by Juliet Vane
“You’ll need to trim the trees again,” a woman was saying in a loud, musical voice that carried. “We can’t afford to lose another window in the next storm.”
She stood next to a man in a courtyard. A weeping willow towered behind them. The man had a big gray beard and wore matching gray overalls, and the woman wore a cream-colored pantsuit with low heels. Her red hair was pulled up in a tight French twist.
“Ah, welcome,” she said, spotting the three of us. “Mr. Abbot, if you could get to work on the trees, that would be great.” As Mr. Abbot walked away, she turned more fully toward us. “I’m Natalie Frost, and I’m so glad you’re here. A fallen limb broke through the basement door and it smells like rot down there. Problem is, it’s so full of garbage and old storage that we can’t see if any major damage has been done. I’ll need you three to clear it out.”
Great. Not only were we at the creepiest building in Colorado, but we’d be in the basement of said creepy building.
I glared at Logan. This was his fault.
She continued in her musical voice. “Mr. Abbot has brought around a dumpster, and you can fill it with any garbage from the basement. Of course, if you come across something that you think might have value, set it aside. There are also some wheelbarrows for leaves and other green waste—full loads can be taken around to the compost pile on other side of the boat house.”
This kept getting better and better, I thought, shooting another glare in Logan’s direction. The only thing creepier than a basement, to me, was an old boat house. The wheelbarrows of green waste could be Logan’s job.
“Now, I’ve hired you for the week. Five days, eight hours each day, six hundred dollars for each of you. So if you finish the basement early, there are other tasks I can find for you. Sound good?”
“Yes, thanks, Ms. Frost,” James said, and Logan and I nodded.
“Call me Natalie, please.” After we nodded, she tottered away on her sensible heels.
Once she was out of earshot, I faced Logan and James. “Nobody said anything about a basement. Or a boat house.”
Logan pointed at Natalie. “Uh, she did.”
“I hate you,” I said, but he and James laughed.
Yep, this would be just like old times.
Chapter Three
Sweet Dreams and Cowbells
The basement opening was on the other side of the wing, so we walked around until we found the large dumpster and wheelbarrows.
“Oh gross,” Logan said from the door. “It smells like the devil’s boil-covered backside.”
“Thanks so much for that image,” I said. “Hurry up. The sooner we finish, the sooner we can be not working in the basement.”
I stood outside while the boys started down. If they came running out screaming, then I’d never ever go down there.
Logan yelped, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“What is it?” I called through the door. “What do you see? Are you okay?”
“I bumped my head on one of these stupid beams,” he said.
“Do you want me to go to your place and find the helmet I made you?” I asked with a laugh. At six foot three, Logan was always hitting stuff. During eighth grade, we’d had to do one of those egg drop experiments—making a little cage for an egg, then dropping it three stories and hoping it wouldn’t break. After our project was over, I’d used the extra padding supplies to make a helmet for Logan. James and I, at least, had thought it was hysterical.
“Ow!” James said.
“Now what?” I called down. Ew, it really did smell gross in the basement. Decayed leaves, putrid rot. Had something died down there?
“I hit my head, too.”
James had grown our senior year, making him nearly as tall as Logan.
“Ha!” I said. “Tall people problems.” At five foot four, I wouldn’t have the same kind of trouble my giant friends had. “So…is it safe? No, like, monsters or ghosts?”
“Not that I can see,” Logan said. “Wait, oh no! Oh, the humanity! Oh, make it stop!”
I rolled my eyes and put on one of the sets of work gloves Natalie had left us. They were large enough that my hands felt awkward inside of them. Humming “Loathing” from the Wicked soundtrack, I eased down the set of rickety stairs. I had to hold tight to the railing because the steps were slippery with a thick layer of mildew.
“What are you humming?” James asked.
I smiled.
“I hate it when you insult us with musicals,” Logan said.
I continued to hum, and James said, “It’s that song from Wicked, about loathing someone.”
“Wow, since when did you learn that?” Logan asked him.
James shrugged. “Osmosis, I guess. April left her CD in my car.”
“Ha!” I shouted. I’d left the CD in his car on purpose before we left for college—I already had a digital copy so I wouldn’t miss it. “He listened to it! I knew he would!”
Logan laughed and James sulked, while I surveyed the basement around us. The guys had turned on a light, a single bulb which didn’t reach the far corners of the large space. The damp air surrounded me, tugging on my skin.
Something wasn’t right in here—I just didn’t know what.
I took my phone out of my pocket and turned on the flashlight app. We were ankle deep in leaves that had turned to sludge, and the sides of the basement were piled high with broken furniture and what looked like old-fashioned trunks, the kind someone would strap to a stagecoach before heading out West.
The basement was even bigger than I’d imagined, probably spanning this half of the school wing.
“There’s a door up there.” I pointed to a rust-colored door in the corner. There probably used to be stairs beneath it, but they were gone and someone had propped an old metal ladder in their place. “Lovely. Which circle of hell do you think that leads to?”
“Just the kitchen,” Logan said.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Natalie let me look around before I agreed to the job on Saturday. I peeked in through that door, which leads to the kitchen.”
I advanced on him, my shoes squelching in muck. “You mean you saw this basement before you agreed to take on the work?”
He smiled proudly, and James smacked the back of his head, Three Stooges style.
“This is going to take us all week,” I said, looking around. Something moved in the corner, and I screeched. “If there are rats in here, I’m out. Done.”
Logan shone his phone’s light on the corner, where a loose piece of fabric lifted from a stack of boxes before falling back into place. “There’s just a breeze coming through. No rats. Chill, April.”
“I can’t chill.” I looked from him to James. They both looked back at me, with slightly hopeful faces. They both wanted to be here and earn this cash. Sighing, I said, “I’ll try to chill.”
James toed a pile of leaves and garbage near his feet. “We’ll have to use buckets or something to get this out of here. It’s too wet to carry it around in our arms.”
“Natalie left some buckets in the corner,” Logan said, pointing.
He came back with three five-gallon buckets, and we each set to work, starting closer to the base of the stairs and working our way out. Several pale, gray spiders crawled through the disturbed leaf-sludge, and I tried not to scream. Logan laughed, but James came and worked next to me for a few minutes until I calmed down again.
This was the worst. I was going to kill Logan.
Pretty soon we fell into a rhythm, filling our buckets with slimy leaves, taking them upstairs, and dumping them in wheelbarrows. I didn’t have to ask the boys to let me off the hook with the trips to the compost pile behind the boat house, which was a blessing.
The boys talked about school and classes, and I chimed in every now and then, but I didn’t want to tell them about stupid Ian. While they’d both known I was moving in with Ian, I doubted they’d noticed when I changed my Facebook status to “single.”
James and I passed each other on the stairs several times. It felt so good when his skin brushed mine. A little zing shot through me every time, and I wanted to smile.
There was more to it than touches, though. Being around James made me happy. And the truth was, I hadn’t been happy in a long time. Not since that last date I’d had with Ian. It had been our five-month anniversary, and we’d spent the day cuddling, watching movies, and ignoring the world around us. When we went out to dinner that night, Ian had looked at me seriously. “I’m having a lot of fun with you, April,” he’d said.
This was it, I’d thought. The proposal. We were moving a little fast, sure, but we were hitting all the right milestones. Dates, moving in together. Next came the proposal. My heart had sped up, skipping jubilantly in my chest.
“But I think we’d have more fun,” he continued, “if we widened our circle a little.”
I mouthed the words. Widen our circle. What did that even mean?
“What are you telling me?” I finally asked.
“Look, I think we’d appreciate each other more…and I think our relationship would be even stronger, if we didn’t ignore the other social opportunities that came our way. We’d be more complete, experienced people.”
“So you want us to keep hanging out with our friends? We already do that. Ian, you’re not making sense.”
He sighed. “I knew you wouldn’t get this. I’m saying, we should date other people, too.”
“What?!” I’d squawked, loud enough to gain the attention of other people in the restaurant.
“April, don’t cause a scene,” he’d said.
I’d gotten up and walked to our apartment, packed all of my things, and gone back to my old dormitory. Some friends there took me in for the night.
I hadn’t had a place to call home since then.
Sometimes menial work sucked, because it gave me too much time to think. I shoved the bad memories aside and resolved to focus on the task and on hanging out with James and Logan.
We’d cleared quite a bit of floor space of leaves, but there was so much left to do. A deep feeling had grown within me, a heavy feeling of dread and unease that started in my feet and was slowly clawing its way up my legs. The boys’ presence was helpful in keeping the panic from taking over, but the chill in the room, the eerie silence if both the guys happened to be upstairs emptying their buckets at once, the scent of damp and dead things…it was getting to me.
I needed out. Even though my bucket wasn’t full yet, I hurried with it toward the stairs. James passed me, going down. “You all right?” he asked, his eyebrows scrunching in concern.
“Just need some air,” I said.
At the top, in the bright sunlight, it was easy to forget the sense of foreboding that had overtaken me down in the basement. I was overreacting, being the diva my mom sometimes accused me of being. Taking a couple more gulps of clean, fresh air, I went back down the stairs.
I worked quietly, focusing only on the work in front of me. The heavy, grasping feeling in my legs and stomach—it was just my imagination. The whispery touch of a breeze against the back of my neck—my imagination. If I just focused on the job, we could get out of here sooner.
I’d reached one of the edges of the room. There was stuff here—some trunks that I’d noticed earlier, and I couldn’t even tell what else because it was draped in heavy, dark gray fabric. The scents of rot and mildew were even stronger. The hairs on the back of my neck lifted, like spider legs dancing on my skin.
What if there were spiders under that cloth? Maybe this was a bad idea. But James was taking a load of leaves to the boat house, and Logan was halfway up the stairs with a bucket.
Stop being a chicken, April, I told myself. Pull your weight.
Logan wasn’t paying attention, so I took the coward’s way out. I didn’t have to touch anything. I’d use my shoe. Sticking my leg out, I used the toe of my sneaker to snag the edge of the cloth. The decaying fabric lifted a couple of inches.
My breathing quickened, and I lost my balance slightly. I put my foot back down, and the fabric fell.
No creatures had come out, fangs bared, when I lifted the cloth with my shoe. I could do this.
I reached forward with my hand, and with shaking fingers, I lifted a corner of the fabric. Feeling as though I were ripping off a Band-Aid, I yanked it away from the trunks.
Wide eyes and a horrified face stared back at me, and I screamed and flung the fabric down.
“April!” Logan rushed down the stairs. James must have just come back, because he was right on Logan’s heels. They came up and stood beside me, fists raised, looking ready to battle spiders.
“It’s—it’s fine,” I said, trying to catch my breath. I could barely hear my words over the frantic pounding of my heart. “Just a mirror. But the face—it didn’t look like me at first.”
Logan and James looked at the mirror. It was maybe three feet by five feet, in an ornate wooden frame. The dust and tarnish made it difficult to see a clear reflection, which had likely been the problem to begin with. Of course the face hadn’t looked like mine—the reflections barely resembled us at all.
“Okay, yeah, so that is creepy,” Logan said. “I agree with you there.”
He started humming “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics. I sang along, and James joined in. After a few turns through the chorus, the song petered out.
“I’ve missed your voice, April,” James said.
“I missed yours, too,” I said, then added, “but not on the stage.”
James chuckled. “That’s why, when we start our band, I will play the drums.”
“More cowbell,” Logan whispered, referencing a Saturday Night Live sketch we’d watched countless times on YouTube. We cracked up laughing.
After we turned back to our tasks, the boys forgot the mirror.
But I didn’t.
Chapter Four
Echoes and Footsteps
At noon, Logan volunteered to grab us some lunch at the deli in town. “Should we all go?” I asked.
“Nah, this way I can call Helen.” His girlfriend. I didn’t know a lot about her, just that they were pretty serious.
From the neutral tone of his voice, and the way his shoulders slumped when he mentioned Helen, I could tell he wasn’t in love with her…but then again, what did I know about love?
He took off, leaving me and James standing in the basement.
“Let’s get out of here,” James said.
He didn’t need to tell me twice. I rushed up the stairs ahead of him.
The sun outside was warm and bright, and it was easier to forget the absolute terror I’d experienced when I first saw that mirror.
“You haven’t said anything about Ian,” James said as we made our way to the courtyard.
“Ugh,” I said, stretching out my arms to soak in more of the sunlight. “Nothing to say.”
“So, it’s over, then?”
I looked out over the lake, at the clouds forming beyond the mountains behind it. A storm was building, although it was already moving in the other direction. “Yeah.”
“What about the place you guys rented?”
I sighed. “I’m sorry. I really don’t want to talk about it.”
He nodded, but his blue eyes never left mine. “Anytime you want to talk, you know I’ll listen, right?”
“Thanks.”
He looked so understanding and accepting, but as I stood there, I couldn’t help feeling bad. I’d always confided in him, more than Logan. Logan was funny and carefree and he could make me laugh, but James listened and heard beyond the words I spoke. Merely from being around him, I could feel that he cared.
But I wasn’t ready to talk to him about Ian. Not yet.
To cover up my awkward feelings, I pointed to the door of the north wing, closest to where we stood. “I wonder if Natalie would mind if we went inside.”
James laughed. “Like you actually would.”
“I would,�
�� I said, indignation in my voice. “I totally would. This is probably our only chance to get inside the other parts of the building.”
He shook his head. “Right.”
I marched over to the door and yanked on the handle. To my surprise, it opened. “Crap,” I muttered under my breath.
“I heard that,” James said with a bark of laughter.
I could either step inside, or close the door and admit I was too scared. “I don’t want to get in trouble with Natalie,” I said, feeling pleased that I’d come up with a good way out.
Just then, footsteps echoed from inside. I peered in, and Natalie stepped into view.
“Hi,” she said. “Lunch break?”
“Yeah. Sorry, I shouldn’t have opened the door, but…” I had no excuse.
Her pale blue eyes were wide with understanding. “It’s okay, you’re probably curious. You can go in and look around, just wipe your shoes off first, and leave the instruments alone.”
I turned to look at James, who had the biggest darn smile on his face.
“I’m heading off to lunch, myself, so I’ll see you in a few.” With that, Natalie nodded once and walked away. I watched as she disappeared around the far corner of the school.
“Shall we?” James said.
“Why, yes, we shall.” My voice sounded steadier than I felt. This was a pretty cool opportunity, I told myself. The inside of Rosebud Academy. It sounded like it would be full of musical instruments instead of ghosts, anyway.
The back door opened into a hall. We dutifully scraped the bottoms of our shoes on the thick mat. A carved wooden staircase winged upward to our left, and the hallway was a polished wood, as well.
“Gorgeous,” I said, rubbing my palm over the smooth wood of the stair railing. Unlike the basement, this part of the building was well looked-after.
James walked at my side, and we went down the hall. Some doors were open, and we peeked in to see rooms empty except for folding chairs leaning in stacks against the walls, and music stands clumped together like tall black flowers. A lone, upright piano rested patiently at the end of one room. We passed a giant kitchen, and I saw the door that led to the basement. It had a padlock, probably to keep out the spiders. I approved.