The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall (12 page)

I
stood in that spot until the shadows grew blue and long. Until the sky began to turn purple and orange and the night mist crept up from the horizon and enveloped the world in an eerie glow.

I don’t know how long I would have stayed there if I hadn’t heard the voice:

“Delia …”

It seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once. I may have been in a daze, but I was aware enough to be frightened. The problem is, when you don’t know where something is, it’s impossible to run away from it.

“Delia …”

“Hello?” I said.

I dashed through the wall, into the dark hallway, and continued through to the kitchen. There, I found myself looking at a ghostly woman dressed in a crisp white-aproned nurse’s uniform. Her name tag read
NURSE CARLSON
and she carried a metal tray—judging by the distinctive rust spot on one side, it was the exact same metal tray that I’d seen in the superintendent’s apartment and in the nurses’ office.

This lady really got around.

Her eyes were encircled with bluish-black bruises. Had
she
been the one saying my name?

She scowled at me. “You’d better get back to the ward before Dr. Normington sees you—whoever you are!” she snapped.

I stared at her without answering. She definitely hadn’t spoken my name before. She didn’t even
know
my name.

“Go!” Her voice rose to a shrill howl. She dropped the tray to the floor with a deafening clank. “Go! You’re bad, just like the rest of them! You’re all bad! You deserve what you get here! Bad, crazy girls! Look what you
did
to me! Just
look
at me!”

I didn’t want to look at her. I didn’t want to do anything but turn and run the other way. So that’s what I did—out of the kitchen, down the hall, and up the stairs to the second floor.

“Delia …”

The voice was like the breath of a stranger on the back of my neck. It made me feel like I was being smothered by something I couldn’t even see.

There was nowhere left to run.

Except up. To the third floor.

*  *  *

On the third-floor landing, I paused outside a door painted in layers of peeling paint. The metal sign, which had nearly crusted over with damp-looking blue corrosion, proclaimed
LONG-TERM CARE
.

I pushed it open and found myself in a large room. With the exception of a few wood benches bolted into place under the windows, which were covered in a thick mesh of chicken wire, the space was bare—there was nothing here except the stained tile floor and sickly green walls. There wasn’t a single picture, no chairs. No fireplace, rug, piano, tables, or lamps. Nothing to suggest comfort or a sense of home. This was the day room for the lifers.

The dust was so thick in the air that it looked like a school of plankton swirling and dipping in the late-afternoon sunshine.

There was a door marked
NO UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE
in a little alcove to my left, and another door across the room, with a dirty-looking stamped metal sign that read
WARD
.

I went through the ward door. Like the day room, the hallway was laid out similarly to its second-floor counterpart—same length and width, same number of doors—but with a few striking differences. The nurse’s station was guarded by sturdy metal mesh, bolted into the walls. The closest door was open to reveal a filthy-looking bathroom with a row of exposed toilets, three grimy sinks, and a pair of bathtubs. There wasn’t even a curtain for privacy.

No dignity for the troubled women on the third floor.

In each bedroom was a metal bed frame holding a limp, discolored mattress, most with rotting foam spilling out from their torn seams. A network of cracked and crumbling leather straps was clearly visible: two for the wrists, two for the ankles, one to go across the chest, and one to go across the upper thighs. Just looking at them gave me phantom sensations of pressure on my wrists and a tight feeling in my chest.

Things were much less luxurious up here, which made sense: for a woman to be confined to the third floor, she probably showed some signs of actual mental instability. Unlike the second floor, where the residents were just troublemakers, the families of the third-floor women didn’t have to do any soul-searching about leaving them at the Piven Institute. There was no need for cozy bedding or snug-looking rooms to entice guilt-ridden parents or husbands with the promise of comfort.

The third floor wasn’t just for show.

With a shudder, I walked toward the window at the end of the hall, where I stood staring outside at the moonlight luminescing off the snowbanks that covered the grounds.

I stepped back from the window.

But when I turned to head downstairs, something was wrong …

The hallway had shrunk.

Before, it had been wide enough that I could have lain down across it and still had a couple of feet between my head and the wall.

Now, stretching my arms out to the sides, I could reach both walls with my fingertips.

Just ignore it,
I told myself.
Ignore it. It wants you to react. It’s trying to scare you.

My first instinct was to scrunch my eyes shut as hard as I could and run for it, but I knew that would be a mistake. What I had to do was act like I hadn’t even noticed and sail right through the hall. Keep my head high all the way back to the first floor.

But when I took a step, I was immediately engulfed by a sick, dizzy feeling. My vision seemed to ripple. I rubbed my eyes to clear them, and when I looked up, the walls were even closer. With my arms extended, I could have rested a flat palm on either side.

Another step. Another wave of nausea rang through me like a gong.

If I stood still, the awful feeling subsided. If I moved, it pressed in on my face and my cheekbones and turned my stomach.

Two more paces forward. I leaned over and retched.

When I stood up, the hallway was less than three feet wide.

Finally, I closed my eyes, stretched my arms out in front of me, and ran.

I made it about ten steps before my shoulder slammed into something, and I recoiled, only to slam into something else on the other side. Now the space was only as wide as my body. And there were still six feet to the door.

I paused and then turned just my head to look back over my shoulder. Surely I’d see that this was all just an illusion. There would be a spacious, bright hall behind me.

But there wasn’t. What I saw was like a view through a fun-house mirror. The narrow walls twisted off out of view, squeezed together and distorted.

What’s more, they were still getting closer—as if a zipper was dragging them together.

As if
I
was the zipper.

I was paralyzed by fear, afraid to go forward and afraid to stay where I was. What would it do to me? Smash me flat? Leave me horribly maimed and disfigured, the kind of ghost that other ghosts chase back to the third floor?

I felt like a mouse being tormented by a cat. Like the house itself was batting me into a corner, playing with me—just because it could.

As if it was showing me who was boss.

Just go,
I thought. They were just walls. I could get through walls. What was the problem? But they were solid against my body.

Suddenly, there was a blast of cold air, so cold it made my whole body ache.

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.