Long Story #21: Into the Playrooms (Part 1)

Long Story #21: Into the Playrooms (Part 1) (Content Tags: Surreal horror, age regression, first-person perspective, wetting and messing, slow-burn) My hobby, which would go on to become my career, was 'urban exploration'. What this effectively could be summed up as was that I fancied exploring the abandoned interiors of long-forgotten buildings. It was something that I'd been interested in since I was a kid, whenever I'd pull myself over the barricades that hosted their big, imposing trespassing signs, so that I could sneak into the memory-speckled shells of the past. Factories, plants, malls...I'd spent decades slipping into places that nobody else dared to go. Places tinged by the rusts of time, where nature had deigned to reclaim what was rightfully its own; places where the human element had long since been excised. It was an exciting part of my life. I would spend countless hours scoping out new places to explore, and after the first couple of years, I decided to start recording these little adventures of mine. It didn't start out with any monetary aspect in mind, no, it started with a simple wish to better remember the haunts that I'd conquered. It was only when I began to post them on a whim, that I realized how profitable it could be to pursue my passion. Other people were just as intrigued as I was to see these forgotten places, but they lacked the same courage or conviction to follow through on their own. So they lived vicariously through my exploits, like so many other content creators, and I welcomed their curious eyes to my channel. I remained anonymous, for obvious legal reasons, but I hadn't been in it for the fame anyway. With my costs covered by my captivated audience, I was able to make exploration my full focus. No more squandering my minutes in the drudgery of retail, not when thousands of people would put dollars in my pocket to go diving into the past. I'd never given much thought to the dangers involved, though they were plainly abundant; most of the places that I ventured were places that either were or should have been long condemned for their lack of safety. Rotting floors, territorial vermin, toxic materials, and unstable foundations were all common threats I would run into. I kept cautious enough to these hazards to keep safe, but I didn't have enough respect for how much danger these places could hold. I could have never anticipated the danger I'd be faced with on my final voyage. It'd been something that was supposed to be an 'easy' venture for me, as a break of sorts from my usual. I'd been running myself ragged the last few months, and my previous video had ended with me almost getting crushed by a collapsing ceiling, so I'd decided to recover with something simple. An old, abandoned daycare by the name of 'Fluffy Bottoms'. My research hadn't been as complete as I would have liked it to be, with the extent of the building's history being but a few paragraphs in a newspaper from nearly thirty years prior. From what little I could scour, it came across that the daycare had been shut down after some occupants had gone missing. Surprisingly, that was all I could find on it. The expectation would have been that it would be a much larger scandal, but the story had started and ended with but one backpage blurb in a paper that no longer even existed. More shocking was the fact that the space had never been bought, renovated, or cleared for something else; the daycare, though now faded and run down, was the same building it'd once been. I didn't take my car; I rarely did, at least whenever the location was within distance of a bus stop. The anonymity aspect was important, and nothing screamed 'trespasser' more than parking an unfamiliar sedan in an abandoned area. The daycare itself was a little off the beaten path, wedged into a corner of the town that saw little traffic. There were still some businesses nearby, but the daycare was obscured by tree coverage that'd reclaimed the territory. That was fortuitous for me, since it meant that it was a lot less likely that someone would see me breaking in. Unlike the more urban spots that I frequented, the daycare didn't have a lot of options for me to cleanly flee; I was a practitioner of parkour, which was great whenever I was trying to evade getting caught in an industrial park, but did little to help for a little place like this would be. I still brought my gear bag, at least a partial one, in the case that there was more than met the eye. I would soon discover that there was a lot more to it, but my gear wouldn't save me from what was to come. The building was about a half hour walk from where I got off the bus. I opted to cut through the wooded area outside the daycare, instead of taking the road; it took a little longer, but it kept my intentions completely hidden. After nearly tripping on more than one root, and getting eaten up by mosquitoes, I finally got spat out right on the edge of the property, where an old chain link fence acted as the only protective partition. The grass was high, overgrown, and the fence had been strangled by creeping ivy that had likewise been starting to retake the edges of the facility. It was further proof that this place had laid dormant for over thirty years, without even the property upkeep that would be expected by whoever owned the parcel of land. That in itself was strange, since one would expect that the owners would keep the place maintained enough to show off to prospective buyers; it might have been a little out of the way, but it was a large enough piece of land that it should have been easy enough to offload onto someone for a neat sum. Most areas that I explored that were left to rot were spaces where the ownership of the property was nebulous, or where the property was desolate enough to never be seen by anyone who wasn't already interested. If someone wanted to buy the land where an old factory was rotting, then they would hardly care about how derelict the surrounding space was, but it was highly unusual for prime commercial real estate on the edge of a suburb to be as dilapidated. Scaling the fence was easy, and I walked past a playground that'd seen far better days. I made sure to walk by it slowly, so that the camera clipped to me could take it all in. My audience loved stuff like this, as evident by the views on my abandoned amusement park videos. There was a creepiness to the way that a cheery, childish aesthetic could be bastardized by the ravages of time. "Wouldn't want your kids going on any of these, eh? Not without a tetanus shot, at least." I joked, peering down at the rusty springs of a faded duck to sit on. "Probably has lead paint too..." I carefully sat down on the duck, my body obviously too big for something meant for a preschooler, and the antique groaned under my weight. "To think, this playground hasn't been used for decades. You'd think that they would have at least torn this part down, to keep kids from trying to come over the fence." Suddenly, and for reasons I couldn't explain, I felt a cold chill go down my spine. It was a feeling that was as brief as it was intense, like a child staring down a dark stairwell into the abyss. It was dread, it was doom, it was fear. It was a completely uncharacteristic sensation. I wasn't someone who got scared, least of all from my work; I was a lowkey adrenaline junkie that flourished in places like this! And yet, as I got off the duck, my eyes quivered at the sight of the nearby building. I could feel a lump in my throat, as if I'd stepped into a graveyard under the pitch black sky of night. What was this feeling? And why was I having it? I shook it off and continued to trudge forward through the grass. Perhaps my brain was taking the backstory of this place too seriously; maybe I felt it made for a good ghost story, and I was psyching myself out. But why? The why didn't matter. Not really. No, what mattered was plodding forward, regardless of the silly alarms trying to ring in my head. I'd never been scared by any of the places that I explored, and those other places had far more reason to be frightening! This was just one little building, next to a suburb, where brats used to play with blocks and drop loads in their pants. It wasn't a derelict doll factory full of plastic body parts, nor was it a partially underwater mining complex that'd claimed two cave divers already, it was just a fucking daycare. It made me feel a little pathetic, as if my edge was dulling. I rolled up to the entrance and looked down at the rusted lock on the doors, and then up at the colorful signage that'd faded over time. Here it was, in all its juvenile glory: Fluffy Bottoms Daycare Center. "This place opened in the late seventies and closed in the middle of the nineties. I bet you're asking yourself 'why'? Am I right? Maybe it was asbestos? Or a delayed victim of the satanic panic? But the story is a little more mysterious than that." I backed up a few feet, so that the entrance was in better view of the camera. "Fluffy Bottoms closed down in ninety-five, and the reason had to do with some kids that went missing from here. Was it trafficking? Was it murder? Did the kids simply wander off into the woods? Your guess is as good as mine, because I couldn't find anything more on this place." That part still bugged me. I knew the internet was in its infancy when this place closed, but there definitely should have been more information than a single, vague article in the back of a local newspaper. "Five kids, one junior helper, and a caretaker. All disappeared one day, and nothing in my research suggests that they ever showed back up. For all I know, they could all be in some shallow grave on the property. Spooky, right?" I had to chew the details a little, since the facility didn't look very large. Most places I explored were massive in comparison, to where I had to edit down a bunch of footage to make an easily digestible video. This place though? I would probably have to use all of the footage and really take my time on it. "Now, I did post on a message board, specific to this community, in hopes of getting some answers. Unfortunately, nobody replied to my thread, and then it got removed by the moderators. So, uh...I guess if anyone of you has deeper insight on this place's history, or any resolution, then please post in the comments for this video!" It wouldn't be the first time that I relied on my fans to do some additional research, but unlike most of those other places, I was genuinely intrigued to know if this daycare had any further documentation to its sordid history. Surely someone had to know *something*. "Enough dawdling, I guess. The windows all looked pretty secure, so I guess we're going to go in the front door. I brought my lockpick kit, but I don't think that'll do me any good with how rusted this thing is..." Looking around the ground, I grabbed a rock in my palm and showed it to the camera: "We're gonna do this like Fred Flintstone." A few solid bashes with the rock and the lock broke off the door, clattering to the ground with a rainfall of brown rust. With the lock no longer impeding me, I had no excuse to stay outside; I grabbed my flashlight out of my bag and opened the door. "Now, hopefully, this place hasn't become a raccoon reserve or anything. It looked sealed up tight from the outside, but you never know with vermin." I joked as I clicked the flashlight on and gently closed the door behind me. The first room, to which the entrance fed into, was obviously a reception area. There was a desk with a positively ancient looking computer, where drop-offs and pick-ups were supposed to happen. The room had that rubber tiling, of pink and blue squares, and the walls had a cloud motif that had seen better days. The air inside was surprisingly sweet, when I would have expected it to be musty with mold; it was a familiar scent, but I couldn't quite place it. There was a mural on the wall that showed cartoony looking pictures of diapered toddlers, all smiling of course, and with licensed characters from things such as Care Bears, Barney, and Looney Tunes, which I was fairly confident that the daycare didn't secure the rights to use. "Hell, maybe that's why the place really got shut down! Got sued into oblivion for copyright infringement." I laughed, turning the camera to show some of the more egregious examples. "Look! There's baby Mickey; you guys know that Disney doesn't play around." I went on to poke around the reception room for a few more minutes, going on a short tangent about how computers used to look, but I wasn't just trying to chew the scenery. I was stalling; I didn't want to go any further in. My feet felt heavy, my chest felt tight. Anxiety, an emotion that I'd seldom suffered, was fraying the corners of my brain. "Hehe, well enough of the history lesson on *that*. Let's move on. Looks like reception leads out into a hall here..." I kept the flashlight steady, or I at least tried to, but my wrist was trembling. The inky blackness at the end of the hall looked as though it wanted to swallow me whole; or perhaps, with each passing door frame appearing as the rib of a whale, maybe I'd already been swallowed? Realization struck that I'd been quiet for too long and I cleared my throat awkwardly. "Man, this is some *advanced* darkness, huh? Well, let's start by going into one of these rooms, okay?" I pushed open the first door on my left and was greeted by a baby gate; plastic, once white but now yellowed by time, and a slight hassle to step over. The room had some light shining in already, courtesy of the window on the far wall, but I kept my flashlight handy. There were some dusty cribs that hugged the walls, with ragged stuffed animals still inside, as if caged and forgotten. "They should fire whoever their maid service is." I quipped as I ran my finger across the top rail of the one of the wooden cribs. "From what I read, this place cared for kids from infancy through kindergarten; I'm guessing this is one of the infant rooms. Over thirty years and this place still smells like..." That was what the sweet odor had been! It was talcum! But why was it still so strong in the air? So much so that I could smell it at the entrance of the building? "...Baby powder. That's kind of crazy, isn't it? What's the half-life on that stuff? Parents who watch my videos, post in the comments if baby powder just lingers forever in your home." My camera captured more of the room, but there wasn't a whole lot of interest to display; there was a rocking chair, a changing table, some pails... Everything was dated, but it wasn't anything that would be out of place in a modern facility. "Kind of surprising that they didn't auction any of that crap off...Or hell, why didn't any of the employees take it home? It looks like it was probably pretty new whenever they closed, so it's just a big waste." The next couple of rooms weren't all too interesting either; one was likely for the five year olds, since it lacked the same infantile aura of the first, and instead focused more on toys and imaginary play. I smiled weakly as I recognized quite a bit from my own childhood, like the fake cookware or the tinker-toys, but it filled me with further unease. It brought up another uncomfortable detail about this place: why was it so messy? If this place closed after a scandal, then forget about the fact that stuff got left here, why was stuff still on the floor? Why did it look like the place got suddenly evacuated during a normal day? And even if it had been, then why was nothing picked up before the lock was placed on the door? It seemed like a petty detail to fixate on, but it was buzzing directly in my brain. Human nature usually dictated that people would fix something out of place, even if they don't necessarily have to, so how did this place get frozen in time like this? Were the fridges full of rotten snacks? Or the pantries full of expired treats? This place looked like it had a fire drill and then nobody ever stepped back inside again! The smell of talcum was getting stronger as I worked my way down the hall, and an additional scent of baby wipes gave a subtle twist to the babyish bouquet. My head was starting to hurt too, and I found myself wondering if there might be a gas leak somewhere in the building. I had to stop once I reached the final door down the hall. I'd gone into the restrooms, the staff room, the kitchenette, and had decided to circle back on going into the manager's office as an ending to the video. The last door down the hall had a soft pastel picture of one of those 'Precious Moments' boys, the one where the big-eyed lad was swaddled in a diaper that tied at the sides; it was a familiar sight, iconic even, but it only intensified the feeling of dread in my heart. My mouth felt dry as I reached for the knob, and one final warning blared in my brain that I should turn around and get out as quickly as possible. Stupidly, I again silenced that voice and turned my hand around the dusty handle to the door; the wood creaked as it opened, and I was greeted by total darkness; unlike most of the other rooms that I'd ventured into, this one had no window to the outside. "Poor kids had no natural light in here..." I muttered as I turned the flashlight on each corner of the room. My nose wrinkled pretty quickly at the scent I was picking up; the talcum and baby wipe smell was still as strong as ever, but now it was joined by something more unpleasant; I hadn't been around little kids since I myself was a little kid, but it was familiar enough to my nostrils: it was the undeniable stench of a dirtied diaper. It was subtle, but unmistakable. "Ugh...You guys are lucky that we don't have smell-o-vision. I don't know why, but this place still smells like the *bad* part of a nursery." I wandered across the room, being cautious to not trip over any of the toy cars or dinosaurs that'd been left to litter the foam puzzle-mat floor. At the other side of the room was the changing table, larger than the one in the infant room, and surprisingly enough, still clearly stocked. No, not just stocked, but left in the middle of use: a clean diaper, obviously from the nineties from its dated design, was on top of the table and open. It was as if a child was about to be changed, and then he just wasn't. Placing the flashlight carefully on the table, I lifted up the diaper to get a better look. It was cumbersome and boxy, with plastic-backed material instead of the more modern cloth, and with old Sesame Street prints. They lacked the flashy coloring of a modern diaper, and likely were far inferior on a mechanical level, not that I'd know much about advancements in polymer technology.