Frost

by Marianna Baer

  “No.” She began sobbing so hard she could barely speak. Noises from the party floated up the stairs. She rocked back and forth.

  “What can I do?” I said. “Tell me. Do you want me to get David?” I remembered he was gone. “Or your mother?”

  “No!” she said. “I’m … I’m … I’m just too tired to fight it anymore.” Her words were forced out between sobs and gulps for air. “I’m so, so tired.”

  “Fight what?” I said.

  “How can you not know?” She gripped a leg of the desk, as if to steady herself. “How can you not know?”

  “Celeste, I’m not sure what you’re talking about.” My pulse had quickened. The tone of her words, her body language, her incoherence—it all made me worry I was in over my head. “Can you come out and sit on the bed? It would be easier to talk.”

  She maneuvered out from under the desk. She was visibly shaking, and on top of that, her body still heaved with sobs. I stood up and grabbed a soft blanket that was piled at the end of the bed. I wrapped it around her shoulders and led her to sit down. I sat next to her.

  “Can you tell me?” I said.

  “No.” She shook, her head and her body. “I can’t tell you. I can’t tell anyone.”

  “If you’re too tired to fight it alone,” I said, “you need someone to help you. Right?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “And not you. Before, before … maybe. But not now. I can’t tell anyone. Don’t you see?”

  “How can I see, Celeste, since I have no idea what you’re talking about? Well, I mean, I have some idea, but …” Either she knew she had some blood disease, someone was hurting her, or she was hurting herself. That much I knew.

  “You do?” She gripped my sleeve with a hand that glowed white and skeletal in the darkened room. “It’s happening to you, too?”

  It’s happening to you, too. Oh, God. Was she talking about David? My head began to spin.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Tell me.”

  “What is it?” she said. “What’s happening?”

  She wasn’t making any sense. “What do you think it is?” I said.

  “There’s … there’s something there. Right?”

  Not about David. Breathe, Leena.

  “Something there?” I said. “Where?”

  “What do you mean? Frost House. Isn’t that … Don’t you know what I mean? Frost House.”

  Frost House? I thought of the closet. She wasn’t talking about that, though. That was mine.

  “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.” I spoke as gently as possible. “But you need someone to help you. To help you fight it. So tell me.” If I used her words, maybe she’d trust me more.

  “How can you not know?” she said. “How can you live there? It’s … There’s no word for it. There’s something there. There’s someone. It’s … evil. There’s something that’s trying to kill me.”

  Sweat clammed up my hands.

  “You mean, it’s haunted? Something like that?”

  “That word sounds so stupid,” she said. “This isn’t a fucking Halloween prank.”

  “Have you told anyone else this?” I asked.

  “Of course not! How could I ever tell anyone? They’ll just think I’m crazy. But I’m not, Leena, I’m not!” She grabbed my sleeve. “Don’t you feel it in there? Your room is the worst. That’s why I moved, you know.” Her words were coming quickly, one on top of the next. “It used to just do things to my stuff. But then it got stronger, it’s seeping over. It’s in the bathroom. It burned me that day. I wasn’t sure at the time, but now I am. And it’s tried to push me under, drown me. It hurts me while I try to sleep. Presses on my chest so I can’t breathe. I can’t get away from it. I’m so scared it’s going to kill me. I don’t know what to do. I can’t tell anyone. I shouldn’t have even told you. But you believe me, don’t you? You know I’m not crazy?”

  What could I say? Of course I didn’t believe her. Of course I thought she was crazy.

  “I just want to help you,” I said. “I hate for you to be so upset.”

  “I think I know what it is, too. I talked to Whip’s grandfather, when I had dinner with him after that assembly. And that girl, that girl Whip told us about. She died there, in Frost House.”

  “What girl?”

  “You know, that one Whip told us about. The one who lived there, before it was a dorm.”

  God, she’d worked up a whole thing in her mind. “Celeste, that was just a stupid rumor.”

  “No. No, it’s not. He told me. She went crazy, after having a baby. And she was locked back there, where we live, and she died. And now she’s there … sort of. Trying to kill me. I don’t see her. I don’t hallucinate, Leena. It’s all physical. My bruises, Leena, that’s what they’re from. She’s hurting me.” She gripped my arm,dug fingernails into my flesh. “You believe me, don’t you? My bruises are proof. You have to believe me.”

  Her bruises—she thought they were from a ghost? What did that mean? Was she doing it to herself? “How long have you been feeling this way?” I said.

  “It’s never been right in there,” she said. “All of the stuff that happened. All of it. It’s this … it’s this … thing. It’s gotten stronger and stronger and I can’t tell anyone and I can’t keep fighting it. I tried … I tried to make peace. I tried to talk to her—to contact her—so many times. You know, how you’re supposed to. But that’s probably all bullshit, talking to them. She just wants what she wants.”

  Jesus. That’s probably what Celeste had been burning those big white candles for. Some sort of … séance.

  “Celeste, why wouldn’t … why would it only do this stuff to you? Why haven’t I felt anything?”

  “Maybe you have,” she said. “You’re … Look at what you do all day. You take your pills and you don’t have any friends—it’s ruining you, too.”

  “No!” I said. “That’s not … that’s all just from stress. Frost House … I love Frost House. It’s not—”

  A quick knock came at the door and before either of us could answer it opened and David was there.

  “Here you guys are. I just got back and couldn’t— Hey. What’s wrong?” He came over and knelt next to Celeste.

  She wiped at her eyes, pushed her hair behind her ears. My heart hurt, it was beating so hard. I couldn’t believe any of this was happening.

  “Nothing,” she said, remarkably pulled together all of a sudden. “Just, it’s difficult to see Dad, you know?”

  “He did pretty well tonight,” David said. His brow wrinkled. “Don’t you think?”

  “I guess,” Celeste said.

  David looked at me. I didn’t know what expression I wanted my eyes to telegraph. Desperation? Panic? Calm?

  “Do you want us to stay up here with you?” he asked.

  Celeste wiped her nose with the cuff of her blouse. “No. I’m fine. Let me just rinse my face and we can go back down. I need to say one last thing to Leena, though.”

  “Okay. If you’re sure.” David stood slowly and started out of the room, turning back to look at us several times. I could feel his reluctance as he disappeared into the hallway.

  Celeste stared at me with a fierce, completely composed expression. “Telling David is not the way to help me,” she said. “What I need is your help to get rid of this thing so I can make it through the next few weeks. Okay? When I don’t live there anymore, I’ll be fine. I just need to find a way to live. Okay?”

  I swallowed hard. Nodded.

  “If you tell David, I’ll make sure you regret it. Understand?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I understand.”

  She lay back on the bed, an arm over her face.

  I stood and made my way to the bathroom, splashed water on my cheeks and returned the key to the top of the cabinet, although it didn’t seem urgent anymore. Before, when she had threatened to tell David about my pill stash, it had scared me. Now, her threat just made me sad. Like I was witnessing her last, desperate atte
mpt to hang on to power. Power her illness would completely strip away.

  We drove onto Barcroft’s campus ten minutes before sign-in, giving me no time to talk to David alone. After Celeste and I dropped him off, the claustrophobic space in the car was filled with a silence more haunted than any house could be.

  “You don’t believe me,” Celeste finally said as I parked in the driveway. Her voice was calm now. Frost House crouched in front of us, shrouded by layers of branches and the darkness. Warm orange light glowed in the upstairs windows of Viv’s bedroom. How had this all happened? How was it that I was here in this car, as scared as if I’d fallen into someone else’s open grave, rather than up there, with my friends?

  “I don’t think you’re lying,” I said.

  “Tactful. You don’t think I’m lying. You just think I’m psychotic.”

  Silence returned as I helped her with her bags and crutches. I resisted the urge to run down the path to my room and into the house, resisted the urge to find calm and sanity in my closet as quickly as possible. Instead, I matched my steps to hers, and held open the door when we reached the entrance. Celeste hesitated for a moment. It must have taken all her courage to return to Frost House. She obviously believed she was in danger, regardless of the fact it wasn’t true. To her, it was true.

  In the hallway outside our rooms I said, “Do you want me to stay in there with you tonight?” It didn’t feel responsible to let her sleep alone.

  “No,” she said. “It didn’t make a difference before. When we were in the same room. It was just as bad.”

  “Why haven’t you asked, you know, to be moved somewhere else?”

  “What would I say? People don’t just switch dorms with a month left in the semester. What could I possibly say?” Her voice was so tired.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You’re positive you don’t want me to stay with you?” If she were causing the bruises herself, somehow, maybe my presence would deter it.

  “I’ve got work to do, anyway. I’ll pull an all-nighter in the common room—it hasn’t touched me in there. Yet.” She reached for her doorknob, then looked back at me. “What are you going to do?”

  “Right now?”

  “No. Are you going to help me, Leena?”

  I smoothed down a flake of paint curling off the wall. “Did you … did you think you might be imagining it? At the beginning?”

  “Of course,” she said. “You think it struck me as totally normal to be living in a place like this? To have all this stuff happen? Of course I thought I was crazy. I didn’t know that something like this was possible. I thought … you know, it was made up, in books and movies.”

  “And why—I mean, how—did you decide, you know, that it’s really happening?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I can just tell. It’s real, Leena. Don’t you know when something is real?”

  How could she be so blind, after seeing her father today? Real was walls and flesh and DNA and brain chemistry. How could she not know that?

  I shut and locked the door to my bedroom, went into the closet, and shut and locked that door, too. I sank down on the cushion, opened my cell, and pressed the glowing green buttons. The phone looked like something from outer space, some alien tool. But it wasn’t. It was a cell phone, made in China, with LED lights that lit up the buttons so I could see them here in the dark. Real.

  “Miss me already?” David said.

  His voice brought everything else about him—his eyes, his goofy laugh, the smell of his skin…. The way he takes care of his family. What was I thinking, doing this over the phone?

  “Leena? You there?”

  “Yeah, I … I just wanted to say thanks. For inviting me.”

  “Everyone loved you,” he said. “And thanks for being so patient with Celeste. I’m surprised she was so upset. Dad was pretty good, all things considered.”

  I tipped my head back against the wall. “I’m glad I got a chance to meet him. And your mother. She seems wonderful. Your whole family does. Anyway, I have to go. I just wanted to thank you for including me. It meant a lot.”

  “I hope you didn’t think I was too pushy,” he said, “telling you to invite your dad to Thanksgiving.”

  I hadn’t even remembered that. “Oh, right. I’ll think about it.”

  “Because at the risk of sounding like an after-school special,” David said, “you’re really lucky you have two … healthy parents. And I think, someday, you might regret not … not trying harder.”

  I breathed deeply.

  “I’d love to get to know your family,” he said. “They couldn’t be all that bad if they made you.”

  I smiled. “Thanks. And I’ll definitely think about it.”

  After saying good night to David, I picked up Cubby, thinking I should put the new pills in her now. Then I remembered my pills weren’t in her anymore, and reached for the plastic bag. As I did, her voice rang in my head.

  He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

  More and more, the voice came on its own, without me asking any question. Like a muscle, maybe, my subconscious was getting stronger. This time, I didn’t understand what she—what I—meant.

  You’re not the one who should try.

  With my family. But … why? Maybe inviting my dad would be a good thing.

  Stupid. Weak. Believing what David says. He doesn’t know you.

  I’d do it if it made him happy. Did that make me weak?

  David’s happiness. What would even be going on in his life at Thanksgiving? Where would Celeste be?

  “Hello, spirit,” I said. “Are you there?” I felt like a total idiot the minute the words were out.

  No answer, of course. I almost wished there had been—a diaphanous figure appearing next to me, saying, “You called?” Then I could have just convinced it to leave Celeste alone, and I wouldn’t have had to worry.

  There was no ghost, though. Not now. Not ever. The whole idea of Frost House as evil was … unthinkable. If there was such a thing as a haunted house, it would be the type of place people write about—where you feel uneasy and scared to turn out the lights. I’d never felt anything but safe and wanted in here. It was that type of house—I’d seen it right away—the type of house that welcomes and protects. You could tell just by looking.

  That much I was sure of. And while I certainly didn’t think believing in ghosts meant you were crazy, thinking one was trying to kill you, well … that took it to a whole other level.

  I pressed my hand against the wall. I moved it slowly, as if feeling for a pulse. Or reassuring it. Good house. Good, strong house.

  Celeste didn’t realize it’s what’s inside us that’s most scary. Nothing in the real world could match what our brains and bodies come up with. It’s all a matter of degrees, what we create as our demons. Some minds create scarier ones. Poor Celeste. And poor David. That sadness in his voice when he talked about losing his father…. Once I spoke to him, he would know perfectly well that he was losing his sister, too.

  Chapter 36

  I WAS TOO ANXIOUS TO SLEEP WELL, felt every spring of the bed frame through the mattress. Even the Tylenol PM didn’t keep me from falling in and out of bad dreams and stretches of lying awake, obsessing over what I was going to say. And in that sort of delirious half sleep, a new worry occurred to me. What if Celeste twisted the story around? What if she told David I was making it all up, that I was the unstable one? She could use the pill stash as proof. If she had that missing paper, maybe he would believe her.

  And something else, new and confusing: if Celeste was a physical danger to herself, was she a danger to me? When she found out what I’d done, would she … hurt me?

  At 5:15 a.m. I gave up and turned on the lights. I slipped into sweats and sneakers, before realizing that I didn’t know what time it was actually legal to leave your dorm. We had to sign in by ten, and you couldn’t leave in the middle of the night. But when was it officially “morning”? The last thing I needed was to
be kicked out of school because of an early morning walk.

  Instead of risking the world’s stupidest expulsion, I booted up my laptop and did research, any topic that related to anything Celeste had said. I searched for a site on hauntings that struck me as authoritative and scientific. But all they did was confirm my opinion. Photos of fuzzy shadows on staircases, presented as proof. Please! I also googled the town of Barcroft and hauntings, to see if there were any accounts of the story Celeste had mentioned. None, of course.

  And students had been living in Frost House for generations. Wouldn’t there be more stories going around about it, other than those old, tepid ones of Whip’s?

  If there was an infinitesimal part of my brain that wanted an explanation for all those things that Celeste mentioned—the vase, the burn, the nests—before closing the door on what I knew wasn’t true, I got it, moments before I was about to put my computer to sleep. I stumbled on one last site, after searching a new combination of terms. Finally, a rational site, that offered legitimate explanations for what lay behind some “hauntings.” What I read on it made me feel both a rush of relief and a slow creep of horror. Because it all fit together. And I was more sure than ever about what I had to tell David.

  By seven a.m., I sat waiting for him on the steps of his dorm. I tore up dried leaves into little pieces and considered my approach, as if there was a good way to tell him his sister might be heading down the same path as his sick father. I’d also decided I needed to come clean about everything, just to be safe. So Celeste couldn’t manipulate the situation. I was trying not to be too nervous, but I still had the jitters. There was no telling how he would react.

  Guys straggled out of the dorm, in pairs and alone, fuzzy, not-quite-awake expressions on their faces. I sat off to the side, inconspicuous. David glided right by me with his hands in his pockets, a brown-striped scarf around his neck and his black wool hat on his head. I waited, appreciating this moment in which he looked like a typical prep-school student, headed off for a normal day of classes and sports and friends on one of the most beautiful campuses during New England fall.

  “Hey,” I called. “David.”