by Frazer Lee
They drag me into the nearest bathroom stall and force me to my knees. I try to breathe before they push my face into the toilet bowl, but the wind is knocked from out of me. My gasp is cut off as a torrent of cold water drowns my face. When it’s over, they drag me to the next stall and flush my head under the water again. And again, and again, until I’m in the last stall. Then they leave me, broken, drenched, and spluttering water. All except Saffy, who pauses for a moment before throwing the crumpled music box at me. I’m too numb to feel its impact. It clatters to the tiled floor beside me and Saffy saunters out. I hear the door shut behind her and I try to scream. But no sound will come. So I scream in silence. Over and over, until I can’t any more. I remain where I am, curled up on the floor, unable and unwilling to move.
And then I see her.
One of the girls is still in the bathroom. I can see her feet under the gap in the stall. She’s just standing there, in the bathroom. I wonder if one of the girls is going to give me another kicking. They certainly aren’t here to help. No one helps. I lie there for what feels like an age. Then, as the feeling begins to return to my body, I feel pinpricks of pain where they’ve injured me. I struggle to my feet. The room tilts because my head is swimming from their blows, and from the water. I stumble out of the stall toward the motionless girl. Her hair hides her face. I reach for her, hoping she’ll help me to walk out of here. But as I do so she moves – almost drifts – to the door. I follow, my feet slipping and sliding on the tiles.
I emerge into the dormitory.
They’re all asleep in their beds. A shaft of brilliant moonlight illuminates my empty bed and for a moment I consider climbing in and curling up to sleep there. But the strange girl, her pallid skin a deathly gray in the moonlight, stands over by the door. I feel a strong sensation as I look at her, one that I can only describe as a kind of bond between us. It’s as though there’s an invisible rope connecting us and whenever she moves, I have to follow. Like schoolchildren roped together in the snow so they won’t get lost. She moves again, and I follow, leaving the softly snoring girls behind.
I’m in the corridor, and the pain from my injuries really takes hold. My right leg falters where it’s been kicked and I support myself against the wall. I can hear my heartbeat in my head. I take deep breaths, the strange girl waiting for me up ahead, and when I take my hands away from the wall I see that I’ve left bloody handprints there. I didn’t know I had so much blood in me.
It’s okay, she seems to say, and it’s totally weird because she does it without actually speaking. We can go somewhere they’ll never find you. Somewhere they can’t hurt you again.
Oh, but I’d like that. That would be a real birthday present. One to treasure forever. So I follow blindly on and feel my mouth curl into a smile. My split lip spills more blood down my chin, but I don’t care. If anything, it just means that I’m still alive.
We turn a corner into the next corridor and I see the recreation yard through the windows. As I limp past it, I admire the twisted shape of the dead tree beneath which I’d sat so many times with Saffy and the others, smoking and feeling like I was part of something. One of the girls. A fellow inmate. But I know that was all a lie, so I move on. I feel the tug of that invisible rope guiding me. After a while, I follow the gray girl to an opening in the wall of the next corridor and realize where she has brought me.
The clock tower stairs.
Of course. We can be alone up there. No one goes – not even Saffy. It’s out of bounds. My silent guide goes first and it strikes me how strange it is that she seems to walk without really moving.
We reach the top, and the pain racking my broken and bruised body is excruciating. I hear a horribly distorted chime. Strange, I wasn’t even aware that I had picked up the music box, let alone carried it with me all this way. And yet, here it is. A broken birthday present for a broken life. I hurl it to the floor and stamp on it, just as they did. With each stomp, the box lets out an agonized little chime. I want to put it out of its misery. When I’m done, I see her standing in one of the open archways. The wind ruffles her hair and I see a flash of intent in her dark eyes. The invisible rope pulls me toward her, and I go willingly because right now she’s all I have.
I climb up next to her.
She wraps herself around me, a cold cloak made of night.
And together we fall.
As we tumble together into space, I see the rage in her eyes. And the despair. And I know that she’s my dark mirror. Too late, I understand that she’s made a victim of me. And that I’ve made a victim of myself. And, even as we plummet toward the hard ground below, I begin to fight back. But she grips me tightly in her melancholic tourniquet. I rail against her, pummeling her frozen, un-dead body with my bloody fists. But she won’t let me go. And the wind whistles ever louder in my ears until it howls at fever pitch. We fall faster and harder, conjoined twins dragged down by the sheer weight of despair.
And we’re going to hit the ground.
I scream.
Chapter Twenty-Three
A Shadow Self Revealed
I slam down onto solid ground.
But not the ground. I’m standing once again in the clock tower room, its aged stone floor beneath me.
And she’s right in front of me. The gray girl.
Our foreheads are pressed together so firmly that it feels as though our flesh is fusing. I rock on my feet, and she moves against me, a perfect mirror of my actions. I circle around, walking on the balls of my feet, and she follows my trajectory. We’re like two rutting stags with our horns locked. And then she’s pushing against me, and she’s stronger, so much stronger. I try to push back, but my feet slide across the stone floor and I’m forced to take rapid steps backward. I cry out at the force.
“Emily!”
Victoria is near, I can tell from the sound of her voice. I can’t see her, because the gray girl is blocking my line of sight. But then I see Victoria’s hand at the gray girl’s shoulder. She’s trying desperately to separate us. But it’s no use. The gray girl is just too strong. She hisses between her stinking teeth and swipes at Victoria with her left hand. Victoria is swatted away like a fly. I manage to pivot around so that I can see Victoria. She’s on the floor, her hand pressed to her forehead where the gray girl struck her.
And then something moves behind her.
A sickly, crawling form lunges from over the lip of the staircase. It scuttles across the floor in horrid, jerking movements. As it reaches Victoria and clutches at her hair and clothing, I see it for what it is and realize with terror that this is – or was – Lena. The pockmarked skin on her arms oozes black filth from each of a hundred or more needle punctures. She opens her mouth in a gleeful snarl, and more fetid black ooze trickles out. Victoria screams in horror as Lena’s vile cadaver envelops her in its corrupt limbs.
But there’s nothing I can do to help her.
Seeing my fear, the gray girl propels her body forward like a battering ram. I skid and slide backward, all too aware of the open archway – and the deadly drop – behind me. I’m losing ground, but I can’t lose the struggle. Not now. Not now that I’ve remembered some of what happened to us – to me.
I redouble my efforts.
“I’m not afraid of you,” I say, and I really do mean it.
I slam my hands down on her shoulders, clutching them tight.
The gray girl seems to lose some energy from this. Good. I push back and feel her give a little. She is rage, and despair, for certain. But she is also fear. And the thing about fear is that if you deny it, it has nowhere else to go. It has to fold back in on itself. Devour itself. Fear, I think, lives in fear of being rumbled. Of being found out. So long as we’re in its grip, well that’s fine, isn’t it? Fear has taken hold of you. But when you rise above it – what then? You have the opposite of fear, that’s what? And as I formulate these thoughts I push back harder
still – until I have the upper hand.
“I’m not afraid of you,” I go on, “because you’re me. And I’m you. If I can love myself for what I truly am, then you don’t have any purpose anymore. And that is the opposite of fear. And in the spirit of all that, dear sister, I release you.”
I headbutt her away from me.
The impact knocks her back. Her hair moves from her face. And for a moment – just a split second, really – I’m looking at a dark reflection of my own face. A deathly gray, mirror image. A shadow self, revealed.
She looks shocked, then appalled. Lost, even.
Then her gray face mutates into a hideous, twisted mask of hatred and anguish. Her mouth contorts, issuing forth a hiss of pure rage. She charges at me.
“No!” I hear raw terror in Victoria’s cry and I don’t know if she’s crying out for her life, or mine, or both. But I swallow that terror. I make it a mere discordant musical note in my mind. The death knell of fear itself. I don’t feel anything except serenity. I close my eyes and hold my arms out wide, ready to embrace my dark sister.
And a cold wind blows right through me.
Because that is all she is, after all.
I open my eyes and turn to see her. She’s frozen in time, framed in the moonlit archway. There’s a mere second of realization in her angry, blazing eyes.
And then she plummets from the tower.
Everything stops dead. Victoria’s cries of terror, Lena’s feral snarls, and all of the sound and all of the fury, gone.
I falter. It’s like something has been ripped from inside of me – all the adrenaline and urgency. My legs give way, but then someone is at my side, supporting me, and I don’t fall. Not this time.
“Thank you,” Victoria says.
I glance around the tower and see that we’re alone. Lena and the other hideous, groping phantoms have gone. Bad memories, scattered to the wind.
I nod. “I guess,” I say.
“Really. Thank you, Emily. Without you, I think I would have been swallowed whole by what she made me feel. What she forced me to re-live. When you got between us like that…. Well, you inspired me not to give up. To fight back.”
I don’t know what to say. So – you guessed it – I say nothing.
“I thought you were going to fall,” Victoria continues.
“So did I,” I say, and that is the stone-cold, honest truth.
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
Now I really don’t know what to say.
“Principal Quick was right about one thing,” Victoria says.
“What’s that?” I ask.
She rubs her sore head. “You learned something. By coming here. I think we both did.”
I wonder what I learned. I think of Principal Quick’s classroom, and of her words so elegantly inscribed on the blackboard there. The seven virtues. “My first step toward rehabilitation? My mother always said I still had a lot to learn.”
Victoria looks puzzled by this, and then amused. “Well, I’m no expert,” she says, “but I do think you’re doing just fine.” Then she adds, “I think you’re the kindest person I’ve ever known.”
We each put an arm around each other, and it feels like friendship. And it feels true. And it does feel good.
Together we stagger to the archway and peer over the edge.
The gray girl is nowhere to be seen.
I sense shadows gathering behind me and wonder if she’s still lurking there. Ready to spring out from the shadows and push me over the edge again, just as she did in my nightmares. I turn to look, and find the tower really is empty and still.
The shadows really are only shadows.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Reformatory’s Dark Heart
Together we descend the stone staircase from the clock tower. It’s a struggle because we’re both feeling battered and bruised after the events of the night. But dawn light glimmers through the high windows at the far end of the corridor and with it, the atmosphere in the reformatory feels changed. I wouldn’t say that it’s actually warm in here, but it’s not as cold, either – if that makes sense?
I know that Victoria feels it too. She looks up and down the corridor with a serene expression on her face. She breathes in and out slowly and steadily, as if savoring the air. I try it too, and feel calmer already. It’s hard to believe that just a short while ago we were being pursued in this very same corridor by visitors from beyond the grave, hell-bent on harming us.
Victoria must have caught the look on my face because she appears thoughtful and says, “Did it really happen?”
“Did what happen?”
“Saffy, Lena, and the others. Coming after us. That horrible gray girl. Attacking me like that.” Victoria puts her hand to her head again, as if in a daydream. “It seemed so frightening and real back there, in the dark. But in the warm light of day I’m not so sure…. You know?”
“I know.”
It is indeed the weirdest feeling in the world, but I also feel that our mutual understanding requires no further comment from either of us. Enjoying the silence, I watch the dawn light as it begins to creep slowly across the corridor floor, and then up the wall opposite us. The light sun-kisses the gray paintwork, giving it a peach-colored glow. A warm section of a rainbow. I walk toward the light, following its progress as it spreads.
“What’s up?” Victoria asks.
“I just…I can’t really explain, but I need to check something.”
“Okay,” Victoria says quietly and reassuringly. “Whatever you got to do, just do it.”
I reach out and hesitate before my fingertips touch the wall.
The gray girl was as much a part of Greyfriars Reformatory as she was part of me. She was definitely gone from the clock tower, and we couldn’t see her on the ground below it, but now I need to know if she’s still part of this building. I take a breath and steel myself.
I place my fingers on the spot where the sunlight meets the gray of the wall, at the intersection between the light and the darkness. The wall feels cool and indifferent to my touch. And then, as the sunlight spreads across the rough surface, a warmth grows beneath my fingertips. There’s no thrumming of energy anymore, only the settled molecules of bricks and mortar. The gray girl is no longer here, and it’s as though some aspect of the building, the part that was alive, has died with her. The reformatory’s dark heart has stopped beating.
I let my fingers fall from the wall and I turn to watch sunbeams dance further along the corridor. Eager to be amidst their warmth, I follow them.
“Where are you going now?” Victoria asks.
“To see,” I reply.
“To see what?”
“To see what we can see,” I say.
Victoria chuckles at that and begins following after me.
The reformatory is so quiet and still as we move through it that I almost feel the need to chat with Victoria to break the silence. But I do like the silence too. There’s a clarity to it that I’ve never noticed before. As we walk, I replay Principal Quick’s—
(I still can’t bring myself to think of her as ‘Mother’.)
—tour of the building in my mind. I remember how adrift I felt, and how the ringing in my ears was a bell calling me home, to my safe place in my psyche. I don’t need it anymore. The silence is no longer threatening to me. If anything, it now feels calming. Ordinary. I begin to bask in that normality, and to focus on the sounds of our breathing, as I lead Victoria in the direction of the main entrance.
Our path takes us to the door of the med store. The door hangs open and I pause for a moment, and then look at Victoria. She nods, and that silent gesture gives me all the courage I need to step inside and check it out.
I find that it’s empty. Lena is nowhere to be seen.
And not only that – someone has done one hec
k of a clean-up job in here. There are no hypodermic needles on the floor at all. I glance around at the shelves, with their boxes of bandages and other medical supplies. Everything is neatly packed away and organized. The place looks, and smells, dusty and unused.
“Weird,” I say.
“Totally,” Victoria replies.
She looks disturbed, and I’m not surprised by that. I feel it too, seeing the empty space where Lena had lain bleeding.
“Let’s get out of here?” she asks, with a slight tremor in her voice.
“Yes. But I just want to check around the building first.”
“Do we have to?”
“If Lena’s not here then….”
It’s difficult to articulate my feeling that the other girls might still be alive in the building and hiding somewhere. Luckily, I don’t have to, because Victoria takes my hand and leads me out of the storeroom.
“We’re near the recreation yard. We’ll check it out, together. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
We begin walking in that direction.
“Emily, if we don’t find Annie there – do you think that means – well, I don’t know exactly, but do you think we might have completely lost our minds?”
“I’d be inclined to think so,” I say.
“That is the most Emily answer I could ever have hoped for,” she replies.
And I see that she has tears in her eyes but quickly brushes them away and attempts a laugh. It doesn’t sound all that convincing, I have to admit.
We near the door to the recreation yard in what feels like no time at all. That lovely, peachy, orange light streams in through the windows. I pause as soon as I step into the light, and Victoria waits with me. We both look to each other for moral support before walking on through the door to the yard.
The tree is bare. No Annie, no jump rope, nothing. The way the bare branches of the tree describe twisted shapes against the dawn sky is something approaching beautiful. I’ve never seen it look that way before. As the clouds roll by, the sky becomes brighter with each second that passes. The small patch of soil beneath the tree glistens with morning dew, tiny beads of water, air, and twinkling light.