And something slammed into me from behind, pushing me into action.
I plunged ahead, pivoting sideways when the walls were too tight to walk straight. I made it to the door, closed my eyes, and pushed through, throwing myself into the dreary day room in the last possible moment.
With no sign of what had caused it, the cold air dissipated.
“Hello?” I called. “Hello—who’s here? Who are you?”
There was no answer.
But there was something on the floor that hadn’t been there before—a tiny image, carefully cut out of a magazine: a little box of cat food.
Weird.
I slumped back against the wall, my energy almost totally gone. Being tired as a ghost was different from being tired as a person—it almost felt like I was beginning to fade away, to lose parts of myself. My body seemed somehow more translucent, and my thoughts jumped around. I couldn’t focus.
I need to rest.
I walked through the day room, noticing as I did that a woman about my mom’s age now occupied one of the benches. She was wearing a flimsy cotton nightgown, carefully counting her own fingers. I tried to get past without attracting her notice, but she looked up as I passed by. Her eyes were empty and hopeless, her expression blank. She didn’t seem angry, or sad, or even confused. She was just … there.
I averted my eyes, like you’re supposed to do around an aggressive dog. But it probably wasn’t necessary. The next time I dared peek at her, she’d gone back to counting.
Then something caught my attention …
Music. A simple melody so sweet and soothing that it might as well have been the smell of freshly baked cookies.
It was coming from behind the other door—NO UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE.
I went through it and slipped down a long hallway. As I passed each doorway, I only paused to peer inside—I didn’t want to stop. I had to find the source of the music.
This was the part of the building where the patients had been treated—doors labeled EXAM, HOLDING, and THERAPY. The exam rooms each held a hospital-style bed with straps just like the ones in the bedrooms. But there were also counters and cabinets still stocked with antiquated medical supplies.
The holding room was a full-on padded room, where you stash people who are so crazy you’re afraid they’ll bash their own brains out against a regular wall. Every visible surface was covered in rough-woven fabric—canvas, maybe—tattered and rotten with age.
The therapy room was closed, as were a few unlabeled doors on either side of the hall past it. Which was fine with me. I wasn’t exploring—I was chasing that song.
The music grew louder as I followed it down to the last door on the left: PROCESSING. As soon as I went through the wall, the song cut out discordantly, leaving me standing in a room that was quiet and cold and filled me with prickly revulsion.
Shelves lined one wall, holding a Tetris-like arrangement of antique suitcases. On the other side of the room was a cabinet whose worn doors gaped open, revealing stacks of folded cotton garments. A few had fallen to the floor, and despite their shapelessness I could tell that they were the same as the nightgowns some of the ghosts were wearing.
In the far corner was a curtain on a metal frame that reached about neck-high. A new patient would be sent behind it to take off her old clothes and put on one of the cotton nightgowns, at which point her old things would be packed away and set on the shelf until the day she claimed her suitcase and left …
Or the day she didn’t.
Staring at the squared-off leather and canvas bags, I wondered which ones might have belonged to Eliza and Florence and Maria. Or the other ghosts I’d caught glimpses of in my time there.
A sick feeling rose in my stomach again, and I wandered over to the small window in the corner in hopes of quelling the trapped, boxed-in sensation that had come over me. Squares of pale winter light formed a grid on the walls. I rested my forehead against the glass and looked out over the snowy landscape.
Off in the distance, a figure moved across the snow, casting no trace of shadow on the white ground.
Theo.
I thought for a second about going down to talk to him, but what if he didn’t want anything to do with me? He must have seen what I did to Nic. What would he think of me? The same thing Eliza did, probably—that I was immature, out of control. I was afraid he would look up and see me watching him, so I started to back away from the window. But as I did, I tripped over something.
I was so captivated by the cascade of delicate musical notes that spilled into the air that I forgot my inability to interact with the physical world. I’d done it when I was angry, but that was different. That came from some dark force inside me—a force I couldn’t control and didn’t intend to release again.
This had been accidental. I told myself it was a fluke. But when I bent down, I was able to pick up the object I’d tripped over: a tiny silver music box, with a cylindrical barrel and a miniscule handle. When I turned the handle, little nubs on the barrel pinged against a row of thin metal strips and softly played a few musical notes.
It was such a novelty to hold something in my hands that I turned it over and over, enjoying its weight and texture, the cold hardness of the metal.
Then I started slowly turning the handle.
The song began as one note … then another … slowly, slowly, they rang through the quiet room, and only once I started turning the handle more quickly did I start to comprehend what I was hearing.
I could still imagine my sister’s voice.
Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me.
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.
Wow,” 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?”
&n
bsp; “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 s
ee 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.