This was written as part of a writing challenge on another website, but since it’s horror, I’m posting it here too. 

Three lads. Early twenties. All perpetually horny and testosterone fuelled.

One text message, so easily led.

A Whatsapp group several seconds later.

“I just got a text from Mike saying the weirdest shit.”
“Yeah me too.”
“WTF i just got one!”

Various screenshots loaded in the chat, proving the same message thrice over.

Rumours of a gory hole in the old abandoned library toilets. gonna drive over if you’re coming, my place at 10-ish.

As you might imagine, the three assumed he meant glory hole, and didn’t have to be asked twice. Each one made their way to their mutual friend’s place, but when they got there, it was dark and nobody was to be found.

“Fucking wanker. He’s full of shit, it’s a wind-up”, Jack blurted out.
Noah just stood there looking dejected.
“Fuck it, let’s just walk to the library anyway, it’s not far”, Liam said, dropping his most recent rollup on the ground and stubbing it out with his boot.

It was raining lightly, and nobody had prepared for rain so their shirts and hoodies got damp pretty quickly, but they weren’t letting wet weather ruin the potential for getting a no strings blow job, plus they wanted to see what kind of other people might turn up. They were absolutely going to take photos and clips and upload them to facebook in an effort to shame any freaks they found.

These boys were not the smartest, especially when they were thinking with their testicles.

The library was on the other side of town, zero lighting and heavily dilapidated. The architecture was something out of the seventies, and the old decor was never updated. The glass doors were shattered and buckled, and the once bright orange foam filled seating inside was now ripped apart and covered in mould and dust. The bookcases had been dismantled in parts, and tipped over in others. They had to use the light from their phones to see where they were going, lest they walked into a fallen case or a broken beam. Any beams that had fallen were rusted and sharp in places, so they had to take care to avoid injury.

Noah was mashing a text message into his phone back to Mike, who was the original sender, telling him he was a fucking bell-end for the wind up and could fuck off. He didn’t get a response right away.

The lads were climbing over piles of abandoned books, their phone lights waving about in the darkness, and curtains of dust flying up the further they went in. A lot of coughing and sneezing happened, but nobody seemed to realise that aside from the noise they were making, the place was deathly silent for somewhere that supposedly held a glory hole in the depths of the basement toilets. They hadn’t noticed in the dark that there were no other footprints in the dust, no new pathways made by scattering those old dishevelled books, and no signs of anyone else being in the building for a very long time.

The reached the stairway, the large brown double doors held open by old bricks. Jack shined his phone light down to reveal they would have to go down three flights to reach the toilets. They weren’t even talking to one another at that point, they just scuffled down the steps, knocking any fallen books or debris out of their way.

Noah’s phone beeped loudly which made them all jump slightly and Liam swear under his breath. Mike had finally responded to his jabs, and said he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. He wasn’t at home, but he was in the middle of nowhere with his girlfriend and hasn’t sent any texts to anyone because he couldn’t keep a decent signal.

Noah shrugged it off as part of the wind-up and called him a fucking wanker out loud, and didn’t bother to respond.

They were finally down in the basement. The toilets were behind two huge grubby double doors, much like the ones at the top of the stairs but these were heavier and were painted a dark green colour. They had been damaged by folks using keys to scratch their names and various pieces of lewd commentary on them, and people using marker pens to sign their names as is tradition on entry to a public access toilet.

The two handles in the middle were held shut by a heavy chain, that upon inspection looked untouched for a very long time.

“Fucking Mike”, Noah spat. “It’s all been a fucking wind-up to get us in here, he was taking the piss. There’s nobody here, it’s a waste of time.”

The heavy chain unravelled and fell to the floor with a horrific clanging slam that echoed off the walls, sending fresh dust crumbling from the tiled ceiling. Jack covered his nose and mouth and coughed into the sleeve of his hoodie. A singular light flashed through the glass of the now unchained doors, and a faint giggle rang out from behind them.

“There’s someone in there!” Liam said excitedly, barreling through the doors with his full weight. The other two followed suit, but Noah was a little less enthusiastic. He knew something wasn’t right about this, but his boner cancelled out a lot of the apprehension and he carried on anyway. The same light that flashed through the window was jiggling about in the toilet cubicle right at the end. The door to the cubicle next to it was wide open, and the boys hurried over, ignoring their surroundings that if they had paid close attention to, they would have run out of there faster than they went in, but it was dark and all they could focus on was getting to the feminine giggling and flashing light.

It didn’t matter that nobody else was there.
It didn’t matter that the heavy double doors closed slowly behind them, and that the chains snaked up and coiled themselves around the metal handles, locking shut.
It didn’t matter that they’d missed the dessicated corpses in the dark corners of the toilet, piled up in the other cubicles out of sight behind their locked doors.
It didn’t matter that it wasn’t actually Mike that had sent the message.

A strangely soft light illuminated the cubicle, and compelled the boys to enter. It seemed larger somehow, that all of them would be able to go inside with no issues, when in reality a single cubicle would barely hold an adult and a child. They moved in slowly, silently but completely of their own accord. The same soft light above them also shone through a hole in the cubicle wall, and the softest of whispers and giggles wafted through it.

“I’m hungry”, it said. “I’m SO hungry and I’ve been alone here all night with nobody to play with. Play with me.”

The soft giggling turned into a more sinister cackle, and suddenly multiple whispers crept out around them, filled with harsh edges and sharp tongues. The voice turned into a wall rattling roar, an angry snarling brimming with hatred and ravenous hunger.

“PLAY WITH ME”, It demanded, turning into a shriek that made the boys cover their ears in terror.

They all tried to fight their way out of the cubicle yelling for help, but nobody was listening. The door was solid and no amount of battering it would open it. Jack was the first to be taken. He was grabbed and flattened against the side with the hole, and his clothes ripped and shredded, flying away from his body leaving him naked. He started to scream as the whispers around them grew louder, and stabbed at his skin, flaying him until he was a mass of dripping muscle and sinew. When his ability to scream was suppressed, all he could manage was a dull rasping noise as his organs were ripped from his skeleton, his eyes exploding with the pressure. He was consumed, sucked through the hole in the cubicle wall, whilst the whispers grew louder and groaned in satisfaction. His skinless bones collapsed to the floor just as Liam was pinned on the other side, his clothes tearing from his body, his phone flying out of his hand and smashing against the floor. Noah watched in wide eyed horror as his best friend’s flesh was ripped from him and whirled through the air and into the gaping maw that was significantly wider.

He tried to dial for help, but his phone was yanked away and flew down into the toilet bowl with a loud clatter, smashed to float in the water. The fingers on both of his hands were wrenched open from his palms, and broke simultaneously in wrong directions, leaving them looking like they’d been through a grinder. His screams previously high pitched, turned hoarse as an unseen grip circled itself around his throat. The last thing he saw was the slippery mess of Liam’s defleshed skeleton hunched over on the floor, as his own eyes exploded from the pressure of the hand around his throat.

Everything went dark. The pressure in his head was relentless, and then suddenly there was nothing as it exploded in much the same way a ketchup sachet would if you squeezed it hard enough.

Nobody was there to see the flesh rend from his body, or witness the pools of blood seeping across the cubicle floor, only to be sucked up through the hole in the wall. Nobody saw the harsh whispers suck the marrow out of their bones, or the way their sharp tongues licked the blood from them. Nobody was there to watch them dessicate and age, and crumble into the corner, dead to the world.
The library had closed down many years ago, before the boys had even been born. It was afflicted with a high staff turnover, dangerous conditions on the lower floors, and increasing levels of staff illness. People were often seen leaving the town as it seemed grim and miserable with no real prospects for anyone. The truth is that nobody ever left the area, and the staff were still very much there. It’s just they were piles of rotten old bones and forgotten memories.