be breathing, too steady to be heartbeat.

It turned its head, but not its body. The head rotated a little too far. The eyes glinted dull white.

“You promised,” it said again.

Then, as the words left its mouth, the PA system buzzed to life above us, and every speaker in the school whispered the same phrase, overlapping, out of sync:

You promised. You promised. You promised.

I stumbled backward, tripped over a chair, and crawled for the door. The figure didn’t chase me. It just stood there in the dim red glow of the exit light, watching.

When I finally reached the hallway, I slammed the cafeteria door shut and wedged my mop handle through the bars. My hands were shaking so hard I could barely fit it through.

Then the laughter came again—this time from behind the door, muffled, dozens of voices giggling together like kids hiding in the dark.

I backed away, heart hammering.

It wasn’t laughter anymore. It was something trying to remember how to sound like laughter.

Part IV

By the time the laughter stopped, I was halfway down the hall, hands pressed to my ears, breathing like I’d run a mile. I ducked into the nearest classroom and locked the door behind me.

The smell of dry-erase markers and old carpet hit me all at once—normal smells, grounding smells—and for a second I could almost pretend the world outside the door was the same as it had always been.

But I knew better.

Something about that voice—about the way it said my name—had reached back to a place I hadn’t thought about in twenty years.

I slumped into one of the desks, trying to slow my thoughts. The school’s ventilation rattled overhead. I remembered being thirteen in that same building, sneaking into the basement with my friends after practice.

We’d dared each other to find the old costume.

It was supposed to be down in storage—past the boiler room, in the corner where they kept the outdated band uniforms and folding chairs. Someone’s older brother said you could still smell the smoke down there.

I hadn’t believed it until I saw it.

The plastic storage tub with the melted lid. The fabric inside that still held its shape. And the tag, half-burned, with the name Calvin Dorrance stitched in red thread.

My friends thought it was hilarious. We used to make up stories about how Calvin’s ghost still walked the gym during pep rallies, still looking for someone to “finish his act.”

That night, we took turns touching the suit, daring each other to put it on. I’d gone last.

When I slid the mask over my head, the inside was slick—almost oily—and it smelled like something between wet dog and copper. My friends said I stayed still longer than I should have, like I was listening to something none of them could hear.

Then I’d whispered, “He says it’s cold.”

I didn’t remember that part until right now.

We’d left the storage room door open when we ran, laughing the whole way up the stairs. The next morning, the janitor—old Mr. Riegler—was found at the bottom of those same stairs. Broken leg. Concussion. He told people he’d fallen, but the rumor going around was that someone pushed him.

After that, they padlocked the basement door.

And now, all these years later, I was the one holding the keys.

I don’t know what made me do it. Maybe guilt, maybe curiosity, maybe the part of me that wanted to prove there was still a logical reason for everything happening tonight. But I left that classroom, retraced my steps to the maintenance hallway, and dug out the ring of master keys from my belt.

The air felt heavier the closer I got to the basement. Dust sifted down from the ceiling with every step. The door’s padlock hung from a rusted hasp, the metal pitted and scarred. I slipped the key in, turned it, and heard the click echo down the stairwell like a gunshot.

Cold air rose from below—stale, dry, faintly chemical.

I pointed my flashlight down the steps.

The storage room was just as I remembered it. Metal shelves. Boxes labeled UNIFORMS and PROM DECOR 1985. But the tub that used to hold the costume was gone. In its place was a smear of black across the concrete, like something had melted and soaked into the floor.

I crouched to look closer. The beam of my light caught a bit of torn fabric—matted gray fur—and beneath it, something hard and shiny.

A zipper pull.

It was still warm.

That’s when the intercom above me crackled to life again, even though there weren’t supposed to be speakers down there.

A soft, childlike voice said, “You left the door open.”

I turned so fast I nearly fell over. The door at the top of the stairs was ajar again, letting in a sliver of light from the hallway.

And behind it, silhouetted in that light, was a shape I’d started to recognize all too well—tall, thin, with long, rounded ears brushing the frame.

I froze halfway up the stairs.

“Calvin,” I said before I could stop myself. “You shouldn’t be here.”

The voice that came back was calm. Gentle, even.

“You let me in once.”

Its hand gripped the doorframe—fingers too long, the skin stretched thin and pale beneath the matted fur.

“You promised to help me finish.”

I tried to speak, but my throat felt locked.

It stepped forward, the air around it humming faintly, like static before a lightning strike. Its face was still hidden by shadow, but the shape of the muzzle—the seams of the mask—were all wrong, melted into the skin beneath.

“Just one more show,” it said. “Then I can rest.”

I backed down the stairs, the beam of my flashlight shaking across the walls. The thing followed, slow but steady, one hand sliding along the concrete as it descended.

I hit the bottom and bolted for the utility room. My flashlight bounced off pipes and old paint cans as I stumbled inside, slammed the door, and locked it.

From the other side came a quiet tapping.

Once. Twice.

Then: “Let me in, please.”

It wasn’t a demand. It wasn’t a threat.

It was a reminder.

Part V

I don’t remember unlocking the door.
One minute I was huddled against the cold metal, whispering “please go away” to no one, and the next the latch was sliding open under my hand like it had been waiting for me to give in.

The hallway beyond was dark. Every emergency light along the ceiling burned low and red, throwing just enough glow to paint the walls in streaks. The air smelled of burned plastic and something sour underneath—like damp fur left too long in a dryer.

At the far end stood the thing that used to be Hoppy.

The costume hung in shreds, fur melted into the skin beneath. Its eyes had gone soft and wet, moving like something alive behind a mask. Smoke curled from its mouth with each shallow exhale.

It stepped closer, bare feet slapping the tile.

“You left the lights on,” it said softly, voice echoing from the PA at the same time, repeating itself down the corridors. “You left the door open.”

I backed away, flashlight shaking in my grip.
The beam hit its chest—blackened fabric, stitched over and over in red thread. A single zipper ran crooked down its torso, half fused shut with melted nylon.

Inside the gap, something pulsed faintly, like a second heart.

“Calvin,” I said, though it didn’t really look like anyone anymore. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

It tilted its head. The skin around the muzzle cracked, revealing teeth—real ones, human, burned to the gum line.
“Cold out here,” it whispered. “Let me in, please.”

I took another step back and my heel struck the pull handle for the fire alarm. The thought barely formed before instinct took over. I grabbed it and yanked.

The siren’s scream ripped through the building. Red strobes burst to life, flashing off every polished surface. Sprinklers kicked on a heartbeat later, raining cold water down in silver sheets.

The thing convulsed.
Steam poured from the seams of its body. The fur hissed and bubbled, curling away from the skin beneath until the smell of wet ashes filled the air.

“Help me finish!” it howled, and for a moment I saw the boy inside—just a shape writhing beneath the ruin of a mascot’s grin. Then its voice fractured into static, echoing through the intercom until every speaker in the building screamed the same three words.

Let. Me. In.

I stumbled backward, slipped, hit the floor hard enough to see white. Water flooded across the tiles, carrying scraps of gray fabric past my fingers. When I looked up again, the hallway was empty except for the flicker of the alarm lights and the echo of dripping water.

I must’ve passed out there.

When I came to, the sirens were gone and daylight was spilling through the windows. Police tape hung across the gym doors. An officer was talking to the principal near the front office, both of them whispering in the way people do when they’re trying not to admit they’re scared.

They said they’d found me unconscious by the back exit, holding a melted piece of latex shaped like a rabbit’s ear. No footprints outside. No signs of forced entry.

They asked what happened, and I told them the truth—the only version I could get through without shaking. They wrote it down, nodding politely, pretending to believe me.

Before they led me out, I glanced once more toward the cafeteria hallway. The puddles there had already started to dry, but in the thin film of residue left on the glass of the exit door, someone—or something—had traced a message with a wet finger.

let me in please