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It had always been there, in the background.

 

She’d gone to school in a small, forgettable town called Sleaford, in Lincolnshire. The kind of place where old things hung around longer than they should. Traditions, buildings and attitudes. 

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They still had the 11+ exam there—one of the last counties in the UK to keep that up.

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Like time didn’t want to move on. Even as a kid she’d thought it was a horrible way to judge people so young.

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She passed the exam. But she hadn’t wanted to go. There was a school in the village.

 

But her mother insisted. Insisted in that way mothers do, where refusal wasn’t really an option. 

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In the end, mothers always know best. The grammar school in Sleaford was for girls only, and still running. It wasn’t the best experience, as most high school experiences aren't. But the school in the village had been a comprehensive. It was knocked down years ago.

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But behind the grammar school, shadowing it, was something older than both. A building - a presence.

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Bass Maltings, it was called. A vast Victorian aleworks, red brick and looming. Factory, yes, but also something more. It had worker’s houses, storehouses, towers, archways—an entire world in itself. A self-contained town swallowed by time. No one ever came to knock it down. 

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And it just sat there.

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Watching.

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Maths lessons dragged on, heads bowed over paper, and still it sat there through the windows. Its broken window panes like watchful eyes. Girls stared out at it in bored silence, but sometimes the silence bent. Curled. It pressed in from the corners of the room, like something listening.

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Sometimes, at the edge of sleep, she could still see it: the dark shapes of the towers jutting into dusk. And in the silence of night, when even the wind forgot how to howl, she could almost swear she heard footsteps on gravel. The trains bringing the hops along the rusted tracks.

 

The sharp slam of a rusted gate. Voices without words.

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No one ever went in, of course.

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Except, sometimes… they did. The boredom of the country got the better of a few, and it begged investigation. 

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She remembered once—barely thirteen—her friend Sam had said she’d go in after school. “Dare you,” she’d whispered with a grin.

 

She never came back the next day. Or the next. The story changed depending on who told it. Sam moved away. Sam ran off. Sam was sick.

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But her bike was found leaned up against the factory gate.

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Rusting. Crumbling. Waiting.

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Years have passed, and Sam no longer lives in Sleaford. Who knows if she lives anywhere. 

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But sometimes, when she sees Bass Maltings, with that red brick and too many broken windows—her breath catches in her throat. Because it’s still there.

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It never left. Maybe neither did she.

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It’s always been there.

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In the background.

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Watching.