We both kind of laughed some more.
“Did you do that?” Alf asked.
I shook my head and I knew he believed me too. Could tell just as well as I had been able to tell on him, that it was genuine fear and surprise that shook me when it moved.
“Do you wanna try again?” he asked.
I nodded.
We laid our fingers on it again.
And I repeated myself but it was a bit shaky. “Is Margaret in the room?”
And the planchette moved slowly, deliberately, that same slow deliberateness that moved the lantern in the closet under the stairs; that turned the knob and flicked off the lights. Whoever it was could be sitting with us and moving it with her cold dead fingers, right next to ours, invisible to us but visible to me when I dream. Maybe it was her. The floured woman. Sybil Groundwick. Died in this very room. Could she be sitting between us in that dark suite? The thought was making me sick but also excited. I wanted to press hard on my scalp but I didn’t wanna move my fingers from the planchette, which now felt so alive.
It moved to the word NO.
Alf’s eyes were massive. He chewed his bottom lip like a wad of bubblegum and stared at me. I looked up at him.
“Well,” I continued, “who is this then?”
And it didn’t move.
“Who’s in the room with us?”
Again just the too-quiet of the suite, nothing moving, no lights flickering.
“Maybe,” Alf whispered, “you can only ask it yes or no questions.”
“Okay, okay. What should I ask?”
“I don’t know. Try to find out who it is.”
“Okay,” I said, and sat straighter still and continued. “Are you a girl?”
And the planchette moved to the word YES.
“Are you a victim of Margaret and Wink?”
And the planchette quivered a bit but remained on the word YES.
And then I was sure. I knew exactly who it was.
It was Sybil. And she was sitting next to me. I could feel her weight, her pull, on the shared planchette on the board. I could even smell her floury skin, hear the sound of her severed throat gurgling.
“Are you from this town?”
And the planchette moved to the word NO.
“Where are you from?”
“Psst,” whispered Alf, “only YES or NO questions!”
“Okay, okay. Um. Margaret’s not in this room. Does she still live here at the inn?”
And the planchette moved to the word YES.
“Is she mad?”
And the planchette quivered but stayed on the word YES. And Alf looked at me, confused.
“What’s she going to do to me?”
Again Alf started to correct me, tell me I was only supposed to ask it YES or NO questions, but he was interrupted when something ice-cold and wet washed suddenly across my feet and scared the living shit out of me. I leapt up and shrieked and Alf did too and we hugged each other and looked around wildly. I could feel his heart beating hard against my chest. And even though I was scared it still struck me as a nice feeling. Someone else’s pumping blood. Someone else’s rhythm against mine.
“What the fuck was that!” Alf screamed.
And my own heartbeat petered off, slowed back to normal as I saw that the wet ice-cold was my spilled coffee and not some cold dead claw wrapping around my toes.
“Christ. It was my coffee.”
“Oh thank god.”
And we caught our breath for a minute but Alf was still looking at me weird, confused.
“But what knocked it over?” he asked.
And I shivered and Alf did too. We both had our arms crossed and were gripping at our shoulders. I didn’t say it out loud but I also wondered why the coffee felt so cold when just a few minutes ago it’d been piping hot.
“You knew who that was,” he continued.
“What do you mean?”
“Who we were speaking to. You knew it was a girl, you knew it was a victim, you knew she wasn’t from here. What’s going on, Noelle? What do you think is gonna happen to you?”
“It’s just common sense, Alf. If it’s not Margaret and it’s a girl, it must be a victim.”
“Come on, don’t be an asshole. Just tell me.”
“What?”
“What did you see? You saw a ghost, I can tell, but you didn’t tell me. That’s why you were so scared to come up here tonight, that’s why you’ve been so unpleasant lately.”
And I really didn’t want to. I really didn’t. And usually, really, I don’t, but this time it happened, I CRIED, and I absolutely hate to cry. But when I tried to lie all that came out of my mouth was a sputtering moan, then tears, filling up my eyes so fast, streaming down either side of my wide-open moaning mouth. This crying felt so ugly. I wish I’d have just told him the truth to begin with.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Noelle, what happened?”
“I don’t know, Alf! I don’t know!”
“Well, just, start from the beginning.”
“I don’t even know where that is!”
“Well, just, tell me something, Noelle, anything, because I’m feeling pretty fucking scared in here.”
“I think that might have been Sybil Groundwick.”
“Who?”
“The last one they killed, you remember her.”
“The one, yeah, the one your dad said looked like she could eat, uh, what was it, corn on the cob through venetian blinds.”
And I laughed because goddamnit I can’t help laughing when I hear that. But it scared me too because making fun of the ghosts was violating a rule. 51
“Yes, her.”
I told him about seeing her. About what I found in my diary about hurting a cat, hurting Sammy, and then the next day all the cats were gone. About how real my dreams were. How there were OTHERS everywhere. And about how I tried to look in the basement, tried to go down the hallways but I couldn’t because something held me back. I was so scared. And I told him about the light flicking off in the little closet and how something had spun the lantern and turned the knob on the door.
And I even told him about my dad. About how my dad was a fucking liar, how he hadn’t been to a doctor in over a year and I just couldn’t stop crying and crying and crying and telling and telling and telling Alf absolutely EVERYTHING.
Well, almost EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING except for the stuff about my head. He didn’t need to know that. Even with EVERYTHING gushing out like it was, something still plugged that information in. Thank god.
And Alf just sat and listened. A big part of me was really hoping that he’d been experiencing something similar, that he’d seen a ghost, but he didn’t say anything like that and I know he would have said so if he had.
After I was done he said, “Noelle, I promise, you didn’t hurt Sammy.”
“How can you promise that?”
“I just can. I know you didn’t.”
“But how do you know?”
“We’re gonna go down to the basement, okay? And we’re gonna look in all the rooms, and I promise we won’t find a cat, okay?”
“No way, that’s terrifying.”
“Noelle, there’s nothing down there. You and I both know, really, that there’s no such thing as ghosts, okay? Yeah, we like to get scared, but we both know that. I also know that for whatever reason you’re really upset right now, and I can make you less upset if I can prove to you that you didn’t hurt any cat. I’m not scared. I’m really not.”
“Well, if there’s no ghosts, who moved the planchette then?”
“I have no idea. Maybe you did it.”
“I did not!”
“Okay, maybe I did it.”
“Did you?”
And Alf hesitated for a moment before he continued. “No,” h
e said, “but listen, I don’t give a shit. You didn’t hurt that cat and I’m going to prove it to you. It’s more important right now that you know you didn’t hurt that cat, okay? Then we’ll sleep all day and come in at night and have a great party, okay? I’ll get Dwayne to get the beer because I know you were just about to ask that, who was gonna get the beer if I was sleeping all day.”
And I laughed and I gave him a hug and then, without really thinking about it, a kiss on the lips too. And I know it made him really happy. And I felt happy too because Alf was sure of the fact that I would never maim a cat. So sure I wouldn’t maim a cat that he’d even brave the basement at night. And not just any night, but a night like this, when we’d used the Ouija board in the suite and everything felt quiet and menacing and bad in here. And that made me feel like a really good person. Not Noelle the legendary asshole who hates her sick but not sick but actually sick father. But Noelle the person who would absolutely not hurt a cat. And someone else on earth was so sure of that fact that he’d chance potential death or maiming or pants-shitting in fear just to prove it.
He turned bright red again, especially his ears, and we packed up and headed downstairs.
49. A small, heart-shaped piece of wood used to move around the Ouija board and indicate or spell out the message on the board.
50. Because Alf never utilized his diary (we found it in a drawer in his room at the inn, empty), we weren’t able to determine the nature or severity of these visions. Particularly whether or not they shared qualities with Noelle’s own visions, or fugue states. According to Alf’s parents and a few teachers and friends, he hadn’t exhibited the kinds of outward changes that Noelle appeared to over the course of the summer.
51. Rule 4: Don’t antagonize the ghosts.
Twenty-Second Entry
Even though Alf had claimed he wasn’t scared, he still flicked the lights on and off five times before we went downstairs. And we still ran as fast as we could down those stairs. Because frankly, we were already doing something scary and stupid, descending into the basement in the middle of the night, about to enter one of the dark hallways. Why add to it by deliberately breaking all of these rules that’d served us so well for the whole summer so far?
I knew Alf was scared even though he told me he wasn’t. Obviously. I’m not an idiot. But I also knew I needed to see if the cat was really there. I had to know. And he knew I had to know. This is why Alf is my very best friend.
We were about to break the eighth rule. 52 We had to go down one of the hallways.
I knew which hallway I’d been led down in my dream. The seventh hallway, farthest from the staircase. Of course. Farthest from our only escape route.
Down that hallway, I hoped Sammy wasn’t lying maimed.
Down that hallway, I hoped we wouldn’t end up maimed.
“It’s that one,” I said, and pointed at it. And one single nail rolled across a metal shelf and landed with a pang on the concrete floor. The noises were starting, the little disturbances that occurred when people spent too long in the basement.
We ignored them.
The way we ignored them when we came down here to do laundry. But of course we weren’t doing laundry now. We were breaking a rule.
Alf took my hand, held it tight, and began to lead me into the hallway’s swallowing darkness.
Just before we entered the pitch black a thunderous clang make us both leap in fear, clutch one another like pieces of floating wood in the middle of an unfriendly ocean.
The pickaxe had fallen. On its side now, pointing at me.
“Jesus,” whispered Alf.
And I couldn’t stop shaking.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
And I nodded.
And we let ourselves get eaten up by the pitch blackness, our shaking flashlights forward. There was a door at the end of the tunnel, coated thick in chipping yellow paint. It seemed to keep inching farther away from us, the hallway impossibly long. Finally Alf was able to reach out and grab the knob. He tried to turn it but it wouldn’t open.
“Locked,” he whispered. And we both thought of rule five. 53
“Try again,” I whispered. “Bang into the door.”
“What?”
“Like, bang into it with your shoulder. It works in movies.”
And he turned the knob and slammed his whole body into the door, but again it wouldn’t budge.
The noises continued in the main room, louder now. And one particular noise that neither of us had ever heard down here before.
The sound of something dragging across the floor. Something heavy.
We both looked back, down the hall, towards the main room where the light was still on. We stared for a while but nothing appeared. We were both thinking of the same rule, I’m sure of it, that nothing can come out when the light is on. That’s what we had decided, early on this summer.
But the dragging sound happened again.
Alf slammed himself harder and harder into the door.
“Are you sure it was this one?” he asked, winded.
“Positive. Okay, okay, let me try,” I said.
I turned the knob and blasted all of my body weight into the door and it cracked open so easily I almost fell over inside.
“I guess you loosened it,” I said, composing myself quickly in case there was anything bad in there.
And we moved our flashlights all over the room, terrified the light might catch something. A pair of cold, dead eyes, claw marks on the floor, bloody nails embedded in the walls. A maimed cat, yowling on the floor. But it was mostly empty.
Stained walls painted in the same careless, too-thick yellow paint. A bare mattress in one corner, thin with faint blue stripes. A bucket next to the mattress. The bucket. The bucket. That bucket couldn’t be trusted. That bucket was bad. Bad like the pickaxe is bad. I should look inside the bucket. I should look inside the bucket and show Alf what was in there, show him what I did. Showing is so different from just telling while crying and being all weak and scared and pretty, telling him something that made him feel like he could be a hero. But I didn’t want to show him. Not now after I’d kissed him. Things were different now, goddammit. Diary, I couldn’t. You don’t understand. Now that we were there I couldn’t show him. I couldn’t do it.
And the dragging outside got louder. Louder. Louder. Whatever was being dragged was being dragged closer to us.
But actually there couldn’t be anything in that bucket. That bucket was fine. It was too small to fit a cat. And it was in the wrong spot, way on the other side of the room, nowhere near where patterned-space Sammy had wheezed. And in my dreams there was blood all over the floor; in real life this floor was just dusty. So it’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with it. There’s nothing wrong with anything here. I get the same kind of chills from that stupid pickaxe too, for no good reason at all. Nothing to worry about. Okay? Tell me I’m right, diary. Or I’ll lock you down here. I’m sorry, no I won’t.
“Nothing!” Alf said, and forced a big smile. “See? I knew you couldn’t hurt that cat, Noelle. You’d never do anything like that, okay? Are you satisfied?”
But I had to know. We’d come all the way down here. I had to see.
So I laid my flashlight over the bucket.
“There won’t be anything in there, Noelle. It’s too small for a cat. Plus there’s no blood on the floor. It couldn’t be like how you described it.”
And Alf kept saying all the things I was thinking. You’re crazy, Noelle. Don’t trust yourself. There’s nothing in there. Nothing to worry about. NO CAT! This is great news! NO CAT, no blood on the floor. This wasn’t at all how it looked at night, guided down here by the floured woman.
But then where is Sammy? Where are the rest of the cats? Shut up, diary. SHUT UP. SHUT UP! SHUT UP!
I kept the flashlight on the buc
ket, not convinced, goddammit, not convinced even though I was trying so hard. And I didn’t want Alf to see but I couldn’t look, I couldn’t look.
So I whispered, “I can’t look.”
“That’s okay,” said Alf, but his voice cracked. And it took a minute of him squeezing fists at his sides before he was able to slowly walk towards the bucket, my flashlight’s shaking beam overtop of it as he peered inside.
“He’s not here!” he declared, obviously very relieved not to have discovered a maimed cat. “He’s not in here, Noelle!”
And I felt so happy I almost cried, I smiled so wide, and Alf came back and hugged me, and I felt his heart beating against me again and it was just so nice.
“Is it empty?” I asked.
“Yeah, just some old garbage,” he said.
So relieved. So very, actually, completely relieved. There was no dying cat down here. There really wasn’t. That’s all I wanted to know, and now I knew. The end.
“Now, let’s get the fuck out of here,” said Alf.
And we turned to get the fuck out.
And found a big, fat, dark figure at the end of the hall, breaking apart the main room’s unnatural light, blocking our only exit. My heart tried to escape through my throat. I think Alfred might have pissed his pants. I pulled him into the room and slammed the door shut behind us.
And that’s where we’re stuck now. I’m using the flashlight to write in here.
Alf did piss his pants.
We tried to listen through the door for a while but couldn’t hear anything. Even all the little basement noises had stopped. No more nails rolling off shelves, things falling to the ground. Like the basement was settled now. Like we belonged in here.
Both of us were too scared to open the door again.
We decided to wait until the morning, when Jessica arrives. We’ll be able to hear her walking to the front desk through the floor. It’ll be morning, sunlight coming in through the cats’ window. Everything will be better then.
So until then we’re gonna try and sleep.
The Boy Meets Girl Massacre (Annotated) Page 13