She cracked her knuckles.
She should hear the hum of the lights above her, talking or something from the other rooms. They still had another four girls in their group to check. Had they already gone to bed? Maybe Lynn had looked in and told them goodnight while looking for Denise?
She looked up the hall, then down it, and wondered where is everybody? Not knowing what else to do, Mandy waited. She stared at the tile floor and counted the colors. The border was dark brown running along the edges of the hall with a lighter shade of tan making up the center of the floor. As she looked closer she saw the tan was broken up by smaller specks of brown, like sprinkles on a bowl of ice cream.
She looked up at the wall across from her. It was painted a pale yellow and the combination of the yellow and the brown made her queasy. The walls had a shine, like they’d been plastered, painted, then gone over with a clear coat of some glossy primer. It looked like a school hallway, she thought.
She wondered if Lynn had been eaten by the walls or swallowed up by the floor because where in the hell was she? What, had Denise wandered over to the boys’ side of the building and gotten lost? Had she run away? Gone outside and got lost in the darkness out back? Where the hell were they?
She wished she’d kept her phone in her pocket, then she could at least use this time to see what Katie was up to. Not to see if Sam had tried to contact her, though. No, she wasn’t interested in that. So she told herself.
A place that boasts as many ghosts as this one, you’d think the moans and rattling of chains would break up the silence every so often, but as she stood there in that moment, the hallway was so quiet, she couldn’t even hear her own breathing anymore. She had to put her hand to her chest and concentrate on the sensation of the air moving into her nose and filling her lungs to even be sure she was breathing.
She wanted to break up the silence, but any sound she made would have been much too loud and she had a feeling of dread that any noise would be terrifying in this moment.
She almost decided to step back inside the room and wait with Theresa, but that girl obviously had wanted nothing to do with her. But wasn’t it her job to get to know them, to be the one they came to when they needed something? She was their guardian, so maybe right from the start was exactly when they needed to start seeing her as such.
But that girl creeped her out. God, it was so hard to be the responsible one when you just wanted to run away. She’d meet her again tomorrow, re-introduce herself in the light.
Mandy moved over toward the stairs, and tried to see if she could hear anything either up- or downstairs. Maybe Lynn was coming, dragging a mischievous little girl behind her.
Something clicked upstairs and she jumped, but didn’t make a sound. She couldn’t tell what it was. The arguing voices she’d heard earlier came back to her and she wasn’t in any hurry to repeat that, but that had been a different hallway, and as far as she knew, the noise had just been another ghost. So she was just fine ignoring it and staying right where she was until someone she knew appeared. Weren’t Jane’s girls on this same floor? Or Bea’s? She didn’t know. But wherever everyone was, surely she should be hearing something from someone in this big building?
She rubbed her arms and wished again that she’d worn a jacket, or at least a shirt with sleeves.
Another click, a little louder, maybe a little closer. On the floor right above her, echoing in the stairwell.
Mandy didn’t want to know what it was. She didn’t want it to sound again, closer this time, she didn’t want it to sound like it was at the top of the stairs, because then it would sound like it was coming down the stairs, and once it reached the bottom, it could slink around the corner and she’d only be five feet from it, and she didn’t want to be five feet from whatever would make a noise like that CLICK.
It was only a click, but it was also the only sound she’d heard since stepping out of that room, and for some reason, that made it all the more ominous.
But she also didn’t want to stand here terrified and just wait for something to happen. If Mandy had to meet another of the building’s ghosts, she decided, she wanted to do it on her terms. They couldn’t hurt her, she told herself.
She stood by the stairs and looked up, trying to see if there were any shadows up there, anything moving. No shadows on the wall in front of her, so no one was standing above her. She leaned out and tried to look up at the top of the railing. Still nothing.
The click again, at the top of the stairs. She made a quick, quiet gasp and her heart pounded.
She felt like, whatever it was, it knew she was here and it wanted her to hear it. And that feeling did not comfort her in the least.
She put her hand on the rail and expected that doing so would cause alarms to go off, that by touching the handrail she was committing to going up the stairs, but that was stupid. She was touching the rail for the same reason people turn down the radio when they’re looking for an address, nothing more. She stepped up on the first step because it would clear the obstruction of the floor above her and if that click sounded again, maybe she would be better able to tell what it was without that blocking the sound.
It came again, but she still had no idea what it was. Just a random click, could be anything. It wasn’t really loud, but loud enough to echo in the emptiness of the hallway.
When her feet kept moving, she didn’t notice until she was at the landing, standing halfway between the second and third floors and staring up at the top, just waiting for something to happen.
She didn’t hear it again, so she decided whatever it had been was gone and the only thing to do now was to prove to herself there was nothing there. And the only way to do that was to go up there and take a look. Her feet were in motion before she’d even made up her mind.
She glanced down to the second floor, but didn’t see Lynn standing there so she continued up. Maybe that was Lynn up on the third floor? She was halfway up when it came again, that CLICK. She’d been right; it was at the top of the stairs, but she couldn’t stop now, she was almost there and how could she stop now when all she had to do to prove it was nothing that could hurt her was to take those last few steps and peek around the corner?
She looked at her feet, looked at the stairs, kept her eyes focused down and in front of her.
CLICK.
She took that last step up to the third floor and looked down and around, not knowing what to expect, but knowing it would be something horrible, something she would see in her dreams, she sensed it.
It was a boy. He was maybe fifteen, she guessed. He wore a black hoody and blue jeans with dirty white Adidas and he held a Walkman in his hands.
Haven’t seen one of those in years, she thought. This guy’s been here a while.
The click was the sound of the boy pressing buttons to rewind and play his music. She couldn’t hear the music, but the look on the boy’s face said it was nothing pleasant. She wondered for just a second what a boy was doing over here in the first place, since the boys and girls were only allowed to mingle in the common areas, and the hallway outside the girls’ dorms was, she was sure, definitely not a common area.
But then the question became moot when the kid, still listening to his Walkman, pulled a razorblade from the pocket of his hoody, pulled up his left sleeve and simply opened up a line of red along the length of his forearm.
This time Mandy did scream, but before the sight became even more gruesome, it was gone and she was left standing and staring at the wall, once again utterly alone in the hallway.
She stepped back and looked around. Surely a scream like that would bring people poking their heads out of their doorways, but there was no one. The hallway was dim, the overhead lights spaced too far apart to offer any real kind of illumination.
She went to the first door she saw and knocked on it. No one answered and she assumed the girls inside, whoever they were, might be asleep already, but she couldn’t help herself; she had to see another face, even one annoyed
from being woken up. She opened the door and stepped inside, trying to think of any reason she could give them, no matter how lame--say you have to use the bathroom, say you’re feeling sick--but it wasn’t necessary as the room was empty.
She took in the darkness, her eyes already semi-adjusted from the dimness of the hallway. She turned on the light anyway and the room was flooded. It was also very empty. Just dust, and lots of it. The smell of it filled the air with a stale odor she felt she needed scrub from her face.
She turned out the light and stepped out, closing the door behind her. She went to the next door and knocked on it. Where were Jane and Bea? Where were their girls?
She opened the door, readying her excuse again, but, again, the room was empty. The third room as well.
She tried the other side and found two more empty rooms.
Maybe there just weren’t enough girls to fill them. But she counted ten doorways and had only checked five rooms. It would be a hell of a coincidence, but there was nothing saying that Bea’s or Jane’s girls weren’t up here occupying five of these rooms and Mandy hadn’t just happened to look in the five empty ones.
So she checked the other five rooms as well, praying with every one that someone would be inside, that hope sinking further and further with each empty room revealed.
She closed the last door and went back out into the hallway.
It was a long long walk to where she’d left her purse and her phone and she couldn’t think of a time she’d ever felt more alone and abandoned, even the day after Sam had moved out. But that day had been sunny and she’d spent a lot of it on the phone with Katie. This wasn’t a feeling she ever wanted to go through again and she wondered if it was against the rules to keep her phone with her on her shift. She could make up a sick parent or something, some reason she may need the phone on her, just in case someone calls, and then sneak the occasional text to her best friend when she found herself having to be alone somewhere in the building.
She headed back to the stairs, not wanting to get close to them in case the suicidal kid reappeared, but she sure as hell wasn’t staying up here. Lynn had to be back by now, she told herself. And if she wasn’t, Mandy would just take that moment to go get her phone. It had only taken a moment for the thought to form before she convinced herself that, yes, she did have a sick parent, and she should probably keep her phone with her at all times, just in case.
The shadows up here were too much. She kept seeing flashes of light out of the corner of her eye, but when she looked, there was nothing. It was a spot on the wall or the overhead light reflecting off a doorknob. It was nothing, over and over, but it still made her nervous and made her want to get out of here as quickly as possible.
She refused to run, though. She refused to let herself become so frightened by nothing that she lost her shit and ran for safety.
She turned down the hallway to her left and was about ten feet down it when she realized there wasn’t another hallway on this floor, it was a straight shot from one end to the other. She stopped and turned around, but where she’d come from was gone. She looked ahead. A long, straight hallway with five doors on each side and a flight of stairs leading down at the opposite end, just like the previous hallway. Except in this one, the stairs were on the right. They had been on the left just a minute ago, which made Mandy believe this wasn’t the building playing tricks, that she really had found another hallway, and had been so spaced out in her own head, most likely from trying to keep her shit together, that she hadn’t noticed it earlier. And how to explain the fact she just turned around and the previous hallway was gone?
Well, to be honest, that one stumped her.
She moved forward and tried one of the doors. It opened to a dark, empty room, just like all the rooms before. She tried another to the same result. She tried a third. She tried a fourth, but she found this door locked. This furthered her belief she’d stepped into a side hallway because none of the doors had been locked before.
Also, she reasoned, the stairs had been on the left before, now they were on the right.
“Ergo,” she said out loud, “different hallway. Period. Obviously.”
She checked the other doors, found them all unlocked and empty. She couldn’t say why she was still checking rooms when it was obvious there was no one up here. But maybe it was that solitude that guided her, that made her seek out another face, another living person even when it was obvious there weren’t any.
She headed for the stairs, but something made her turn down another hallway, and she was a little further along this one when she realized there hadn’t been another hallway. She stopped and turned around and the way she’d come was gone. She found herself with only one way out, past the ten doors lining both sides of the hall--five on each side--to a set of stairs the led down. This time the stairs were on the left again.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph
She wanted to panic, but there was no one here to help her either way, so she moved to the center of the hall, looking up and down in both directions. Her breathing was very loud in her ears.
She turned toward the stairs, but detoured down a hallway and was halfway down it before she stopped and turned around, realizing she’d just turned down a hallway that hadn’t been there a minute ago.
There’s a walking path that encircles NIN Park in Angel Hill. Or there was. The path was destroyed shortly after being completed. For the first few weeks of its existence, people enjoyed the path. Many people came to enjoy the summer sun, the open space of the park with its bright green grass and the sound of the fountains mingled with the laughter of children. Many were attempting to get into better shape by taking a stroll along the path while their children played on the swings and jungle gyms.
The walking path was trouble from the beginning. It wasn’t a particularly difficult path, it merely came in at opposite ends of the park and nearly circled the entire thing. All told it was about three miles from one end to the other, but for some reason they couldn’t figure out at first, it seemed a good chunk of Angel Hill citizens who tried the path dropped dead at the end of it. At first the deaths--heart attacks, all of them--were blamed on the victim getting a start on their healthy new life too late in the game. If they’d started a month earlier or had changed their diets previous to deciding on this walk, or had just not let themselves get into such bad shape to begin with, maybe they would have made it. But then healthy people started dying, people who had spent their lives working out, people who had no reason at all to believe themselves at risk of a heart attack or any other sort of life threatening mishap.
That was when the attention shifted away from the victims and moved instead to some possible outside causes.
The plants along the path were tested for toxins, the animals and insects found around the area as well. But neither of them proved the least bit harmful to anyone who encountered them.
Then some especially insightful detective realized all the people who died on the path died at the same end of it. The west exit of the walking path was the deadly one. But why could people enter from the west side and exit at the east and make it out just fine, but anyone--and it was everyone, to a man--who started on the east side of the path and came out the west end dropped dead?
Why indeed?
Using basic alchemical symbology, the symbols for life and death are identical, only inverted. While the symbol for death looks like the top of a keyhole with the bottom two branches split and folded outward, the alchemical symbol for life is the exact same thing, flipped vertically, so the open end is facing up.
This was also the configuration of the walking path surrounding NIN park. The open end of the path faced the entrance to the park, which faced north in Angel Hill. So anyone starting from the west end and walking east was completing the Life configuration, but anyone who start from the opposite end was making the symbol for death and paying for it with their lives.
Mandy thought of that walking path around NIN Park and the evil thing it
was able to do, such a simple thing, making people walk a particular circuit and it had the power to make them drop dead. Now, wandering lost in the unending hall, she wondered if each new turn was another twist in some puzzle. She didn’t want to know what she could be unlocking.
Mandy liked to tell people that she had been on the path the day it was discovered what it really was. She liked to tell people she had been a mere ten feet from the west end, walking along and listening to music when someone ran up to her and pulled her off the trail, showing her the newspaper headline that had been on that morning’s front page. Mandy never read the paper, and hadn’t seen the article or the pictures or diagrams. She hadn’t known the combination of the walking path or that she was ten simple feet away from dropping dead.
Her life had almost ended that day. That’s the story she liked to tell people.
The truth was much less exciting. She had thought of going to the park that day and reading a book, but parking was impossible due to a combination family reunion/birthday party, causing her to have to park two blocks away and walk. When she saw that, she’d decided it really wasn’t worth the effort, and she’d left. She hadn’t even set foot in NIN Park that day.
However, that story wasn’t nearly as exciting as the cursed walking trail almost claiming Mandy as its final victim, so that was the story she chose to report whenever the subject of the park or its damned trail were brought up.
The world is made up of hidden puzzles, she thought, secret patterns and rituals, and she felt more certain with each step that the phantom hallways she’d been subjected to were all part of something like that.
She turned down the hallway again and stumbled along. She was halfway down and expecting the hallway to reappear when she heard something ahead. Something shuffle-slapping, getting louder, and there at the top of the stairs she saw Theresa in a robe, standing on the top step but not climbing fully to the third floor. She held the railing and leaned forward, searching for Mandy. They saw each other and Theresa said, “Watch your step. Keep your eyes on me and grab my hand.”
The Ghosts of Mertland (An Angel Hill novel) Page 8