Misery Loves Company: Part 1
Original Horror Fiction: A Four-Part Ghost Story for Halloween Season
Editor’s Note:
In honor of Halloween Season, every Saturday this month, we’ll be publishing original horror fiction…Clay Boone’s “Misery Loves Company”, broken up into 4 parts. It's set at a real place: Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri. What happens there is his. Enjoy.
- Mike
I’ve never believed in what I couldn’t see.
That was before something gave me a reason to start looking.
It all started during the dot-com bubble burst of 2000. I was laid off from my job as a programmer. At that point, I didn't have two pennies to rub together. I was ready to take the first job that offered employment. On top of that, I was going through a nasty divorce and was at an all-time low in my life.
So, while job searching, I went for something easier and more familiar to me to wash the bad taste of my layoff away. I'd been in the military during the start of the Gulf War, and the camaraderie I felt took me back to happier times.
Fortunately, the first job that offered me employment was a military academy for high school and junior college cadets named Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri. The job title was training, advising, and counseling officer, or TAC officer.
Basically, I was to play the adult while the cadets played army. The pay wasn't great, but I got three square meals a day. I figured it'd be a nice break from staring at a computer all day. And with my previous military experience, how hard could it be?
The interview and hiring process was a breeze. After which they showed me around the campus. On the way out of the admin building we passed a hallway lined floor to ceiling with framed photographs, graduating classes, faculty, cooks, groundskeepers, going all the way back to men with handlebar mustaches. I remember thinking somebody must've had a hell of a time dusting them. First thing they showed me outside was the quad. It was the centerpiece to cadet life. The quad was a large slab of concrete in the center of the campus where cadets formed up every morning, afternoon, and evening.
But this time, they were formed up preparing for lunch. The scene made me smile. Like any old vet, I'm overcome with nostalgia way too easily. They had musicians in uniform, and the cadets executed military commands like the best of them.
I noticed one cadet on the side of the quad getting reprimanded. Over him was a female cadet in a drill instructor's hat with a shiny first sergeant rank on her collar. The first sergeant screamed cadence down at him as the other cadet struggled to do push-ups.
Just like old times.
The academy boasted a track, football field, ROTC course, indoor track, and four barracks facilities.
The grass around the buildings was pristine, especially around the World War I doughboy monument and the old Vietnam helicopter they kept on display. All the buildings were made of a uniform red brick produced in Lexington's local brick kiln over 100 years ago.
All the buildings had character in their old age, but none so much as Hickman Hall, the eldest building on the site.
The cracked face of Hickman loomed over the academy with dust caked window panes like lifeless eyes. Its great bell tower crumbling away beneath an endless sky.
Hickman was a rock caught in the streams of time, slowly eroding into sand.
However, the most peculiar thing about Hickman was the face in the third story window next to the bell tower.
That day was the first time I saw it. I say I'm an atheist, but it still kind of creeped me out. Had large empty sockets for eyes staring down at the passerby and a narrow human-like face surrounded by a fog-like dust. When I asked about it, the Commandant just laughed.
“Some cadet probably snuck up there and drew that with their finger. Came up a few years ago. If you take the job, you're going to hear all kinds of rumors and ghost stories about this place.”
“Hickman Hall is no longer structurally sound. That's why we don't use it. That's why we built Tillotson barracks. This is our newest barracks.”
I brushed it off and smiled. It's not like I believe in that stuff anyways.
He asked me if I were interested in the job.
By then, my interest had piqued. So, I took it without hesitation.
I had a week before I started. In that time, I had my old army uniform refitted, my boots, medals, and insignias all shined up. When I put them all on to my newly fitted, crisp uniform, I looked into the mirror at my clean-shaven face and chest full of medals. My dignity had returned. Like the last few months had never happened.
Sleep came with ease for the next week.
That is until the night before the job actually began.
I had dreamt I was patrolling the campus when I stopped by Hickman Hall. The lights in the building all turned on at once. So, naturally, I went to check the breaker. When I turned the corner past one of the windows, the lights suddenly went out.
And then there was that face with large empty sockets for eyes.
Black as the void, a hole you could fall into forever. Surely someone was inside just playing with me. So I went through the door.
The door was chained. When I went to open it the chain slid off. So, I pushed the old doors open. The creak of the hinges echoed down its empty halls.
I stepped up the stairs. They creaked under the weight of my foot. I looked down the hallways.
I looked left and right. My beam of light piercing the black. Dust, cobwebs, and furniture that seemed to have been just pulled out and forgotten. I felt a chill, as if the temperature had just dropped.
Strange.
It's midsummer.
I pulled my coat closer.
I took another look around, shining my flashlight inside one of the rooms.
Something moved in the beam.
More dust.
At first I thought it was drifting down from the ceiling, but it wasn't falling. Tiny specks of dirt hung in the air, trembling in place.
The hairs along my arms and neck began to rise.
A low vibration passed through the floor beneath my boots. I felt it more than heard it. The walls seemed to hum with it. Door frames shivered. Somewhere down the hall, glass rattled softly in a window.
The dust lifted higher.
For a moment, the whole room seemed to be holding its breath.
Then, as if a multitude of voices shared the same throat, a single word boomed through the halls.
“Look!”
I was jolted awake.
I sprung up from my bed, chest heaving, sweat dripping from my brow and stinging my eyes. I grabbed a glass of water and sighed a breath of relief. It was just some mild angst before this new job started, making its way into my dreams.
My first day of work, my fellow employees gave me the rundown on regular rule breakers and their offenses. By the end of my first month, I learned the kids' schedules and where to catch the smokers, cadets who hid from classes, who got too friendly with one another.
The kids there really grew on me and the majority of them were good kids. The rule breakers I broke down into three different groups. There were the edgy cool kids, the rebels, and then there was a small pocket of downright malicious cadets, who oftentimes held rank over their peers. Fortunately, the malicious ones I could count on one hand.
There was one I remember distinctly. His name was Jeremy Weaver. The only time Jeremy ever smiled or laughed was when he was doing something mean-spirited.
When the brat first showed up on my radar, it was around 2:00 a.m. one night during my first semester. Everything was peaceful with not even the sound of crickets chirping. Not a light shone in any of the barracks windows. I was patrolling around the Scholastic building when I heard muffled laughter coming from within the building, followed by a bone-chilling scream.
What the hell was that? I scrambled for my keys, fingers fumbling until I found the right one. The lock on the building unlatched. I continued my mad dash to the basement dark room where I could still hear laughter coupled with high-pitched pleas.
“Unlock the door! Let me out!”
The voice screamed between sobs. Outside the dark room, a group of cadets stood.
Weaver, who held the rank of first sergeant, stood with a sergeant and a private. They looked just as shocked as I was.
“Open the damn door,” I ordered.
They did as I commanded and snapped parade rest with scared eyes and stupid faces.
The room was pitch black. The light from the hallway only reached a few feet inside. The column of light from the outside revealed what they had done. They had tied a poor kid to a chair and locked him inside. In the center of the empty room was Cadet Dunston.
He was one of the new freshman recruits. There he was bawling his eyes out. His snot-covered mouth blubbered out sobs. His eyes were red with tears.
When I asked him why he was screaming like a stuck pig, he told me it was because there was a ghost in the dark room.
"There's something in here. Get me out of here."
I looked around. Back when anybody still bothered with a school photography club, this was where they'd developed their film. A couple of stained sinks sat along the back wall with an empty clothesline strung over them, and there was a red safelight above the door I'd never once seen turned on. The whole place still smelled like vinegar and old chemicals. Other than that, the only unusual thing was the chilling temperature of the room, which was most likely because of the fall weather. I shook my head and untied him. I told him there was no such thing as ghosts, but it did little to comfort him.
“I know what I saw in there, sir," he said.
My patience was growing thinner by the minute, so I sent him back to his bunk. I didn't know who was more annoying, the little squealer in the dark room or the three idiots I now had to deal with. Weaver told me they were initiating the new recruit into the company.
I guess Dunston had been the screw-up in the batch of new recruits. This made me even more furious.
I was about to send them reeling back to their bunks when I noticed something dangling above my head.
I pulled it down.
It was a wooden apple, red with a little green leaf, and some stupid message painted across it.
‘When all else fails, pray for a fire drill.’
I asked which one of them hung it there on the light, but none of them knew where it had come from. I figured they were pulling more shenanigans, so I made a show of my anger, and I dramatically slammed it into the garbage can. Then, sent them back to their rooms.
As the semester progressed, there was nothing unusual to report. Dunston left after only one semester, which was no surprise. Weaver and his accomplices had since lost their rank. But that wasn't the end of it.
On the last day before Christmas, as cadets left for home, I remember patrolling the campus one last time that evening.
Snow fell silently, blanketing the ground when I noticed a light hadn't been shut off. It was the basement of the Scholastic building, a dull red glow down in one of the window wells.
The dark room.
I rolled my eyes. One last trick on me before Christmas break. I unlocked the door. As a chill wind blew past me into the hallways, I shuddered. Took a deep breath, let the door swing shut behind me, and headed down the stairs. The red safelight over the dark room was on, the one I'd never once seen work, and the whole basement looked like a photo lab in some cop movie. I shut it off, thinking nothing of it. When something brushed the top of my head.
It was the wooden apple with its painted letters.
‘When all else fails, pray for a fire drill’
A sudden, more violent flurry caused the door that I had come through to swing open, smashing into the wall.
I jumped.
Jesus Christ.
I snapped the thin apple in two and threw it in the garbage.
Now, this was persistence, even for a brat like Jeremy Weaver.
I locked up and left for a long-deserved break.
Since I didn't have any money to spend on my holiday with friends and relatives, I spent it in the most unhealthy way possible.
Frozen pizza, Chinese takeout, booze, and researching the tragedies surrounding Wentworth Military Academy.
I guess I had become one of Wentworth's tragedies that Christmas break because, God was I lonely.
From what I had gathered, before the first brick of the academy had been laid, the town of Lexington, Missouri was rich with history.
Its most notable history went back to the Civil War. Lexington had changed hands and seen enough soldiers come through that half the old families seemed to have some story about it.
One of those stories concerned a boy named Daniel Keaton.
During one Union withdrawal, soldiers had been ordered to burn farms, barns, and houses that might provide food or shelter to the men following behind them. Families in the countryside had also taken to hiding their older boys whenever soldiers came through. Depending on who came riding up the road, a healthy boy could find himself carrying a rifle before supper.
I found Daniel's name in what was supposedly a transcription of a letter written by one of the Union soldiers to his wife. I couldn't find the original, and by then I'd learned not to trust everything floating around on local history websites.
Still, it was specific enough to keep me reading.
My Dear Sarah,
I pray you never know what it is to put fire to another man's home.
We were ordered to leave nothing which could be of use to those coming behind us. We burned two barns in the morning and a corn crib besides. Later we put the torch to several houses after the families had been driven out. I tell you this because I cannot tell anyone here.
At the last house a woman came running after us screaming that her boy was still below.
He had hid himself in the cellar when he saw the soldiers coming.
The house was already well afire.
I went back with Wilkes and another man whose name I do not know. We found the cellar door beneath the rear of the house, but smoke was coming through it so thick we could hardly see our own hands.
I heard the boy inside.
Sarah, I heard him.
I went down as far as I could and called for him. Something moved below me and then I felt his hand. He was a small fellow. I had hold of his wrist and thought for certain I had him.
Then part of the floor came down.
The heat drove me back and someone pulled me by my belt or I believe I would have remained there with him.
The boy was calling for his mother.
Our officers were shouting that we had to move. The enemy was too near and we could hear firing behind us.
God forgive me, Sarah. We left that boy beneath the house and rode away while it burned.
I have smelled smoke every night since.
According to the account, the boy was Daniel Keaton. The Keaton house had once stood on the same ground where Wentworth Military Academy would be built eighteen years later. And Hickman Hall was the first building they put there.
Many ghost websites cite Hickman’s haunting as a suicide. Some cadet back in '71 or '72, depending on which site you believed, and not one of them bothered with a name. I found no death certificates confirming any of it online. By then I was a few beers in and mostly skimming anyway.
I let out a sigh, looking back at the reflection from my computer screen. I looked old, too damned old. An uninvited image of my empty Saint Louis living room came to mind. Nothing left but a broken lawn chair in the center of it, before the divorce papers were even signed.
Misery loves company, even if the company is a dead kid in an old story.
My stomach rolled. I reached for the wastebasket beside the desk and spewed. Pizza and rice slop splattered through the mesh onto the floor.
No bag.
Of course.
We’ll end it there this week. Tune in next week for Part 2 of “Misery Loves Company”.
AUTHOR BIO:
Clay Boone is the author of Where Shadows Are the Darkest. He grew up in rural Missouri, where stories about the Civil War and Reconstruction were passed down through generations by word of mouth. That sense of lived history shapes everything he writes. His work blends the brutal realities of the post-war South with folklore, fear, and the religious tensions of the period. It is not gunsmoke and glory. It is the copper taste of blood, the smell of last night's fire, and the burning in your lungs when you run.
Read Clay’s Articles, HERE.
Visit ClayBoone.com
Buy The Book on Amazon: Where Shadows Are the Darkest
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