cold, thin air: Volume 2

by C. K. Walker

  Since the silence was unnerving me, I threw my iPod on the docking station and turned up AC/DC.

  I got dressed and then stood in front of the mirror to dry my hair. I flipped my head over and blow dried upside down to try and give my hair some volume. When I flipped my head back up and shut off the blow-dryer I immediately noticed the silence in the room. But that wasn’t all I noticed.

  I wasn’t in my dorm anymore. Behind me was reflected the dusty bedframes and large open windows of room 733. I spun around in a panic to find that I was actually standing in my own room. I looked back at the mirror to see that 733 still reflected there. A slight movement behind me was all it took to make me run.

  I grabbed my purse and phone and I fled from my room slamming the door behind me. On the elevator ride down I called Alice.

  "I can't do it anymore," I said when she picked up. "I can’t go back in that room, again. I can’t ever go back.”

  “What happened?”

  I told her.

  "Jesus. What do you want to do?" She asked.

  "I need to talk to someone who knows what the fuck is going on. Is Tom Garris the only person we know was here in 1961?"

  "The only one I know of. Maybe we can get him on his way in tomorrow morning? We'll just corner him and refuse to move until he tells us something. He comes in at 6:30 according to the schedule I have. Do you want to meet me outside the Starbucks in the Atrium?"

  "Fuck yeah I do. I have a class at 7:30 but I'll blow it off."

  “Okay. See you then."

  I wasn’t usually much for parties but I was glad I was going to one that night. As soon as we got there I asked Ian to get me a drink. Since I wasn’t usually much of a drinker he gave me a raised eyebrow. I gave him a brief synopsis of what had happened earlier, hoping he wouldn’t think I was crazy.

  Ian made me a scotch and coke. It was the first of many.

  Around midnight I went to have a cigarette and checked my phone. I had a voicemail from Lydia left at 11:04pm.

  "Hey Becca, listen I just, ugh, I just had a huge fucking fight with Mike. He, well, I guess his frat decided that for Halloween this year all the new brothers have to spend the night in the Suicide Room. In our dorm. I just, I can't fucking take it. He knows what's been going on with us and he still agreed to do this. He’s now trying to convince me that Sigma Chi is behind all of the stuff going on in room 733 because they’ve been trying to drum up buzz for their Halloween deal. I can't-"

  I hit end and threw my phone in my bag. No wonder Lydia was pissed. This was not good. Not good at all.

  I found Ian inside and asked him to take me home. I was suddenly very stressed, very tired and very drunk.

  When the alarm went off at 6am, it took everything I had to pull myself out of bed. I got dressed in the clothes I'd worn the night before and shuffled my way across campus to the Atrium.

  Alice was already there with a black coffee in hand.

  "I figured you'd need this," she laughed.

  "How'd you know?"

  "Your texts."

  "I texted you last night?"

  "Yeah, at about 1. You told me about Sigma Chi.”

  "Oh, god, yeah." I pushed my sunglasses higher up my nose and pulled my hood lower over my eyes.

  "Those guys are idiots. Remember how I told you that it's crafty? Well what if the point of messing with you was to make 733 provocative, you know, to seduce people into going inside. No one has been in that room for years, can you imagine how hungry that thing is?”

  "Do you think they're really at risk?" I asked as I sat down on the steps to the Admin building.

  "Yeah. In fact the only thing they have going for them is that all those suicide victims were alone at the time of their deaths."

  "So, it'll be less powerful with all of them there?"

  "Theoretically. We would know a lot more if we knew what it was. And we can't know what it is without knowing how it got here. And that is why we need Garris."

  "What time is he supposed to get here?"

  "Actually, twenty minutes ago," Alice said, grimly.

  It was another half an hour before we resigned ourselves to the fact that Mr. Garris had snuck around us as usual. We went to the front office hoping to beg again for an appointment with him anyway.

  The woman at the Admin desk regarded us coldly.

  “Tom isn't coming in today. Or any other day for that matter. He quit yesterday. Looks like you won’t be harassing him anymore."

  "We weren't harassing him,” I said. “We just desperately needed to talk to him."

  “We still do.” Added Alice.

  "Well you won’t get any of his personal information from me," she said snidely and walked away.

  "What the fuck do we do now?" I asked Alice.

  "Without Tom Garris there's nothing left to do."

  "Alice, fuck, I can't go back into that room.

  "Well, then I guess it’s good your transfers came through."

  "They did?!"

  "Yep. I got the notice when I checked my work email this morning. You're going to Morton and Lydia is going to Tinsley."

  "Oh thank god."

  "I thought you'd be happy about that. I also convinced my boss not to assign anyone else to room 734.”

  "Thank fuck."

  “The only thing is you won’t be able to move until Monday."

  "I can last through the weekend, especially now that the end is in sight. I have to tell Lydia."

  I opened my phone to pull up Lydia's number but my attention was caught by the red ‘1’ badge over the voicemail logo. I hit play. It was the rest of the message from last night.

  "-even look at his dumb fucking face anymore so I'm going to head home. Don't worry about me, I'll be okay. I’m drunk enough to sleep through any bullshit from next door. I'm just so fucking pissed off right now. I would honestly rather deal with Dumbshit Beth than Michael-My-Parents-Must-Be-Siblings-Because- I'm-That-Fucking-Retarded-Benson. Let’s hang out tomorrow. Love ya!"

  The message ended.

  "Goddamn it."

  Alice gave me a questioning look.

  "Lydia spent the night in our dorm."

  Alice cringed.

  "She's safe though, right?"

  "As long as she doesn't go into 733."

  "She won’t.” I thought of the always open large windows of the corner room. If nothing else the mere thought of those would keep Lydia the hell out of that room.

  "Good. Well, since we have nothing else to do, do you want to go look for theology books in the library? It's pretty much the only thing open right now. "

  “Sure," I shrugged. I didn't have another class until 10.

  The little old lady who sat behind the library's checkout desk must have been 1,000 years old. Ms. Stapley's eyes were small and watery and her skin looked like it was melting off of her skull. Still, she was nice and knowledgeable and she sent us in the right direction for books on demonology, though she gave us a curious look as she did.

  There wasn’t much. We read everything we could but it either wasn’t relevant or wasn’t in English. We returned to her desk 30 minutes later.

  "Ah, do you have anything on the occult?"

  "The occult? Ah..." Her voice trailed off. "Yes, I do. Over there to the left of the reference section.”

  "Ok thanks. Sorry, I‘m too hung-over to use the Dewey decimal system," I said.

  "I don't think she likes the look of us," Alice whispered as we walked away.

  "Our look or our subject matter?"

  "Probably neither."

  Within the hour we were back up at her desk having struck out again. We could tell she was getting annoyed as her eyes narrowed suspiciously at us as we approached.

  "Ah, sorry, do you know where we could find something on séances or Ouija boards or-"

  "Now listen, girls.” Ms. Stapley stood up from her desk and looked over her glasses at us. “I really hope this is for class."

  "It is," I said.


  "It's not," Alice answered simultaneously. "It's personal research.”

  "Research? What kind of research?"

  "Look, we're not going to mess with a Ouija board or anything…" I said.

  "Good," Ms. Stapley smoothed her pleated pants and sat back down. "Because I can't have that sort of thing going on here again."

  "Again?" Alice latched on.

  The older woman suddenly looked very uncomfortable and started fidgeting with a stack of books on her desk.

  “We may have something on séances in-“

  "Ms. Stapley, we’re researching what happened in Reilly in 1961.” Alice interrupted.

  “And also what’s been happening there ever since.”

  "Well, it's no secret, is it? A student committed suicide in that room. Dreadful but not unheard of on a university campus.”

  "Five students." I corrected her.

  "But you know that, right?” Alice was suddenly talking very fast. “Because you sound like you’re well versed in this story. Please, tell us how this started and we might be able to end it."

  "End it?" Ms. Stapley's voice became quieter but more concentrated. "Don’t be so arrogant, young lady. You can't end it. People have always died in that room and they always will. There is no end to it so you’d best stay far away from it."

  "But maybe if we knew how this all started -"

  "It started just as you think it did. But everyone that was involved is either very old or very dead by now. Just stay away from that room. Concentrate on your studies."

  I leaned over her desk. "Well, I'd love to but they assigned my friend and me to the room next door. Maybe you can forget about all the suicides but we can’t. It won’t fucking let us."

  "Young lady, I never forget." Ms. Stapely voice was even quieter now. "My friend Ellen was the very first to be killed in that room. She was my very best friend and not a night goes by that I don't imagine her wiggling out of that tiny window, standing upon the cold ledge in her bare feet and jumping off the 7th floor of that building."

  Alice sighed. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t know.”

  "Yes, well these are old wounds, my dear. Now girls, I suggest you request a room reassignment immediately. No one should be living on the seventh floor of that building. And that’s all I’m going to tell you about it. “

  Alice sighed but resigned herself to a nod. We wouldn’t learn anything more here. Still, it was quite a breakthrough - at least we had some information now.

  Alice walked away and I made to follow her but my feet wouldn’t move. Something was bothering me - a small yet poignant word had been buried in Ms. Stapley's story; a word that suddenly seemed very important.

  "Eh, Ms. Stapley,” I asked the tired, old woman at the desk, “Why did you refer to the windows in 733 tiny? Because I’ve seen those windows and they’re huge, like 5 feet tall.”

  "Dear, you're thinking of the corner room, that’s the supply closet. Room 733 is next door to that."

  "No-no," I stuttered, "that's room 734."

  "Yes, well, it is now. When they built the additional rooms on to the south hall they moved all the room numbers down.”

  Oh my god. I suddenly felt very hot and very dizzy.

  "That sneaky fucker," Alice whispered next to me, her skin paling.

  "Lydia."

  We took off across the campus at a dead run, witnessed only by the few bleary-eyed students on their way to morning classes. When Reilly finally came into view I stumbled on the pavement as my blood turned to ice. From our vantage point we could clearly see the windows of the corner room were closed – the first and only time I had ever seen that way. And the window to my room was open.

  We ran into the lobby, pushing past several latte-sipping, Ugg boot-wearing freshman who had just gotten off the elevator. I hit 7 and watched the doors close more slowly than they ever had before. I leaned against the wall, trying to steady my breathing.

  "Alice, how the fuck did this happen?"

  "I don't know. I don’t fucking know.”

  "She's been in there all night, Alice. In our room. Alone.”

  Alice shook her head but had nothing to say.

  When the doors finally opened on floor 7, we saw a quiet, deserted hallway. I ran toward my room with Alice right behind me. Rounding the corner, I threw open my door hoping it wasn’t locked. And it wasn’t.

  Lydia looked back at me. And for one breathless moment, cruel glimmer of hope crossed over her tear streaked face.

  But it was too late. The next second, she leaned forward so slightly, and she was gone.

  She screamed the entire way down.

  Alice ran to the ledge where Lydia had just been while I stood motionless. She stuck her head out the window and looked down just as a different kind of screaming started from the bottom floor. Alice closed her hand over her mouth and pulled her head back into the room as tears of shock ran down her ghost- white face.

  The screaming from outside got louder as more people saw what remained of my best friend on the cold pavement. I leaned back against the dresser and slumped to the floor. A falling death. Lydia never wanted a falling death.

  I absentmindedly picked up one of the pictures that were strewn all over the floor. It was a picture of Lydia's mother. She was dead. I picked up another picture. It was Lydia’s baby sister. She was dead, too. There were dozens of pictures just like it all over the floor - Lydia has been busy last night. As for the things depicted in them, I cannot tell you. Lydia was a talented artist and I only saw a few before I got sick on the floor next to me.

  Alice was standing in the doorway yelling something down the hall. I don't know what she was saying because all I could hear was a high pitched whine in the room. Suddenly a piece of paper slid out from under the crack in the closet door and glided across the floor toward me. I picked it up and studied it for a moment.

  This was drawn by Lydia too, but it wasn’t like the others. It was a picture of the closet from my exact vantage point. In the drawing the door was cracked and there was something looking back from the darkness.

  I put the paper down and studied the closet. The door was cracked open just like the picture. I squinted my eyes and tried to see inside. Just as I started to distinguish the defined lines of a long face looking back at me, Alice pulled me to my feet.

  "We need to get out of here," I thought I heard her say.

  I never went back into that room. My parents moved my things and I spent the rest of the semester in an apartment off campus. I transferred to an out of state school for my spring semester and finished my degree there.

  Every night I dream of Lydia pulling herself through the tiny window, shimmying out onto the cold ledge, standing up and knowing there’s nothing between her body and the terrifying abyss in front of her. I watch her look down seven stories to the black pavement below and realize, though not accept, her terrible fate. I see the blind horror cross her familiar features. I hear her wildly pounding heart, desperately trying to race through every beat of the life she should have lived, and knowing it has only mere seconds.

  I watch her look back at me. And I watch her fall.

  It's been 9 years since that night. And every fall semester for 9 years I’ve called Resident Services to see which dorms are open for new student assignments. Reilly is always open. The seventh floor is closed.

  This year life and work got in the way and I called much later than usual. I was put on hold immediately.

  "Resident Services." A man finally answered. "Were you the one asking about open rooms in Reilly?”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “We're entirely filled up and there’s a waiting list for Reilly. But, as it happens, you actually have great timing. I make no promises but we may be able to get you in. We just got approval this morning.”

  “Approval for what?” I asked dubiously.

  “We’re opening up the seventh floor.”

  PALEONTOLOGISTS WERE WE

  Jake was my best friend wh
en I was a kid. We’d bonded over a deep obsession of the Jurassic Park movies and our resulting passion for Paleontology.

  We used to spend every weekend out in the woods excavating the forest floor for dinosaur bones.

  But one day when we came home from school and gathered up our digging equipment, my parents stopped us on the way out the door. They told us it wasn’t safe to go outside today. We went up to my room but we could still hear the adults whispering about “another body being found after all these years”.

  Jake’s parents came over and they sat us down in the living room and made us promise to only play in our backyards from now on. We insisted we weren’t playing, we were making scientific discoveries. They just smiled at Jake and me and sent us outside with squirt guns, which we abandoned as soon as we were out the door. I snuck up to my room and grabbed our tools instead.

  That was the day we finally hit pay dirt. After a year and a half of excavating we had finally found our first section of dinosaur skeleton – and in my backyard no less! We hurried inside to tell our parents but they had left to a neighborhood meeting and only my father was home. When we told him he was very excited and agreed to take us to the university the next afternoon to present our findings to the anthropology department for testing.

  But we never went to the university. And it wasn’t because my dad didn’t keep his promise, either. It was because Jake never made it home from school the next day. And he never came home any other day either. I was scared and lonely for a few months but my parents hired me a therapist and I slowly got better. By the time we moved out of state less than a year later, I’d forgotten entirely about the dinosaur bones we had discovered in the back yard.

  Until today.

  This morning my daughter came home from a weekend with Grandma and Grandpa. She said she hadn’t been allowed to go outside because of some missing kids in the area. And for the first time since I was nine I thought about the bones Jake and I found in my backyard. And I wondered…

  THE SUICIDE OF BRADLEY ALLIGAN

  Bradley Alligan died on a quiet Wednesday morning in August of 1999.