“The Red Light in the Warehouse” is a short story by Mr. Jimmy Juliano, a faculty member at Lake Forest High School. Watch a reading of the story in the embedded YouTube link below, or read the text in full. 

Toby was a born liar. When his parents got divorced he told everyone that he lived with his dad on weekends at a llama farm, and that he had a waterslide that went from his bedroom window to a pool. We were gullible ten year olds, but even then we all decided that Toby was full of shit. But Toby stuck by his story – and none of us were ever invited to his dad’s house, so we could never call him out on it.

It was almost admirable, in a way, that type of devotion to lying. So even though I admired Toby in a weird way, I also never trusted a single word he said. Not as kids on the playground, and not in the few times we’d spoken in the last fifteen years. Toby was always fun to hang out with, but there was always this distance between us. I’ve known for him for a long time now, but I’ve never felt like I’ve really known him.

Toby was an actor, and the world was his stage – or however that expression goes.

So when Toby called me out of the blue a few weeks ago and wanted to talk about the red light in the warehouse, I figured it was all part of Toby’s theatre of life. I hadn’t thought about the red light in the warehouse in years. It was just something stupid from our past, something that was a big deal as kids, but as adults you’d just shake your head and chuckle.

I know now how wrong I was.

Toby suggested we meet for drinks back in our hometown, even though neither of us had been back there in years. He said it was important, so I drove the the three hours to our old stomping grounds. We sat across from each other in a small booth at a rundown bar, and right off the bat I thought Toby looked different. Not just older, but weathered. Nervous – but not the stuttering or sweating type of nervous.

Toby looked like a man that thought he was being followed. I almost smiled. Toby’s performances were still top notch, I thought.

My old friend immediately cut to the chase. He said he was convinced *that thing* that lived in the abandoned warehouse with the red light had finally found him. Twenty years after Toby had disturbed it, it was back.

I naturally didn’t believe him. I waited for the punchline, for some supernatural twist that would finally give away one of Toby’s many lies. I waited for him to tell me that a grinning skeleton floated above his bed, or that he was being awoken in the middle of the night by an icy hand gripping his wrist. I waited for the unbelievable, but Toby’s reasoning was much more believable.

He looked at me dead in the eyes, and without wavering, he said:

“My nightmares are bathed in red.”

I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up and give you a little backstory.

Growing up, Toby and I were fascinated by the abandoned warehouse on Jackson Avenue. The structure was a cutlery factory back in the 1950s, but that had long since closed by the time we were in elementary school. The property hadn’t been used in decades, and the old factory was slowly crumbling away. The bricks were decaying, the fire-escape ladder iron was rusted brown, and most of the windows were smashed. The old place was guarded by an eight-foot tall chain link fence with barbed wire on top, which gave the building a rather forbidden aura.

But what was exceptionally odd to us kids was the red light that burned in the stairwell on the the third floor. It didn’t seem to have any business being there, but it shone every night through the empty window frame like a watchful, red eye – just a lonely light bulb that never seemed to die. The sixteen other windows on the north side of the warehouse were blacked out, but every night the third floor stairwell was doused in crimson.

Explaining it now sounds rather mundane. It was the most ordinary of things, really, just a red light bulb that burned in the stairwell of an abandoned warehouse.

Like I said, ordinary.

But we were *kids*, where even the most ordinary things could be fantastic. So we made it fantastic. To some it was a secret vampire lair; to others it was a murder factory for kids with too many detentions. Occult meetings, werewolf breeding, the evil spirit of a janitor that slit his own throat – imagine a yarn about the stairwell with the red light, and some kid in our town probably spun it around a campfire. Everyone believed something different, but there was one thing that all of us agreed on:

No would ever go into the abandoned warehouse. Not unless they had a deathwish.

Toby apparently had a deathwish. So did his brother.

We were twelve years old when Toby announced to everyone that he was moving to Oregon with his mom and brother, Jake. Toby said that Jake had recently explored the warehouse in the middle of the night, and it had “messed him up real good.” They were taking him to a special clinic across the country, and they had to live there.

“He’s pretty disturbed,” Toby said. “Jake saw something in there, but he won’t tell us what he saw. He just kind of…shakes. He’s always looking around the room, like something is following him.”

As usual, I thought Toby was full of shit. I didn’t believe he was leaving for Oregon, and I certainly didn’t believe his eight-year old brother had gone haunted warehouse exploring.

But Toby kept on insisting, and none of our friends believed him. Not about Jake, and not about moving. Even the night before Toby claimed he was leaving, I *still* didn’t believe him.

“I’ll prove it to you,” Toby told me. “Meet me outside the warehouse at midnight.”

So I did. I snuck out through my window and criss-crossed through yards until I arrived at the decrepit warehouse. The red light in the third floor stairwell glowed menacingly. I waited alone, and I studied the cursed building. Something moved three windows down from the stairwell, something dark – it barely flickered in my vision, but it was there. I backed up, wondering if it was Toby playing a trick on me. Or maybe it was someone else.

Or some*thing* else.

“Hey, man!” Toby’s voice cut through the silence of the night, and he rounded the corner of Jackson Avenue. I swallowed hard, and Toby jogged up to me.

“This is my last night,” Toby said. “This is my last chance to check out the warehouse. Maybe I can figure out why my brother is so messed up.”

I pleaded with Toby not to go in there. We all knew the stories; there was something terrible in that warehouse. Something people aren’t met to see. I told him I thought I saw something moving in there a little bit ago, and Toby just shrugged.

“I won’t get another chance,” Toby said. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

And with that, Toby wiggled underneath a small gap between the chain link fence and the hard ground, and he slowly crept towards the warehouse. I put both hands on the fence, about to plead with him once again, but no words came. I actually smirked.

*This is Toby’s grand finale,* I remember thinking. *His brother isn’t sick, but his family probably is moving – and Toby just wants to give us something to remember him by. If Jake was really screwed up, there’s no way Toby would walk into the same certain horror and doom. He’s playing us…again.*

An expression popped into my head, something my dad would say about some “yahoo at work” who always took his jokes too far.

“A showman until the very end,” I whispered to myself.

I watched that magnificent liar crawl into a broken first floor window, and then he disappeared. I couldn’t hear Toby’s footsteps, only crickets in the suburban night. The red light pulsated. After a few minutes I saw a figure appear in the first floor stairwell. It could have been Toby; it could have been something else. Moments later a dark figure emerged in the second floor stairwell, and then vanished.

Seconds seemed like minutes. Even though it was Toby’s greatest performance, he still shouldn’t have been in there. What he was doing was suicide, every kid in town would agree. The red light throbbed, and I waited for Toby to appear in the third floor stairwell. Worst case scenarios flooded by mind – I saw a cloaked madman clutching a blade, or a disheveled woman in a white dress with pale skin. I saw blood spurting out of the empty window like a red mist, only to vanish into the air.

I shook off my morbid fantasies, and then I saw Toby in the empty window frame. I was positive it was him – he was wearing the hoodie with “Force Football” printed on the back. I waited for him to turn and give me the thumbs up or maybe make a goofy face – but he just stood in the third-floor stairwell with his back to me, staring at something unseen.

He was bathed in red.

I wanted to yell out to him, but I couldn’t. I just whispered Toby’s name as loud as I could to get his attention, but either he didn’t hear me, or he was unable to turn.

The pop of a light-bulb made me jump, and I heard shards of glass sprinkle the ground from inside the brick and mortar monster in front of me. The red light in the stairwell extinguished. There was nothing but blackness in the warehouse, and I couldn’t see my friend.

I was frozen in place; my feet felt rooted into the ground. I gripped the fence, and although I’d lay in bed later that night with red marks on my hand and my fingers slightly throbbing from clutching the chain link, I didn’t feel the sting at the moment. I waited for Toby’s scream and for him to come rushing outside, but there was nothing.

I’m not sure how long I stood like that, but I eventually found myself on the ground. I hugged my legs into my chest and rocked myself back and forth. I considered running for help, and I also considered going in there after Toby like some movie hero – but instead I just sat there like a coward. As I slowly rocked on the sidewalk, I simultaneously cursed Toby’s name and apologized to him at the same time. I felt like whatever was happening to him in that warehouse was *my fault*, and that he probably was telling the truth. His brother probably did stupidly explore that cursed place, and Toby was probably stupidly trying to make it right somehow.

And I should have tried harder to stop him.

The shaking of the chain link fence jarred me back to reality. Toby wiggled underneath the gap in the fence and climbed to his feet. I jumped up and hugged him.

“What the hell happened in there?” I said.

Toby shook his head. “I didn’t see anything. Nothing at all.”

“But I saw you staring…”

“I didn’t see anything.” There was fear in Toby’s face. As usual, I thought Toby was lying. He *did* see something.

We walked home in silence, and Toby moved away the next day. I’m not sure when the red light was replaced, because I was too scared to walk by the old warehouse for weeks. But the next time I mustered up the courage to check it out, the red light was back.

I’m not sure who replaced it.

I saw Toby sporadically throughout high school. He’d visit his dad a few times a year, and sometimes Toby would call me; sometimes he wouldn’t. But we never talked about the red light in the warehouse. Not once. Toby mainly told lies about his new life – how his mom was dating some movie star, and that Toby had designed some computer software that he was going to sell for million of dollars.

I always played along.

We got older, Toby and I drifted apart, but the memory of that weird night before Toby moved away was still plenty vivid – but I began to think differently about it. What was once undeniably supernatural and macabre became just the wild imaginations of a bunch of kids. I no longer thought that Toby had seen anything in that warehouse. It was just Toby, the fantastic liar. Just another one of Toby’s pranks. As an adult, I felt stupid to have ever believed it in the first place.

But as I sat across the table from Toby all those years later in our hometown pub, I reconsidered. Toby appeared so genuine, so heartfelt, so broken – I couldn’t help but take him seriously.

“How can I help?” I asked him. “Is there anything that I can do?”

Toby shook his head. “There’s nothing anybody can do. I guess I just wanted to talk about it, that’s all.”

“Please, just tell me. Twenty years ago outside that warehouse, you told me that you didn’t see anything. But tonight you said you *disturbed* something. If it’s found you, then we need to do something.”

I said that without knowing what it meant. It all sounded so crazy. Toby stared into nothing and took a long drink of his beer.

“What did you see in that warehouse?” I asked.

Toby looked down at his drink. His fingers danced across the glass. He thought about my question for a very long time.

“I didn’t see anything,” Toby said. “Can we talk about something else?”

We bullshitted for a while – jobs, movies, sports, until Toby took a phone call and said he needed to go. We shook hands, and he left. I finished my beer and walked to the parking lot. My old car rumbled to the highway, but then I quickly turned around. Curiosity was getting the better of me.

I drove the ten minutes to Jackson Avenue. I pictured the old warehouse still looking the same and that red light beaming as a beacon of fear. But it wasn’t.

There was no red light. The warehouse was now a pile of rubble.

I stopped my car and got out. I walked to the fence and gripped it like I had those many years ago, this time as a grown man. As I looked out over the pile of broken bricks and concrete, it felt like the warehouse was never there at all. What was so clear to me as a child now seemed like false memories – supernatural things and spooky tales that were so obviously made-up. I felt stupid all over again, and I again wondered if Toby was pulling my chain. Maybe he had called me up only to reclaim his status as Toby the Deceiver.

*Toby the Con Artist.*

He was probably laughing in his car right now, thinking he pulled another fast one. It’s what he was best at.

*My* dreams were bathed in red that night – in my nightmare I was Toby, frozen in that small stairwell. Sitting on the step in front of me was a man with a ragged beard surrounded by buckets of blood and dead animal carcasses. The man looks up and his face bubbles, like it had been seared over an open flame on a stovetop. He bares his teeth, and they are covered in mucus.

“Don’t you ever tell anyone what you saw in here, boy,” the man snarls.

The red light bulb explodes, and I snap awake, drenched in sweat.

I washed my face with cold water and cursed Toby’s name for giving me nightmares – after all, he was the reason I had shoveled through those memories. Still, I couldn’t help but smile.

That’s probably what he wanted to happen.

*Toby the Conniver.*

I thought that was the end of it for me. My life carried on like normal. No more red dreams, no supernatural stories. Just the monotony of my adult life – work, eat, sleep. You know, the ordinary stuff.

The phone call came a few weeks later.

It was Toby’s brother, and he told me that Toby had died. Doctors said he had a brain aneurysm.

“I saw him,” Jake told me over the phone. “His mouth was open, and his eyes were frozen in fear. It was like he saw something he wasn’t supposed to see. It’s weird, but do you know the first thing I thought when I saw him? I thought about that old warehouse back when we were kids, the one with the red light. Do you remember that place?”

I didn’t say anything. I just listened to Jake’s troubled breath inhale and exhale through my phone. His voice was tinny and distant. Lost, almost.

“Eyes frozen in fear,” Jake said to himself. “I think I know exactly how he felt.”

I almost didn’t believe Toby was really dead, that it was just another one of his lies. But I went to the wake, and there he was – just laying there peacefully, surrounded by flowers, photoboards, and a few of his old things. I half-expected his corpse to jump out of the casket and yell, “Gotcha!”

That didn’t happen. Not even trickster Toby could fake his own death.

I went out for drinks after the wake with a few of my old friends. I didn’t tell them that I had seen Toby recently and that we had talked about that damn red light. It just didn’t seem right. We just fondly reminisced about our friend Toby, laughing heartily at all of the lies he told when we were kids.

After all, it was just Toby being Toby. The lies were his speciality.

I lay in bed awake for a long time that night, just thinking about my friend and all of the stories he told that weren’t true. Still, I wished he’d told me the truth about the red light in the warehouse. Maybe I could have helped him – but I don’t think he’d have wanted that. That would have ruined the illusion.

It would have ruined the wonder.

And then I began to wonder some more. Maybe Toby *did* have the waterslide that every kid dreamed of. Maybe Toby *did* sell software for millions of dollars. And maybe Toby and Jake *did* see something awful and terrible in that warehouse. But mainly I wondered one thing:

Who called me on the phone to tell me Toby was dead? Because it couldn’t have been Toby’s brother. It just wasn’t possible. Toby told me a long time ago that Jake had died right after they moved to that special clinic in Oregon.

I thought about that tinny and distant voice I’d heard over the phone.

*I saw him. His mouth was open, and his eyes were frozen in fear. It was like he saw something he wasn’t supposed to see.*

Whoever it was sounded so lost.

*I think I know exactly how he felt.*

It was like he was calling from a different existence.

I pulled my covers up to my shoulders, and felt a smile form at the corners of my lips. Even though Toby was dead, he was still making me wonder.

A showman until the very end.