The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall (19 page)

I looked down at my sister, who had rolled to her side and curled up in a ball, sniffling sadly.

“But it was an accident,” I said.

I’d never seen Eliza look so young. She peered down at me from beneath the dark line of her bangs. “You do believe me, then?” she asked again.

Frankly, even if I didn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered. She’d saved Janie’s life. So no matter what she’d done, I owed her forever.

But I did believe her. “Yes,” I said.

She drew in a long, shaky breath. “Well, that’s something, I suppose.”

I turned to lean down and listen to Janie’s breathing, and when I sat back up, Eliza was gone.

But Penitence was back in her seat at the table, a wretched expression on her face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I would have helped. But I’ve never been able to leave this spot. Not in a hundred and thirty years.”

“No,” I said. “You’ve never
chosen
to leave that spot. There’s a difference.”

She bowed her head.

“It’s fine,” I said. “Everyone has to fight their own demons. Next time I just won’t bother asking for your help.”

Behind me, the door to the day room opened. Mom called, “Jane? I’ve got your Cheetos. Will you help me—”

She stopped short at the sight of Janie lying on the floor. Dropping the grocery bags, she fell to her knees by my sister’s side. “Jane? Janie? Are you okay?”

Janie opened her eyes, then reached out and grabbed Mom’s hand, holding it as tightly as a little child.

“What happened?” Mom stared down at my sister’s blood-covered fingers. “What happened to you?”

Janie looked at the window, where the screen was pulled away from the wall. The wall itself was streaked with fresh red blood.

Mom followed her gaze and gasped.

“There’s something here, Mom,” Janie said. “I don’t think Delia killed herself … It’s time to go home.”

*  *  *

Mom helped Janie to her room and was going to help her pack, but my sister insisted she’d be all right. Mom’s room was only twenty feet away, and she needed to pack up, too. My mother moved as if there were a fire burning beneath her feet, running from room to room, collecting their scattered possessions and shoving them willy-nilly into bags. Every couple of minutes, she came back and checked on Janie, who was resting comfortably, and seemed, actually, more relaxed than she had since they arrived.

Finally, Mom came into Janie’s room, drenched in sweat. “Done,” she said. “I’m going to start loading the car.”

Janie kicked her legs off the side of the bed and stood up. “I’ll help.”

Mom looked torn. I could tell she wanted to keep my sister close but also wanted her to take it easy. “No, honey—you hit your head, and I’d rather you rest. It’ll only be a couple of trips.”

I stayed with Janie. I didn’t plan to take my eyes off her until she and Mom were safely clear of the property. She sat up and tucked her phone into her purse, then got to her feet and dragged the old red suitcase out to the day room. Standing there, all of a sudden, she made a little squeaking noise, and pressed her fist to her mouth. Her body trembled, and fat tears rolled from her eyes.

“I’m sorry, Delia,” she said. “I’m sorry for what I did. I hope someday you’ll forgive me. But if it makes you feel better … I’ll never forgive myself.”

“You dolt!” I said. “How could that possibly make me feel better?”

She went on crying, until she leaned against the doorframe and slid to the ground. And then she cried some more. I wanted to wrap my arms around her but couldn’t bear to feel her body slip through my touch.

There was nothing I could do.

Being dead really sucks sometimes.

After a couple of minutes, I realized that something was wrong. Mom should have been back by now.

Moments later, Janie reached the same conclusion. She wiped her eyes, then called, “Mom?”

No answer.

My sister got to her feet and started walking toward the day room door.

My heart began to pound.

I couldn’t let her open that door.

“Stay back!” I said sharply, positive it wouldn’t work.

But to my surprise, Janie stopped in her tracks. She stared at the door for another moment, then took a few backward steps.

“Stay,” I said to Janie, the way you’d say it to a dog. And though she couldn’t hear me, she wandered back to the piano bench and sat down.

I crossed the room toward the stairwell, a heavy, hot feeling in my chest.

“Something’s wrong out there,” a voice said. I turned to see Penitence sitting nervously, helplessly, in her seat.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Watch my sister. Call for me if something happens.”

I stepped through the door.

The stairwell was completely filled with oily black smoke, so dense I couldn’t see. Its bitter flavor invaded my nose and mouth.

Fear rolled through me—I was paralyzed by the memory of being trapped in this fog once before, and the horrific outcome.

Suddenly, I felt a gentle touch on my back. Then a hard shove. I stumbled and lost my balance, and felt myself falling—toward the stairs, toward a swirling black hole of fog below.

But at the last second, someone grabbed my arm and interrupted my fall.

I looked up. Penitence was standing over me. When she saw that I was steady on my feet, she disappeared.

As the smoke began to clear, I spotted a figure standing in the stairwell with me. I recognized the wavy light-brown hair. The open-knit gray cardigan.

It was my mother.

And she was looking right at me.

Only it wasn’t really my mother. Her eyes were completely black. And when she spoke, wisps of black smoke escaped from her mouth.

“Pardon me, Delia,” she said, with an exaggerated, grotesque air of courtesy. “I was expecting someone else.”

I froze, terrified.

Then, as if it had been sucked out into a vacuum, the smoke left her body and the blackness disappeared from her eyes. My mother stood at the top of the stairs, looking around in alarmed confusion.

“How did I get here?” she asked.

“Mom?” I said.

But she didn’t answer. She couldn’t see me anymore, of course. Whatever controlled the smoke had the power to bridge the living and dead worlds. When it was inside her, she had been its portal. Now the smoke was gone, and my mother was herself again.

I wish I could say that made me feel better.

I
ran back to the day room, where my sister was on her phone, leaving someone a message.

“Dad?” I heard her say. “It’s Janie. Listen, Mom and I are at the Piven Institute and there’s something weird going on. I know you’re busy in New York, but we need you—”

The door from the stairwell creaked as it opened a few inches.

“Jane?” Mom called, her voice faint.

Janie hung up without saying good-bye and dropped the phone on the piano bench. Then she walked warily in the direction of the stairwell. “Mom?”

When there was no answer, she pushed the door open another couple of inches.

My mother was on the floor, holding her head in her hands.

“Did you …” Mom’s voice trailed off in confusion. She looked shaky and ill. “I don’t remember. I don’t … I don’t feel very well. I think I might need to lie down. It must be a migraine or something.”

“Yeah, you don’t look good,” Janie said. “Let me drive you into town, okay? There’s an urgent-care place.”

Mom looked up and squinted, as if the dim stairway was painfully bright. “But you can’t drive.”

“Of course I can,” Janie said, doing her best to be cheerful. “I’m just not supposed to. Totally different.”

Mom didn’t look up, and Janie went rigid.

“Hey,” she said, leaning down. “Let’s just get you into bed for a few minutes.”

Mom groaned as she stood up, and then my sister shepherded her back to the ward and into the room where she’d slept the night before. Janie helped Mom lie down on the bed. Then she pulled over the stool and sat down, studying Mom’s face anxiously.

I stood in the doorway and sighed. So much for progress.

Eliza appeared next to me, holding the wrench I’d left downstairs. “Delia, something’s wrong with your mother,” she said. “I saw her in the main hall, and she was acting terribly odd.”

“She got possessed or something,” I said, my voice shaking. “The smoke, it was, like … inside her. She could see me.” I glanced at Mom, who was lying in the bed, her complexion a distinctly grayish hue. “And now she looks terrible.”

“I think I know what happened.” Eliza set the wrench down outside the door and went over to the bed, inspecting my mother from a few inches away. “She’s not in danger, but she probably feels awful.”

“What was it?”

“The house,” Eliza said. “Toying with her. Probably using her to get to your sister.”

I was expecting someone else,
Mom had said.

She’d been expecting Janie—planning to push her down the stairs.

Instead, she’d pushed me. And I would have fallen, too, if it hadn’t been for Penitence.

Twice now, in a
single hour
, the house had tried to kill my sister. I was beginning to think there was no way to stop it from getting what it wanted. I thought all we had to do was get them out the door, but even that was beginning to seem impossible.

“We need to buy some time,” I said. “How did Cordelia survive here for so long?”

“Carefully,” Eliza said. “She used quite a bit of salt.”

It was unlikely that my mom and sister wouldn’t notice an invisible hand pouring copious amounts of salt around the house. “What else did she do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Eliza said. “We weren’t exactly bosom friends.”

I stared at my mother’s sallow skin and the exhausted way she drew her breaths—almost in two stages, an inhale interrupted by a stutter.

“Well,
somebody
here was friends with her,” I said, suddenly recalling something I’d read long ago. “She mentioned in her letter that there was someone I could go to for help.”

Eliza seemed flummoxed. “I have no idea who that would have been.”

“Maybe Florence?” I said.

“If it was, she never mentioned it to me,” Eliza said. “And I never saw Cordelia around the lobby or the parlor.”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” I said. “She spent most of her time on the third floor.”

“Then … that’s where you should look, I suppose,” Eliza said, sounding less than thrilled on my behalf.

We both turned to glance at Mom and Janie. My sister leaned forward as my mom struggled to sit.

“We need to leave,” my mother said, her teeth gritting against the pain.

Janie patted Mom’s arm. “We can wait a couple of minutes. Just till you feel better. You know what? Actually, maybe I’ll just call the police. Where’s your phone?”

“It’s in my purse,” Mom said.

“Where’s your purse?”

Mom barely managed to shake her head. “I don’t know.”

“No problem,” Janie said. The forced nonchalance of her words did not match the rigidity of her shoulders as I followed her back to the day room.

She went right to the piano bench, looking for something.

She’d left her phone here.

“Oh, come on,” she muttered, bending to look at the floor.

“Penitence,” I said, and she appeared. “Did you move a cell phone off the piano bench?”

She cocked her head. “A what?”

“A little box,” I said. “A flat, shiny box.”

“Oh, the one she carries around,” Penitence said. “No. But … you said it was shiny?”

Um. “Have you seen a
non
-shiny box?”

She sighed. “No, but the girls love shiny things. I’d imagine they’ve added it to their collection.”

“Which girls?” I asked.

“The pair,” she said. “The ones in their nightgowns. Died in ninety-six. Tuberculosis. Rosie and Posie, or whatever their names are. If something goes missing, it’s a fair bet they took it.”

The nosy girls. “Where do they live?” I asked. “The lobby?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I doubt it. I believe the grand Southern lady rules the lobby. I’d try the third floor. That’s where they lived when they were here.”

Janie pushed the hair away from her face, wearing a defeated expression as she went back to Mom’s room.

Mom was asleep, but her face still looked drawn and tense.

“She’s okay,” Eliza told me.

“Someone took Janie’s phone,” I said. “She can’t even call for help. I need to go to the third floor. But …” I glanced at Mom and Janie. They were sitting ducks.

“I’ll help,” Eliza said. “I can provide a distraction. Draw attention to myself.”

“How?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I’ll think outside the ball.”

“Box,” I said.

Her eyes glittered. “Perhaps I’ll take a little stroll about the grounds.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked.

The usually stoic line of her mouth quirked up on one side. “No. But you must admit it’s an interesting one.”

“Be careful.”

She nodded. “I’ll have Florence help me. We’ll be fine.”

*  *  *

As I reached the third-floor landing, I saw Maria standing a short distance away from the top step.

“Back off,” I said. “I’ve poured salt on uglier monsters than you.”

She shrank away.

There was a peculiar, agitated feeling among the ten or so ghosts lined up against the hallway walls. I didn’t see the two giggling girls among them, though. One, a girl about my own age wearing a straitjacket, growled and lunged as I went by. Another, a woman in her thirties, stood in the center of the hall with her mouth open and eyes shut, her fists clenched and her body jittering around in a silent scream.

Something had rattled them.

The enormity of the house hit me all at once—the thieving girls could literally be anywhere, and the things they took could have been in any of a million hiding spots. I paused in the hallway, awash in despair. It wasn’t going to work. How could you find something small in a place this big?

I was outside Cordelia’s office, and as I cast a glance inside, I had a sudden flash of memory:
Whenever I need something, I seem to be able to find it here.
Could she have meant that literally? That things went missing and turned up in her office? It didn’t seem possible, but at the same time it felt like the most obvious thing in the world.

There wasn’t time to agonize over it. I went inside, using one of Cordelia’s books to break the line of salt and then immediately repair it behind me.

I walked to the desk and started looking through the drawers. The top ones were packed full of a lifetime’s worth of paper clips, rubber bands, entire rolls of unused postage stamps, and a motley collection of pens and pencils. Plenty of implements for letter writing but no sign of my sister’s cell phone—or any other stolen shiny objects.

So what was here? Where were the answers I’d been so confident I would find, back when I was alive? What did I think would be waiting for me? Because there had to be
something
.

Aunt Cordelia had left me her house for a reason. She wanted me to do what she hadn’t been able to do. She would have found a way to tell me … But how?

Of course. She would have written me a letter.

I remembered the letter Janie had pulled from the desk blotter. What had it said?

And I have something to share with you …

Maybe the “something” didn’t mean facts or an idea. Maybe she meant she had an actual
thing
to share—another letter. What if the one Janie had found was just an introduction, and the real information was someplace else?

I opened each desk drawer, pushing the trinkets and office supplies out of the way. I was sure I would find something. Aunt Cordelia had planned for this. Something may have gone wrong at the end, but she’d been planning it for a long time. No way would she have left the most important element to chance.

“What are you looking for?”

The voice, low and garbled, practically gave me a heart attack. I turned to see Maria standing just on the other side of the salt line.

“How long have you been there?” I snapped.

“Long enough to know that you’re looking for something,” she growled.

“I’m looking for something my aunt wanted me to have,” I said. I wasn’t about to give her any specifics, for fear that she knew where the letter was and might go back and destroy it.

Maria’s eyes traveled over the newspaper-covered walls. It was almost physically painful to look at her disfigured face and ruined body. Instead of focusing on her monstrous flaws, I forced myself to look beneath them for the shape that used to be a little girl.

“She came in here every day,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“But then she stopped.”

“She died,” I said.

“Yes, I know.” Maria looked me straight in the eye. “I helped her.”

I blinked. “You
what
?”

Her beady eyes were fixed on me, fearless. “She was sick and hurt and getting worse. She was frightened of what she might do.”

“What did she think she might do?”

“She didn’t know,” Maria said. “The house nearly got her, in the end. There were smoke beasts everywhere. She was scared and sad. So I helped.”

“But she killed herself,” I said. “Do you mean you helped her kill herself?”

Maria tilted her head. “Not exactly. I told her that if she left, she could die and be free.”

I was only a foot away from Maria now, with the wall of salt between us. Anger and disbelief throbbed inside me as I stared down at her oozing skin, her thick-scarred eyelids. But behind the horror show of her face, something in her eyes was surprisingly intelligent and human.

“That’s impossible. How could you have
told
her? We can’t tell living people anything,” I said, a razor edge in my voice.

My intensity caused Maria to take a step back. Her eyes darted around the room, refusing to meet mine. “She was nice to me,” she said. “She knew I came in here. She called me her little friend. She had pretty pictures for me to look at. She would set them down on the floor in the morning, and I would sit and look at them. And at the end of every day, she would cut one out so I could take it with me. I still have them all. I’m very careful with them. They’re my favorite things. And she gave me a blanket, because it’s so cold here. I—I’m still cold, but I like the blanket very much.”

I pictured Aunt Cordelia leaving small offerings for this poor, destroyed creature, speaking to her kindly, as if she were a normal little girl and not a beast.

And then I remembered something I’d seen years earlier—a cut-out picture of a box of cat food.

Was it possible I’d been wrong about Maria? That we were
all
wrong about Maria?

I lowered my voice and crouched down to her eye level. “How did you tell her what to do?”

Maria didn’t answer. She looked like she was afraid she’d be in trouble.

“If you did help her, then … thank you,” I said. “She didn’t want to die here.”

“I know!” Maria’s rotting chin jutted up toward me, hurt and defiant. “No one should die here. If you die here, you can never go home.”

“Do you want to go home?” I asked.

Our eyes met. Hers were disconcertingly honest, like any child’s. She nodded.

“Then maybe you can help me. I’m looking for something—my aunt used to write me letters. I think she wrote one, but never mailed it. I think it’s here somewhere.”

Maria’s ruined hands wrung the front of her dress. “I found her one day, when she was sick. I was a little scared of her, because that was when she was very bad. The smoke had gotten her, so she yelled and chased me … but I knew that wasn’t really her. Later, I heard her crying, so I came back. She was very weak, and she fell on the floor. The salt was broken, so I stayed here to chase the bad ghosts away from her, and then I went up to her, and I …” She lowered her hand, as if placing it across an imaginary forehead. “I told her,
Shhh, don’t cry, it’s Maria, I will help you
. I told her she had to leave, and not come back. Otherwise it would get her—the black fire.”