by Ronald Malfi
“Jennifer?” Her voice shook. “Mouse?”
To her astonishment, Mouse’s peeling lips broke into a skeletal half-grin. With painful lassitude, Mouse backed herself up against the bed then proceeded to ease herself down onto the mattress, not taking her eyes from Kelly for a single moment. It seemed her bones might snap. That half-grin remained, unflinching. Something fluttered behind Mouse’s eyes and it wasn’t merely recognition. It was something else, something almost devious. Kelly was suddenly afraid…
How can this be Mouse? Mouse was so virile, so intense, so active. This can’t be Mouse, can’t be the same person. She would have never allowed herself to go this far.
But Mouse had never possessed control over her mind; rather, it was the other way around. It was an unraveling—that was the simplest way of understanding it. In a way, Mouse had lived her life as a slave to the bizarre inclinations of a faulty mind. It owned her. Perhaps the same sickness that had satisfied her youth with a dramatic imagination and a profusion of energy had, in adulthood, crippled her into the vapid, feeble woman that now sat on the edge of a hospital bed, watching her from across the room.
“You don’t remember me,” she said. “It’s me, Kelly. We used to be friends. Long ago.”
“It’s warm,” Mouse said, her voice rusty and out of practice. It didn’t sound like it should be coming from this woman, Kelly thought. “I need help to open the window.”
Kelly looked at the window. It was sealed shut and presumably had been since forever. Short of a sledgehammer, there was no way of opening the window. Plus, the room was freezing, probably a chilly sixty degrees.
“Kelly Kellow,” she repeated, hoping the name would spark some sort of recollection. But even as the words vacated her mouth, one look into Mouse’s blank eyes assured her that there would be no recollections today, and probably for the remainder of Mouse’s life. Yet Kelly continued nonetheless. “We used to be friends here a long time ago. Kelly Kellow. Do you remember?”
“I’ll help you,” Mouse said, and Kelly felt her heart leap, as if this strange woman somehow understood that she was here for answers, here seeking something, and that yes, yes, she did need help. But then she realized Mouse was still talking about the window and she felt a sudden sinking in the pit of her stomach. “It’s warm and the window sticks,” Mouse went on. “I’ll help you lift it.”
It’s okay, Kelly thought. What would it matter if you remembered me anyway? What would it matter if you had all your senses about you? Was I driven here to see you, to see how you turned out? Jesus Christ, what the hell good does that do me?
Mouse cocked her head to one side like an inquisitive puppy. A pang of grief washed through Kelly and she didn’t think she’d be able to spend another second in this room.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to bother you. I was…I’m…”
I’m what? Huh? I’m sorry that she turned out this way, that her brain continued to decline after I was released and went about my life on the outside world? Where I can open all the windows I damn well please?
She turned to leave…then stopped, suddenly frozen by one of the drawings taped to the wall. She stared at it in utter disbelief, like someone abruptly confronted with their past life, as the rest of her surroundings faded away into nothingness.
It was a simple drawing done in crayon of a little girl standing in front of a tree. Large, diamond-shaped tears spilled down the girl’s cheeks. A second figure stood in the background, half-hidden behind the tree itself, too indistinct to make out if it was a boy or a girl, or even a human being at all. But what caught Kelly’s attention was what was written on the trunk of the tree, in scrawling red crayon:
K.K. + S.S.
She felt reality suddenly shift, suddenly teeter to one side, and felt a tremendous heat overtake her. Her skin prickled and sweat broke out along her arms, her neck and forehead, droplets running down her ribs from beneath her arms. On unsteady legs, she propelled herself across the room and thrust a finger at the drawing.
“What is this? Mouse, what is this?” Her voice cracked under the strain of fear. “Did you draw this? What is it supposed to be?”
Mouse just studied her face. She didn’t even turn to look at the drawing.
“Is this it? Is this why I’m here? Did I come here to see this, Mouse?”
Her mind was careening. Who’s the crazy one now?
Like a bolt of electricity through her head, an image shocked her mind and sent her conscious thoughts into a spinout. Suddenly, she was not in the tiny white room with Mouse any longer; now, she was in some ill-lit, cavernous room that smelled oddly of cedar and copper and moldy furniture. She was aware of a throbbing red light, of a jumble of plastic forks strewn across the wooden floor…a floor covered in pine needles…
Mouse stood from the bed, her head still cocked. Her movement shook Kelly back to reality. She was breathing heavy. In a fever, Kelly’s tongue worked over the contours of her mouth, which felt like hot dunes of sand.
Mouse was muttering something under her breath: “Simple Simon met a Pie Man going to the fair…Said Simple Simon to the Pie Man, ‘Let me taste your ware’…”
“This picture!” Kelly insisted. “Damn it, Mouse, where did this come from? Who’s in this picture? Is it me? Is it? It is, isn’t it? K.K.—those are my initials, aren’t they?”
Mouse only chanted louder: “Said the Pie Man to Simple Simon, ‘Show me first your penny’…”
“Stop it, Mouse.”
“Said Simple Simon to the Pie Man, ‘Indeed I have not any’…”
“Stop it!” She could feel her heart beating thunderously in her chest, could hear it in her ears.
“Indeed I have not any!”
“Stop!”
“Indeed!” Mouse barked and sprung forward, her tine-like fingers hooked into claws, her eyes suddenly ferocious and startlingly intelligent. Her hands closed around Kelly’s arms, the force of the jolt knocking her off balance and sending them both crashing to the floor. Kelly’s head slammed against the linoleum and oily stars exploded in front of her eyes. She felt Mouse’s bony knees digging into her arms, pinning them to the floor, as the woman straddled her.
And then Kelly was gone again—
(lost in some secret fairy tale world of gingerbread houses and rivers of chocolate and rainbow bridges and marshmallow clouds but the rivers did not run full with chocolate they ran deep with blood and the marshmallow clouds blackened and curled destroyed by fire and the smell of rot clogged the air)
She managed to knock Mouse off her and roll onto her side, dragging herself across the floor to the door. The back of her head throbbed, and as she tried to stand her vision multiplied. In one final effort, she made a leap for the door and grasped the knob with one quavering hand—
“Kelly Kellow and Simple Simon,” Mouse muttered from behind her.
Kelly turned, her breath coming in great whooping gasps now. “What did you say?”
“What did you tell the Pie Man?”
“Mouse…” She looked back at the drawing on the wall, the initials: K.K. + S.S.
“What did Simple Simon do to you? You told me once.”
“Simple…?” Her voice died. Her mind was like a dam, bulging under the force of a river of memories. She could almost hear the sounds of bolts coming loose in the foundation of the dam, popping free and whizzing through the air…
“Is he still your friend?” Mouse said. “Does he still come to you, come creep-creep-creeping in your window? Does he still haunt you, Kellerella?”
“Muh-Mouse—”
Mouse tilted her head forward. She stared at Kelly from beneath the ridge of her brow. Her eyes gleamed. “I remember you, Kelly.”
“You…remember…” Her own voice sounded very far away.
“The ham,” Mouse said, breaking into a grin. “We were sneaky, weren’t we?”
“Yes. You brought ham into the room after hours. You…you hid it in your bra strap.”
>
“You did it.” Without looking, Mouse’s arm shot out and pointed to the drawing of the sobbing little girl on the wall behind her. “You did it, Kelly, and I kept it for you. Maybe he’d come for me one day too.”
“Who?”
“Simple Simon,” she said. “The Pie Man.”
“Why do I know that?” The dam was losing strength, the bolts popping in steady succession now. “Why do I know…?”
“You don’t remember,” said Mouse. Her eyes narrowed. “That’s why you came here.”
She didn’t understand. “I came here because of Simple Simon?” The dam—creaking…ready to burst…water seeping through…
“You came to get away.”
“What is this? How do you know this?”
“Because you told me,” Mouse said. Then: “Because you showed me. You showed me what you could do, Kelly.”
“What could I do? What did I show you?”
“Upstairs,” Mouse said, “on the third floor. You showed me on the third floor. You were scared to go because of what happened to those two girls there but it was your idea, wasn’t it? Yes. You were scared but that was the only quiet place, the only place you could show me. It felt safe then. It was where those two girls died and you used them to show me what you could do.”
You used them to show me what you could do. Mouse’s words rang in her head. Her mind was pulsing, expanding and contracting in synchronization with the force of her memories, now furious to break free.
“I can’t remember,” Kelly said. “Mouse, help me remember.”
“I can’t show you,” Mouse said. “Go upstairs and see for yourself.”
“Where?”
“The closet. Go upstairs and see the closet where the two girls died, just like you showed me that day. Go see the closet and you’ll remember what you told me, what you showed me. You’ll remember it all. Go up and see.”
For a moment, Kelly couldn’t move.
“Go up and see. Go up and see. Go up and see. Go up and see…”
As if driven by some unseen force, Kelly turned, flung open the door, and hustled down the corridor to the stairwell. A dozen eyes watched her leave.
In all its mystery, the third floor hallway stretched out before her just as she’d remembered it. Idle and silent, the faint but distinct smell of sulfur in the air, the hallway was a straight length of white track to the end. On either side of the hallway, doors to the long-vacant rooms stood shut and barred, the paint peeling off in flaky spirals and curls. Several sections of the ceiling sported large brown water stains; other places boasted gaping holes stuffed with twigs, straw and dried leaves—the nests of animals. Plaster from these holes had fallen and shattered on the floor, covering the linoleum in a sheet of powder. The light fixtures either didn’t work or were not in use; the only light issued in through the windows, casting crooked panels of sunlight against their respective walls. Dust motes floated in the air.
Here, the silence was arresting. Kelly was aware of every sound—her own breathing, heartbeat, the scuff of her heels against the floor. An enormous fly thumped stupidly against one of the milky windowpanes off to her right. Up ahead stood the abandoned nurses’ workstation, now a relic in its own time. The countertop was blistered and warped from water damage.
At the end of the hallway, facing her, was the broom closet. The door was closed, though not barred and locked like the rest. It didn’t seem real; rather, it seemed superimposed on the wall, its image a projection of her own imagination. If she went to it, reached out and touched it with her hand…would she actually feel anything? Would the door really be there? After all these years, would it be there?
She began walking toward it. Her shadow, large and distorted, followed her along the wall. The stink of sulfur intensified.
They’d come up to the third floor only twice, Mouse and her. The first time it had been Mouse’s idea. After stories about the two dead girls diffused throughout the institution, Mouse found herself unable to think of anything else. She’d been ravenous with desire to actually see the place where the girls had been found dead, to perhaps open the closet door and step inside. “You’re afraid of ghosts,” Mouse had said to her one evening. It was not a question and the authority in her voice had irritated Kelly. Wild-eyed and unsettled, Mouse had insisted they creep up to the third floor and at least look at the closet—heck, no one had to actually go inside if they didn’t want to. And despite Mouse’s affinity toward the extreme, she was the closest thing Kelly had to a friend at the hospital. If Mouse wanted to go to the third floor, Mouse was going to go…with or without Kelly. Anyway, she wasn’t terribly scared…
They’d gone up after everyone was asleep. The corridors were uncomfortably silent, pierced by the occasional muffled shout in the night. Mouse had led the way, her thin and spindly form just a few steps ahead of Kelly on the stairwell going up. And when they reached the third floor, Mouse had crept on ahead of her in the darkness, her eyes alight with something too close to insanity, her mouth twisted into a bizarre grin. The look in her eyes that night frightened Kelly more than the actual trek to the third floor. Even more than the stories about the dead girls.
“What do you think they did in that closet?” Mouse had asked, leading the way down the hall. “You think they did sex?”
“I don’t know,” she’d answered.
“You think they went in there a lot? To do sex?”
“I don’t know.”
Their bare feet padding along the cold floor, Kelly had followed Mouse to the end of the hallway. Mouse stopped just in front of the closed broom closet.
“This is it,” Mouse had said.
“So now what?”
“Open it.”
“No.”
“I want to look inside.”
“No.”
“I’ll do it.” And she did—Mouse reached out and turned the knob. The door stuck a bit, warped from age, but when Mouse administered more force, it popped free of its molding and creaked open. Blackness inside—
Mouse had screamed, jumped back. Startled, Kelly had cried out and stumbled backward. She tripped over her feet and crumbled to the floor, twisting her ankle in the process, her heart thudding mechanically in her chest.
Mouse had broken out laughing. “Gotcha,” she’d said.
“Bitch,” said Kelly.
“Bitch you.” Mouse peered back inside the closet. “This is it,” she said again. “This is where they died.” And after a length of silence: “What do you think it was like for them to die in here like that?”
She had no answer for Mouse, too afraid to let her mind summon the corpses, to see them, to see what they might have looked like…
Now, stopping before the closed broom closet door, Kelly could recall the expression of intensity so prominent on Mouse’s face. What had Mouse expected to find in the closet, anyway? Perhaps she’d wanted to see it the way young boys will want to explore haunted houses—not necessarily because they believe in ghosts, but because they wanted to believe in ghosts.
Ghosts, she thought now.
That had been the first time. They’d gone up to the third floor a second time too—almost a full year later. Only that time Mouse hadn’t been so excited. By then, Mouse had started retreating into the back of her mind, and by then she had become frightened too. Frightened and confused. And it had been Kelly’s idea to come back up to the third floor, not Mouse’s. Kelly’s idea…because she needed to tell Mouse something, needed to show her something…
Standing before the closet door now, Kelly almost recalled what it was. And with that near-recollection, she could feel the threads of other memories—memories from home—being pulled along behind it. It was a train; everything was connected.
This is the only way I can explain it to you, Kelly had said.
Tell me, said Mouse.
I can’t. I have to show you. And I don’t want to talk about it down here, not with everyone else around. Let’s go upstairs, to the third f
loor. Let’s go to the closet again.
And what exactly had she told Mouse? What had been so important to tell her friend…to bring her back up to the third floor one year later? Kelly had become more and more depressed with the passage of time. It had been Mouse who’d forced her to talk, prevented her from falling too deep inside herself. And it had been Mouse who’d finally asked what had happened, and why Kelly had been sent to the institution in the first place. Mouse’s story was not a secret: though Mouse’s parents claimed they were concerned about their daughter’s well-being, it was clear that the Sotes really feared for their own lives. Mouse had been a confused and bizarre child who had often succumbed to impromptu bursts of violence. But Kelly…she’d never given up her secret, never told what had happened, never wanted to discuss it. It was just best to forget, she’d managed to convince herself. Some nights, she almost managed to make herself forget, and that would have been just perfect. There was nothing she wanted to remember, nothing she wanted to keep inside her for the rest of her life.
We can forget, she thought now, but it never truly leaves us. It just stays inside, sits dormant, until it’s ready to attack us again.
“What did I take you up here to tell you?” she mumbled to herself. And she didn’t just tell her story—she showed Mouse, convinced her…
How?
Reaching out, she gripped the pitted brass knob of the closet door, turned it. She heard the tumblers in the lock roll over. In one great swoosh, she yanked the closet door open and stood there, staring inside.
Her heart nearly stopped. Her hand fell away from the doorknob. The world around her pulled back and vanished as she stood there, staring inside the closet, staring at the two writhing, huddled shapes in the blackness…
The two dead girls were there, propped crookedly against each other, their clothes hanging off their bodies, their skin a pale white-blue. Patches of scalp showed through their hair. Their eyes, large and fishlike in their heads, rolled with a wet, sucking sound to face Kelly. Their lips parted simultaneously, exposing black, rotted gums and teeth like twisted, rusting metal.