Young Explorers

When my best friend Riley and I were ten years old he convinced me there was treasure in the abandoned building over on 18th Street. Riley said it had once been a lavish home built in the late 1800s and had belonged to someone who made pianos. After the owner died someone else bought it and converted the three-story building into apartments, but the neighborhood was run down now and Kimball Apartments was shuttered. In my eyes it was still an iconic beauty with a turret surrounded by dilapidated old homes.

“It’s condemned. Why would treasure still be in there?”

“I’ve read about these old buildings. They always built secret passageways and vaults so the owners could hide their treasure,” Riley answered. He gave me that look like girls are so dumb.

We smuggled our way in through a broken window. Riley remembered to bring a flashlight and beamed it around the rooms. Our noses were assaulted with the smell of urine and empty rum bottles strewn haphazardly. I tried to breathe through my mouth. When I couldn’t I choked back nausea. We crept up the grand staircase, our sneakers leaving footprints in the dust. My eyes burned. We searched the rooms on the second landing. Soft wood floors creaked under our foot steps. “Let’s get out of here,” I whispered, my heart hammering in the eerie stillness certain I saw something scuttle from the corner of my eye.

“Big baby.”

I followed Riley up the rickety steps to the third landing. We didn’t see it right away. Moonlight slanted in from a broken window. Tattered wallpaper and the clink of rum bottles falling over didn’t prepare us. There, propped in the corner, a body without eyes.

Rats swarmed over our feet. We screamed until we couldn’t scream anymore.


Word Count: 299