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| A Terrifying Taste of Short & Shivery: “The Girl in the Air Duct” |
You probably wouldn’t notice the vent unless you knew where to look. It's tucked in the corner of the old school basement, behind the boiler that groans like it remembers being young. The janitor, Mr. Keene, always kept it locked—even though everyone said no one used the basement storage anymore. But that’s not exactly true.
Two years ago, a seventh grader named Lila vanished during a fire drill. The alarms screamed, kids poured outside, and somehow—no one saw her go. They searched for weeks. Her backpack was found near the basement stairs, half-covered in dust. But the rest of her? Gone.
People whispered. Kids dared each other to go down there. Most ran back up after a few seconds, coughing and laughing nervously. But last Friday, Eli didn’t run. He went alone, flashlight in hand, phone recording like proof might matter.
He crouched beside the boiler. The vent was smaller than he expected. Rust ringed the edge where the lock had once been. Someone had snapped it. Inside, the metal tunnel stretched back into blackness.
He heard breathing.
Not the kind you imagine—this wasn’t your own heartbeat bouncing off pipes. It was soft, ragged, wet. And then a voice, almost a whisper: “I’m still here.”
Eli dropped the flashlight, and for a second, it spun and caught something in the beam—something pale, with too-long arms and fingers like coat hangers. A face with lips too dry to close, eyes that didn’t blink. A girl, sort of. A girl who’d been crawling through vents for two years, eating rats, forgetting sunlight.
He ran. Everyone says that. But Eli didn’t make it up the stairs. They found his phone outside the boiler room, still recording. The last frame shows fingers pulling something back into the dark.
Now the vent’s sealed with a steel plate.
But if you go down during lunch hour and listen hard enough…
You’ll hear breathing.
https://www.storywritinghub.in/2025/04/Boy-Hidden-Island.html
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