This Story Will DESTROY You

We need your help to keep tails from the break room and all of eeriecast alive. Go to eerie.fm. That's e-e-r-i-e.fm. And sign up to be a premium member. As a member, you'll never have to listen to another ad on any eeriecast show. You'll unlock dozens of hours of exclusive audiobooks including one narrated by me. You'll get exclusive shows and bonus stories you can't hear anywhere else, and more. Only $8 a month or $70 a year. That's all we need to keep the horror alive. Thank you. That's eerie.fm. Hi, welcome to Dad in Roaston. What can I get you? I need to be clear with you about the following story. This is not your usual scary story. This one is well written, darkly realistic, and very, very devastating. If you have trouble dealing with subject matter regarding harm against kids, then this one might not be for you. It's not graphic at all my stories never really are, but this one will make you feel dirty, and it will leave you wanting to cry. The story is titled "Everything I Never Know" from E.J. Walkins. (Music) My sister disappeared from a dairy plant in October of 2003 when I was 9 years old. The county still has the case open. Her name was Delilah. She was 8, almost 9 years old, and I was a year older. She had a stuffed daughter named Bean that came with her everywhere, and a small white scar in her chin from a porch step she'd fallen off of when she was 4. There was this thing she did where she would go really still right before she cried. Like she was holding a breath she knew would set her off if she let it out. I remember the day it happened. My mom had flown to Ohio because her mother had died, and the funeral was Saturday afternoon. Dad was supposed to take care of us for the weekend. He was a foreman of the cheese line at the dairy plant and had been there 12 years by then. Most days he left before we were awake. The phone in the kitchen rang at 508 that morning. I was already awake by then. Delilah had crawled into my bed sometime in the night with bean tucked under her arm, and I'd been lying there pretending to sleep so I wouldn't have to roll over and give her more room. I heard Dad answer in the kitchen, mumbling something into the receiver, then he walked into the hallway. After a minute he said, "No, I'll come," twice in the same low voice. He came into my room a few minutes later, and his jeans and a flannel shirt. He stood in the doorway for a long second, looking at the two of us in bed. I had my eyes just barely open, so he couldn't tell I was awake, but I could see him there. When he turned on the lamp, Delilah blinked and made a small sound, pulling bean closer. Gidds, "Hey, Eli, wake up, bud." I opened my eyes and pretended I was just waking up. Something's going on at work. I've got to go in for an hour, maybe two. I'm going to take you guys with me. Why can't we stay here? I tried Mrs. Adler, she's not picking up, and I'm not leaving you too alone here. Delilah set up and pushed her hair off her face. She told him her stomach hurt. He sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand to her forehead. Whatever he was feeling for, he didn't find it. You're not warm. You probably need to eat something. Come on. I don't want to go. Delilah, it's going to be one hour. You can watch cartoons. Nobody's there. I have to check on a tank, and I have to do it now. She looked at me. I shrugged. I was nine, and to me the dairy plant was interesting. We'd only been there once before, and I'd liked it. She held being close, and got out of the bed, walking down the hall to her room without another word. In the kitchen, dad poured cereal into two bowls and set them on the counter without milk. He was wearing his work boots by then, untied, so the lace is ticked on the linoleum when he moved. Delilah came back in a sweatshirt over her pajamas, holding bean by one foot. She climbed onto a stool, ate maybe four bites, and pushed the bowl away. "My stomach hurts." "You all feel better when we get there. I'll bring you crackers," my dad said. He was on the phone, and he wasn't really looking at her when he said it though. The drive was 26 minutes. The fields outside were silver with frost, and the sky was a deep before dawn navy. Delilah was in the back seat with bean on her lap, and her cheek against the window. "Daddy?" "Yeah honey. I don't want to go in." "Delly, we talked about this. My stomach hurts so bad." "You can lay down on the couch in the break room. I'll bring you some ginger ale." She watched the field instead of answering. The plant was on a county road off Route 30, all the way behind a chain-link fence and a sliding gate. Dad had a keep for the pedestrian gate and a different one for the side door near the loading dock. The main building was long and low, with the words "Hagner Valley Dairy," stinceled and faded green above the loading bay. No other cars were in the employee lot. He pulled around to a spot by the side door and killed the engine. The silence that came after made me realize how loud the heater had been. "I undid my seatbelt." Delilah stayed put. "Delly?" "I don't want to go in." Delilah Marie come on honey. "He's in there." I remember that moment. I recall thinking I didn't know what she meant at the time, and I didn't ask. Dad sighed and twisted around in his seat to face her. "Who's in there, baby?" "The shadow, man." He looked at me and once more I shrugged. I didn't know what to do with that information either. He turned back to her and his voice softened. "Del, there's nobody in there." I checked the cameras before we left the house. "Just me, you, and Eli." I promise. "I could tell she was trying not to cry." I told her it was fine. Being came inside with us. The side door opened into a vestibule with a shoe cleaning grate and a wall of clipboards. Dad punched a code into the inner door and held it open for us. The hallway beyond had the smell I remembered from a Christmas open house would bend to when I was six. It's hard to describe if you've never been to the dairy plant. Kind of like bleach, I guess? With that undertone of milk, he walked us down to the break room and turned on the lights as he went. Those fluorescent tube lights woke up two at a time with soft electric popping sounds. The break room had a folding table, a microwave, a vending machine, and a small TV bolted to a high shelf in the corner. The couch against the wall had clearly been somebody's living room couch before it got donated to work. Dad turned the TV on, flipping through to Cartoon Network and handed me the remote. Right, so the phone here goes to my office, numbers tape on the wall right there. If you guys need me, you pick it up and dial that. Don't go anywhere. Delilah, are you listening? Yeah. You stay in this room. Don't touch the microwave or open the back door, and don't go anywhere near the production area. I'll be back in an hour. Maybe a little more. Okay. Eli, watch your sister. You hear me? I hear you, Dad. He looked at her one more time. She was sitting on the couch with bean on her lap, and her shoes still on. He started to say something else. Then he changed his mind, and he kissed the top of her head, telling her he loved her, and that he'd be back soon. The sound of his boots faded as he went down the hallway. After that, I could only hear the TV and some refrigerator in the distance, somewhere deeper in the building, a steady sort of pulse. Delilah scooted closer to me on the couch. She'd pulled bean up against her chest with both hands tied around him. We sat there. The cartoons played. Eventually, the clock on the wall said it had only been 35 minutes. I'd lost interest in the show somewhere around the second commercial break. Delilah hadn't moved from her spot, and Bean had taken up his position against her sternum. I'm going to go look around. Eli? "I'm just gonna go look. That's not gonna care. We came here that one time and he showed us the tanks, remember?" "But he said don't leave." He said don't go to the production area. The break room is right by the offices. I'll just look at the offices. She didn't say anything after that. I stood up. The TV was loud now that I was paying attention to how loud it was. I told her I'd be 10 minutes. She went still again, meaning she was about to cry, so I sat back down. "Okay, okay, I won't go without you. Come with me. I don't wanna." "Delly, there's nobody here. Dad said. He said he looked at the cameras." She kept her face turned to the TV. What did you mean by "shadow man"? She looked at me sideways without turning her head. He's here. He stays in the corners. I don't see anything. He doesn't want you to see him. Bean was getting squeezed, so tight his head was at an angle. She's eight years old, I thought. She's making it up because she's scared and doesn't want to be here. You said you've seen him before? "The other time we came, he was up on the walkway." He didn't say anything then. I told mommy. What did mom say? She said it was a regular man. That seemed strange. I think now my mother probably said something else, and Delilah translated it through her own head, but at the time her response sat in my chest and didn't move from there. I told her I wouldn't leave her, and she could come with me, and if she saw him, she could tell me and we'd come right back. She thought about it. Then she got off the couch and put her hand in my hand. Bean came along by his foot. The hallway outside the break room ran in two directions. To the left was the way Dad had brought us in. The right was a long beige corridor with linoleum tile and a strip of black rubber baseboard lit by the overhead lights that Dad had switched on as he walked us down it. None of the doors had names on them. Just laminated sheets and plastic frames with what looked like codes written on them. Two doors I tried were locked. The third was a supply closet that smelled like bleach. Delilah pulled at my hand and I closed it. The corridor opened on the right into a wider space that I now know was the shipping office. There were two desks with old desktop computers and a cork board layered with paper schedules. Somebody's mug was on one of the desks with a brown ring inside it for mold coffee. The mug had a cartoon cow on it and it said, "Got milk?" We went on. The corridor tea intersected at the end. The left end had a heavier door with a small wire glass window and a hand-lettered sign that said, "Production, keep closed." The handle there didn't turn. I went back to the tea and turned right. Delilah came with me but slower now, looking back the way we'd come. I had to tug her hand a little to keep her with me. At the end of that hallway was a stairwell with a yellow railing and a doorway that opened onto a metal catwalk. The catwalk ran out over the production floor, ten feet up, and from the top of the stairs, you could see the whole room through it. Stainless steel tanks, tall enough to take up two stories, with pipes connecting them and small valve handles painted red and blue. Below the tanks, the floor was open to drains and washed and pale grey light from the high windows. This was the part I'd like the first time we'd come. I let go of her hand without thinking and walked out onto the catwalk to look down. The grading made a different sound than the linoleum had under my shoes. Behind me I heard her say my name. "Ely?" "Look, it's huge." "Ely, come back." I turned. She was at the doorway with both hands on the frame, not stepping out onto the catwalk. "It's safe. There's a railing here." I went to go back. One second. I leaned my forehead on the rail and looked straight down. The hum I'd been hearing in the break room was louder out here, low and steady, and I could feel it in the metal under my hands. When I turned back toward her, her face was pointed up into the right. Past me, at the far end of the catwalk, where it disappeared around the side of a tank. Her mouth was open. She was doing the still thing again. I looked where she was looking. The catwalk turned out of sight behind the tank, but I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. "What is it?" She didn't answer me. I walked back to her and took her hand again, and her hand was cold. "Delly, what did you see?" "He's down there now." I told her there was nobody, and I pulled her back through the doorway into the stairwell. Attention, all fans of horror. Darkness prevails here. Host of unexplained encounters. Tales from the break room and more. I'm so excited to announce the new Erie Cast platform at Erie.fm. I've been working years to create a platform like the Netflix of Horror Audio, and I've finally done it. And go to Erie.fm. That's E-E-R-I-E.f-M. To listen to all your favorite Erie Cast shows and get free full-length samples of members only content, like exclusive horror novel audiobooks you can listen to, or even read now in our built-in e-book reader, and exclusive members only shows like "Fractured Reality," where I narrate real people's stories about glitches in the Matrix. Come a member today, and you're not only helping me and all of Erie Cast survive and thrive, you're unlocking every Erie Cast show, add free, and members only content. All of that for only 8 bucks a month. Plus favorites, playlists, sleep timer, playback speed, listen with your phone locked, all the cool podcast features you're used to. Don't worry, an Android and iPhone app are coming very soon, and I'll let you know when they're out. You would be nothing without loyal fans and supporters like you. Again, go to eerie.fm. Thank you. Hey there, Darkness prevails here, founder of Erie Cast, my little network of scary shows. I appreciate you listening to our scary content. But did you know you can support us? Get ad free feeds of your favorite shows, get a 20% discount code to the Erie Cast store, get unlock access to members only audiobooks all at the same time. Just go to eeriecast.com/plus and become a member today. It's cheap and really helps us out. That's eeriecast.com/plus. Thank you. We came out at the bottom into a corridor I hadn't seen on our first visit. The walls were too big stainless tanks set side by side with a 5 foot gap between them. The gap ran maybe 60 feet and ended at another door. The tank walls were polished bright enough that you could see your own outline in them, blurred and stretched in the curve of the steel. The lilo stopped at the entrance. I don't want to go that way. It's just a hallway, I replied. He's at the end of it. There's nobody at the end. Look, I'll show you. I walked into the gap. The reflections of me on either side walked with me. Two pale ghosts at my elbows. Faces smeared. I could see Delilah behind me in the curve of the steel. And still on the doorframe with bean dangling. As I went farther down, she got smaller. The humming sound was stronger here, with a higher note in it under the base. I got to the door at the end and I tried the handle. It was locked. I turned around to walk back. The reflections walked with me again. And that was when I saw that one of those reflections was not mine. It was farther down the curve of the left hand tank behind my reflection, taller than my reflection. And it was a person's shape that was the wrong proportions. Nero at the shoulders and long down the middle, blurred along edges that didn't match the edges on me. I stopped walking. The reflections stopped walking. I blinked hard. When I opened my eyes, the reflection was just my reflection and Delilah's small reflection of the doorway behind me. Beyond that, just the curve of the tank. I made myself walk back at a normal speed. When I got to her, she was looking at me with the same face she had. Whenever mom was about to tell us something serious. You saw? I didn't see anything. I told you. There's nobody there. "You saw?" "Delie, I didn't. Come on." She put a small hand on my shirt on my chest and she said, "Please don't leave me here. I won't." We walked back to the break room together without going by the shipping office or the stairwell. She climbed onto the couch and pulled her knees up, holding being to her face. The TV was still on. cartoons had moved to a different show. I sat next to her. After what I saw with the reflections my heart had sped up a bit. The clock on the wall said 742 when we sat down. The next time I looked up, 811. "Del, I'm thirsty." "There's water." "I want to capri-son." "Dad said there was a vending machine in the office hallway." "I don't want to go." "You can stay. I'll go and come back real quick. I won't go anywhere else." "You said you wouldn't leave me." "I'm not leaving. I'm just going to the vending machine. It's right there." She went quiet. Then she lay down on the couch and turned her face into the back cushion. Bean was tucked between her chin and her chest. I told her I'd bring her one too, but she didn't say anything. The vending machine took dollar bills and quarters. I'd brought four quarters from the cup of change on Dad's dresser. It didn't have capri-son, but it did have bug juice, so I bought one for me and one for Delilah. I carried them under my arm. Dad's office was at the other end of the hallway. I told myself I would just look inside real quick and see if he was there. I wanted to ask if we could go home already. I didn't say to myself the second part, which was that I wanted to tell him that Delilah was still talking about the shadow man. But his office was empty. The light was on, which I thought was weird. His coat was over the back of the chair. There was a clipboard on the desk and a coffee cup next to it, and the coffee cup was empty. The chair was pushed out from the desk like he had just stood up. I called for him quietly, though I wasn't sure if I wanted to be heard for some reason. I didn't get an answer. I walked back down the office hallway toward the break room with the two bug juices under my arm. It must have been ten minutes maybe twelve at most. I was nine years old and wasn't wearing a watch at the time. When I got to the break room, the TV was on, but the couch was empty. Except for Bean. Bean was still on the couch. Delilah's juice box from breakfast was tipped onto its side on the table. A small amount of apple juice had run out onto the laminate. The straw was still in it. I called her name. Delilah? Nothing. I said it again, louder. The bathroom in the corner of the break room was empty. I called into the office hallway, then up the stairwell, where the catwalk doorway echoed her name back at me. Delilah? I then tried the production door, but the handle didn't turn. I went down a hallway. I hadn't been down with her. Past doors that said, "Cold storage two or three," the Reheavie plastic flap curtain that closed behind me with a soft slap. The room past the flap was warmer than the rest of the building. There were tanks in there too, but smaller ones, and a workbench with a panel of gauges and a wrench laying on top of an open clipboard. Delilah? Eli? His voice came from a doorway at the back of the room. I went to it. The doorway opened onto a smaller space with a single tank in it, a white, tiled wall and a graded drain in the floor. Dad was standing at a utility sink at the far wall, with his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, drying his forearms with a blue paper towel. Water was beaded on the front of his shirt, where his apron had been. The apron was on a hook by the door. Eli, what are you doing back here? You shouldn't be in this room. Delilah's gone. What? She's not in the break room. She's gone. He stopped drying his hands. The paper towel was in a wad in his fist. He looked at me, and I had never seen his face do what it did then. It was like watching a man who had been wearing a costume, realized that his costume was on backwards. He dropped the paper towel on the floor. What do you mean she's gone? I went to the vending machine and I came back and she wasn't there. How long ago Eli? I don't know. Eli, how long? I don't know. Dad, ten minutes, maybe more? He pushed past me through the flap curtain. I followed him. We searched the plant for an hour. Then we called 9-1-1. By the time the first deputy arrived, I had told my dad three more times where I'd been, how long I'd been gone, and each time he asked me for a number of minutes, I gave him a different answer because I was a kid and I was panicked. He kept his voice level, never really raising it. The deputies cleared the building. Then a county sergeant came in, along with a search and rescue unit with two dogs. Somebody got a hold of my mother in Ohio. By the time she made it home, it was after dark, and there were six cruisers in the dairy parking lot and a news van out at the gate. The side door near the loading dock had been propped open with a folded square of cardboard. Nobody could say when. Dad said he had brought us through that door, but he had let it close behind us. The deputies took photos of that cardboard. The dogs went out across the field behind the plant, but lost track of anything at the ditch. The county's theory after the first week was that a stranger had abducted her. Someone who had known the plant was empty on Saturdays, and yet knew we would be there. Sometime in the next year, it became an abduction by someone who had been watching the family for a while. And after that, it stopped being any specific theory and just became the case file with my sister's name on it. And her second grade school photo, paper clipped to the inside. A woman from the FBI asked me to draw the plant on a piece of printer paper. I drew her the catwalk and the corridor between the two tanks, and the room in the back were at found my dad. I told her about the shape and the reflection, and she wrote it down. Our living room at that point smelled permanently, like casseroles, from all the people we didn't know sending them to us for support. My mother sat at the kitchen table at 3 a.m. with all the lights off. Bean was on the kitchen counter in a clear plastic evidence bag. Three days after, in the same plan, he had worn that morning. My dad sat in the front yard at sundown until it was fully dark. My mother got the diagnosis when I was 17. She lived another 19 months. By the end, she could not say "delilah's name" anymore without coming apart, so she found ways to talk around it, and we all learned to use the same language. My father stopped saying it earlier than that. Sometime that first year, I don't remember him saying her name again. I grew up. I went to college in state and moved out for good after my mother's funeral. I got a job in an age vac. I called my dad on Sundays, but we never talked about much. The thing that started it was a planner. Two summers ago, my dad sold the house I grew up in, moving into a smaller place on the other side of the county. The basement had been a slow accumulation of everything none of us had been able to throw away after my mother died. He needed some help clearing it out, and I was the only one left to help him. He took the garage and I took the basement. He said he couldn't go down there for more than 10 minutes at a time, without his back giving out. The basement had been my mother's territory. Her sewing machine and boxes of fabric were down there. Along with plastic bins of Christmas ornaments she labeled, in her famously round handwriting, on masking tape strips that had yellowed and curled at the edges. I was going through a stack of bins along the south wall when I found the box of her planners. She had used the same brand of black hardcover daily planner from the year she got married, until the year she got sick. There were 23 of them, banded together in fives with rubber bands that broke when I touched them. I sat on the basement floor and went through them one at a time. I couldn't help it. Most of the entries were grocery lists, dentist appointments, or my soccer schedule, or Delilah's piano lessons. I found the 2003 planner near the bottom of the stack. I almost didn't open it. I sat with it on my lap for a while. When I finally did open it, I went straight to October. Then I made myself close it and started January instead. I read from there. I thought if I went straight to the month that happened. I would skip past whatever else was in there, and I didn't want to do that, even though it was a bit tempting. But I found something on a Wednesday in mid-September, two and a half weeks before that day. The entry was three lines. Most of it was about a plumber. But the line in the middle said, "Mr. A called from school today regarding D. Talk to John tonight. The D had been written first, than a name on top of it that had been started and crossed out before I could read it. The exclamation marks were my mothers. She underlined the "tonight" twice. Obstares I could hear my dad walking from the kitchen to the garage. He had developed a slow shuffle over the last few years. I knew Mr. A. His name was David Allen. He had been the school counselor at the elementary school I went to from kindergarten through fifth grade. The same school Delilah went to from kindergarten through second. I'd seen him once in fourth grade. After a kid in my class, I'd said something about my sister, and I broke the kid's tooth. Mr. Allen had been a soft-spoken man with a beard. I remembered him saying that what had happened to my family was not my fault. And I'd nodded and said, "Yes, sir," and the meeting ended. I closed the planner, and I put it back in the bin. Then I put that bin in the pile of things to keep. I didn't say anything to my dad about it that day or the next. I drove home that night with the planner in the passenger seat under a folded sweatshirt. And honestly, I wasn't sure why I took it. A couple days later, I called the elementary school. Crazy, but the receptionist actually remembered me, which I had not been counting on. She said Mr. Allen had retired in 2015, but she could get me his email. I said thanks. I wrote him a short message that night and left it open on my laptop for two days before finally sending it. I told him I was Delilah's brother, that I was trying to fill in some things from back then, and I was wondering if he would be willing to talk to me. He wrote back the next morning, saying yes. He asked if I would come to his house. He couldn't drive at night anymore. His house was a brick rancher with a wheelchair ramp by the front door. He met me in the doorway. He had me sit at his kitchen table and made coffee. And he waited to ask me any questions until after the coffee was poured. "Mr. Allen," I said. "David," he corrected me. "David, I found something in my mom's planner. It says you called her about Delilah three weeks before she went missing." He sat across from me with both hands around his mug. "I remember the call," he said. "Can you tell me what it was about?" "I was a counselor for 31 years, and I had two cases I have not been able to make peace with. Your sisters was the first." I called your mother because Delilah's teacher had come to me with a concern. Your sister had drawn this picture of her family during a quiet activity. There were things in the picture that were, well, unusual. "I'll leave it at that." I called your mother and told her I'd like to set up a meeting with both of your parents. She was very upset on the phone. As she asked me not to call your father. She said she would talk to him herself, and she would call me back the next day. Did she ever call you back? She left me a voicemail at the school three days later. She said she had spoken to your father and that that picture had been a misunderstanding. She said there was a relative in the family who had had problems with alcohol, and that Delilah had been around it. She thanked me and asked not to follow up. What happened after? "Well, I waited a week. I went to Delilah's classroom on a Friday and spent 15 minutes drawing with her at her desk while the rest of the class did silent reading. I asked her if she was happy at home." She said, "Yes." I asked if anything was scaring her, and she said, "Yes." She said a man was in the corner sometimes. I thought she was describing an imaginary friend. I asked her if it was a real man, and she said no. I thought about it through the weekend, and on Monday morning I picked up the phone to call your mother again. That was the morning I heard about the dairy plant. "Ele, I want to say one more thing. I've run that conversation with your mother through my head every week for 21 years. I should have called your father. I should have called CPS." I didn't either. I told myself at the time that there was a process and that nobody had told me anything that crossed the threshold for a report. That was true. It was also a way of letting myself off the hook. I'm old enough now to know the difference, and I wanted you to hear me say it. I stayed and talked for another 15 minutes, but nothing really was said. I mean, nothing more important than what was already said. Before I left, he said that he was sorry. I believed him, but I didn't have anything against him. A friend of mine from college works at a regional engineering firm that does plant maintenance contracts for several of the dairies in the state. His father had worked in the plant when my dad did. I decided to call him up on a Thursday, asking him a favor I knew he probably couldn't do. I asked if he could pull the maintenance logs from the plant for the week when that event happened. I told him why. He called me back the next Tuesday. I was expecting him to tell me that he wasn't able to do it. We met up for a beer on Wednesday at a place near his office, and he had a Manila folder. This is from a backup the new owners imported when they bought the assets. It's not a chain of custody document. You can't take it to anybody, okay? I know. Thank you, man. Thank you. I'm only giving it to you because I think it's the right thing to do. I'm not going to make you regret it. I swear. He slid the folder across the table. It had 18 pages in it. Most of them unremarkable cleaning logs and vendor visits. I went through them at the bar with him sitting across from me. He watched me while I read. The Friday night entry was on page 11. The day before my sister's disappearance. The badge log showed my father had clocked in at 9.47 pm and clocked out at 2.13 am. About 4.5 hours. The work order line said, "Concrete Patch, Basement Utility Room, Facility Maintenance, JFK. JFK was my father's initials. Yes, like the president." My friend pointed out two problems with that line. The badge log showed only my father's entry for the whole night, with no companion work order, and patches like that were nearly always two person jobs. The dairy plant didn't have a basement utility room. He had pulled the floor plan to check just in case. There was a utility crawl space under the production wing, accessible by a hatch in the washdown area. But it wasn't called a utility room, and it wasn't somewhere you would patch concrete on a Friday night. The Saturday entry was on page 15. The badge log showed my father in at 5.46 am and out at 7.11 pm. The work order line said Facility Check, "Tank 3 Cold Storage, JFK." The line below it said, "No service ticket generated. See Facility Log." That Facility Log was page 16. There was no entry for that morning. The page jumped from Friday's evening shift to Sunday mornings incoming run. My friend watched me close the folder. "You like?" "I know." As I said, you can't take this to anyone. Not even the cops with this paperwork. You understand that? "Yeah, I understand." I left after thanking him again and without touching my beer. That fall, my dad and I went out for dinner a few times. The first time was at his place. He made some spaghetti, which is what he made almost every time we ate at his place. We talked about these Steelers, and Aliki had in his bathroom ceiling. He hugged me longer than usual at the door. I could tell he was starting to feel lonely. The second time we went out that fall was at a chain restaurant on the highway. He had a beer with his meal and made a joke about getting old. He told me a story I'd heard before. About a coworker who I dropped a wrench into a tape. tank during a cleaning cycle and had to fish it out on a wire hanger. He laughed at the part where the co-worker swore in front of the plant manager. I laughed too, like I always did. Then I asked him about the fall. That fall. I tried to make it sound natural in the conversation. I said I'd been doing some thinking lately, trying to put pieces together for myself. I wanted to ask him a few things if he didn't mind. He said his beer down and looked at me. I couldn't tell what that look even meant. What do you want to know? That Friday night, you were at the plant late. How do you know that? I was looking through Mom's planner. She didn't keep track of when I was at work, Eli. It was something else. It doesn't matter. I just remembered. He tinkered with his spaghetti, with his fork. I worked late a lot. You know that. I do know that. Do you have something to ask me, son? Did something happen that week? What do you mean did something happen that week? I don't know. I'm just asking. Eli, I don't know why we're talking about this. He drank his beer and began to watch the TV over the bar. I changed the subject. He paid for dinner and walked me to my car, hugging me and telling me to drive safe. The third dinner was back at his place two weeks later. Spaghetti, of course. And we didn't talk about any of it. He fell asleep in his recliner during a college football game. I sat there and watched him sleep before I went home. There was one more thing I did. Delilah had a friend in second grade, named Amber Peltier. The only real friend I remember her having outside our family. After the Saturday, her parents pulled her out of the school. She never saw her again. I found her on Facebook. Her last name was different now, and she was a teacher at an elementary school two counties over. Her profile picture was her with two kids on her lap on a porch. I sent her a message telling her who I was, asking if she'd be able to talk to me. She wrote back within an hour. She asked if I could come to her house that weekend. I brought some sunflowers. She met me at the door and put them in a vase at the kitchen sink, while her husband took the kids to the park to give us the house. We sat in her living room. There was a candle burning on the coffee table that smelled like apples. You know, I've been wanting to talk to somebody about this for two decades. I've never really known who to talk to, so I'm glad you're here. She explained. I'd say it's good to be here, if you know what I mean. But thank you for having me. She told me, "I want you to understand that I'm telling you what an eight-year-old told me when I was eight, okay? I don't know what's true versus what she made up to deal with something else. I'm just gonna tell you what she told me." I nodded. We had a sleepover just the one time. I don't know if you remember that, but we were playing truth or dare together in my room. She took every dare instead of a single truth. But you know who kids that age, especially the anxious ones. Dairs are scary, so it's always truth this and truth that. But not her. So I dared her to tell me a truth. And she started to cry. I thought I'd done something wrong that I said something I shouldn't have. I remember that night. I replied. She was so scared yet excited to have her first real sleepover. It was a quiet night back at home for me. I recall feeling proud of her for being brave about it. But yeah, that sounds like Delhi. She had always been very difficult about opening up. Did she say anything afterward? After herself looked like she might cry, she cleared her throat then and said, "I'm so sorry, Eli. I'm telling you this because you need to hear it. So please don't think that I'm trying to start a family feud or hurt you. This is something I never even told the cops. God, I'm so sorry." I swallowed. "It's okay. Please tell me." "Your sister, Delilah. She said that every time she was around her father, her stomach would start to hurt and that she never knew why. I asked her if he had ever heard her. And she said, she said that her father was the nicest man but could be scary. He watched her from corners," she said. "And sometimes he would follow her to her room. When no one else was around, when I asked why he would do that. She cried so hard she couldn't speak. I held her and rocked her and got her to calm down but I did everything I could to keep the topic away from her home and her father for the rest of the night. My eyes filled with water and I held both hands cupped in front of my mouth, elbows on my knees. I didn't know I'd been staring at the floor the entire time until I finally blinked, causing some tears to come loose. I wiped my face and stuttered. Thank you, Amber. I need to go. I'm so sorry, Delilah. I should have told someone I was so young and scared and I didn't know what any of it meant at the time. I walked out and I just drove. Around the start of November, I went out to the plant for the first time in 21 years. I didn't go in. I sat in my car across from the chain link fence and just looked at that building. The plant had closed back in 2019 when Hagener Valley sold to a national co-op that consolidated the operation into a larger facility 40 miles away. The Hagener Valley dairy stencil had faded to where you couldn't read it anymore. But I knew it was there. The lot had weeds in the cracks of the asphalt and a four-sale sign by the gate. I must have sat there for nearly an hour. The light was going. A second floor window at the south end of the building was a weak yellow square, and I hoped it was just the setting sun catching the glass at an angle. When I drove past at the second time on my way home, the light was gone, and I made myself stop trying to figure out whether it had been anything. I called the listing agent two days later. His name was Brian Conroy, and I'd apparently played intramural soccer with him in college. Truth be told, I didn't remember him. I told him I was thinking about getting into commercial real estate as a hobby, and I wanted to walk a vacant industrial property to learn what to look for. He laughed and said the dairy was a perfect place to learn, because every system in it was 40 years old. He said he would meet me there one day. But instead I asked if I could just take the keys for an afternoon and bring them back. I could hear him shaking his head over the phone. He said he wasn't supposed to do that. I explained my situation as best I could, that I really wanted to get a feel of the place by myself, that whenever people showed me properties I never got the right feel, that it felt like I was being rushed or pressured, and I always walked away feeling like I never really saw everything I wanted to see. I played up the "I've got money now" angle, and eventually he relented. He said that he trusted me, having known me back in college, which is miraculous considering, again, I didn't remember him, beyond his name I mean. He said he would leave the keys in a lock box on the gate, and he would text me the code, and he would have to change it the next morning. But he said don't get hurt, and don't let anyone see me go in. I thinked him profusely. The day before I went, I sat at the kitchen table in my apartment, and drank a beer. I looked at the code that Brian had texted me for the lock box. Mike I was afraid I would forget it or accidentally delete it. Around 11, I decided to call my dad. He picked up on the second ring. Hey son. Hey dad, I'm just checking in. "You alright? You sound stressed." "Yeah, it's been a long week for me. How's your back?" "Same as it's been. You sound tired." I am tired. "Then get some sleep." We were quiet for a few seconds, and eventually I said, "Dad?" "Yes, son." "Uh, nothing. I love you, dad." "I love you too, son." I hung up, and I made myself go to bed. I drove out there a little past noon. The sky was gray, but the forecast did not call for a moment. or any rain or sun, just gray. The county road was empty. I parked on the shoulder again across from the gate, and I walked over to the drop box. I typed the code, scared it wouldn't work. But it opened on the first try. The three keys on a brass ring inside had handwritten labels, but read, "Side, office, general." The gate squealed when I pushed it. The chain had been wound through a fence post instead of the gate itself, which meant the gate had been swinging on its hinges for God knows how long. I walked the locked to the side door by the loading dock. The lock turned slowly, and I pushed the door open, standing in the vestibule with the cold air from inside meeting me at the chest. The smell when I went in was nothing like I remembered. That bleachingness was gone, and the milk ghost under it was gone too. It was there instead was the smell of old building that had not been heated in five winters at least. It had the stench of cold concrete and dust, a thread of mildew there too, so moisture was probably getting in somewhere. I propped the side door open behind me with a folded square of cardboard. The office hallway looked the same, but the fluorescent tubes were now gone from half the fixtures, and the plastic frames on the doors were empty where the laminated codes had been. The shipping office had been stripped except for the built-in desks. The mug with the cartoon cow was not on the desk anymore, but it was a mug, so I'm not really sure what I was expecting. I went down to the break room. My stomach getting heavy and painful. In the break room, the bracket where the TV had been was still on the wall, but everything else had been hauled out. The folding table had been left behind, leaned against the back wall with its legs folded. I stood in the doorway, but I did not go in. I had been in this room enough. I went on. The corridor that had tea intersected at the production door was the same corridor. The production keep closed sign had been pulled down at some point, leaving a ghost in the paint where it had been taped. The vestibule beyond the door was empty. The stainless wall the wash down station had been mounted to had been pulled off, and the bracket holes were ringed with black where the silicone calk had stained the surrounding metal. I walked through into the production room. I had to stop, because the room was not the room I'd walked into when I was nine. The tanks were gone. All of them. The catwalk was still up there, tin feet over the floor, but it ran across an empty space now. Where the tanks had stood, there were rings of bolts set into the concrete, and a few feet of pipe stub poking up where the cold lines had been cut. The drains were still in the floor, but the hum I'd felt under my hands and the catwalk railing was gone. I stood in the middle of the empty room. I'd been carrying that room around in my head for two thirds of my life. And somebody had come through five years ago, unbolting it, selling it for scrap. The corridor I'd walked down between the two tanks, the one with the reflections, was gone. Where it had been, there was just floor. I made myself keep moving. The office key opened my father's old office. The door was no longer locked, but the key worked, which surprised me a little. The office had been empty like the rest of the building. The desk was still there, after all it had been built into the wall, a slab of laminate over a frame of two by fours. The drawers were still in the desk, there were three on the right side, stacked. I sat in the empty office for a minute, then I started with the top drawer. The top drawer was empty. The middle drawer was empty except for a single rubber band in a paperclip. The bottom drawer was the deepest of the three, and it was empty too. But I'd read enough crime novels and watched enough movies in my life to know what to do with an empty, deep drawer. I pulled it out of the desk frame and turned it over. When I saw it, I couldn't breathe. You have to understand that I did not expect to find anything right there. But there was a Manila envelope taped to the underside of the drawer. The tape was yellow and brittle, and it came off in pieces when I pulled the envelope free. I sat on the floor of my father's office with the drawer in my lap, and the envelope in my hand. The envelope was unlabeled. It had been folded twice to fit under the drawer. When I unfolded it, I could feel by the weight that whatever was inside was paper, and not very much paper. So I knew it wasn't maintenance logs or photographs. It had to be something else. I opened the envelope, my heart pounding. Inside was a single folded sheet of construction paper. The paper was orange, soft along the creases from being folded for a long time. I unfolded it on the floor in front of me. It was a drawing made clearly by Delilah. I knew her crayon the second I saw it. She had drawn five figures in a row across the page in her crayon shorthand. The first was a woman in a triangle dress with yellow hair. Over it she had written "Mommy" in pink. The second was a boy with a cowl lick. She had given me on the front of every picture she had ever drawn of me. And over it she had written "Ely" in green. The third was herself. With brown hair and a purple dress, she didn't actually have, but liked drawing. And over it she had written "Delilah" in purple. The fourth was bean with his round outer face and his stick limbs. The fifth was a tall, thin black shape with no features. She did not give the fifth figure a name. She had drawn arrows between the fifth figure and the figure of herself. And on each of the arrows she had written in tiny purple letters. No. The arrows pointed both ways. Underneath the row of figures she had written one line in her purple crayon. Daddy says "shh." I sat with the paper. I struggled to breathe. I stared at that paper for so long, but I had to get up off the floor at some point. So I forced myself up. I folded the paper back into the envelope and I placed it into my jacket. I put the drawer back in the desk and stood up. I had one more place that I needed to go. The wash down station and the production wing had been pulled out, but the hatch was still in the floor. I didn't notice it the first time I walked past because the wash down equipment had been mounted over it for years. It was a steel plate set flush in the concrete with a recessed handle. The kind of maintenance hatch I'd seen a hundred times on job sites in my own work. I knelt down and I lifted it. A short steel ladder went down four feet into a concrete crawl space. The ceiling of the crawl space was the underside of the production floor. The space was maybe four feet high, but only by what came down through the hatch, with the cold dead air that smelled like wet stone. I had a flashlight on my keychain, so I clicked it on and I went down. I had to stoop. The crawl space ran the length of the production wing under the floor I'd walked across as a nine-year-old, and the floor down here was poured concrete, gray and unfinished, with hairline cracks running through it where the slab had cured. The flashlight on my keychain was small enough that I had to sweep it across the floor section by section. Most of the slab was the same gray, about 15 feet from the ladder near the wall on the south side of the building. There was a section of concrete that was a different gray. It was a rectangle, roughly four feet long, by two feet wide. The edges of it were not perfectly straight, and the surface of it was a little rougher than the rest of the slab around it, because fresh concrete cures a little different from the slab it's been patched into, even when the work is done right. I'd patched concrete on job sites a hundred times. I knew what a patch looked like. This patch was decades old. The color had set in long ago. I did not need to test it. I sat on the concrete next to it, and I put my hand flat on it. The concrete was cold. I knew I could sit there, and spend an hour trying to pry it open. But I was not ready for what I might see inside. When I could finally move again, I climbed back up the ladder and closed the hatch. I walked out through the empty production room, and the empty office hallway. As I approached the break room, my stomach began to feel painful again, and I couldn't bear to look into it when I walked past. I locked the side door, putting the cardboard square back where I found it. I then walked out to the gate. I put it in the box. Put the keys in the lock box and spun the dial. I sat in my car on the shoulder of that county road, and I took my phone out of my jacket pocket. I called my dad. "A son." I'd had a plan on the drive-over about what I would say. I'd been thinking about it for weeks now, practicing sentences in my apartment, while hoping that everything in my head was wrong. But none of those words were in my mouth now. I sat in the car with the phone to my ear and listened to my father breathing and waiting, and ever noticed how patient he could be on the phone. "Ely, are you there?" "Yeah, dad. I'm here." "Are you okay?" "I don't know, dad." He waited again, and I tried my best not to cry. I had the phone to my ear, and I was listening to my father's breathing again. But somewhere between my previous words and the start of his next, something changed in his tone, even in that breathing. "Where are you, Eli?" I hung up my phone, and I dialed three numbers. That was a tough story to finish. Children should be protected, allowed to enjoy their youth and innocence. The idea that anyone could harm them is already a horrible thought. But to be harmed by your own parent, that is a sin beyond sin. Good night. I'm Darkness Proveils. You've been listening to Tales from the Breakroom. You can now do everything on our new site. Listen to the show. Submit your own story, and check out my other narrations, all in the same place. Go to eerie.fm. And consider becoming a member for 8 bucks a month or 70 bucks a year. That's the price of one video game a year, and it helps us to keep doing what we're doing now. Especially since YouTube has decided to demonetize everyone in their dog. Members also get bonus stories, exclusive members only shows, audio books, and dad-free listening to all eerie cast content. Again, that's eerie.fm. Thank you. Till next time, everyone. I'll be clocking out for now. But I'll be back again real soon.