Ashes to Ashes (Experiment in Terror #8) (27 page)

She waved at him dismissively,
a big smile on her face. “Oh, don’t you worry about me. I feel
right as rain. Just a quick stomach bug, as nasty as it is.
Speaking of rain,” she turned to look out the windows where the
trees were waving in the wind and dark, ominous clouds rolling in,
“it looks like it’s going to downpour any minute.”

It was third period and Brenna
was back at school teaching, but not without offering to accompany
me, Dex, and Rebecca throughout the school to any of the floors we
wanted to visit while she had a spare hour. Davenport was still
being extra strict, and though she never knew we had gone into the
body chute or the playground last night, we knew we only had one
more night at this place and didn’t want to risk pissing her off.
Supervision it was.

That morning the three of us
had woken up short-tempered and fuzzy-headed from lack of sleep.
With dark circles under our eyes and a pasty pallor, we looked no
different than Elliot or Shawna. I was still mad, or at least
uncomfortable, around Dex and Rebecca, and they seemed equally
awkward around each other. In short, it was pretty much the worst
morning ever, made worse by the weather taking a nasty turn.

I never told them about my
dream, nor what happened in the teachers’ lounge after I woke up.
Dex tried a few times to break the ice, and though I felt my
defenses melting down every time, it still wasn’t enough. We’d been
to places before where it felt like outside forces were fucking
with us and making us turn against each other, like D’Arcy Island,
and it didn’t seem wrong to say this place was doing the same kind
of thing. Maybe all the years of death, anger, murder, and
loneliness builds up and seeps into you. I looked around at the
children who were going to and from their classes, and even though
they looked to be okay, you could see the irritability in their
teachers’ faces, as if something was permanently hanging over them,
a net waiting to drop.

In my opinion, the net was the
floors above the school, the ones that housed all the horror. There
could be no peace here, not while so many injustices happened,
tragedies that were supposedly buried and never saw the light of
day. I thought about Oldman and his grandmother, whom he knew would
never hurt a fly. I wondered if that were true, and if so, if she
knew of others that did do such a thing. The wrongs that were made
in this place would have been insurmountable.

“
Brenna,” I
said cautiously as she nervously tugged on the ends of her sweater.
“Before we get started, do you mind if we ask you a
question?”

I knew Rebecca and Dex had no
idea about this so I quickly launched into it before anyone had a
chance to say no.

“
The other day
when we were interviewing you, you were going to tell us about the
time you saw the bad thing. You never did. Do you mind telling us
now?”

“
Now?” she
questioned. “Right before we head up into its usual
territory?”

“
We saw the
thing last night,” I said simply without looking at Dex. “I don’t
think it has a territory anymore. I think it’s off leash and
running loose.”

Brenna’s face contorted
pitifully. “Oh dear. I wish you hadn’t said that. I’ll never be
able to get any work done. Sometimes I stay after school to work on
projects and…”

“
The sooner we
know more about it,” I said, venturing into unknown territory
myself, “maybe the sooner the ghosts will be gone for good. Either
the school will get recognition from the episode and parents will
demand a new school, or we can help you.”

“
Perry,” Dex
warned.

I ignored him. I knew I was
shooting my mouth off. I knew when we first met Brenna that she had
assumed we were ghost whisperers and that we could get rid of the
problem. I still didn’t think that was true, but if we could, it
was definitely worth a shot. And it all started with understanding
what we were dealing with.

Brenna leaned back against the
radiator heater and crossed her arms. She sighed, a piece of curly
hair flying off of her face. “Okay. I’ll tell you. But I’ll make it
quick because it’s not something I like to relive.” I gave her an
attentive nod, trying to tell her that I knew exactly how she felt.
“I was teaching my class how to do a multi-media collage, using
paint as well as day to day materials such as paper, dirt, and
twigs. I wanted to do something different though, something that
would challenge their minds and mix up their environment. I decided
we would pay a visit to the second floor. It was a week when
Davenport was away, and I made sure that none of the teachers knew
about it. The floors really can be a hazard. So much upstairs is
falling apart or structurally unsound. But I figured the second
floor would be okay.”

She looked nervous but
continued as rain began to pelt the windows and the morning light
dimmed, making it look like evening outside. “We were only two
rooms down from the staircase. I wanted the kids to take materials
they’d found upstairs and bring them down here, and find a way to
incorporate pieces of history into a project about this place.
Well, it was going fine until Jody wandered off.”

That damn Jody.

“
It took me a
second to realize she was gone,” she continued. “I should have been
watching her more closely; I knew that she’d probably find Elliot
and try to play with him. I left the kids for a moment and went
after her, searching down the hall. I came to one of the rooms that
had a closet and I could see her tiny footprints in the dust,
leading to there. The closet door was even open a touch. I called
out her name, quietly, not wanting to alert the other kids, then I
opened the door. The closet was somehow filled with coats of all
different shapes and sizes. Old coats that had probably never been
cleared out, belonging to the staff. One of the coats moved
slightly, like Jody was in there, trying to hide behind
it.”

She took in a deep breath and
pushed her hair off her face. “I called for her first. I told her I
found her and if she didn’t come out, she’d be in big trouble. But
she didn’t answer. And so I went into the closet after her. The
doors immediately shut on me, locking me in. I was trapped and I
knew, I knew that Jody had never been in there to begin with. I
tried to open the door, pushing my weight against it, trying the
handle, doing everything I could without drawing attention to
myself. Then I felt hot breath on my neck, and long hands around my
waist…”

I nearly swallowed my tongue
trying to imagine that, the fear she must have felt. It was all
over Brenna’s face. She angrily wiped away a falling tear with her
hand. “And then I started yelling for the children, all while this
thing…had me. It was whispering in my ear all these words that I
knew were cruel but I didn’t understand, and I almost lost my mind.
But then Jody yelled something from outside the closet, something
like “leave her alone,” and the door opened and I came falling out
onto the floor. We immediately went back downstairs, and I was so
shaken, I almost quit right then and there. To make matters worse,
when we walked back into my classroom, one of the easels was
standing in the middle of the room. I know it had been bare when I
left, but now it had a painting on it. A black, human-like creature
with white eyes and very long arms and legs. Jody pointed at it and
said, ‘Look, Miss Brenna. That was in the closet with you.’” She
looked at us with worried eyes. “I never found who painted it, but
I assume it was Elliot or Shawna. Anyway, I tore up the painting
and lit it on fire. I never wanted to see it again. And I haven’t
seen it—the bad thing—since.”

While I felt almost immobile
from the fear, Dex said to Brenna, “Are you sure you want to take
us upstairs then?”

She nodded. “I can’t live in
fear. The fear makes me sick, you know. I’m often getting terrible
migraines or stomach aches. When I spend the day at home, even if
I’m in the worst pain, I feel at peace. I feel safe.”

I frowned. “Maybe this isn’t a
good idea.”

She straightened up and put on
a brave face. “No sense in hiding. Besides, if you guys are there,
and you’re more, um, ghost-friendly than I am, I don’t think
they’ll be as interested in me.”

She was probably right about
that. If the bad thing or Shawna were to show up again, they’d be
bee-lining it straight for me, Perry Palomino, ghost magnet. I was
like the highly sought after call girl of the supernatural. A whore
for the unhappily deceased.

With that, the four of us
gathered our wits and left the room. As we approached the stairway,
Dex pulled me aside.

“
Baby, talk to
me,” he said gruffly. His brows were stuck in a permanent
frown.

I looked at him as if he were
nuts. “Later. We have work to do. This is our last show,
remember?”

“
This isn’t
fair.”

“
No,
Dex,” I hissed at him. “
This
isn’t fair. You’ve had all
morning to talk to me and you’re choosing right now, as we’re
taking that poor woman upstairs to go look for the ghosties that
traumatized her? What is with your shitty
timing?”

“
I don’t
know!” he exclaimed, then recovered once he realized that Rebecca
and Brenna were both waiting for us and staring at us, totally
unimpressed. “We’ll talk later.”

I rolled my eyes and followed
them up the stairs. It wasn’t as if I wanted to hold a grudge over
him and Rebecca, but knowing me and my insecurities, coming to
terms with it all was going to take time, and at the moment, all I
could think about was the fact that we were heading up the stairs
to our potential demise.

Or at least
my
potential demise. And no, I didn’t think I was being
overdramatic, considering what a dead child had said to me last
night, that I had what she “needed.”

I suppressed a shudder and
continued on up the staircase. Luckily, none of us had any
intentions of exploring the upper floors. The wind was blowing
harder now, rattling the window panes and whistling through the
gaps and parts of the ceiling that had started to leak with
rainwater.

“
Looks like we
should just stick to this floor,” Dex said, much to everyone’s
relief.

Just as we did before, we
headed down the hall toward the room where we had seen Shawna’s
picture hanging—and near the room where she had been with the bad
thing. We were silent as we walked, listening for anything out of
the ordinary. It was amazing how quiet that floor could be
considering there was an active school downstairs.

When we approached the room
with the desk, we were all suddenly overcome by a nauseating
stench. I knew what death smelled like, and that was it.

“
My god,”
Rebecca said, covering her nose. “That smells wretched.”

We peered around the corner and
saw something that immediately made me want to vomit.

The entire floor of the room,
as well as the desk, was piled with the carcasses of hundreds of
dead rats, festering with crawling maggots and flies.

“
Fuck me,” I
cried out as we all staggered backward from the disgusting sight. I
looked over to Brenna who was turning a shade of green. “Do you
normally have rat problems here?”

She shook her head, her eyes
watering, and walked a few more feet away so we were out of the
range of stench. “We have some, I guess, because the building was
abandoned for so long, but not like this.”

“
This isn’t a
job for the Orkin Man,” Dex commented, still breathing into the
sleeve of his jacket while filming us at the same time. “This is a
warning of some sort.”

As if we hadn’t had enough
warnings already. If this was how we were starting out our
expedition, I didn’t want to know how much worse it was going to
get.

He looked at us all. “Shall we
continue?”

We all nodded begrudgingly and
followed Dex further down the hall as the wind swept in through the
open windows. We went all the way down to the end where it veered
off into a wing with rotted doorways and a lot of water damage.

“
Look,” Brenna
breathed out. She pointed in front of her where an orange rubber
ball was rolling toward us. It slowly came to a stop just a few
feet away.

“
Elliot?” she
asked, her head cocked like she was listening, trying to hear
through the creaking building and the howling storm outside. We all
did the same until I realized there was a piece of equipment we
hadn’t used yet.

“
You guys,” I
said, “I’m going down to the room to grab the EVP recorder.”
Normally we brought the recorder out when we were filming the show
and Rebecca usually handled it, but I guess since everything had
been up in our faces since the moment we stepped in the building,
it kind of slipped our minds. But for communicating with Elliot and
possibly other ghosts, it could come in handy. It was amazing the
sounds and voices the device sometimes picked up.

Dex frowned while Rebecca said,
“Be careful.”

She didn’t have to tell me
twice.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I wasn’t planning on
casually strolling down the second floor to get the EVP recorder,
anyway. I was going to get in and get out as fast as I could.
Ignoring the warning look in Dex’s eyes, I turned and booked it
down the hallway, not looking into any of the rooms—especially the
room of dead rats
—
nor looking ahead of me
in case there was something I didn’t want to see. I ran watching my
feet, and as soon as I hit the stairs, I vaulted down them. Once I
reached the school’s floor, I relaxed and walked quickly over to
the nurses’ room without drawing attention to myself from the
passing schoolteachers.