Greyfriars Reformatory

by Frazer Lee

  “She’ll know we’ve been in here anyway,” I remind Victoria, “when she finds her cigarettes have been stolen.”

  “We won’t take all of them,” Victoria says. “Just a couple of packs. She’ll never even notice. Especially if she’s knocking back that vodka as often as I suspect she does, the old lush.”

  Together, we move the fallen books but there’s no sign of the lighter. Victoria peers underneath the bookcase and I see her hair flutter like a flag in a breeze.

  “There’s an opening,” she says, “and it’s just big enough for a person to crawl through. I can see a stone floor on the other side. There! I can see Quick’s lighter.”

  I hunker down next to Victoria and peer into the space beneath the stacks. Cool air washes over me and it feels like a memory of being outside. But it smells of dust and age. Kind of musty. I don’t like it, so I’m relieved when Victoria announces, “Keep watch. I’ll have to go. I’m thinner than you.”

  Victoria searches my eyes for a response. What kind of response, I’m not altogether sure. She’s right; she is much thinner than me.

  “Really nothing bothers you, does it?” she asks. Then she positions herself flat on the floor before wriggling head first through the opening into the crawlspace.

  “Can’t quite reach it,” she says, her voice muffled from within the tight space. “You’ll have to push my legs….”

  I look down at her legs. They appear disembodied now that her top half has vanished under the bookcase. Such a weird image. I don’t really want to touch them.

  “Grab my ankles and push my legs!” she insists.

  I position myself between her ankles and take hold of them. Victoria wriggles against my grip and I push. It’s working. With a bit more wriggling, and some more pushing, the rest of her body disappears into the gap under the book stacks.

  “Shit!” Victoria’s voice echoes from the space beyond the bookcase. It sounds oddly like she’s been trapped between their dusty spines, her muffled tones yelling at me from within their yellowed pages.

  “Did you get the lighter?” I ask.

  “Well, no, I didn’t,” comes her muffled reply. “There are some steps in here, and I knocked it down there when I grabbed for it. Hold on, it can’t have gotten far.”

  I lie flat and peer into the gloomy space. Sure enough, I can make out Victoria’s feet descending from view down some steps a little way from the mouth of the opening. I wait, listening to the sound of my breathing. I see a flicker of light against the stairwell wall on the other side of the opening. She must have found the cigarette lighter at last. Maybe it’s a trick of the light but I see a dark shape move across the wall. It looks like the shadow of a person, and then it’s gone. It must be Victoria’s shadow, or at least that’s what I tell myself.

  But the shadow was moving down the stairs, not up.

  I hear a piercing scream. It echoes around the space behind the bookcase. The light flickers and goes out. And then I hear something else. Crazed laughter.

  “Victoria?”

  I can hear footsteps now, coming back up the stairs. I recognize Victoria’s feet as she nears the top. She sounds like she’s…chuckling to herself.

  “Spooked myself good and proper down there,” she says, breathless. “Thought I saw someone looking at me from the shadows, but it was just my reflection in an old glass picture frame.” She chuckles again and I don’t know why, but the sound unnerves me a little.

  “We’d better get out of here,” I say through the gap.

  “You won’t have to tell me twi—” Victoria says, but then doesn’t finish her sentence.

  I see the shadow move across the wall near the floor again, and it’s as though it’s followed her up the stairs. A dark band loops around Victoria’s ankle and she topples backward before she can place her foot down on the top step. She issues a garbled, panicked shriek as she tumbles back down the steps.

  “Victoria?” I call out to her. “You okay?”

  I hear a slight and distant groan, and then only stark silence. Maybe she’s broken her leg or something. I don’t know what to do. But the onus is on me now to figure something out. This smoke run was a bad idea, I decide, contemplating going to rouse Principal Quick for assistance. But she’ll crucify us if she finds out we snuck into her office. Only one thing for it, I guess. I begin to wriggle through the gap.

  It’s smaller, even, than it looks. Victoria was right, she is slighter than me and was therefore much more suited to getting through unscathed. I grit my teeth and wriggle, feeling my fingernails scraping against the cold, unyielding stone floor on the other side. I’m about a third of the way through when I see Principal Quick’s lighter lying on the floor. It is just inches away from my fingers. I squeeze my upper body further through the gap and the painful pressure on my ribs makes me gasp. Contact. I retrieve the lighter and pass it over to my right hand. I strike it, but it doesn’t ignite.

  “Oh my god.” Victoria’s voice is shaky, but at least hearing it means she’s alive.

  “Anything broken?” I call out. Then I try the lighter again. There’s a final wisp of smoke, but still no fire.

  “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.” Victoria sounds really panicked now, petrified even. I hear a shuffling, and then the sounds of her tripping her way back up the stairs.

  I thumb the lighter and it catches alight, the flame illuminating Victoria’s terrified face just a breath away from mine as she stumbles up the stairs and hits the floor.

  “Let me through! Oh my God! Let me through!” she shouts.

  I quickly extinguish the lighter and clutch it tightly in the palm of my left hand. With my right, I take hold of Victoria’s hand and begin pulling her back through the gap with me. Her skin is cool and clammy to the touch. Her eyes are wide with fear.

  “What happened down there?” I ask between grunts as I help her wriggle through the opening beneath the bookcase.

  Victoria ignores me. Or she doesn’t want to say. Her eyes are so wide I can’t help but wonder what they’ve just seen. She emerges fully, and now I can see the fear written all over her face. She looks really shaken up, so I decide not to pursue it any further. I guess I’m getting better at reading people the more time I spend with them doing insane activities like, oh I don’t know, stealing stuff from Principal Quick’s office closet. Still, I do wonder what it was exactly that freaked Victoria out while she was in the basement. Freed from the confines of the crawlspace, we both get to our feet and dust ourselves down.

  Victoria frantically starts stacking the books into a pile.

  “Help me out here! Put it back! Put the lighter back!”

  I pick up the carton of cigarettes from the floor and pocket two packs. I climb up onto the wobbly stack of books and place the carton and lighter back where we found them.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, hurry….” Victoria begins shelving the books the moment I step down from them. I get to work and help her shove the last of the books back onto the shelves.

  “What the hell is wrong?” I ask. “Did you whack your head down there?”

  The look on Victoria’s face sends a chill right through me. It’s as though something has gone from behind her eyes. She backs out through the closet door, terrified. I’m about to follow her when I think of something. I turn back and grab the vodka. I think we’re going to need it. After closing the closet door firmly behind us, I turn the key in the lock.

  Wasting no time, I cross to Quick’s desk and pull the drawer wide open. I lift the picture frame up and replace the key beneath it. Then I slide the drawer closed again.

  Mission accomplished. No fatalities. Well, apart from Victoria’s mental health and the jury was out on that long before anyhow.

  “What’s—?” I begin to ask.

  But Victoria is already out the window.

  I clamber out, then slide the w
indow shut. After crossing the shadowy recreation yard, I catch up to her in the corridor just around the corner from the main door to Principal Quick’s office.

  There’s a loaded silence between us as we begin to retrace our steps back to the dormitory. We pause to catch our breath at the next turning. Victoria sees the vodka bottle and swipes it from my hand. She twists off the cap and takes a massive gulp. Wiping her lips with the back of her hand, she sighs heavily.

  “Better?” I ask.

  Victoria nods and takes another enormous gulp of vodka from the bottle. Then she offers the bottle to me. I take it from her. I wonder how it tastes. I can’t remember if I have drunk it before. I’m just about to find out when we both hear a piercing scream.

  “Great, someone’s having the night terrors,” Victoria whispers. “Whoever it is will wake every damn body, Principal Quick included.”

  “We’d better get back to bed.” I look at Victoria and nod to the bottle cap.

  She passes the cap to me and I twist it back onto the top of the bottle, sealing it.

  Another loud scream echoes down the corridor, and I realize the sound is coming from the opposite direction from the dormitory. I can see from the puzzled look on her face that Victoria has realized it too. As the screams continue I head off, bottle in hand, in the direction of the sound and hear Victoria’s footfalls following mine. A few moments later, we arrive at the door to the swimming pool.

  “In here,” I say, pushing open the door. Victoria follows close behind.

  We rush inside, through the empty changing area, and into the pool room. It’s an eerie place in the dead of night. Low-level emergency lighting casts a reddish hue over the water. The ceiling and walls undulate in a red glow cast by the shifting surface of the water. But why would it be moving? As we get closer to the water’s edge, I see for myself.

  Principal Quick stands beside the pool, as silent and still as a statue. I didn’t notice her at first because the place where the shadows end and the principal begins is kind of difficult to discern. Hearing us approach, she turns and sees us. Her momentary surprise becomes a look of intense distaste when she notices the vodka bottle in my hand.

  (Busted.)

  Victoria comes to a halt right beside me and I hear her gasp. At first I think she’s just shocked to see Principal Quick standing there waiting for us. But then she puts her hand over her mouth and makes a horrid gagging sound. I wonder if she’s going to throw up. She’s looking beyond Quick, her eyes wide with horror.

  “What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck?” she says, over and over.

  Saffy lies facedown in the water, deathly still. What the fuck, indeed.

  Principal Quick’s shadow looms over the water, not quite reaching Saffy’s prone body. I watch as the blonde tendrils of Saffy’s once lustrous hair spiral to and fro with the lapping of the water. For a few breathless moments, I wait for Saffy to come back to life. To roll over on her back and thrash in the water, gasping for air, just like she did when Principal Quick made us swim lengths – when I see the gray girl walking across the water.

  Is she here now, I wonder, watching? I glance at the shadows lining the pool but see nothing. The crimson glow cast by the emergency lights has turned the water blood red. My heart starts to beat erratically and I feel a hum growing in my head. The hum stretches out, a sickly, throbbing yawn between my ears that coils into my ear canals before increasing in pitch and then becoming that old familiar ringing sound. My legs feel weak and I swallow against an acidic taste at the back of my throat. Maybe I’m going to throw up instead of Victoria.

  Through my numbness and the nausea, I sense movement at my side and see a dark shape launch itself into the water. It isn’t until she resurfaces that I realize Victoria has dived in after Saffy.

  She reaches Saffy in moments, but looks reluctant to reach out and touch her. Treading water, she turns herself around in the pool to face me, her arms moving constantly to keep her afloat.

  “Don’t just stand there,” she says. “We have to help her!”

  Victoria looks to me for help. And I feel that I want to help. But my legs feel distant from me, separated from me by the dull ache that has taken hold of my body. The loud ringing in my ears is at fever pitch.

  “Please!”

  Moving her arms against the water’s surface, Victoria looks up at Principal Quick for help. A look of confusion passes over the principal’s face, and she glances over her shoulder behind her.

  I understand now that Victoria is looking past Principal Quick, and into the shadows beyond the tiled edge of the pool.

  At the gray girl.

  I see her too, a silent observer watching from the shadows, that dead-looking, gray girl.

  Victoria recoils in fear, arms and legs flailing in the water. And as she does so, her movement turns Saffy’s body over in the water, face up.

  Saffy’s face is horribly contorted in a rictus of fear. A red gash bleeds at her temple. Her jaw is locked open in a silent scream. Her mouth leaks chlorinated water. She looks like she was scared, and battered, to death.

  The ringing in my ears retreats, becoming a shrill, cracked scream. It’s Victoria. She screams again and backs away, treading water. Victoria points at the gray girl.

  “She d-did it!” she stutters, barely able to speak. “She d-drowned Saffy!”

  I look back to where the gray girl was standing just seconds ago. But now there’s no one there. Only Principal Quick. And Victoria is pointing right at her.

  The principal’s expression is inscrutable.

  I look back to Victoria and see that she now looks more afraid of Principal Quick than anything the shadows can conjure.

  Chapter Twelve

  Tragic Accidents

  My legs are aching from standing at my desk for so long.

  At the head of the class, Principal Quick watches over us with an expression on her face that I can only really describe as regal. It’s like she’s a queen surveying her subjects, watching for any sign of weakness, or of dissent. Her eyes fixate on each of us in turn. When it gets to be my turn, I dare not look away or even blink. She holds my gaze, her face an expressionless mask. The silence in the classroom is so excruciatingly tense that it’s becoming almost tempting to make a noise just to shatter it, no matter the consequences.

  I watch Principal Quick as she takes a sharp, quiet breath.

  “You may sit,” she commands.

  (At last.)

  Our chair legs scrape against the floor noisily and the sound grates against the already unbearable atmosphere. I hear Lena groan as she sits down. Her legs must be aching too. I glance at Jess’s desk, then at Saffy’s. They are notably unoccupied. I wonder if the others are feeling that too – the absence of those two girls. Our fellow inmates.

  Principal Quick catches me looking and the dark glimmer of a frown contorts her face. I remember Saffy’s face in the pool, the water lit red, and then Jess’s face in the bathroom stall amidst so much blood. I try with all my might to blink the unwelcome images away. But it’s hard to, especially when their empty desks accentuate their absence. I stare at the weathered wooden surface of my own desk.

  Principal Quick waits for us to settle, and then clears her throat.

  “Terrible tragedy has hit this noble institution. We must remember our fallen inmates and promise to do our very best in their honor. Only through self-discipline can we avoid such tragic accidents from happening again.”

  Victoria is at the desk next to mine and I see her bite her lip. It’s as though she’s fighting to keep something from escaping her mouth.

  “You are here to better yourselves,” Principal Quick goes on. “To honor the rules and regulations put in place for you so that you may be rehabilitated.”

  The principal clasps her hands tightly together, as if praying to some higher source.

 
“As of tonight, lights out will be an hour earlier.”

  At that, I hear sounds of protest from Lena and Annie. Principal Quick just watches them, coldly, her icicle-sharp eyes daring them to comment further.

  “Understood?”

  There’s an uneasy silence in the room. I can sense the others holding back, each waiting for another to say something first. Victoria appears to be losing the fight to keep her lips sealed.

  “Do I make myself clear?” the principal prompts us.

  “Yes, Principal Quick,” I reply, in unison with the others.

  Victoria leans in closer to me. “Tragic accidents…” she whispers, just loud enough for all of us to hear.

  Principal Quick glares at Victoria. “Something to share, Victoria?”

  Victoria’s cheeks burn beet red.

  “If you do indeed have something to say,” Quick adds, “then by all means share it with the rest of the group.”

  I can see tears forming in Victoria’s eyes. Her hands are clasped together on top of the desk and she’s trembling.

  “Very well,” Principal Quick says impatiently, “in future, do not interrupt me, young lady.”

  Victoria unclasps her hands. Making fists, she slams them down onto her desk.

  Annie yelps in surprise at the sudden outburst.

  Lena chuckles.

  Then, Victoria pushes herself up from her desk with a scrape of her chair against the floor and glares angrily around at each of us, Principal Quick included.

  “Jess’s throat didn’t cut itself, did it? Ask her what she’s got hidden in her basement,” Victoria announces, pointing her finger at the principal, who looks as though someone just pulled a rug from under her feet.

  I glance at the others. Their eyes are wide in disbelief, or confusion, or both. A collective ‘WTF’ hangs in the room.

  “I saw Jess’s dead body down there,” Victoria says, “behind her closet.”

  Principal Quick looks quite at a loss for words.

  So am I, to be honest. After we went on the smoke run, what happened with Saffy put anything else from my mind. I never thought to ask again what spooked Victoria so much in the basement beneath Principal Quick’s closet. Never would have had the opportunity anyway. As soon as the principal had confiscated the vodka bottle—