Return to the Dark House

by Laurie Stolarz

  Ivy takes the card and hurries in that direction—a couple of rows over from the DIE!-stamping boy. She squats down at the end of the aisle, running her fingers over torn, cracked spines. “It’s here,” she says, after only a few moments. Madame Bovary looks absolutely ancient with its wrinkled yellow pages, most of which are loose. Ivy flips through it, her hands trembling.

  “Hurry up,” I tell her, more than anxious to move on.

  “Shhh,” a voice says from behind, making me jump.

  Ivy jumps too, and lets out a gasp.

  An old woman is there, behind us, wearing a billowy white dress. She has long gray hair and the most wrinkled skin I’ve ever seen; the lines form tiny checkerboards. “Are you ready to check out?” she asks, her eyes rolled up toward the ceiling.

  Ivy’s in complete panic mode. She avoids the librarian’s gaze, continuing to search for the note. But I remain looking at the woman—at the dark-red tears running down her face, getting caught up in those checkerboard lines.

  The old woman’s image wavers slightly, but just like the boy, she looks so real.

  “I’ve got it,” Ivy says. Her fingers tremble as she opens a folded up piece of paper.

  The note has yellowed with age, but the words are still very clear.

  Dear Reader:

  I’m sorry for what I’ve done, but I couldn’t bear listening to the voices anymore. They creep up on me in the middle of the night and sneak beneath my bedcovers to whisper into my ear. They remind me how foolish I am: foolish for waking up in the morning; foolish for going through the motions of the day; foolish for going to bed at night, only to repeat it all over again.

  I’m haunted by other voices too: my parents, teachers, classmates, dorm monitors, the headmaster. Everybody telling me how I should act, should speak, should feel, should do in school.

  “You should read this, not that.”

  “You should look up, not down.”

  “You should study harder, not longer.”

  “You should speak loudly and clearly.”

  “You should think twice before speaking at all.”

  My life is an endless black tunnel of “should.” But what no one seems to realize is that I hate myself even more than they do, and that the voices in my head are the loudest ones of all. This is the only way I know how to silence them—this is my “should.”

  Love,

  Ricky

  “Holy shit,” Ivy whispers.

  “What’s the clue?” I ask her.

  Ivy looks back down at the letter, and then at the bookshelf.

  “Are you ready to check out?” the old lady asks again. She starts to laugh—a high-pitched cackle.

  Ivy drops the book. Pages spill out onto the floor.

  I pick them up, along with the book, and flip the cover open to the front—to the spot where the checkout card goes. Ricky’s name is there, on the card. “He signed the book out a bunch of times, which either means he was a really slow reader…”

  “Or?” Ivy asks, champing at the proverbial bit.

  “Or he was just really into horny, middle-aged French chicks.”

  “This isn’t funny.”

  “Who’s laughing? Beside Grandma Creepy, that is.” I nod to the old lady. “Look,” I say, doing a doubletake at the checkout card. “Beside Ricky’s name…It says twenty-eight R.”

  She holds the card super close to her face, like an old man with cataracts. “It has to be a clue.”

  “Okay, but what does it mean? And how does it go with April showers?”

  “April’s my real name,” she says.

  “Since when?”

  “Since before it had to be changed.”

  “Okay,” I say, for lack of better words, assuming the name change must have something to do with her parents’ murder. “And…you take a lot of showers?”

  Before she can comment, the music starts up again: “I’ve got my eye on you, Sweet Honey Bee. My eye’s on you. There ain’t no leavin’ me. With me, you’ll be, for all eternity.”

  “Ugh,” I moan, barely able to think straight, let alone crack the all-important code.

  As we start toward the door, I hear something else—a turbulent clamor that stops us in our tracks, like metal tearing through metal. I cover my ears and look around, trying to figure out where the sound is coming from. A dusting of cement sprinkles down on top of our heads.

  I look upward. The chandelier wobbles from side to side. I push Ivy out of the way just as it comes soaring down, crashing into a table, snapping it in two.

  Ivy lets out another enviable scream, and we both hurry out of the library, my heart hammering, my nerves shot. And still that creepy Denise Kilborn music plays in the background.

  HARRIS SAYS THAT I’VE BEEN here for months now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been closer to a year. I’ve lost track of time.

  I’m cold, hungry. My bones ache. My muscles twitch.

  Is Ivy really going to come?

  Facing the wall, I tell myself that this isn’t really a prison cell, that I merely climbed down inside a manhole and found myself a nice little alcove where I could be alone. Being here is my choice, I repeat inside my head. Nobody made me come. Nothing’s making me stay. I can leave whenever I want. I grab a few strands of hair—nice long ones with lots of elastic. I give them a quick tug. The follicles look like snow.

  I wonder what my parents are thinking, what the news is saying, if anyone cares. I can almost hear my parents now:

  My mother: “We tried to steer our daughter in the right direction, but she never would listen.”

  My father: “She was too obsessed with this Justin Blake person. Someone should hold him at least partially responsible for creating such cultish filth.”

  Harris says that some of the contest winners are dead. I know I should believe him, but he could also just be saying that so I’ll work harder at trying to get out.

  There’s a clank sound in the distance—metal against metal. He’s back. The Nightmare Elf. He wears the suit from the movie, like some deranged fan, giving a bad name to all of Blake’s true fans—like me.

  The air down here is musty. The smell must be from all the storm drains, I tell myself, picturing a manhole cover, imagining myself lifting it off and climbing down a ladder.

  I wind my finger around a clump of hair. More follicle snowflakes sprinkle down in the light. Christmas will be coming soon.

  The Elf is getting closer: the sound of footsteps against the cement. I lay down and shut my eyes, so he’ll think I’ve been good and taken all my pills. Hopefully he’ll leave me a tasty present.

  BACK IN THE LOBBY, I try to catch my breath, silently acknowledging what just happened: a crystal chandelier—so huge and heavy that it was able to break a table in two—almost landed on my head. And if it hadn’t been for Taylor pushing me out of the way, it most definitely would have.

  “Thanks for saving my life,” I tell her.

  She’s sitting with her back up against the wall. Her head is in her hands. She doesn’t look up.

  “I’m sorry.” I sit down across from her. “I never should’ve gotten you involved in all of this.”

  “It’s not your fault.” She peeks up in my direction. “I was the wise one who followed you here, remember?”

  “But only after I showed up at your dorm, in the middle of the night, like an escaped mental patient,” I say, remembering her words, as well as the pill container in my bag. I haven’t taken my meds in the past couple of days.

  “You’re not really an escaped mental patient, are you?” There’s humor in her voice, and yet her expression remains serious.

  “No. They let me out for real—on the condition that I take my meds, do as I’m told, go to therapy, and stop trying to set myself on fire.”

  “Seriously?” Her eyeballs bulge.

  “Kidding.” The joke feels foreign in my mouth; I can’t remember the last time I tried to be funny.

  “Well, this is way more fun
than, say, lounging around in bed or going to the mall.”

  “Now you’re joking,” I say.

  “About hanging out in a creepy, abandoned building and being terrorized by a psycho serial killer trumping such activities as shopping and/or lounging…you’re right; I am joking. But I wouldn’t want you to go through this alone.”

  I hold her gaze a moment, wishing that, like the way I felt about Parker, I’d have met her someplace else, under difference circumstances, and that we’d have had a completely normal shopping/lounging/stay-up-all-night-pigging-out-on-junkfood-and-talking-about-boys kind of friendship.

  Instead of this.

  I run my fingers over the copy of Madame Bovary; the suicide note sticks out between the pages. I read it a few more times, looking for some hidden message. But I don’t find anything that goes deeper than the words themselves. “I wonder if any of this is even real.”

  “What do you mean? Which part?”

  “All of it: the suicide note, the story of Ricky, the killer’s nightmare, his going to school here…”

  “Or if this is just a movie location, you mean? With us as the actors.” Taylor looks directly at my strap-on camera and gives it the finger.

  I gaze back down at the book and flip to the checkout card. The clue is written in black marker, just like the note itself. “Twenty-eight R.”

  “R, as in right,” Taylor guesses. “Like part of a locker combination.”

  “I guess only time will tell.” I fish my notebook out of my bag and open up to a fresh page. I scribble down both of the clues, as well as the phrasing “Don’t let her out…”

  …of my sight?

  …of my mind?

  …of this building?

  …of my life?

  Was Natalie/Harris referring to Taylor? Or Shayla? Or someone else?

  There’s a clicking sound coming from my headphones. “He’s going to say something.” I signal to Taylor.

  She slides over to join me.

  “Enjoying your time so far?” his voice pumps out. “Ticktock, ticktock. Need I remind you that your time is limited?”

  Taylor gives my video camera the finger again and then flashes me her watch. We’ve already burned an hour.

  “I was in the seventh grade when I found Ricky’s note,” the killer says. “People had associated Ricky with Madame Bovary, since he’d always had the book in his possession, checked out seventeen times over his two-year stint at August. One might’ve thought he’d have gotten himself his own personal copy. But, in some way, Ricky liked the attention that came with always checking out the same book—a book about a cheating woman who took her own life, not so much unlike his own mother. At least that’s how the rumor went. Alas, Ricky thought that his choice for the note’s hiding spot was somewhat poetic, but instead it just proved futile, because no one ever thought to look there. A more obvious spot would have been someplace in his dorm room, left out in the open for all to see. I want you to fix his poor decision now. Find room F and place the note on his bedside table. Then turn off the lights and blow out the candles.”

  WE MOVE PAST THE LOBBY, in the opposite direction from the library. There’s a long, narrow hallway with broken floor tiles and rotted moldings. I shine my flashlight along the walls, startled to find a series of photos taped to the crumbling plaster.

  I angle my flashlight closer, feeling my heart pummel. “This can’t be real.”

  “What can’t?” Taylor asks. She’s farther down the hallway now.

  The photos look brand-new, printed on bright white paper, with vibrant colors. I focus in on one of the photos. “It’s him,” I say, thinking aloud.

  The clothes he’s wearing are the same…all the layers of charcoal and gray. His hair is the same too: dark and straggly, held back with a bandanna. The photo was taken here. He’s sitting on a bench with the courtyard fountain behind him.

  “And I repeat: What can’t be real?” Taylor asks, standing by my side again.

  “It’s Garth,” I say, noticing the sharpness of his jaw.

  She moves within kiss distance of the photo. “How can you tell? He’s angled away from us. And, wait, where are his hands?”

  “It looks like he’s got them behind his back,” I say, wishing that I could see them too—to recognize any of his silver jewelry. “See there, the way his shoulders protrude outward in an unnatural position. He could be tied up or handcuffed.”

  I shine my flashlight over the other photos. There’s one of Shayla in the lobby, sitting against the wall. Though she’s also positioned partially away from the camera, I’m able to spot the pursing of her lips and the flare of her nostrils; it looks like she might be crying.

  The photo of Frankie is less clear. It was taken in the library, where he’s seated at the piano. His hair has grown out over his eyes. His fingers look mangled and cut up. There’s a scar across the front of his wrist. Was it always there? Do I remember it from before?

  “Do you think this might be some sort of trick or illusion?” Taylor asks.

  I close my eyes and flashback to the Nightmare Elf’s video—the one that Parker and I were forced to watch before trying to exit the amusement park. It looked like Frankie had been buried alive. But in the back of my mind I’ve wondered, hoped: What if the burial was just a scene created for the Nightmare Elf’s movie? What if Frankie was dug up and then revived immediately after the scene cut?

  Is it possible that Shayla was never really killed? That the Nightmare Elf didn’t choke her to death? Maybe he only choked her unconscious.

  And what about Garth? Is it such a stretch to think he might’ve survived having fallen out the window? In the video, there was a close-up shot of an ax, but we never actually saw it come down on Garth.

  I’ve been racking my mind for months, asking myself why the Nightmare Elf would’ve cut the scenes where he did—why he wouldn’t have shown the characters’ very last breaths. “They’re here. Alive somewhere. Parker is too,” I say, thinking about the box of letters in my bag.

  “I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”

  “They’re here,” I repeat, turning away to study the photos again. Shayla’s wearing a pair of gray sweatpants and a big, bulky coat. Frankie’s in a hooded sweatshirt; I can’t see his legs. Neither of them is in the same clothes as on the night of the Dark House amusement park.

  “Okay, but what if these photos were Photoshopped. Wasn’t Frankie buried alive at the amusement park?”

  “They never found his body,” I remind her. “It’d been dug up. No one ever found any bodies.”

  “Okay, but didn’t Garth fall like a kagillion stories out of a building?”

  “Who knows how many stories it really was. The camera can and does lie.”

  “My point exactly.”

  I clench my teeth. Her words have blades.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, reaching out to touch my arm. “I can be an insensitive beetle sometimes. I guess I’m just preparing myself for the worst. That’s sort of how I deal.”

  I take a deep breath, and suck up any tears. It’s not like I haven’t heard these doubts before—from police and people at the hospital, and even from Apple and Core.

  Taylor wraps her arm around me. “Don’t listen to anything I say. I wasn’t even there. I was a coward, remember? I didn’t get to meet the others.”

  “You met Natalie,” I say, correcting her.

  “Right. And why isn’t her picture here? Or Parker’s?”

  I search the wall, as well as the photos, really wishing I had a clue.

  “Look,” Taylor begins again, “if you really believe that the people in these photos are the genuine, bona fide players, then I believe you.”

  “Except they aren’t players.” I turn to face her again. “They’re people.”

  “Right, and I’m an insensitive beetle, remember?”

  “If that were true, you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Okay, so maybe only the beetle part is true. I mean, ser
iously? If someone like you can be so optimistic despite everything she’s been through, then what the hell is my problem?”

  “Let’s just keep moving,” I say. “Ticktock, remember?”

  We continue down the hallway, passing by classrooms to the left and right. There’s a door at the end of the hall. We go through it. Facing us is a mahogany stairwell that leads up and down.

  “Should we try the basement?” I ask.

  “Do you really think that prep school kids would agree to sleeping by leaky water pipes and mousetraps?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Now, if I were a dorm room…” Taylor taps her chin in thought. “Upstairs?”

  “It’s worth a try.”

  We hike up the stairs, two at a time. At the top there’s another long hallway. Sheets of paper are sprinkled about the floor—fresh paper, the texture is crisp, the color is bright white. I trample over a couple of sheets before picking one up.

  “What is it?” Taylor asks.

  “‘In a thousand words or less,’” I read aloud, “‘describe your worst nightmare. By Jenna Adams.’”

  “Huh?”

  “They’re contest entries,” I say, shining my flashlight over pages and pages of nightmares—there has to be over a hundred of them. “Some of the people who didn’t win, maybe.”

  Taylor nods, reading one of them. “This person dreams about the chicken in her freezer coming to life in the middle of the night and paying her back by pecking at her face.”

  “Except if it’s frozen chicken, then its beak’s been removed.”

  “Not necessarily.” She grimaces.