The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall (13 page)

Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee.

The notes were so simple and lovely. And it was so comforting to have something, at last, to
do
—to actually do with my hands, with my fingers, with my time.

I sat on a little wooden chair by the window, leaning forward to look over the grounds again, my fingers still turning the tiny crank.

Theo was gone. Off to wherever he went, to do whatever he spent his days and months and years doing.

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me.

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me.

The gray sky began to glow with moonlight reflected off the snowy earth.

And I went on turning the handle of the little music box.

The snowdrifts melted away, revealing dead, brown grass and puddles of mud. Rainstorms rolled through and coaxed new, green life out of the hillside. A bird searched for twigs for her nest and then worms for her babies, and a raindrop fell, millimeter by millimeter, from the eaves.

And still I played the song.

W
ow,” said a voice. A man’s voice.

I didn’t turn from the window. But I let the music box rest silently on the windowsill.

“Carlos, come check out these suitcases,” the voice said. “Wild.”

“Hang on,” said a second voice. “I’m just checking the readings …”

I looked over at the entrance to the room, where two men in their late twenties stood studying a complicated-looking handheld meter, the kind with the needle that swings from red to yellow to green.

“Clear,” the scruffier one—Carlos—said. “Dude, I’m telling you, this place is clean.”

They were both wearing khaki cargo pants and long-sleeved T-shirts. Carlos’s was from some event called Phoenix Conspiracyfest 2013. The other guy’s shirt read
I WANT TO BELIEVE
. He was clean-shaven with a buzz cut and carried a camera. Over his shoulder was slung a backpack labeled
JASON
.

“Is this the last room?” Carlos asked. “There ought to be stairs out that door.”

Jason nodded, then raised the camera to his face and began taking a video of the room. He panned across the suitcases, toward me.

I froze, wondering if he would somehow sense my presence. But he didn’t seem to.

He finished the pan, holstered the camera, and shrugged. “I agree. Clean.”

Carlos looked troubled. “How do we explain the Christmas incident?”

“I don’t know,” Jason said. “Those were just dumb high school kids. They probably trashed the place and then made up a story to keep from getting in trouble.”

High school kids? Were they talking about Nic and Landon?

Did that mean she was alive? Surely they would have said something if she wasn’t.

“It’s been two years since then, with no other reports of sightings. The repair guys were here, the insurance guys, the cops … nobody’s seen a thing.” Jason sniffed. “Not to mention our readings show zero paranormal activity.”

Wait a second. They were measuring paranormal activity? These guys were ghost hunters.

“Let’s send the report to the investors tonight,” Carlos said. “And tell them to put the check in the mail. There are no ghosts here.”

… Really, really incompetent ghost hunters.

Jason wandered over to the shelf of suitcases and cracked one open. “Why’d they shut this place down, anyway?”

“If you read the articles I sent you—”

“I didn’t,” Jason said.

“It was a private sanitarium,” Carlos said. “The old-fashioned version of what the developer’s looking to do with it now. Designed mostly for short-term rehabilitation. But at some point the state noticed that people weren’t being rehabilitated. They just got worse with time. That was back when they’d lock you up for being a party girl, you know, just to scare you back to good behavior. But the party girls went crazy. They all went crazy. And more than a few of them died under mysterious circumstances.”

Jason was holding an old shoe he’d pulled from one of the bags. It was coffee-colored leather, with a sturdy two-inch heel, and it looked stiff and shrunken with age. Suddenly, it seemed to occur to him that an actual person had once worn that shoe—a person who may have met a terrible end in this very building. He shuddered and gently put the shoe back.

“This place
should
be haunted, then,” he said, looking around. His demeanor had changed. He looked uneasy. “Shouldn’t it?”

Carlos was making a notation on his phone. “It’s not.”

“But maybe we should do one more walkthrough,” Jason said. “Since we’re talking about bringing
more
troubled kids here. If we missed something—if there were some kind of supernatural presence—it could easily feed off—”

“No way,” Carlos said. “Look, dude, we’ve been here for five hours. It smells and it’s giving me a headache, so I’m going back to the hotel. You’re welcome to stay and host a séance. But I’m leaving. This place is clear. There are no ghosts here.”

Were Carlos’s words true? Were my parents going to sell this property to a developer who wanted to put
another
mental hospital here?

I thought about getting up out of my chair, creating a disturbance, getting their attention somehow. I tried to will Jason to stand his ground.

And then, behind me, I heard one clear note from the music box.

Jason tensed. “What was that?”

But Carlos laughed and ran a hand through his scraggly hair. “Buddy, you’re getting paranoid. Let’s go.”

No.

Wait.

Stay.

But no part of me took action to keep them there. To draw their notice.

The door closed behind them, and I remained in my seat. The music box played a couple of enticingly clear and lovely notes, and in spite of my intentions to do otherwise, I reached over and gently picked it up, holding it in my lap.

I’d been holed up in that room for two years. Was that even possible?

Briefly, I considered going downstairs and finding Eliza or Florence. Telling them about what the ghost hunters had mentioned—that the house would soon have more troubled young adults in its grasp. And while I wasn’t sure exactly what would happen, I knew to my core that it would be bad.

The house holds on to troubled girls,
I thought.
It doesn’t want to let them go.

The thought hit me with such clarity that I recognized it immediately as a solid truth.

That was why the house—the presence—the dark smoke, whatever it was—had come after me. Killed me. Because I was trying to leave … when I “belonged” here. So what would happen when more troubled teens came?

Disaster, that’s what.

But what was
I
going to do? I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t save anybody else. I couldn’t even save myself.

Without thinking, I’d begun to turn the crank on the music box again.

Out front, Jason and Carlos were packing up their car to go. Theo stood a few yards away and watched them. Then they started the car and drove straight through him.

Worst ghost hunters ever.

I didn’t move from my chair. The grass in the fields grew strong and tall and green, and the days got longer. The sun’s path widened in the sky, and the stars made arcs over the horizon. I half believed that I wasn’t stuck in a house at all, but on a journey across the ocean, on a huge, creaking ship. And the rippling grass below me was the moon frosting the tips of the indigo waves.

My body, buried somewhere hundreds of miles away, gave itself back to the earth.

My soul began to peel away from my consciousness, until I began to feel that there was nothing left of me.

The music was everything I needed or wanted. It was all.

In this way, lost in my daydreams, bearing witness to the seasons on the hillside, and always, always carrying in my mind the lilting song from the music box, I passed another year and a half as if it were a single mildly interesting day.

*  *  *

A car door slammed.

I sat stunned and motionless, looking down at the music box in my hand.

A choice lay in front of me. If I kept turning the crank, I would never need to go and see who had come here. I would never face the uncertainty or heartbreak of being reminded at every turn that I was gone, forgotten. So what if the house wanted more victims? Why was that my business?

The temptation to ignore the living altogether, to let the fog of death rise around me and contain my existence, was real and nearly irresistible. I didn’t have to resist—I could be one of the ghosts who sat in the background, counting her fingers.

I’d be the one on the third floor with the music box.

It would be so simple, just to surrender myself and my thoughts. Let the house have me, let time carry me forward like a river. What difference did it make? Besides, what was the alternative?

Pain and rejection. Sorrow and heartbreak.

How could you know that? You haven’t even tried.

All I’d ever done was mess things up. Massively.

Maybe you were a dumb kid. Maybe you did make stupid, irresponsible choices. But you don’t have to be that person forever.

But the person I decided to be right here, right now—that would be the person I was forever.

I looked out the window. All I could see was a red car, an unfamiliar model that hadn’t existed when I’d died. With a flutter of anxiety, I wondered if it was some hapless troubled kid forced here by her parents. But the grounds were still decrepit, the grass still dead.

A few feet from the car, watching it carefully, was Theo. He glanced up at the house, and he noticed me and waved.

Slowly, I waved back.

And then I stood up and left the music box behind.

I
skipped down the stairs two at a time, and the air moving through my body felt warm and inviting. Some distant part of me recalled how it felt to step outside on a summer day and feel the sun kiss my skin.

I made my way to the lobby, where Florence and Eliza stood at the window, looking outside.

“Hello,” I said. “Long time no see.”

“Three and a half years, give or take,” Florence said. “What have you been doing with yourself?”

I shook my head. It suddenly occurred to me to be ashamed of how I’d spent my time.

“It’s all right, sugar. It did you good. You look refreshed.” She gave me a smile.

“I came to see about the car,” I said.

“More visitors. Oh dear—it’s a girl.” Eliza still hadn’t deigned to look over at me. She sighed disapprovingly. “Girls shouldn’t come here. This place is inhospitable.”

The “girl” could more accurately be described as a teenager. Her hair was black with a magenta streak, shaved close on one side and long on the other. I couldn’t see her face, but I could tell by the way she moved and walked that she was unhappy.

“What do you think happened to her?” Eliza asked. “Why is her head shaved? Some kind of head injury?”

“No, that’s not an injury,” I said. “It’s just the style. She’s Goth.”

“
Goth?
Short for
Gothic
?” Eliza studied the girl. “I take it that’s a mode of fashion?”

“Basically,” I said, looking at her long-sleeved black shirt and roughed-up black jeans. On her feet were black rubber flip-flops, and even from this distance I could tell her toenails were painted black. “For some people it goes a little deeper than that.”

“She looks like a vampiress,” Florence said.

Then the driver got out of the car.

I gasped.

“I suppose being Gothic doesn’t run in families, then,” Eliza mused. “That woman looks quite normal.”

I leaned closer to the window, hardly able to believe what I was seeing. “
‘That woman’
is my mother!”

“Oh?” Eliza said, looking more carefully. “Oh … yes.”

“She looks like you,” Florence said. “Very pretty.”

And if the woman was Mom, then that meant the girl was …

“That’s my
sister
?” I said. “Oh my God—that’s Janie!”

“Are you quite sure?” Eliza said. “It doesn’t look like her at all. I remember her being a sweet little thing. Blond, wasn’t she?”

I ran outside and down the steps, desperate to get a closer look at my little sister. When I reached her, I practically skidded to a stop.

This … this couldn’t be Janie.

When I was alive, my sister’s favorite colors were pink and hot pink. Her blond hair had always been her favorite feature.

No way had that sugary-sweet aspiring pop princess turned into this creature of the night.

But when she lifted her face, there wasn’t a speck of doubt left. Despite the dark, asymmetrical hair and the eggplant-purple lips and the eyes ringed with smoky circles of gray makeup, this was definitely Janie.
My
Janie. I was so enthralled by the sight of her that I stood about a foot away and stared at the curves of her cheeks, the slight upturn of her nose.

“She’s not a little girl anymore,” I said out loud. “Look at her. She’s so …”

“Scary,” Theo said. He had come up behind me.

“Beautiful.”
I shot him a cool look. “She looks like a model.”

“Well … not like any fashion model I ever saw in my time. But if you say so.”

I went back to studying my sister. How old was she now … fifteen? Nearly the age I had been when I’d died here. If I’d lived, I would have been twenty. An unexpected zap of jealousy went through me. Janie was growing up. Soon she’d be older than I ever got to be. Then she’d go to college, have a career, start a family.

Stop it,
I scolded myself.

“Don’t forget your mother,” Theo said. “She’s here, too.”

After another few seconds spent staring at my sister, I turned to look for Mom. At first glance, she looked as she always had. Her hair was the same, she wore the same pale rose shade of lipstick, and I even recognized the gray T-shirt she was wearing as one she’d owned back when I was alive. But when I got closer, I realized that my initial impression was wrong. She’d changed. Something was different.

Something was … gone. It was like a piece had been removed from her soul. When she looked warily up at the house, I could see that some part of her was far away, searching. Sad.

Because of me.

Instinctively, I looked around for my father. Then it hit me—if Mom and Dad had separated three years ago, he was probably completely out of the picture by now.

“Why do you think they came back?” Theo asked me.

I didn’t really care, honestly. They could have been there to start a bunny-worshipping cult, and I would have been thrilled to see them. I felt buoyantly happy, and was suddenly struck by a strange and wonderful idea.

“What if they’re going to
live
here?” I said.

The scenario unfolded in my mind: Mom needed a change of scenery. Maybe she’d decided to finally work on the novel she’d always wanted to write. And this place was sitting empty, so they figured
why not?
Stranger things had happened, right?

“That would be terrible,” Theo said. “Don’t even wish for it.”

My mother put her hands in her pockets. “I guess we should get everything inside.”

Janie shrugged and trudged through the knee-high weeds toward the front steps, but Mom called out to her. “Jane? Could you help me with the bags?”

Jane? She went by Jane now?

It’s fine,
I thought, even though it felt like the floor had just dropped out from underneath me.
Kids grow up. She’s not a baby anymore. She’s a teenager.

But Janie—sorry, she’d never be
Jane
to me—didn’t hurry back to help our mother. Instead, she froze, her shoulders rigid, and stared at the door for a second before she spun around, stalked back to the car, and wordlessly waited for Mom to pop the trunk.

“I know this isn’t your first choice—” Mom started to say. But Janie cut her off.

“I just don’t see why I have to be the pack mule when you’re the one who decided to bring almost everything we own.” She hoisted a bag over her shoulder and frowned. “Where are the keys?”

Mom’s lips pressed into an unhappy line, but she handed over the key chain. Then Janie reached back into the trunk and pulled out a scraped-up red suitcase.

I gasped. That had been
my
suitcase.

Trying desperately not to show that the stuff she was carrying was almost too heavy for her, my sister tottered up the steps and unlocked the front entrance. Then she went inside. The doors gaped open behind her, and I quickly moved to follow her into the house.

“Delia, hold on,” Theo said softly. “I think we should talk.”

I glanced back at him. There was something like worry in his expression. The prospect of spending time with Theo was tempting. But I didn’t have time to chat. I had my family back.

By the time I got inside, Janie had opened the door to the superintendent’s apartment and set down her bags. Mom came in carrying everything else—cleaning supplies, groceries, her laptop, pillows, sheets, blankets, a tote full of books (my mother never went anywhere without books). Then she ducked into the kitchen to put the food away.

When she came out, she looked around.

“Jane?” she called.

No answer.

“Jane!” I detected thinly-veiled panic in her voice. Could you blame her? Alarm rose inside me, too, like a tiny, quaking creature.

Mom dashed out to the lobby and threw open the front doors to look outside—was she making sure the car was still there? Then she went back inside and down the main hall, pausing to listen for any sign of my sister. Finally, she climbed the stairs and walked across the day room to the ward door. I trailed close behind her.

In the ward, she made it almost all the way to the end of the hall before stopping outside Room 4 and letting out a massive sigh. Over her shoulder, I saw Janie sprawled on the bed, her eyes closed and earbuds in, with tinny music spilling out of them.

“Jane,”
Mom said loudly. My sister lazily opened her eyes, and plucked out one of her headphones. “Honey, why didn’t you tell me you were coming up here? You can’t just run off by yourself. You could get lost in this place.”

Not likely. I remembered the hand-drawn map on Nic’s phone. At some point, my sister had done some unauthorized exploring.

“Please,” Janie said. “I’m not a little kid.”

“Why don’t you come downstairs?” Mom asked.

But Janie just stuck the earbud back in her ear.

“Why on earth have they returned?” Eliza asked, popping in by my side.

I looked at my mom, who was clenching her fists in an effort not to lose her cool.

“To get the place ready to sell, I guess,” I replied.

“How would you know? Have they said?” Eliza turned her reproachful gaze toward my mother. “Surely someone else could have handled the details for them.”

“Who knows?” I said. “Maybe they don’t have enough money to hire people.”

After all, with Dad out of the picture, Mom was having to make ends meet with one salary instead of two.

But a plaintive, embarrassed voice deep inside me said,
To see me. To be near me.
I mean, sure, I was dead, but wouldn’t they naturally want to spend time at the place I’d died? To sort of … cherish my memory or something?

“Well,” Eliza said, bells jingling as she placed her hands on her hips, “I hope for their own sakes that they don’t stay long.”

I bristled with indignation.

“Oh, don’t get grumpy,” Eliza said. “You know what I mean. This place isn’t safe.”

I turned on her. “And yet you keep saying it’s fine.”

“I don’t—” She colored slightly. “It
is
fine, in some ways.”

“Like if you’re dead?”

“I suppose.”

“Yeah, well, news flash,” I said. “I wasn’t dead until I came here.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What’s a ‘news flash’?”

“Forget it,” I said.

“Anyway, whose side are you on?” she asked. “Do you want them to stay or leave?”

I stared at Mom for a beat. She and Janie had just finished a mini-argument that left them both hurt and angry.

The answer was blindingly obvious.

My mood sank instantly. “To leave,” I said. “They need to leave and never come back.”

“All right, then,” Eliza said. “What are we going to do to make that happen?”

I looked at her, feeling equal parts gratitude and confusion. “We?”

The pink in her cheeks intensified. “I couldn’t help
you
,” she said. “I might as well do what I can for your family.”

*  *  *

Mom cooked dinner in the superintendent’s kitchen and served it on paper plates. Janie took her food and went to eat by herself on the couch while Mom sat at the table with a paperback. After they’d finished eating, my sister got the red suitcase and started for the door to the hallway.

Mom jumped to attention. “Are you going upstairs now? I’ll come.”

“Mother, could you just … not?” Janie said. “I’m fine. I can be alone for five minutes without you fawning all over me.”

Mom tried to look light and carefree, but the effect was miserable. Her face contorted like a sad mask. “Sorry. Are you sure you’re okay up there alone?”

“Relax,” Janie snapped. “You’re making me so nervous.”

Mom was silent, and my sister relented.

“I’ll be fine,” Janie said, flipping her hair the way she used to—only now it was habit, not affectation. “It’s fine.”

Her niceness seemed to soothe some wild fear in our mother. “Okay,” Mom said, her face still plasticky bright. “See you in a bit, sweetie. I guess you can text me if you need anything. Thankfully they put in that cell tower up the highway. It’s like we’re living in the twenty-first century again!”

“Sure,” Janie said. Then she walked out.

My mother gave a little sigh and went back to her book.