The Night the Lights Went Out at Pepperdine, Installment Five

Todd felt his heart quicken with something he had rarely felt before - panic. It was true - he was a solid rock, the calm one, the rational one who could always see a soluation. He was always rational, except that he wasn't. Not this time, not when it came to Joy. He'd do anything for her, and now they were trapped inside of this builidng with no way out, no way to get her help.
"Do you swallow any of it? Spit it out!" Todd exclaimed, knowing that sheer panic was coming through on his voice. Scottie grabbed a trashcan and handed it to Todd. Joy luckily had not swallowed any of the pie, but she knew she was still going to have a reaction. She wasn't that allergic; she knew she wouldn't die, but she wasn't sure what exactly would happen.
"How allergic are you?"
"It's not that bad. I'll still be able to breathe."
"What can I do?" Todd asked, feeling fear run through his veins.
"Just get me some water. I'll be fine."
Todd jumped up and grabbed the flashlight from the floor where it had been resting. He rushed out of the room, letting the door close behind him.
"Are you sure you'll be okay?" Cedar asked, and Joy nodded before remembering that none of them could see her.
"I will be. I'll be a little uncomfortable, but I'll be fine."
"He seems like a really great guy. He really cares about you. You're lucky to have such a great boyfriend," Cedar said, thinking about her own boyfriend, who was often more like having a child than a partner.
"What, Todd? He's not my boyfriend. We're just...friends."
"Really? The way he looks at you, I just thought...I mean, he cares so much about you. It's obvious that the boy's in love with you."
"No, I don't think so. I mean, he's never said anything..."
"Joy, of course he hasn't. He's a boy. So tell me, do you like him?"
"I think I might, I don't know."
"Make up your mind. Boys like him don't come around every day."
Todd was back with a styrofoam cup of water in his right hand and the flashlight in his left. Sabrina was glad to be able to see again. The dark made her jumpy. Above their heads, something creaked and moaned.
"What was that?"
Scottie said "Pengilly" at the same time that Todd said "the wind."
Sabrina, afraid and guilible, believed the former.
"So, what now?" Scottie asked, seeming bored.
"We're going to be here a while, so we might as well get comfortable," Cedar said, wishing her sketch wasn't locked up across the hall.
"Are you sure you'll be okay?" Todd asked again, and Joy looked up at precisely the right moment to see the fear and love mingle in his eyes. Cedar had been right, she knew at that moment. Still, she didn't know how
to take the next step, or even what the next step was. When you look like you're twelve, boys don't exactly jump at the opportunity to be in a relationship with you, she'd learned. She nodded, closing her eyes. She could feel her mouth beginning to itch, and knew it was beginning.
"Truth or Dare?" Scottie proposed, and everyone but Sabrina groaned.
"I've never actually played before," she admitted shyly. There had never been time to stop and "play" since her feet hit the ground at fourteen months old. Her parents had never allowed anything different, and over time, she had become accustomed, and possibly even dependent, on working constantly.
"How is that possible? You were a teenager, right?" He said, chuckling inwardly.
"Not really," she admitted, as if she'd done something wrong. In Scottie's eyes, she probably had. She'd never discovered such a strong polar opposite before in her twenty-one years. She didn't understand how someone could be exactly the opposite of driven, exactly the opposite of herself, all play and no work.
"Okay, you first, then. Truth or dare?"
"Uh, truth. That seems safest." Todd and Joy were barely listening, but Cedar actually seemed interested in their little game.
"What is hottest about me? What's my best feature, baby?"
"You cocky bastard," Cedar said, smiling.
"I don't know..." Sabrina said.
"That's illegal. You have to answer."
"Well, uh, your eyes. You have pretty eyes." And she was right; they were a green-blue hazel. She wasn't telling him anything he hadn't heard before.
"Hey Todd, truth or dare?" Cedar asked.
 "Huh? Oh, I don't know."
"Truth or dare?"
"Fine, truth."
"How long have you been in love with Joy?"
He blushed bright red, but it was unnoticeable in the dim light.
"I don't have to answer that."
"Answer it. You can't back out of a truth. Rules of the game," Scottie said.
"I didn't agree to play this game."
"Dude, it's cool. We all know you love her. Just tell us all how long it's been."
"No comment."
Joy started scratching her hand, a result of the hives that were starting to spread over her skin.
"Are you okay?"
"No comment," she replied, sounding a little bitter.
"Joy, truth or dare?" Sabrina asked, sounding more sure of herself.
"Dare." Before Sabrina had even opened her mouth to issue the dare, Joy wrapped her itching hand around the back of Todd's neck and kissed him, finally doing the one thing he'd been hoping for for almost a year.
The wind - or the Pengilly ghost - howled again above their heads, but neither Todd nor Joy even heard the sound.

The Night the Lights Went Out at Pepperdine, Installment Four

"The Pengilly ghost?"
"Sure, Joseph Pengilly. He donated a bunch of money to Pepperdine a long time ago. There's a residence hall named after him, but they closed it this year, after the accident."
Scottie could dimly see Sabrina's face and smiled to himself. He'd always been an excellent storyteller. He had a knack for details and a penchant for making the close reality mysterious. His mother had pushed him to be an English major and be a writer, but that seemed like too much work. And he knew Englsih majors were weird; they all had a huge secret to hide.
"I know about Pengilly, but I've never heard about a ghost," Cedar said incredulously.
"Really? You mean, nobody told you about the accident?"
"I'm a senior," Cedar said. "I think I would've known about an accident if it happened while I was here. You're what, a freshman?"
"I'm not saying that you have to believe me. I don't care what you believe. But I blame Pengilly for locking us in this damn building. Especially after what I've heard."  He knew a little reverse psychology could go a long way, especially with Sabrina. She was the only one he really cared about scaring.
"What happened?" Sabrina asked, just as he'd known she would.
"Nothing major. Nobody died, not really, anyway."
"What do you mean, 'not really'?" Joy piped up.
"Well, the boy, he's still alive, physically. But mentally? He's gone."
"So what happened to him?" Joy asked.
"Oh, it doesn't matter. I shouldn't scare you." He smirked to himself.
"Dammit, tell us! What happened?" Sabrina demanded.
"A group of kids last Halloween decided to try to contact the spirit of Joseph Pengilly, and they succeeded. Four of them came out of it just fine, but the last one, I believe his name was Tommy, was never quite right again. They say that something terrible happened to her, but nobody talks about the details. They're too terrible. They say that those kids set the spirit of Joseph Pengilly free that night, a year ago. And I've heard that on Halloween night, when the curtain between reality and the spirit realm is the thinnest, he will now be able to roam freely. And I'm guessing he isn't happy. I sure as hell wouldn't be."
"Cut it out, you're just scaring everyone," Todd said, not feeling shaken himself, but knowing that this short little ghost story had affected Joy.
"The truth is a scary thing, my friend," Scottie said, extra cocky.
"So maybe this is because of some ghost, I don't care. What are we going to do about it?" Cedar asked curtly.
"What can we do?" Joy asked.
"Who has a cell phone?"
Scottie's had been smashed in the hallway, Cedar's was in the locked studio, and Joy and Todd never brought anything to distract from the music. They all looked hopefully to Sabrina, who only looked down at the ground.
"I don't have pockets in this outfit. My purse is in the theater."
"This is great. Just great." Scottie said, still thinking about the party he was missing. It was fun to scare the others, but not nearly as fun as tipsy girls in Halloween costumes. That was where he should have been, except that he wasn't. He was locked inside a damn building with four people he either barely knew or didn't like, as part of life's cruel, ironic karmic balance.
"We might as well get comfortable," Todd said, his right hand holding the flashlight, and his left hand trying (and failing) to touch Joy's shoulder affectionately.
"I'm hungry," Cedar said, looking around for a nonexistant vending machine.
"There are a few offices. Maybe there's some food in a mini-fridge." Scottie knew a lot about three things: storytelling, women, and food.
The first office was meticulously clean and didn't have a crumb of food left in it, so they moved onto the second one. It did happen to have a mini-fridge, but all they found was a half-melted stick of butter and an empty can of Sprite. The third office had a bit better prospect: inside the mini-fridge, they found two pies, still wrapped in Saran Wrap, with a note that said, "Sorry we missed you at Pie w/ the Pi Phis, Dr. B. Enjoy. -Jess"
Pies from a sorority - it doesn't get much better than that. Todd grabbed both of them and led the others into the bigger classroom on the island, next to the room he and Joy had been practicing in.
"How are we going to cut them?" Cedar asked, and Scottie laughed.
"We're just going to have to eat them." Todd set the flashlight down and tried to break a piece off for everyone. One of the pies was really sticky and didn't have a crust. He guessed it was pecan, and he started with that one. He handed the first piece to Joy, then Cedar and Scottie. Sabrina declined.
"I'm sorry, I just really hate pie."
"How can you hate pie?" Scottie asked, sounding shocked.
"I've just never liked it. Besides, I don't feel like eating. I just want out of here."
"That's not really an option. We're all stuck here, so you might as well eat something."
"I'm okay. Really."
Todd handed her a piece anyway, pushing it into her hand. She complained about it being on her hands.
"Just take a bite. We'll all do it together. One, two, three!"
They all took a bite, and Sabrina moaned quietly. It was amazing.
"Wow," was all she could say.
"It's good, isn't it?"
"Oh my God, I can't believe I thought I hated pie for so long. This is literally the best thing I've ever eaten."
"Told you so," Scottie said.
"What kind of pie was that? Hand me another piece. God, it's so good."
"It's pecan."
"Um, Todd?" Joy said, looking scared. Todd wondered if she'd heard something and bought into Scottie's ridiculous ghost story that wasn't really even a story.
"Yes?"
"I'm allergic to pecans."

The Real Installment Three

Sorry about the technical difficulties...

“What are you doing here?” Scottie asked, wishing he could see the girl’s face.

“I could ask you the same thing, but I won’t. Do you know what happened?”

“Uh, the power went out?” He couldn’t let her know what he’d done – bragging was the quickest way to get caught. He’d learned that the hard way once or twice. Because of this, he was a master at playing dumb. He could tell the truth, no problem, but the whole truth was a different story. It was honest, except that it wasn’t. It was brilliant.

“You’re a bright one, eh? Do you know why?”

“Do you?” He still hadn’t lied, something he was very careful about doing.

“No. I heard a girl singing and a soon as I stepped out of the studio the light got cut. Wow, listen to her. She’s still going. That’s incredible.”

“Damn, who is that?”

“Let’s go see.”

And so, the two of them stumbled down the pitch-black hallway together in search of this mysterious girl and her piano player. She was in a small classroom near the end of the hall, in a group of rooms situated on a sort of island. Two classrooms, three offices, a storage room, and the women’s restrooms were on the island, such that they didn’t touch the outside in any way. It also so happened that they were unaffected by the security system, which only locked doors which had a means, through an emergency exit, to the outside.

Just outside the door to the classroom, Scottie and Cedar ran into a third person: Sabrina. She still hadn’t recovered from the lights going out, though she had somehow made it out of the bathroom. She was going towards the voice, just as the other two were. When she saw them, or rather, saw their eyes, she screamed, a high-pitched ear-piercer that made the others jump and Joy stop singing.

“Todd, what was that?” Joy opened her eyes, but realized that it made no difference. She couldn’t see anything.

“The power went out. Somebody was screaming.”

“How long ago did it go out?”

“Two or three minutes, I’m not sure. I don’t count when I’m playing.” What he meant, though, was that he couldn’t focus on anything else when she was singing. It was like his whole world revolved around her for those few moments, and nothing else existed.

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“Should we see who screamed? Nobody’s supposed to be in here.” He changed the subject as smoothly as possible, which wasn’t very. They opened the door and he placed his hand on her shoulder, hoping she wouldn’t pull away. She didn’t, surprisingly. Three pairs of eyes stared back at them.

“Who’s out there?” The five quickly exchanged names, but without being able to see one another, names were pointless.

“The generator should have kicked on by now. These buildings have emergency lights,” Todd said, trying to reassure everyone. He was the calm one, the solid rock, as Joy described him. But she wasn’t looking for a solid rock. She’d made that clear enough in the past.

“They would have come on by now,” Sabrina said, her voice shaking with fear.

“She’s right, actually,” Scottie said, smirking to himself. He just had to find his way to the door and he’d be out of here, on his way to a beach party with more beer than even he’d know what to do with. And with beer, there were always hot girls. And with hot girls, there were always less hot, more desperate friends. It was his kind of party.

“Which way is out?” Sabrina asked, not knowing which direction to turn. It was so dark she couldn’t even see her hands shaking in front of her face.

“Just walk along the edges and start trying doors. The ones to the outside will open.” Todd said.

The five split up and walked the whole perimeter, but no doors opened. They were all locked from the outside and wouldn’t budge. Scottie said a few choice things that made Joy cringe. Sabrina would have said something rude about how immature he was, but she wasn’t thinking clearly. All she wanted was to get out of this building. She knew she hated Thursdays for a reason.

“Why won’t the doors open?” Cedar asked, but no one had answer.

“I have a master key,” Sabrina whispered, and the others yelled at her in frustration.

“Why didn’t you say something before?” Todd asked, his voice level.

“I don’t know…”

“Hand it to me.”

He tried it in all the doors along the perimeter, but nothing happened. He found that he could open the doors on the island, and they crowded into the storage room, which was closer to a closet than anything else.

“I think I found…Yes, I did.” Todd clicked on a flashlight, and everyone sighed in relief. He flashed it over everyone’s faces slowly, getting a good look at everyone.

“Hey,” Sabrina said, pointing at Scottie. “I know you. You’re one of those kids in my religion class that always pisses the teacher off. Do you have any idea how incredibly frustrating you are?”

He shrugged, noticing that she was the annoying assistant that he was supposed to be keeping out of the theater. He’d obviously done his job. And you know what? She wasn’t too bad looking, if she loosened up a little.

They left the store room, trying to find other ways out of the building. They heard something crash, and Sabrina screamed again.

“What was that?”

“What, haven’t you ever heard of the Pengilly ghost before?” Scottie asked, smiling to himself. He was going to enjoy scaring her.

The Night the Lights Went Out at Pepperdine, Installment Two

Nobody left any comments on yesterday's post! Remember, this is audience interactive - you can leave a suggestion for the plotline, setting, characters, etc., and I will try to incorporate them into the following day's installment. Use this power wisely! 

Joy kept singing as if nothing had happened. In fact, she hadn’t even noticed a change. She preferred to sing with her eyes closed, and had had this piece memorized for years. There was something very spiritual about feeling the music flow over and fill the air, and she didn’t want anything, including the cramped space and fading blue carpet of the practice room, to get in the way. The song had just turned minor, her favorite section of the whole piece. Todd had told her it was so beautiful it was eerie, what was exactly her intention.

Sabrina grabbed onto the faux granite countertop in the public restroom, her heart beating a bit too quickly. She wasn’t exactly afraid of the dark, but she was afraid of those things that might come out of it. She was also afraid of not being able to get back to the stage. She worried about the show not going on. She wondered what could have possibly gone wrong and how she was going to fix this problem. First, she had to find her way out of this dark bathroom.

She inched towards what she hoped was the door when a sound stopped her dead in her tracks. It took her about thirty seconds to be able to breathe again. She heard a voice, a high female soprano, and for that moment, she felt as if she’d been transported into a real-live horror movie. She never admitted it, but horror movies really frightened her. She couldn’t just tell herself it wasn’t real; it was as if her rational mind just disconnected from the rest of her.

Scottie wandered down the dark hallway, the dim light of his cell phone lighting his path. He was looking at his feet, to be sure he was keeping his footing, and never even noticed Cedar until he ran right into her. His phone fell from his hand and Cedar’s boot came down on it, smashing it into pieces. She screamed, not having expected to see another person in the dark hallway. He shouted loudly as well and scrambled for his phone, but it was too late.

Scottie was only a freshman, but what he lacked in age, he made up for in confidence and sheer impulsivity. He was from Texas, where “Go big or go home” was more than just a saying – it was a way of life. So, when the three boys came together with an initial plan, Scottie wanted to make sure it was done right. They couldn’t just flip the circuit breaker – they had to do something that wasn’t quite so easy to reverse. The show must not go on.

The prank had been Mike’s idea – a senior from Nor Cal who had been dropped from the theater program the year before for not taking it seriously. He was certainly taking this seriously. He knew that ruining tonight’s show would make for a perfect scheme of revenge, especially since this was in the only show in the school’s history that was only showing for one night. The easiest way to ruin it was to cut the power and the backup power generators to the building. For this plan, he enlisted two boys from his fraternity to help him – Peter, a kid whose parents forced him to choose Pepperdine over MIT and could rewire a computer in ten minutes flat, and Scottie, a boy with enough cockiness for the whole frat, twice over. It was a flawless plan, you know, except that it wasn’t. Not quite.

What the boys didn’t understand were the unforeseen consequences of cutting the backup generator’s power. Everyone found their way out of the auditorium and besides a lot of screaming and frustration from the cast, there weren’t any problems. Electricians were called, and would be out to fix whatever was wrong, but not soon enough. Classes weren’t meeting the following day; they had scheduled an off-campus faculty conference appropriately on the day after Halloween to allow students a day to recuperate, even if it would never be admitted out loud. It was a flawless plan, except for the fact that all the doors in the music building were locked, both inside and out, and could only be opened when the security system was online. It was connected to the backup generator. Five students were trapped inside a building where they shouldn’t have been in the first place, inside a building where no one would know to look for them.

The Night the Lights Went Out at Pepperdine

It was a day like any other, except that it wasn’t. It was a Thursday, Sabrina’s least favorite day of the week. It was also Halloween.

It was like any other in that Sabrina was working. She worked seven days a week, not because she necessarily needed the money, but because she needed the work. She couldn’t stand to be idle. She’d heard people use terms like “workaholic” and “pushy,” but she preferred ambitious, or perhaps driven. She knew where she was going, and didn’t intend to get there on cruise control.

One of her three jobs, the assistant to the assistant to the director, who was also the head of the theater department, was keeping her busy tonight. They were putting on a production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show in the auditorium, and she’d been running errands for the past two hours. She had stopped for a quick bathroom break when it happened.

The building was supposed to be empty; Cedar had caught a door just as a professor was leaving his office and she had hid in the bathroom until everyone was gone. It should have been empty, but she could distinctly hear a piano and a girl’s voice coming from somewhere down the hall. Cedar left her drawing of the New York City skyline on the table and stepped out into the hall to find that voice. She had taken three steps when it happened.

Joy had to prove herself, and she had brought Todd along for the ride. Auditions for this spring’s opera were in two weeks, and Joy had been turned down for too many roles because of her size. At 4’8” and eighty-five pounds, most directors took one look at her and assumed she was just a kid playing a joke. She had just celebrated her twentieth birthday, but most people treated her like a middle-schooler – immature and out of place. It didn’t matter how flawlessly she could hit a high C or how she could fill an entire auditorium with her voice, even without a microphone. It didn’t matter to them, but it certainly mattered to Todd. When it happened, neither of them stopped. Todd’s father had made him practice wearing a blindfold back at home; he didn’t need to see the keys to keep going, and he wouldn’t stop until Joy did.

Scottie snapped his phone closed and smiled. He only had one job: to make sure no one caught his two best friends, Mike and Peter while they performed the prank. It was simple, just a flip of a switch. It was getting in and getting out that was a little more difficult. There were people everywhere, cast members, stray audience members, tech crew kids, and that snarky assistant, Sabrina. The witch, as Scottie referred to her, always showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was one person they couldn’t afford to cross paths with. Mike had just called him, telling him that Sabrina had moved into the music building. He closed the door between the theater and the music building and stood on the other side of it, waiting to intercept her when she decided to go back in. He stood in that one spot as it happened, ready for the screams of the two hundred and fifty people in the audience one room away.

To My Viewers:

Alright, you've voted! I expect heavy traffic on these posts! 

I didn't post a blog last week, and decided I needed to make up for it, one way or another. I've decided how. 

Each day this week, I will post a one-page installment to a short story. If your suggestions are posted by midnight (Pacific Time) the day before, I will attempt to incorporate them into the story line (given that they are appropriate, and at least attempt to make sense). This gives you a whole lot of power, so use it wisely! 

Please enjoy Sabrina, Cedar, Joy, Todd, Scottie, and the other minor characters. They're working hard to put on a good show!

Publish Post

Eyes on the Ball

I’ve been lost for a long time. I’ve been in the same place for almost three weeks – nineteen days, to be exact. I’m not very far from where I used to work – I can still hear all the people I worked for. I originally only had one boss, bus she passed me on to the others. She used to come by quite often, but in the past few months she’s been by less and less. She’s probably found another place she enjoys more, doing something she finds more enthralling. She loses interest more quickly than I’d like to admit – inside her home there are discarded musical instruments, aerobics videos, gourmet cookbooks, and yoga equipment. I spent a little bit of time there too, but I never stayed for long.

I hear them, not so far away, and I know I’ve been replaced. They don’t even remember me, I’ll bet, but I won’t ever forget any of them. Besides my boss, I have my favorites. Jesse is a CEO, and he comes out with his best friend from high school early in the morning sometimes just as the sun rises. Some people complain about waking up for work, but I love getting up and being able to help people after a long night.

JuliAnn is a young blonde just out of law school. I see her on her lunch-hour, with whomever she can convince to come with her. I feel for her – she’s in a high stress environment, and I know she doesn’t eat nearly enough. Obviously, since she comes here instead of having lunch, she has a problem. I try to boost her self-confidence as much as I can, but I’m not sure how much I can really do. I care about her, though, and I’ll do all I can.

Miriam and Joseph come by three times a week, precisely at ten. Sometimes I work with them, but often enough, they come prepared. They’re a beautiful couple; they celebrated their golden anniversary last January. They have fourteen grandchildren, but I’ve never met them. They’re very meticulous about their schedule, and children would get in the way. Overall, they’re so positive and a complete pleasure to work with.

There are others, but most people don’t come regularly. I recognize some of them, but I don’t know their stories. I’d be interested to know, but people are generally so reserved.

I can hear them – they’re so close. Eights pairs of tennis shoes squeak on the asphalt, a sound I used to love, when I could participate. There’s something so cathartic about my work, feeling myself fly through the air after feeling the hit. There’s nothing like it in the world, as far as I know. I haven’t done much else, though. I’ve only had this one job, one boss, since I was born, but I know it’s the one thing in this world I was created to do. I can just tell.

As I think about this, I hear a small girl screaming excitedly. I’ve never much liked children; adults are more interesting to me. I hear her, coming closer, and I hear something else, something that sounds like crazed, labored breathing. It’s coming closer, too. I feel something wet drop on me – it’s drool. Before I know it, I feel teeth close around me. I want to scream, but I can’t. No sound comes out.

“Buddy, what did you find?” The owner of the high-pitched scream yells. She wrenches me from the beast’s mouth and throws me as hard as she can, but I don’t go very far. The beast runs after me and picks me up with his teeth again. She keeps throwing me, and I keep wishing I could go back to being lost.