Forgotten Echoes

I teach at an old school built during the war. Maintenance once told me there were

tunnels under the building—bomb shelters, forgotten. Last month, a student disappeared

during detention. We searched everywhere, until a janitor found a loose tile behind the lockers.

Beneath it—stairs leading down. The air was cold, stale, humming with a low

electric sound. At the bottom, we found a narrow corridor lined with chalk drawings:

names, dates, faces with no eyes. One of them was the missing student’s—drawn

perfectly, but older. My flashlight flickered. In that flash I saw dozens of children

standing at the far end, motionless, mouths open as if screaming in reverse.