Tales Of Lin
When Lin Primary unveiled the new playground equipment, it was the biggest event of the year. For weeks, rumors had flown among the students—there was going to be a slide. Not the plastic, faded kind that burned your skin in summer and cracked in winter, but a gleaming, metal beast that twisted and curled like a frozen snake. The school board had spared no expense, saying it would enrich recess opportunities.
On the morning it was finished, the children swarmed it like bees to a flower. The chute glistened in the sun, mirror-bright and almost too polished to look at for long. Its curved tunnel seemed to hum faintly, though most kids assumed that was just the breeze funneling through. Everyone wanted a turn. Everyone, that is, except three boys.
Caleb, Marcus, and Jax—the unspoken rulers of the playground—were the first up the ladder. They laughed, shoved kids aside, and declared loudly that this slide was theirs. Anyone else who tried to climb the ladder was met with jeers, a rough push, or worse. By the end of recess, they had scratched their initials deep into the paint with rocks. By the next day, they were pouring sand down the chute so that other kids who dared to use it came sliding out coughing and sputtering.
The teachers scolded, but lightly. No one wanted to confront those boys for long. And so, the slide became their throne, and the rest of the children watched from the swings and monkey bars, yearning. Among those watching was a boy named Lennie. Lennie was not a troublemaker, nor was he much of anything. He was quiet, small for his age, and had the kind of stillness that made teachers forget to call on him. At recess, he usually sat in the shade with a book, though sometimes he would just watch the other kids play, eyes fixed but unreadable.
On the third week after the slide was installed, Lennie did something strange. Instead of sitting on the bench, he walked slowly across the playground, past the tetherball poles and the hopscotch squares, until he reached the base of the slide. The bullies were lounging at the top, legs dangling, lording over their perch. Lennie sat down at the bottom, right where kids would normally come shooting out, and tilted his head back to stare up the gleaming tunnel. He didn’t move.
For nearly an hour he sat there, unblinking, as recess played out around him. When Caleb shouted down,
“Hey, loser, scram!”
Lennie didn’t so much as twitch. Marcus threw a pebble that bounced off his shoulder. Jax clambered halfway down and tried to shove him. Lennie finally spoke, his voice a faint whisper, raspy from disuse.
“It knows your names now.”
The three boys laughed, but not for long. There was something about the way he said it. Soft, deliberate, as if he were only relaying a message, not threatening them.
That night, Caleb awoke to a noise. It was a slow, dragging scrape, like metal on plaster. He sat up in bed, blinking in the moonlight, and saw long, silvery grooves etched across his bedroom wall, as if something had rubbed against it from the outside. Then he heard it again shhhk… shhhk moving closer, circling the house. Caleb pulled the blankets over his head, trembling, until finally he drifted into a shallow, fitful sleep.
By morning, he was gone. His parents found his bed empty, the covers pulled taut, almost tucked too neatly. On his pillow lay a single bolt, small and greasy, gleaming in the sunlight. The school was in an uproar. Police visited classrooms, teachers whispered in corners, but no one mentioned the slide. Except the children. Some swore they saw something tall and chrome gliding along the school fence that night, bending the chain links as it passed. Others claimed the slide was different the next day—its surface rippling faintly as if breathing, its ladder rungs sticky with something that wasn’t paint.
Still, recess continued, though quieter. Marcus and Jax stayed on the slide, though their laughter had dulled. Marcus especially seemed nervous. He jumped at shadows, scanned the treeline, and more than once asked Lennie what he had meant. Lennie only smiled faintly and said nothing.
A week later, it was Marcus’s turn. He was walking home late, dragging his backpack through the dust, when he heard a sound behind him: the faint whoosh of something heavy sliding across pavement. He turned and saw nothing. He walked faster. The sound followed. He broke into a run, heart hammering, sneakers pounding the cracked sidewalk. Then came the clang—a metallic echo, like something striking a rung. He risked a glance back and saw, for a split second, a reflection that should not have been there. A curve of polished steel, a hollow tunnel glinting in the moonlight, rushing toward him. He screamed, but no one heard.
By morning, Marcus was gone. His mother found his backpack on the porch, unzipped, its contents spilled like entrails. On top of the pile sat a long, rusted screw. That left Jax. He tried to act tough, cracking jokes, but the swagger was gone. His eyes darted constantly, and he started skipping school. When he did show up, he wouldn’t go near the playground, choosing instead to huddle by the bathrooms.
Finally, desperate, he approached Lennie. His voice shook as he said,
“I’m sorry, okay? We—we didn’t mean anything. Just tell it… tell it I said sorry.”
Lennie, sitting on the bench with his book closed, looked at him for a long moment. Then he raised one thin finger and pointed. Toward the slide. Jax turned, and for the first time, he saw it the way Lennie did. The chute’s metal skin shimmered faintly, almost pulsing, as though something alive was pressed just beneath the surface, waiting to push through.
“It’s waiting,” Lennie said.
The next day, Jax didn’t come to school. Teachers assumed he was sick. Children whispered otherwise. By afternoon, when the principal finally asked around, the slide itself was gone. Where once it had stood was only a shallow groove in the mulch, as though dragged away in the night by something impossibly strong. The teachers were baffled, but practical.
“It must have been removed,”
They insisted.
“The board decided to relocate it.”
But no trucks had been seen, no workers hired, no holes patched in the fence.The children knew better. And Lennie? He was gone, too.
Years passed. The story faded into half-remembered rumor, told by older kids to frighten the new ones. Yet sometimes, far from Lin Primary, in playgrounds the world over, children swore they heard faint laughter echoing from inside metal tunnels. A whisper in the dark, like sand pouring endlessly down a chute. Some say if you listen too long, it will call your name. And if it does, you should walk away before the slide decides you belong to it.
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