The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall (3 page)

BOOK: The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall
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The morning of March 8, I hugged my parents good-bye, commanded Janie to stay out of my room, and ran out to Nic’s waiting car with a suitcase full of sunscreen and bathing suits, reminding myself that statistically, 99 percent of the things we worry about never occur.

Except two things happened.

One, I accidentally left my cell phone on the kitchen counter.

Two, Landon texted said cell phone three minutes after I’d left for the airport to say he changed his mind and thought maybe it wasn’t an awesome idea so he wasn’t going to go. And OH, by the way, last night he ran into a girl he’d gone to summer camp with and realized he had feelings for her and thought it was fair that we take this week apart to explore the idea of not being a couple anymore. And OH, double by the way, he still loved me and cared for me and wanted me and Nic to be super careful in Daytona because he’d heard it could get a little wild.

So after five months of being a couple, the boy I kind of in the back of my head could picture myself eventually marrying (I know, I know, but I couldn’t help myself) not only sold me out but also dumped me … over text.

Too bad I wasn’t there to see it.

But Janie was.

So my parents showed up at the airport, demanded to be let through security and practically caused a national security crisis, and then accosted Nic and me in the waiting area, where we were drinking Starbucks and keeping watch for Landon.

It was a
super
fun day.

Dumped, caught, and yeah—grounded until graduation.

Later that night, as I lay on my bed, I reached for the framed photo of Landon that smiled at me from the nightstand and flipped it facedown.

Next time I get a bad feeling about something
, I thought,
I’m going to run so fast in the other direction all that’ll be left is dust.

OBSERVATIONS MADE AFTER THE FACT

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

In a way, I was right.

All that’s left of any of us is dust.

Living people can be so arrogant sometimes.

(And I can say that, because I was one.)

M
y exploration had two main objectives: One, to see more of the building, because (creepy or not) it was by far the most impressive thing I had ever been able to claim as my own, and that provoked in me a burning curiosity to see every nook and cranny.

Two, I wanted to unearth more about Aunt Cordelia. The letters she’d written me were rubber-banded together in my messenger bag. I’d reread them on the car ride and noticed repeated mentions of a room that she loved—her own little office, where she felt free and peaceful. If there
was
some secret worth learning about Aunt Cordelia’s death, about what she’d done and why, it had to be in that room. She’d listed a few details about it: blue-painted walls, an antique lamp, and a little desk by a window where the sunlight came slanting in. So I knew that the room wasn’t in the superintendent’s apartment.

I decided to start in the wardress’s office, which was dim and smelled like stale library books, with wood-paneled walls and a large, fancy desk. Everything was old-fashioned and covered in a quarter inch of dust.

The desk was in immaculate order, not an item out of place except for a folder labeled
DISCHARGE PAPERWORK—1943
.

In that moment, it fully sank in that the charming cottage of my daydreams was an honest-to-goodness
mental institution
. An incredulous laugh bubbled out of me at the sheer preposterousness of it.

But when I picked up the envelope, revealing a perfectly dust-free rectangle on the desk’s surface, an uncomfortable tingle made its way down my neck. In more than seventy years,
no one
had come into this room and moved this folder?

A dozen yellow slips of paper spilled out when I tipped the envelope. I picked up the closest one. There was a name typed at the top:
VICTORIA FOWLER
, and below that, a date:
JULY 18, 1943
.

I wondered what Victoria had done, and whether being here had helped her at all. Just how troubled did a female have to be to be sent to a place with the word
institute
in its name, anyway? Were the patients criminals, murderers, completely insane? Or were they just headstrong women whose families decided things would be easier if they were locked away?

Having recently been categorized as moderately “troubled” myself, I was a little sensitive to the idea.

I shook off the uneasy feeling. Back to business. There was no way this was the room Aunt Cordelia had talked about in her letters.

A second door, labeled
NO UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE
, opened into a little nurses’ office that contained a bed, a desk, and two chairs. On one of the chairs was a metal surgical tray, identical to the one in Cordelia’s kitchen.

I paused on my way through to glance at a newspaper clipping that had been left on the corner of the desk. The headline read:
ROTBURG SANITARIUM TO CLOSE DOORS AFTER 77 YEARS.
I scanned the first few paragraphs, which quoted a man from the Pennsylvania State Board of Medicine as saying that there had been numerous problems at the Piven Institute over the years, and the decision to close was “strongly supported” by the state.

The imposing stone institution has remained in the care of the Piven family since its founding, even after the 1885 disappearance of founder Maxwell Piven. Local legend speculates that Maxwell, tired of the day-to-day burdens of his role, went west to California in search of a new life.

Hmm. Maybe we Pivens have always been the type to sneak off without permission.

Next I found myself in a small back hallway. The closest door had a sign that read
NURSES’ DORMITORY,
and the other signs were for the kitchen, janitorial closet, basement, and patient stairway.

I hesitated, thinking how nice it would be to explore somewhere light and tidy, like a dormitory for efficient, white-frocked nurses. But by now I had a sense, down to my core, that what I was searching for wasn’t contained in any cheerful, well-kept rooms.

The kitchen, janitorial closet, and basement seemed too creepy for solo exploration. So I passed by them and started to climb the stairwell.

On the second floor, I came to a small landing with a cork bulletin board on the wall. A yellowed paper sign was pinned to it with rusted thumbtacks:

IF THOU BE HUMBLED AND RENOUNCE THY SIN,

THY PITEOUS SOUL MAY FIND MERCY WITHIN.

—LORD P. LINDLEY

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
.

BOOK: The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall
5.63Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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