by Frazer Lee
“What is this place, Emily? Is this Hell?”
I don’t know the answer. So I just shrug.
“Lena’s dead,” she says.
“I know,” I reply.
“Where’s Annie?”
“Annie’s dead,” I say.
“Oh no.” Victoria looks like she is struggling to take it all in. “How?”
“I found her hanging from the tree in the recreation yard.”
“Jesus Christ,” Victoria says. “That’s how her file said she died.” Then she coughs to clear her throat. “Except it said she hanged herself in detention. Why would it say that?”
“I didn’t—”
“I know, okay. It’s her. That…gray girl. It’s like she knows every bad thing you ever did in your life.” Victoria coughs again, then struggles to her feet. “Lena’s case file said massive blood loss from torn veins. Said it was intentional self-mutilation – in case the drug overdose didn’t do the trick. That’s how she died, for sure. But Principal Quick entered it in her case file like a premonition or something. At first I thought you and she were in cahoots somehow…” She catches my look. “…and I’m sorry about that, but you can understand why I thought that, right?”
I can’t. But I nod anyway because it seems the right thing to do at this particular time. Maybe I’m getting better at navigating this kind of human interaction after all, because Victoria seems to accept my nod.
“I just don’t understand it, Emily. How could Principal Quick know? And why did she choose to top herself like that? She was studying you, right? For her book?”
I nod again. I’m getting good at this.
“Well,” Victoria goes on, “she had you back, right where she wanted you. And then Jess died, and Saffy. Followed by Principal Quick herself. Then Lena and Annie – not sure who went first….” Victoria winces, as though she’s said, or thought, something truly terrible. She takes a deep breath before continuing.
“So the only thing left to puzzle out is the gray girl. Do you think she’s real, Emily?” Victoria asks. “Do you think she really can be killing us off, one by one?”
“There was something in Principal Quick’s manuscript about her,” I reply. I try to remember the exact words, but can’t summon them. “That she was…a projection or something.”
Victoria’s eyes widen. She starts pacing the corridor, thinking aloud. “That manuscript of Principal Quick’s. That’s your case file, Emily. I think it must be the key to all of this.” She stops pacing and looks right at me with excited zeal in her eyes. “We have to go back and take a proper look at it. You game?”
Again, I nod.
“And your file?” I ask. “Is it true, Victoria?”
“I fucking hope not,” Victoria says before marching off along the corridor.
* * *
“Emily…” Victoria says, and I’ve seen it too.
Principal Quick’s body has gone. Her desk is unoccupied. The empty pill and liquor bottles are still where they were before. The phone receiver lies, silent and useless, on the desk where Annie put it down. The manuscript is still there, too. I rush over to grab it.
“Do you think she faked it?” Victoria asks. “Her death, I mean?”
“She could have, I guess,” I reply. “If anyone would know how, it would be Principal Quick. She seemed to know a thing or two about meds, after all. Maybe there was something she knew she could use to look stone-cold dead. But why would she want to fool us like that?”
Victoria shakes her head. “I think she’s insane, Emily. I mean was…or is…. Jesus, you know what I’m saying – completely off the scale batshit mental. I think she’s been playing a game with us since we arrived here. And I’m not sure it’s a game we can win, unless we can stick together, okay?”
“Okay.”
But there’s always the chance that someone just moved the body, I want to add, but I can’t bring myself to say it. And I wonder why – before I realize that it’s because if the body was moved then it means whoever moved it was very probably the gray girl who’s been haunting us every step of the way. My skin turns cold at the thought, and I shiver.
Then the phone starts ringing.
Off the hook.
I look to Victoria and she looks back at me as if to say no way, I’m not answering it. But it rings on, and one of us has to do something. So I reach over the desk and pick it up.
“Emily…?” Victoria says feebly.
At first, I can’t hear anything except a weird kind of whispering sound, like the breeze through some trees. But then, down the line I hear a faint musical chime and remember the small music box in my pocket. Then comes a burst of shrill laughter.
“She’s coming for you, Emily,” a voice rasps, after the laughter has died out.
The voice sounds weirdly familiar, and utterly alien all at the same time. It chills me to my core, and I slam the receiver back down on its cradle. But the voice is inside my head now, laughing and taunting, and I clamp my hands over my ears in the vain hope that this will block it out.
“Coming for you, coming for you, coming for youuuuuu….”
All that my hands over my ears are doing is to keep the voice inside my head, looping and echoing, growing in intensity until—
Victoria screams.
—and the horrible voice stops.
But then I look at Victoria and see the fear etched into her features and I’m almost too scared to look at the corner of the room. To see what she sees. But Victoria is gasping and pointing now, and I have to see what’s gotten her so terrified.
There, in the shadows next to the filing cabinet, stands Principal Quick. And she still looks dead. Worse still, her face is still locked in that look of horror, her glassy eyes betraying no emotion. She’s just standing there and watching us, and I wonder if she’s been there this whole time. There’s a jangle of keys and I realize with dread that she has taken a step toward us both.
Victoria screams and moves beside me.
Principal Quick’s body moves stiffly, like a mannequin’s, as she takes another step, and then another. Each time she moves, there’s another jangling sound, and as she emerges into the light from the desk lamp, I can see the bunch of keys in her hand.
“Looking for these, girls?” Her voice has the sound of something that’s been buried deep in the earth and then dragged to the surface again, bringing some aspect of that grave along with it. When she giggles, a foul, yellow fluid spills from the corners of her mouth and Victoria and I both turn and run to the door.
We clatter out of the office and into the corridor.
But the jangling continues, and I know we are being followed.
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” Victoria says breathlessly, her terrified eyes fixed on the office doorway.
Mirthless laughter echoes down the corridor as Principal Quick follows us out of her office. She lifts her dead hand and jangles the keys in the air, taunting us with them.
“God can’t help you now, foolish girl,” she says in that charnel voice, her face still locked in that look of life-extinguishing horror.
Then Principal Quick’s entire body twitches like a mad puppet’s before dropping to the floor in a crumpled heap.
The keys are buried beneath her.
Victoria screams again. And I try to, but I can’t. The sight of Principal Quick, back from the grave, was harrowing enough. Now I just clamp my hand over my mouth because there she actually is, as plain as day, standing behind Principal Quick’s fallen body. The gray girl, her dark eyes blazing through her mane of tangled hair. She shoves Principal Quick’s dead body aside with one foot and it’s as though she’s discarding an unwanted Halloween costume.
Then she creeps toward us as lithe, and as quiet, as a spider.
I feel Victoria clutch at my hand. Her hand trembles against mine
, and I hold on to it tightly.
We run.
Chapter Twenty
Those Dead Eyes Seem to Find Us
We turn a corner at breakneck speed and Victoria loses her footing.
I skid to a stop and help her to her feet, glancing over her shoulder to make sure the gray girl hasn’t caught up to us.
“Emily,” Victoria says.
But there’s no time to talk. I see a muddy shadow stretching across the wall at the corner we just turned.
She’s gaining on us.
“She’s coming,” I say, and see panic in Victoria’s eyes.
I let go of her hand and we run on.
“We’ve been down this corridor before, haven’t we?” Victoria asks breathlessly. “It’s like we’re running in circles.”
I stop worrying about the shadow that’s pursuing us for a moment and look. Really look. Damn it all to hell. Victoria’s right. We definitely passed by this spot before.
“How is that even possible?” Victoria asks, seeing the look on my face, and the fear in her voice provokes my own.
I recall how the gray girl was at one with the reformatory, not just part of its fabric, but woven into it somehow. That immense heartbeat—
thrum, thrum, thrum
—comes back to haunt my memories, and I remember how the gray girl emerged from the masonry, and was knitted together as if from the dust of time. I wonder if she’s as trapped in this building as I feel. Perhaps she knows she can’t get out, and so puts all of her dark energies into keeping people in. Her playthings. Her pets. The mazelike corridors caught me up inside of them once before, and now I’m beginning to wonder if she can manipulate the physical layout of the building. To keep us trapped inside and chasing our tails until we weaken. In this game of cat and mouse, or rather – mice, it’s clear which roles Victoria and I are playing. We’re already both out of breath.
How long can we keep up the pace on her mad treadmill until she catches up to us?
Victoria has slowed to a jog.
“I have a stitch,” she says, and grimaces.
She stops still and clutches her side with one hand. With the other, she reaches toward the wall for support and I swear I actually see its drearily painted surface shiver.
“Don’t,” I warn her. “Don’t touch the walls.”
She withdraws her hand and looks at me, puzzled.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you why,” I say.
“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” she replies.
Then I hear a sharp, rasping breath and can see from the panic-stricken look on Victoria’s face that she hears it too.
“I believe you though, Emily,” she says. “If you say we’re in danger, then we’re in danger.”
“We’re in danger,” I reply.
And I’m not kidding.
We take off again at speed. Victoria clutches at her side. Her trust in me seems to give me renewed energy. And I focus on that energy until I feel sharper, and more alert than ever.
We run on until we reach a T-junction at the end of the corridor. Victoria veers to the right, but I reach out with my hand and grab hold of her sleeve. She looks at me, eyes wide from our flight.
“This way,” I say, feeling sure that this is the correct thing for us both to do. “We should go this way.”
She nods, and we take a left down the corridor, picking up our pace as much as we can. The green glow of an emergency exit sign reveals a door beneath it. We slow to a stop and then check out the door. It’s chained and padlocked shut.
“No health and safety restrictions at Greyfriars Reformatory,” Victoria sighs.
“Come on,” I say and we push on along the corridor.
Another left turn is the only way we can go except back on ourselves, so we follow it around into another corridor.
The dormitory door is up ahead, to the right.
It’s still open from when Lena sprung the lock.
We run to the door and steal inside. I give the corridor a quick, nervous scan before I shut the door. Impossible to say for sure, but I think I saw a shadow flicker at the corner of the corridor. I decide to keep that to myself. Victoria already looks petrified.
Closing the door, I catch my breath. Victoria doubles over in pain, complaining about her stitch. But I know we have a bigger problem.
“Can’t lock the door without any keys,” I mutter.
The high windows are no use as an escape route, either. They’re out of reach and, even if we could climb up to somehow reach them, they’re all barred. Keeping the door shut has to be our priority, so I start looking for a solution.
The beds all stand in rows, empty and white, except for the bed that Lena cannibalized for the lock-pick spring. That one stands, skeletal looking, at the center of the room. It’s all we have, so I march over to it and grab one end of the metal frame.
“Help me barricade the door,” I say.
“What use will that be? Against a phantom?” Victoria protests.
“We have to try,” I say.
Victoria groans, and trudges over to the other end of the bedframe. At least she appears to be over her stitch. Just in time for me to give her a new one.
“On three,” I tell her. “One, two, three.”
We lift the heavy bedframe and carry it over to the door. I take the lead, and maneuver the bed around until we can stand it on its side. Shuffling it into place, I manage to trap the door handle with the bedsprings beneath it.
Having a physical boundary feels good. But only for a moment, because then I hear a faint scratching sound. And another.
Scritch-scratch.
I look to Victoria, whose eyes fill with fear. The scratching intensifies, then there’s a loud knock and we both jump back from the door.
“We need more weight,” I say, looking around the room frantically. “The mattresses.”
We rush over to one of the unoccupied beds and grab a mattress. It’s bulky, but far lighter than the bedframe. We carry it to the door and place it over the bedframe, adding more bulk to our barricade.
Scritch-scratch.
“Another,” I say, wiping sweat from my eyes.
Scratch.
“Another,” Victoria agrees.
Knock.
We both rush over to another unoccupied bed. I grab hold of one end of the mattress, and Victoria the other. We lift the mattress up and away from the bed.
Victoria screams – and I see the pure terror etched into her eyes.
There, curled up on the floor under the bed, is a girl, dressed in the same gray uniform that we wear – but hers is spattered in dark blood.
“Oh my…” Victoria begins to say.
But before she can find religion once more, her words become another scream of fear as the bloodstained girl we’ve inadvertently revealed twitches and jolts over onto her back. Her face is a tortured mask of perversity, her contorted expression locked between pain and delight. Her eyes pop open, hideously white, and glare up at us from the floor. She opens her mouth and, with a sick gurgle, thick blood spills from the corner of her vomit-smeared mouth.
And she laughs. Jesus H. Christ, she actually laughs. And I swear it’s the most harrowing, and soul-destroying, sound I have ever heard.
Victoria is yammering away now, her mind apparently unhinged by what’s she’s seeing. She screams in fear again as Jess – or what used to be Jess – claws at the air suddenly, her fingers all bloody. Jess’s body twists with the momentum and her pelvis thrusts upward. Her head dangles, upside down, and she licks those vile lips of hers as she looks hungrily at both of us. Then, crablike, she starts to scuttle from under the bed and toward Victoria. Her laughter dies away, only to be replaced by the hideous snapping of her teeth.
“Jess, oh my God, Jess, no!” Victoria says, and gas
ps as the Jess-thing clutches at her ankle with its bloody fingers.
Victoria hops up onto the bed behind her and the crablike cadaver circles around the bed, its teeth snapping.
I take my chance and run for the door.
The scratching and knocking continues and I feel trapped between the threat of what’s outside the door, and what we’ve inadvertently barricaded ourselves in with.
“Emily!” Victoria’s warning cry echoes around the room.
I turn sharply to see Jess scurrying over toward me, her twisted body making horrible snapping sounds with each tortured movement. I can’t help but notice with disgust how her hands and feet leave bloody prints on the dormitory floor behind her. The awful chattering of her teeth grows louder and more intense as she nears me, and I have only seconds to act.
I hop to the side of our makeshift barricade and grip the bed frame with both hands. When those chattering teeth are inches from my feet, I pull with all my might, and bring our barricade – mattress and all – down on Jess’s head. Her body crumples and her legs twitch violently. Her arms flail by her sides madly, as though they’re attempting to free themselves from the rest of her body. There’s blood everywhere now and, even worse, the clatter of teeth on the hard floor surface as Jess spits them from her mouth.
“Victoria! Now!” I shout, and she jumps down from the bed, giving Jess’s madly flailing body a wide berth.
Joining me at the door, Victoria grips the handle. I do too, my hands over hers, and we open the door, ready to face whatever nightmare is out there.
We stumble into the corridor and look frantically around.
“There!” Victoria says, her voice almost crushed by terror.
I see it too.
A dark figure watching from the shadows. We both run the other way. I can almost feel the darkness snapping at my heels, like Jess’s blood-smeared teeth did. We turn a corner, and then another, and I see the familiar entrance to the recreation area up ahead of us. We increase our speed and slam into someone coming the other way.
One moment the corridor was empty, and then….
The someone is sent sprawling from the impact onto her back in the corridor. She groans, and chuckles dryly. I see with horror that her body is unnaturally bent and distorted. She sits up, with a horrid cracking of bones, and I see why her body looks that way. It’s Annie, her neck still broken from her fall in the noose. But her eyes are wide open and looking straight at us. They are the same lifeless, milky white as Jess’s were.