Golly. How inspirational.
The door next to the bulletin board was marked DAY ROOM. I entered to find a large, airy space. The walls were papered in yellowing ivory decorated with trailing, flowery vines. There was a plush Persian rug on the floor, a stone fireplace, an upright piano, and a row of rocking chairs. It could have been a parlor at a college or nursing home … except for the wire screens bolted in front of the windows.
The June sunshine had been trapped in the room all afternoon, and the air was stuffy and warm. I slipped off my cardigan and set it on a small table, then walked over to look more closely at a small writing desk by the window. Could this room have been Cordelia’s refuge? From her letters, I didn’t get the impression that the place I was searching for was so … roomy. She’d made it sound like she had a little corner, tucked away by itself. Besides, the walls weren’t blue.
I set my bag down on one of the chairs next to the piano and reached inside it for the bundle of letters, unfolding one to see if I could find any useful information.
Dear Little Namesake, (that was what she always called me)
I was so pleased to hear about your third-place finish in the Holiday Fun Run. I was never very athletic myself. Of course such qualities weren’t valued in my family, especially in the girls …
It continued on in that way—small talk about her childhood (although she never mentioned spending that childhood at a mental institution), compliments on my penmanship, lots of little bits of advice, and a word of hello to my teacher.
At the end, I found a paragraph that seemed to offer a bit of insight:
Well, the light is beginning to fade in my little sanctuary—do you have a sanctuary in your home? Someplace you can go to be with your thoughts? Whenever I need something, I seem to be able to find it here. But, as dear as mine is to me, the sun sets on the other side of the house, so it gets dark early here. I don’t like to be alone in the dark. So I will pack up my work for the day and say farewell for now. I look forward to your next letter, and hearing about the results of the spelling test you were worried about …
The sun sets in the west, so her room had to be on the east side of the house. That narrowed things down a bit.
I was about to open the next letter when something across the room danced into my peripheral vision—a difference in the light on the wall. I looked up, but whatever it was—if, in fact, it had been anything at all—was gone.
But when I glanced back at the letters, I immediately saw the same thing at the outer edge of my eyesight. I cut my gaze to the right, without moving my head, and saw what it really was: a reflection dancing on the wall, like a sparkling spiderweb. It was about four feet in diameter, and it was in constant motion.
It reminded me of the way the sun bounces off the unsettled surface of a swimming pool.
It had to be coming from some body of water somewhere—but where?
I set the letters on the top shelf of the piano. Then I went to the window and stared down over the grounds, looking for the source of the reflection … but there was no water in sight. Only the line of trees in the distance, hills so small you couldn’t even really call them hills, and one shallow, dry ditch a hundred feet away.
Then what could be causing the dancing pattern of light?
As soon as I turned my head to study it, it was gone again.
Awash in equal amounts of wariness and embarrassment, I went back to looking around the day room. On the far side of the room was another door, this one marked WARD, but it was locked, and having made it this far without having to use the keys, I wasn’t eager to begin now.
Then there came a sound from behind me—a faint, clear ringing, like jingle bells.
I nearly jumped out of my skin. Then I spun around. “Hello? Mom? Dad?”
No one answered.
“Who’s there? Janie?”
I listened for a reply. No sound—not a word, a breath, not even more jingling.
It was nothing. Nothing.
But I didn’t really believe myself.
It seemed like everywhere my eyes landed—the piano, the floral-cushioned chairs—I caught a hint of a movement just finished, a moment of sudden, expectant stillness, like the space between an inhale and an exhale—as if some wily trespasser was lurking in the shadows, slipping around just out of my sight.
Time to go. Aunt Cordelia’s office was clearly on the other side of the building. What was to be gained by poking around in here?
That’s why I’m going, I thought, starting for the door. Not because of the hairs standing up on the back of my neck, but because I was on a mission.
I stopped by the door to pick my cardigan up off the table, and froze when I realized that the table was completely bare.
My sweater was gone.
I blinked as my brain tried to catch up to my eyes. I almost freaked out, but managed to hold it together long enough to kneel and look under the table. Sure enough, my gray cardigan lay in a crumpled heap. I grabbed it and shook out the dust bunnies.
That was when I noticed what was strange about the table where I’d set it—
The polished wood tabletop gleamed in the low light, bare and lustrous.
Unlike every other surface in the entire building, there wasn’t so much as a single speck of dust on it.
* * *
My footsteps echoed off the narrow stairway walls as if someone else was right behind me.
Once I was in the hall, I went through the door I assumed would lead me back to the nurses’ office, from which I’d find my way out to the lobby and then back to my parents. But by the time I’d stepped inside, reached for the light switch, and realized there was no light switch, the door had closed behind me—and locked.
I had the key ring in my pocket, but in the pitch-dark there was no way to know which key was the correct one. I fumbled for my phone, turned on the flashlight, and surveyed my surroundings. Shadows of the ornate hanging lamps leapt erratically in the motion of my flashlight. This wasn’t the nurses’ office. I’d found a shortcut back to the main hall.
The door to the superintendent’s apartment was the farthest one to my right, and I had no trouble finding it. But the knob wouldn’t turn—it was locked. I knocked a couple of times and then hung back, waiting for someone to come let me in.
Out of nowhere came the sound of bells ringing loudly, not two feet away from me.
I swung around, looking for its source.
Don’t jump to crazy conclusions, I told myself. Maybe Aunt Cordelia had a cat. That was possible, right? If she’d had a cat, and the cat had been alone since April, it would probably be eager to find someone new to feed it. It could be following me around—
Jingle jingle jingle.
Before I knew it, I was up against the wall, the line of the wood molding pressing into my lower back.
Jingle jingle.
There was no cat. There was no one but me.
In some of Aunt Cordelia’s letters, she’d said that even though she lived alone, she never felt truly alone. At the time I thought that was because she maybe had a lot of nice friends who came visiting.
Now I was starting to think she’d meant something else entirely.
Why were my parents not opening the door?
My hands shaking, I raised the key chain to my face and squinted at each key, scanning the peeling labels frantically. Finally, I found one that read SUPE-APT and stuck it in the keyhole.
Before I could turn it, though, the bells turned shrill—an unpleasant jangle rather than a gentle ringing. And still, no one—nothing—was there.
Then I heard a sound to my right—the sound of something being dragged.
I couldn’t even will myself to turn my body, so instead I just turned my head and my flashlight, fully prepared for the sight of some ancient, forgotten old mental patient who’d been hiding in the shadows, surviving all these years by eating rats.
I didn’t see an emaciated old woman.
But someone had been
in the hall with me. The rug had been rolled back on itself, revealing a six-inch-tall letter scratched into the hardwood floor beneath it. More of Aunt Cordelia’s dementia-induced vandalism.
It was an E.
Driven by curiosity, I went to the far end of the rug and pulled the whole thing out of the way.
In the narrow spill of light from my phone, I read the first letter: a deeply gouged D.
I walked down the hall, piecing the words together as I saw each new letter.
O … N … T …
SELL THE HOUSE.
Then I noticed smaller letters, under the E in HOUSE. One last word. I held my phone closer.
DELIA.
The message was for me.
My dead great-aunt had gouged messages into the floor for me.
The light on my phone blinked out.
Adrenaline propelling me forward, I rushed back to the door, forcing the key to turn in the lock. I followed the sounds of my parents’ voices back to the dimly lit bedroom, where three silhouettes stood in the corner over a pile of luggage.
One of the silhouettes turned around.
“Honey?” Mom said.
I was too out of breath for a lengthy explanation. The words came out of my mouth in a puff.
“I can’t stay here,” I said. “I’m leaving. Tonight.”
As my eyes adjusted to the light, the first things I could make out were Dad’s raised eyebrows. “Excuse me?”
“I’m not staying here,” I said, gulping in another breath. “I can’t. I refuse.”
Mom’s face wrinkled in concern. “Delia, what happened? You look pale.”
“You look crazy,” Janie added, her eyes like little moons on her face.
I dodged my mother’s arm as she reached out for me. Then I took a moment to figure out how exactly one might go about telling one’s parents that one would rather scoop one’s eyeball out with a plastic spork than spend one more minute in this place, where something sinister oozed beneath every door, down the walls, up from the floorboards …
“I think I know why Aunt Cordelia ran away and killed herself.”
“Delia.” My father looked annoyed. “I thought we agreed—”
“Did she really, Brad? Your aunt killed herself?” Mom interrupted.
Dad sighed and shot me a look that plainly said, Sellout. “Delia,” he said, “I’d really appreciate it if you would sit down, take some deep breaths, and think this over like a rational person.”
“There’s nothing to rationalize,” I said stiffly, wrapping my arms around myself. “Unless you see what I saw—unless you feel that thing watching you, following you, stalking you …”
“That’s enough,” my father said. “You’re scaring Janie.”
That much was perfectly true. My sister looked like a statue, her lips slightly parted.
Mom eased her arm around Janie’s shoulders, but Janie jumped away. “I’m not staying here!” she said. “If Delia’s leaving, I am, too.”
Normally, her copycatting would have irritated me, but in this case I was relieved. Janie might have been a total pain, but at the end of the day she was my sister. And I didn’t want her in this house.
“Tell us what happened,” Mom said. “You’re frightening me.”
I wove my fingers together and took a deep breath. “Something chased me around. With bells. And there’s this light on the wall upstairs, and a table that won’t let you put things on it. And Cordelia left a message for me on the floor in the main hall—Don’t sell the house, Delia.”
“Oh, you’re kidding. Did she carve up the hall floor, too?” Dad asked, sighing into his hand.
Really? That was the part that concerned him? A massive chill went up my spine, contracting every muscle in my back. I turned toward my mother. “Mom, please,” I said. “We have to leave. This place … I think it’s haunted.”
For a beat, we all stared at each other.
Then Dad crossed his arms. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry, but no. We came here for the summer, as a family, and we’re staying for the summer—as a family. I don’t know what you think you saw, Delia, but one old lady’s senile ramblings aren’t—”
He blathered on, but I wasn’t hearing his words.
No more discussing for me. I’d moved on to planning. I had to get my things and go, as fast as I could. They’d never drive me, so I’d walk myself back to town, or as far back as I needed to go to get cell service, at which point I would call Nic. She would do whatever it took to help.
I spied the pile of suitcases in the corner and moved to grab mine, an old scraped-up red bag that had been Mom’s in college.
“What do you think you’re doing?” my father asked.
I turned to face him. “Leaving.”
Dad’s slow-burning sigh seethed with frustration. “You’re not leaving.”
Our eyes met.
“Brad, maybe—” Mom said.
“Lisa, I’ve got this, thank you,” Dad said.
“I don’t want to leave, Daddy,” Janie said, with a golden-girl smile. Traitor.
“Janie,” he snapped, “find something else to do for a little while.”
My sister scowled and slipped out of the room.
“No one’s going anywhere,” Mom said, exasperated. “There’s a huge downpour practically on top of us. We’ll talk it over first thing tomorrow morning.”
Even more reason to get out. The thought of being stuck here on a dark and stormy night … “No way,” I said.
“Yes way,” Dad said.
My parents looked as determined as I’d ever seen them. I knew that no matter how hard I pressed, I’d lose this argument. I had a choice: try to leave now, and deal with the potentially nuclear-level fallout, or leave later, when they weren’t looking. Once they noticed I was missing, they might call the police to pick me up, but that was fine. I’d much rather spend the night in jail than in this house.
Time to re-strategize.
So I shrugged and attempted to act resigned. “Whatever.”
“First thing tomorrow,” Mom promised, her shoulders rounding with relief.
Dad nodded sharply, forced to play nice but obviously furious that I had the nerve to defy them.
I turned away, nursing more than a little fury of my own.
In the sticky silence that followed, we realized that Janie had taken my father’s instructions seriously and left the apartment altogether. Dad talked Mom out of going to look for her, but I was on edge, picturing the words on the floor, the light dancing on the walls, and my oblivious little sister in the middle of it all.
A few minutes later, she showed up, dusty but unharmed. The keys clanked as she dropped them on the table. On her face was a wide-eyed expression I couldn’t decipher. She’d always been delicate, like a ballerina. Now I had the urge to stand in front of her like some sort of bodyguard.
I went over to her. “Did anything happen?”
“Yeah,” she said, her voice hushed.
“What?” I asked.
She glanced around. “Come closer,” she said. “I’ll whisper it.”
I leaned toward her, my heart pounding, as she stood on her tiptoes and raised her mouth to my ear.
“It was …” Her voice trailed off.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t be afraid to tell me.”
“It was … BOO!” she shouted directly into my eardrum, deafening me. Then she (wisely) rushed away as I stood frozen with rage. Her gleeful laughter bounced off the walls.
I couldn’t believe I’d been worried about her.
“You are such a jerk,” I hissed.
“At least I’m not a scaredy-cat!” She danced farther away. “You’re just mad because I’m braver than you.”
Then she (very wisely) ducked out of my reach and ran for the kitchen, just as Mom stuck her head out and said, “Time to eat. Has anyone seen that tray that was in here before?”
After our tense dinner of gas-station gourmet, I stood up. “So wher
e are we sleeping?”
“We can put the air mattresses over in the corner by the TV, I guess,” Mom said.
“No, not there!” Janie said. “I found someplace better!”
She was wiggling like a delighted puppy.
“Upstairs,” she said. “I found a place called Ward. It has bedrooms. And real beds!”
I thought of the door in the day room marked WARD—the one I’d been too afraid to go through. Maybe Janie was actually braver than me (but that didn’t make her any less of a jerk).
“If there are beds up there, they’re a hundred years old,” I said. “They’re probably full of maggots and bedbugs.”
“No,” she protested. “I sat on one. It was nice.”
Mom and Dad exchanged a dubious look.
“You can’t seriously be thinking of letting her sleep up there,” I said.
“Oh, Janie, I don’t know,” Mom said to my sister. “If Delia would go, then maybe … but the rooms must be so … old. And dusty.”
Not Delia doesn’t like it up there. Just a general distaste for dust and oldness.
“We brought clean sheets,” Janie said. Then her eyes cut over to me, and in them I saw expectant curiosity, like she was waiting for my reaction.
Thirty minutes earlier she’d been scared enough to want to run away with me. Now she wanted to spend the night in some weird part of the house. This was just a bratty dare, designed to get a rise out of me, and I refused to give her the satisfaction. What difference did it make? I wasn’t planning to sleep there, anyway.
So I shrugged. “I’m beyond caring at this point.”
Maybe we’d get lucky and the ghost would eat my sister.
* * *
The ward hall, which I’d expected to be starkly institutional, with concrete and metal and straitjackets, appeared to be a perfectly normal hallway—the kind you might find at a posh boarding school. There was a communal bathroom and six individual patient rooms, which Janie had actually been right about—they seemed pretty nice, furnished with matching dark wood nightstands, dressers, and vanity tables. The closest one to the bathroom—Room 1—had a pastel-pink bedspread and a dresser with a missing drawer.
“I’ll take this one.” The words left my mouth before I knew they were coming.