The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall

  “Have you seen any more?” she asked, looking from me to Eliza. “Did you look in the basement?”

  “No,” I said. “But I think it’s fair to say we’re on their radar.”

  Blank looks.

  “I mean, they’re aware of us—maybe aware that we’re aware of them,” I said. “But if we’re prepared, we can fight them. All it took to kill the thing was to throw salt on it. The key is not to be caught off guard.”

  Florence and Eliza glanced at each other. “That’s just it,” Eliza said. “We can’t touch salt. I couldn’t pick it up and fling it if I had a steam shovel. Your ability to move it must stem from your possessing some degree of authority here. As the former owner.”

  Basically meaning I was on my own. The idea of fighting the shadows by myself didn’t exactly thrill me, but I was resolved to protect Mom and Janie. “Okay, then,” I said. “Point me toward the salt, and I’ll take care of them.”

  Florence looked a little faint, so Eliza gave her a bracing thump on the back.

  “That would be lovely, and we’ll take you up on it,” Eliza said. “But you should know that the shadow creatures are only a symptom. The real core of the problem—the root—must lie somewhere else. Discovering that may prove more of a challenge.”

  “We don’t have to discover it,” Florence said, tucking her hair behind her ear. “We just need to make sure it doesn’t discover the little Gothic girl, right?”

  “It’s already discovered her,” I said. “That must be why it sent its monsters to her room.”

  Eliza let out a frustrated little sniff.

  “Sugar, you’re worrying me,” Florence said to her.

  Eliza fidgeted awkwardly in place, then looked pleadingly at Florence. “It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, would it … ? To know what’s trapped us here, and why?”

  Florence’s jaw dropped. “You’ve been happy for ninety years, and just like that you’ve changed all your convictions?”

  “No,” Eliza said stoutly. “Not all my convictions. But there has to be a reason for our being stuck, and I’d like to know the reason. That’s all.”

  There was an uncharacteristically earnest note in her voice—a tiny break that hinted at years of loneliness and helplessness.

  As scary as the unknown was—the idea of ceasing to exist—it was easy to appreciate the full horror of being left behind, trapped here, while everyone you love withers and dies.

  Florence stared despondently at the threadbare rug beneath our feet. “Maybe it doesn’t want us to know,” she said. She lowered her voice as if she were about to say something scandalous. “What if you just make it mad?”

  “We won’t go poking it with sticks, I promise,” Eliza said. “Anyway, that’s not what’s important at the moment. For now, we’ve got to focus our efforts on getting Delia’s family off the property. Perhaps we can arrange a sewage leak or something.”

  Florence flopped back, her forearm over her eyes. “Lovely,” she muttered.

  “If we’re pitching ideas,” I said, “I have one that might be a little less stinky.”

  * * *

  “I’m telling you,” Eliza said, her voice straining in an effort to be patient, “this isn’t going to work. I don’t know why you won’t believe me.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “But I have to try.”

  After making sure I noticed her annoyed look, Eliza handed me the orange Sharpie. (We’d already been through her looking at the logo on the pen and asking me “What’s a Shar-Pie?” as if it were a blueberry pie or apple pie.) “What do you plan to write?” she asked.

  We were sitting on the floor on the ward side of the door, on which I was preparing to write a message to my family. Something they couldn’t possibly ignore. My object-holding skills were still touch and go, so I’d persuaded Eliza to join me, just in case I needed help.

  “Something powerful, but simple,” I said. “Maybe … Leave? In all capital letters.”

  She shook her head. “Go ahead and try. L.”

  “I know how to spell, thank you.” I pushed the tip of the marker against the door and paused. Then I started to make a line, the vertical part of the L.

  Suddenly, the marker veered off course.

  Eliza sat back. “See?”

  I rolled my eyes, then raised the pen and tried again. Again, the pen seemed to jerk out from my control.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense.” She sat back on her heels and looked up at me, having the grace not to gloat. “If we could just send messages, everyone would be doing it. You can’t cross the planes that way. It’s too literal. You’ve got to be subtle.”

  Subtle. The same word Penitence had used.

  “But we can control physical objects,” I said. “Why can’t we just draw a line?”

  “You can draw a line,” she said, taking the marker and drawing one.

  “Great!” I said. “Draw another line, and then we’ll have an L.”

  She sighed, looked at me as if I were totally hopeless, and reached over to draw another line. This one went wildly diagonal.

  I was silent.

  “Do you believe me now?” she asked.

  “I guess I have to.”

  She got to her feet, leaving the marker on the floor. “We’ll find a way to make them leave,” she said. “I promise. But you’re never going to be able to communicate this way.”

  I sighed. “We have to think outside the box.”

  “Outside of what box?” She frowned. “Have you found some sort of special box?”

  “No, there’s no box,” I said. “Forget it.”

  Eliza grimaced. “I’ll go look into a sewage leak.”

  Just then, the bathroom door opened and Mom emerged, wrapped in a towel. She walked right by the scribbled-on door.

  “Janie?” Mom called. “I mean, Jane? Do you smell something? It’s like … a dead animal. Yuck.”

  There was no answer.

  Mom was quiet for a second. I assumed that by this point she was used to being snubbed by my sister and would just go back to her own room. But instead, she tensed and walked the length of the hall, peering inside every open door. Not finding Janie, she returned to the closed door of Room 1—my old room—took a deep, bracing breath, and opened the door.

  There was a surprised shriek.

  “Mom!” Janie cried.

  “Janie!” Mom cried back at her. “What are you doing in here?”

  “Sleeping,” Janie said. “Trying to, anyway.”

  “You shouldn’t be in here,” Mom said, her voice firm. “You need to choose a different room. What’s wrong with the one you slept in last night?”

  “I didn’t like that one,” Janie said, and I heard the hesitation in her voice as she passed over her chance to tell Mom what had happened. “Anyway, I like it in here.”

  I walked over. I felt a jolt seeing Janie, her Goth-y hairstyle all mussed from sleep, in the pink bed I’d never actually slept in. The boards and broken screen had been removed from the window.

  “Jane,” Mom said, with a calmness that hinted at some suppressed surge of emotion, “you cannot stay in here.”

  “But—”

  “I’m not debating this with you!” Mom hardly ever raised her voice, so when she went full-on angry, it was a terrible sound. “Get out of this room. And stay out.”

  Janie’s face fell, and for a moment, she looked like a little girl again. “But I like it in here. I feel—”

  “For once,” Mom said, seething, “just once, do as I say. God, you are so much like your sister sometimes.”

  There was a heavy, painful silence.

  Mom looked at the floor. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I … I’m sorry.”

  Wordlessly, Janie got out from under the covers, scooped up her bag, and stalked across the hall to Room 2.

  As the slam of the door echoed in the hall, my mother pressed her hands to the sides of
her face, turning her head in a slow survey of the room where I’d died. Her whole body trembled almost uncontrollably. She made a low, quiet sound, a sustained hum that kept trying to break out into something fiercer. Then she fell silent, gave herself a sharp little shake, and walked away.

  The trail of pain she left behind was almost tangible.

  How could I have ever thought she would forget me?

  I slipped through the door to Room 2 as Janie was sitting down on the bed and pulling a thin tablet-style computer from her bag. She connected her phone to it with a short white cable, hooking it up as a wireless modem before opening the computer’s web browser. I was impressed—at some point, my little sister had morphed into a tech geek.

  I watched raptly over her shoulder as she pulled up a website called Paranormal Interests and logged herself in as Need2Know.

  A notification window popped up. You have 8 unread private messages.

  I watched her scroll through them. Each one was from a different sender, but they all wrote as if they knew her. Are you there now? someone asked. Has anything happened, any occurrences? someone else asked.

  She clicked through them all but stopped on one from SawW. It was written with a lot more formality than the others.

  Dear Jane,

  I must ask you again to reconsider. I think you are taking an unnecessary risk. There are other ways to learn about what happened to your sister.

  Janie had been talking to people on the Internet about me and my death? I was anxious to know more, but Janie was already typing a reply to SawW.

  Dear Walter,

  As usual, I appreciate you worrying about me—you always have great advice and that means a LOT. I printed out the pamphlet you sent, so thanks for that, too. The thing is, I can’t reconsider because this is my last chance. My parents are selling the property in August, and I will never be able to come back. If I don’t figure it out now, then I will never know what happened, and I will never ever be okay again. Which I guess is only fair because Delia will never get to be okay, but I still need to try. For my parents’ sake as much as for mine. If I am never okay again, then they might as well have lost two daughters.

  I bristled. Who was this Walter guy, and why was he messaging my sister? I had a horrified vision of some creepy mouth-breather. What kind of sleazebag would prey on an emotionally vulnerable fifteen-year-old?

  She clicked Send, and not thirty seconds later, another little window popped up. This one said, You have a new private message from SawW. Next to it was a little avatar of a man who must have been Walter. To my immense relief, he looked about eighty-five years old.

  Janie clicked on the window and winced when the text popped up.

  IF YOU CONTINUE THIS FOOLISHNESS, THEY WILL LOSE TWO DAUGHTERS!

  As if it could erase the ominous tone of his words, Janie quickly closed the window and sat staring at her desktop background—a photo of her and me from that perfect Halloween, the one where she was a housewife and I was a grunge rocker. In the picture, Janie was clutching my hand and laughing. I was beaming at the camera, holding her mop in my other hand.

  With a sigh, Janie clicked on a folder icon on the desktop marked Private. It contained at least a dozen subfolders, each meticulously labeled. There was a folder called Police Files and one called Historical. She paused before selecting Floor Plans.

  A map popped up—rather, five maps—one for each level of the building, starting with the basement and going all the way to the attic. All of the rooms were drawn out and clearly labeled.

  What’s more, they had some sort of notation on them—a seemingly random assortment of numbered red dots. But next my sister opened another file called Incidents, which was a numbered list. I scanned it quickly until I hit a familiar name:

  3. Maria Gorren: died 1885, 10 yrs old, electrocuted self and Nurse Carlson

  4. Harriet Carlson: died 1885, resident nurse, electrocuted by Maria Gorren

  I looked at the image, searching for the red dots labeled 3 and 4, and found them in the third-floor ward bathroom.

  Perusing the rest of the list, I found Florence—

  8. Florence Beauregard, 20 yrs old, died 1902, asphyxiation by hanging

  I gasped. Had Florence really hanged herself? Or had she hanged herself in the same way that I’d leapt out a window—which is to say, not at all?

  Farther down, I found Eliza. 19 yrs old, died 1922, unknown causes.

  I flinched at #27—Theodore Hawkins, 19 years old, died 1940, drowning.

  The last death on the list happened in 1943. After that, nobody else died, probably because they’d shut the place down.

  My heart thunked to the bottom of my chest at the sight of my own name, listed by itself farther down the page. But I was also intrigued. I was part of a pattern, an investigation … At least somebody thought there was something odd about my death. I just wished that “somebody” wasn’t my little sister.

  Mom, still believing my death was a simple suicide, had come here to make the final pre-sale adjustments to the property. But something told me she had no idea that Janie had a completely different goal—to actively seek out the truth about what had happened to me.

  When I was alive, Janie had been sweet, flighty, and lighthearted. Now there was a spark inside her, some sizzling, simmering tension. I could see it in her eyes as they anxiously skimmed the laptop screen, in the quickness of her fingers as they tapped out words on the keyboard. In her taut, wiry posture. She was after something.

  And she was determined to find it.

  There was a sudden, urgent knock on the door. My sister yanked her bag over her computer just as Mom pulled the door open. The sternness of my mother’s expression silenced any protests before Janie could voice them.

  “I know you don’t like it here,” Mom said, “but that is no reason to deface the property, is that clear?”

  Janie frowned. “Um … sure?”

  So Mom had seen the mess Eliza and I made on the ward door … and she thought Janie was responsible.

  They stared at each other for a long beat, until Mom said, “Okay. I’m going to town to buy some groceries and grab a few things at the hardware store. Want to come?”

  “No, thanks,” my sister said. “Just bring back some real food. I want Cheetos.”

  Mom nodded and shut the door.

  Janie slipped her earbuds in her ears and flopped back on the bed with her eyes closed. But after a couple of minutes, she sat up and switched off the music.

  Standing in the doorway, listening down the hall for any movement, she called, “Mom? You still here?”

  No answer.

  A few minutes later, Janie sat in front of the ward door with a rag and a bottle of cleaning solution, scrubbing with all her strength. When the bold orange marks had been reduced to a few pale streaks, she sat with her back against the wall and let the rag drop to the floor.

  “I don’t care who you are or what you do to me,” she said aloud. “I’m going to find out what really happened to my sister.”

  “Yes, that’s very brave,” I said. “But you still need to be careful, you crazy dumbhead.”

  She obviously had some idea that this place wasn’t all it seemed. She was already wary enough to protect herself using salt. But then I realized, with dread making its way down my spine like some frozen liquid, that salt might not be enough of a defense against a force that could slide through the very walls and seep into your mind.

  My sister had brought a knife to a ghost fight.

  And what’s more, she was in terrible danger. Because my sister had become exactly what I had been, back four years earlier when the house had found me irresistible:

  Janie was a troubled female.

  Operation Just Leave, Already was under way. Eliza had identified a rusted pipe in the bathroom, one that, with a little slamming from a wrench or sledgehammer, might shatter and flood the place.

  The tools were in the basement, presumably under the watch of another shadow cre
ature. So that’s where I was headed.

  The kitchen pantry was packed with salt. Standing surrounded by navy-blue cartons of the stuff, my skin thrummed and my nose and mouth filled with acrid, salty fumes. But I was able to pick up one of the cannisters and carry it out to the counter.

  I needed to transfer it to a container that would make it easy to aim and throw. I found a scratched-up metal measuring cup and filled it with salt, then pushed open the kitchen door with my hip. A thrill of satisfaction went through me at the ease with which I’d been able to do it—as if I had an actual body.

  I was starting to get my dead groove on. I just hoped I wouldn’t be shredded into spaghetti by a shadow monster before I got to enjoy it.

  Then I faced the basement door. It was locked, so I set the metal cup down and passed through the solid wood, intending to turn the lock from inside and go back for the salt.

  I had to hurry—no doubt my ghostly blue glow was enough to grab the attention of any lurking shadow creature.

  But just as I was struggling to get a grip on the lock, it turned from the other side. I slipped back through the door and found myself face-to-face with Janie, who stood with the keys in her hand and that Nancy Drew look in her eyes.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “Don’t go down there! Have you never seen a horror movie?”

  Suddenly, there was a tremendous thump against the basement door.

  Janie and I both jumped back.

  I thought for sure that she would leave now. I know I would have, if I’d been in her place. But to my considerable surprise (and dismay) she took a deep breath and reached into her pocket, taking out a small paperback book—hardly more than a pamphlet. I printed out the pamphlet you sent, she’d written to that old Walter guy.

  She unfolded it and started to read, a shade louder than a whisper. “By the authority of nature,” she said, “by the forces of creation. By righteousness and through the power of good, I—”

  Another huge thud.

  My sister flinched, but her voice grew stronger. “Through the power of good, I bind you, I bind you—”