PATH project- enjoy!

TAP, TAP

Something was tapping at Molly’s window.

She yawned, shuffled out of bed, and went to see who it was. She looked down, but nobody was there. Maybe it was a bird, she thought. Like an owl or some other night hunter.

Molly was hungry, so instead of going back to bed, she decided to make a sandwich. She pulled her teddy bear out from her sheets, and cuddled him. She peeked around the door, and saw a sleek black cat chasing a mouse down the hall. “About time you got to work Moggy!” She whispered. She took a few quit steps down the hallway to the kitchen, then stopped. “Wait a minute,” she thought, frowning. “Moggy is orange!” She looked back to where the cat had been, but it was gone.

She tiptoed down the hall, even though she knew her dad wouldn’t wake up until noon on nights he went to his friend’s house. When she got to the kitchen, she carefully opened the cupboard and ducked. She looked up: no mice. She grabbed the peanut butter and put it on the weathered counter.

Opening the fridge, she poked around until she found jelly. It was peach. Why in the world would her dad buy peach jelly? He hated peach jelly! That made absolutely no sense at all. Shaking her head, she closed the fridge door, turned around, and got some wonder bread out of the bread box.

With everything on the counter, she got out a knife and started to spread the peanut butter on one of the slices. Then she carefully spread the jelly on the other slice. She looked up at her teddy bear, who was sitting on the bread box. Molly thought back to when her mother showed her how she made a PB+J for her school lunches. She had loved wondering what her mom had written on the note she always put in her paper sack lunch. Now she had to buy lunch at school.

Molly grabbed her sandwich, a paper plate, and her teddy bear and walked out the door to sit on the steps outside her house. She started munching on her sandwich while looking out on the dark black street. Plastic bags, leaves, old newspapers and other junk blew down the street. If her dad knew Molly was out on the street at night he would have had a fit. Normally she wouldn’t even think of being out on the street at night, but somehow it just seemed right at the moment. She heard a rustling to her left. “Hello little girl.”

Molly gasped. Then, very slowly, she turned around. It was a shaggy, messy, hairy old man. She exhaled and untensed. She recognized him- he was the man who sat at the corner next to the grocery. She had no idea why anyone would want to live on the street, just that her dad always walked faster whenever they came to his corner. She always smiled at him, and he always smiled back. But she had never seen him away from his corner, and she certainly didn’t know what he was doing in her neighborhood. Also, why was he awake this late? She was fairly certain he wasn’t getting a sandwich. But she was pretty sure she was safe, and she smiled. “My name is Molly.”

“Hello, Molly. May I ask just what you doing up so late at night?” he asked with a terribly rough voice that sounded like he had not drunk anything for days.

“I wasn’t tired. May I ask just what you are doing up so late at night?” She said stiffly. She didn’t like it when people asked her questions.

The corners of his mouth twitched in the beginning of a smile. “I wasn’t tired,” he replied, “and I’m going downtown. Would you like to come with me, Miss Molly?” He asked as he gestured down the street.

Molly looked back at her house. Then she looked down the street. She looked back at her house. Then she turned to the man. “Yes. I would definitely like to go with you.”
He smiled warmly. “Come on then. We’d better hurry, or we’ll be late.” His grin faltered a little. “And we wouldn’t want that, would we?
“Why not?” Molly asked, curious. He didn’t respond, but turned from her and started walking down the street. She set her teddy bear down on the steps, patted its head, and went to take a bite of her sandwich.... which had disappeared. She frowned. She must have finished it during her conversation, but she couldn’t see her paper plate. She turned to look behind her, then froze.
Molly thought she saw something in the corner of her eye. It flickered, a bit like a candle flame. She turned around to get a better look, but it was gone. Molly stood there for a second, but then she felt something was watching her. Scared, she ran back up the street to catch up to the man, who was quickly and steadily walking up the street.

It was dawn. The streetlamps were turning off, the sun was rising. Molly had never been this far from her house before. Even her school bus didn’t go out this far. And she was so tired. She wished she were back in bed, but somehow she felt she simply couldn’t miss... well, whatever it was that the man was taking her to.

“And here we are!” the man shouted, a huge smile playing itself against his rough, scruffy face. He pointed toward a very large empty looking building with tall smokestacks on top, which Molly guessed to be a factory. Just looking at it made Molly think of terrible emptiness. Her father had told her it was actually pretty scary how many factories were closing down nowadays. Molly believed him: the old building was really giving her the creeps. She squeezed her teddy bear for comfort, then paused, confused. Hadn’t she left her stuffed bear back at the house? Now Molly was really scared: what was going on?

“What is it that you needed to come here for?” Molly asked tentatively. The Man had started walking towards the big metal doors that were the front entrance to the factory.

He paused at the door. “It’s... a gathering of a sort. For people like me. You’ll like them, I think. Don’t worry,” he said as he saw her open her mouth to speak. “ Nobody uses the building. Nobody cares if were here.”

That wasn’t at all what Molly was about to ask, but she just shrugged her shoulders and ran up to the door. She set her teddy bear down on the steps, and looked up at the Man.

“Ladies first,” he said, bowing deeply and chuckling as he turned the doorknob, which was evidently unlocked as the door swung wide open. She thought that was a little odd, a door to a great big building like that being unlocked, but she was no expert on old abandoned factories, so she kept quiet and walked through the door.

Immediately the door slammed behind her, leaving her all alone in the cold and the smothering darkness of the horrible abandoned factory.

After a few seconds of absolute terror, the lights flickered on, and Molly noticed two things. 1: She was standing at the beginning of a long stone hallway that ended in a “T”. 2: She was holding her teddy bear again. Molly was so scared she would have thrown it down the hall, but she thought it would just come back, and she would probably have a heart attack if it came back again And, you know, it was her teddy bear. You just can’t throw those guys.

Molly turned around to try to open the door, but it had no doorknob or latch or anything. Who would make a door that was impossible to open from the inside?

She waited for a few minutes for the man. After all, Molly thought, he didn’t seem mean. Maybe the door was too heavy for him to keep open. Maybe someone (Molly guessed the police) had come running and he had to run and hide? Maybe he was a criminal?  But he would come back for her, right? Nobody would shut a little kid in a abandoned factory! Or would they?

Molly felt a chill go through her. She remembered seeing “lost children” posters in the post office. Kids who had been kidnapped. She had asked her dad why anybody would do something like that to a kid, and he had said, “sick people, Mol. Very sick people.” She had a feeling he hadn’t been talking about a cold.

Her dad would notice she wasn’t at home soon. He would find her. Right? No, of course not. Even if he did run around the whole city, he would never think to look here. She sighed, and decided nobody would come for her.

She had two choices: stay here and rot until somebody found her, which could be months, or even years. Or she could go down the hallway, and look for an exit. Then she could find her way home, she was certain. And even if she couldn’t, anything would be better than this horrible, dark hallway.

Having made up her mind, Molly ran like heck toward the end of the hall way, then screeched to a stop. She looked down both hallways. She didn’t see any difference between the two, so she went down the left one first. Seeing no door at the end she went back to the first hallway, only to find.... That it wasn’t the first hallway. There was no door at the end of it. It was identical to the right one, and the one she had just been down.

Molly gulped. She had only one option now: run until she found an exit. She took it. Molly ran through hallway after hallway and kept running.

Then she got hungry, and she slowed a bit. She took a quick bite of her half eaten PB+J. Then she stopped running altogether. She was certain she had finished that at home. But, she was hungry, and when she was hungry, she ate.

Then she took off running again. She was going so fast- she had never been able to keep up this pace in gym class. As she ran, the walls seemed to be stained green, like the walls outside of Molly’s school, and cracks appeared, making strange designs fly past Molly as she made her flight through the halls. Green stain turned to green vine and cracks turned into old bricks- Molly liked these hallways a lot better- they made her feel like she was outside again.

Molly thought she had been going fast, but now she was going faster. She felt her bear drop from her hands, but sure enough it returned in a few moments time. Now the walls were blurring- but Molly could see the walls getting greener and greener, as if nature was quickly taking over the once stone walls. She felt the halls get darker and looked up; the vines were closing in on the overhead lights, covering them up.

Panicked now, she cried out and ran even faster. Molly could no longer see anything but green on the wall, and now vines were growing over the floor too. she tried to avoid them, but it was getting harder and harder to see- the vines were clearly winning their battle against the lights.

Worse, Molly could feel something running next to her: the same thing she had seen in the corner of her eye at her house. She couldn’t see it- it was still slightly out of her vision- but she didn’t want to see it anyway.

It was so dark now she could barely see anything- but then, against wall to wall green, was a faint grey rectangle. She cried out in joy, and stopped right in front of a door.  And this one had a doorknob. She reached out to grab it, but the thing that had been following her intercepted her.

It was the most horrible thing Molly had ever seen.

Molly suddenly sat up in bed, coated in sweat and out of breath. She let out a huge breath and flopped back on her pillow- it had only been a dream. Taking huge gulps of breath, she got out of bed ( leaving her teddy bear) and started down the hall toward the kitchen- she was still hungry from her “run” through the ivy covered halls.

As she walked past, a fat orange cat watched a mouse as it ran right past its paws. “Good cat, Moggy.” whispered Molly as it stayed put.

As Molly got to the kitchen she grabbed the peanut butter from the cabinet, (after checking for mice, of course) and got the wonder bread out of the bread box.

Then she opened the fridge, and cautiously she searched for the jelly until she found a Smuckers jar. Almost too scared to read the label, she turned the jar over in her hand- and saw it was grape.

With a huge sigh of relief, she put the jars on the counter and started spreading the peanut butter while humming her favorite song. Smiling as she spread the grape jelly, she put the slices together and got a paper plate. Sitting down at the kitchen table, (she was never going to eat on those steps again in her life) she started munching on her sandwich. She paused mid chew- had she heard something? She strained her ears to listen.

Something was tapping on the kitchen window.