CHAPTER SIX
I looked over at Dex and almost smiled. I mean, as creepy as this was, it was almost fun to see the physical evidence of a ghost and especially in front of people who could be described as skeptics. Though when I looked back at Kelly, she was already smiling apologetically.
“I don’t really see much,” she said, as though she knew what I was thinking. Maybe she did. “Just here and there. Nothing terrifying, nothing that makes me want to quit my job. Sometimes I get creeped out, especially if I’m here alone. Sometimes things happen that I can’t explain. But for the most part, I don’t feel any…animosity here. Maybe Brenna will tell you differently, but aside from the never-ending ball game that Elliot plays with his friends, I don’t ever feel uneasy.”
“Elliot?” Dex asked as he walked over to the rubber ball. He picked it up in his hands, looking it over and then smelled it, as if that would tell him something.
“He’s one of the ghosts that Brenna sees. Brenna McIntosh. Some other people report seeing him, too. That drawing in my office of the young boy with the teddy bear? One of the students, Jody Robinson, she drew that. She sees him. I just see glimpses, I get a feeling. But I don’t actually see him.”
“So you mainly stick to the first floor?” Rebecca asked. “Do you ever go upstairs?”
Kelly shook her head rather vehemently. “This is about all that I can handle. I can handle Elliot. I can handle the fact that he apparently has other friends, friends I never see evidence of and I’m happy to keep it that way. But when you go upstairs, things change. Only Brenna goes up there, and Carl, our custodian. I can’t even get halfway up the staircase before I start feeling dizzy. No one goes upstairs.”
“Well, it’s fairly safe to say that we’ll be going up there,” Rebecca said. “Can you tell me—us – about—what we could expect?”
Kelly rubbed her hands up and down her arms as if she were cold. “I think I should keep showing you around.” She walked out of the room as Dex came around to me and held out the ball.
“Touch it,” he said.
I grimaced, pushing his arm away. “No. That’s a dead kid’s toy.”
“But you’re so good with balls.”
“Shut up.”
He put the ball on top of the first bed and we hurried after the two of them. Kelly led us back the way we came and down toward the classrooms. Almost all the doors were closed so we just read the signs on them as we walked past. Mrs. Collins. Mrs. Keats. Mr. Murphy. Ms. Ross. There were about fifteen rooms in total and the last ones we’d come across as we went further into the west wing were all the artistic electives.
“We’re an arts school,” Kelly explained, “but we still believe in having a proper, well-rounded education. Most of the teachers here just teach the basics for each grade—math, English, science, history. But two hours of every day the kids get to take art classes, and that’s where the teaching becomes more specialized. Like Brenna, here.”
We came to a stop outside an open door and peered inside. The room was covered in paintings with paint splattered stools and stacks of easels in the corner. At a large desk was a woman asleep, dark brown hair pooled all around her.
Kelly cleared her throat. “Like Brenna here,” she said a bit louder, but even then her voice was quiet as a mouse.
“Brenna!” Dex yelled.
I smacked him on the chest as the woman jumped up from her sleep, her hair all in her face. “What? What?”
“You’re a jerk,” I told him.
He shrugged. “Got the job done, didn’t I? Don’t say I’m not a man of results.”
Kelly waved at Brenna who was trying to clear her messy desk and appear like someone who hadn’t just fallen asleep on the job. “Hey, Brenna, sorry to wake you. The ghost hunters are here.”
Brenna got out of her chair and smiled at us. “Hi,” she said exuberantly. For some reason I was expecting Brenna to look like a meek and put-upon person but that wasn’t the case. She was young-looking, maybe just a few years older than me, with wavy brown hair and an apple-cheeked glow about her. “I’m Brenna McIntosh.”
“I’ll leave you guys with her now,” Kelly said politely before walking off down the hall like a wisp of a person.
“Can I tell you how happy I am to meet you?” Brenna said as she came around the desk. Dressed in boot-cut jeans and a black tunic, she seemed even more personable. She stopped in front of me and pulled me into a hug. “Sorry, I’m a hugger,” she said to my back while I was brought forward into a cloud of strawberry perfume.
“That’s okay,” I told her, getting my bearings as soon as she released me. “I guess you watch the show?” >
“All the time,” she said proudly. She looked over at Dex. “And you, I loved you in the Sasquatch episode, well at least the parts of it that you were allowed to air. But poor Twatwaffle.”
He stuck out his lower lip in mock sympathy then sighed. “Yes. Thank god all good llamas go to heaven.”
She didn’t seem to catch on—or she didn’t mind—his sarcasm because she went onto Rebecca next. “And you must be the new manager. You’re doing a great job.”
I could have sworn Rebecca blushed at that. “Thank you.”
“Brenna,” Dex began, “do you mind if we talk to you on camera? Is this a good time?”
“No problem,” she said. “I’ve been preparing for this. It’s too bad I fell asleep, I probably ruined my Hollywood face.” She burst into a flurry of giggles.
“You look great,” I reassured her as Dex touched my shoulder and let me know he was running out to the car.
“So are you sure you’re okay with us filming right here today?” Rebecca prodded, ever mindful of a lawsuit. When Brenna nodded she went on, “Even with the kids and everything?”
“Oh,” she said, “well I guess you shouldn’t really film the kids. I mean, interview them and such. I think we would need permission for that. On camera, of course. Off camera I think it’s fine.”
“But doesn’t the school care if the school—or their kids—are being featured in a ghost hunting show? That’s bound to scare a lot of the parents, isn’t it?” I asked. I know I’d be concerned.
She leaned forward, her hair swinging in her face. “Davenport doesn’t care. She’s been wanting to build a brand new school since the other one burnt down. As far as she’s concerned, she doesn’t care if parents get scared. It will only make them want a better school, the one she thinks we deserve.”
“And what do you think?” Rebecca asked.
Brenna’s eyes darted around the room. “I’d have to agree. I need this job though and I can’t chance getting hired elsewhere. If we could move, I would be a lot happier.”
At least it explained why they were so willing to go on camera. Still, with that amount of determination and attention, a part of me wondered if the whole thing wasn’t exaggerated a little. Perhaps the little boy and his bouncing ball were a fake, perhaps we’d already been lied to. Perhaps there were no ghosts, just a faculty who really wanted a new school.
I looked quickly at Rebecca and I could see from the skeptical raise to her forehead that she was thinking the same thing. It was better to start treating this episode with a side of caution.
It wasn’t long before Dex came trotting back into the room with his camera in hand. His eyes were dancing, his body buzzing with adrenaline. “Get this,” he said, raising his camera up and flipping the viewfinder around for us to see. He pressed play, and as our four heads all converged around the screen, we watched as he filmed the ground, a paper plane lying at his feet. He picked it up and then aimed the camera up to the roof of the building. Within seconds, another paper plane came sailing down, barely visible against the foggy sky before it drifted lazily on an air current.
“There were only two planes,” he said, placing the camera down and pulling one of the paper planes out of his pocket, rubbing it between his fingers. “But still, I think that’s got to count for something.” He looked at Brenna. “Does anyone have access to the roof?”
She didn’t look shocked. “Just the custodian. I can get the keys. It’s locked for safety reasons.”
“So then it had to be a ghost,” he said.
“Unless the custodian’s taken up a new hobby,” Rebecca said, though I knew what she was thinking. Davenport herself or even Kelly could be up on the roof, tossing paper planes over the side, knowing they’d provide a pretty good show. “Brenna was just telling us that Ms. Davenport doesn’t mind if the school is featured on the show because they’re hoping the parents will want to move their kids into a newer school.” She stared hard at Dex, trying to pass on the message without saying anything more.
“Oh,” he said. He looked at Brenna. “Tell me, sweetcheeks, you wouldn’t happen to be pulling our leg about the whole ghost shit in order to get a new school, now would ya?” Leave it to Dex to be so direct. I knew for a fact that his bullshitting tolerance was pretty damn low.
Brenna’s mouth turned down, her eyes becoming rounder. “No. No, not at all. This is all real. And it’s only happening to me. No one else. They all feel it, they all believe me, but they don’t see it like I do. In fact, it’s gotten worse since I got here, at least that’s what some of the a*sholes here say, like it’s my f*cking—sorry—my damn, fault. But I’m still the only one who gets haunted here. Me and a few students.”
“Jody,” Dex said slowly.
She nodded fervently. “Yes, Jody. They love her. Kyle too.” She stopped and looked at me. “You have to believe me, this is happening. I want to leave. I want to go to the new school. And if you guys can’t make the haunting stop, then at least the show will push the parents to make the move happen.”
“You do realize that we aren’t ghost whisperers,” Dex said sternly. “Perry and I, we just see them. Our job isn’t to fix anything, it’s just to record it, report it.”
“Like batshit journalists,” I filled in. “Hacks. But we don’t banish anyone or anything.”
Except for that one time, I thought back to The Benson. I had to say that felt pretty good.
“I know that,” she said, and for once her expression wasn’t so jovial. “I’m just getting tired of this. And desperate. Please, you have to believe me.”
Rebecca walked over to a chair and pulled it out. “Here, love. Why don’t you sit down and we’ll start getting to the bottom of this.”
Brenna smiled gratefully and took a seat. “Okay. We have about an hour until my next class, but I should be able to wrap it up by then. If I start wasting footage, just let me know.”
Dex quickly got the camera set up and I pulled up a chair next to Brenna, feeling like a chump in my hoodie. Rebecca put wireless mics on the two of us and we got started.
I asked Brenna to go back to the beginning, from when she first started at the school. She’d only been hired at the start of the semester. The last teacher quit and no one really knows why. One day she had a nervous breakdown and resigned. According to her student Jody, it was someone called Shawna that made the teacher leave. Brenna said she eventually found out who Shawna was, along with Elliot. Both of them Jody described as her imaginary friends. When teaching first graders, imaginary friends weren’t normal but they weren’t that uncommon, either.
“At first,” she said, “the only odd things that happened were just Jody talking about Elliot and Shawna as if they were real people. Often children with imaginary friends still know that they are imaginary. But Jody acted like they were as real as her other classmates. Only…” she trailed off, her brow furrowing. “Only Shawna wasn’t someone that Jody liked…Jody feared her. That was another thing I found odd – I’d never heard of an imaginary enemy before.”
“Not unless the kid is batshit crazy,” Dex commented. I shot him a dirty look to which he shrugged.
She nodded. “I know. But Jody seemed well-rounded. And then when her classmate Kyle started talking about Elliot, I knew something was happening. They weren’t messing with me, either. I’m pretty quick to see through children’s games.” She paused to look us each in the eye, playing with the timing of the story like a good teacher would do. “Then, I saw Elliot for myself.”
I sucked in my breath as she continued.
“It was back in February, a month after I started. A huge snowstorm had set in on the coast, which was unusual. We get a lot of bad storms here throughout the year, but snow was rare. And so the power went out at the school and the kids were all sent home around noon before the snow really got going. We have a generator here but Davenport was worried about the roads becoming impassible.”
I’d been given a ride in by my boyfriend because his car was the only one with four-wheel drive and so I was waiting for him to pick me up, just hanging out in the teacher’s lounge with a few other staff and watching the storm blow in. When the last staff member left, my boyfriend called to tell me he was about fifteen minutes away. I went back to my classroom to make sure everything was okay and that the lights wouldn’t come blazing on when the power returned. At that time, my classroom felt safe to me. The rest of the building, with the wind shutting open doors and howling through the halls, made my hair stand right up.”
Finally, when I thought I should be waiting outside, I left the classroom and walked back down the hall. Suddenly the air turned as cold as ice, as if the storm itself had reached inside, and I heard a kick and the sound of a ball bouncing after me. I turned around to see an orange ball rolling down the hall. And, further down from that, was the silhouette of a young boy, backlit from the windows of the classrooms and the gauzy snowstorm outside. I asked who the boy was and he quickly turned around, as if spooked himself, and ran off down the hall until he disappeared.”
“That was all fine,” she said, catching her breath. “I was scared in a way but I wasn’t creeped out. It was weird. It was interesting. I’ve always had weird things like this, unexplained things, happen to me before so it wasn’t like it threw me for a loop. I just thought, oh, so that boy must have died here from TB. I was actually sad. Then the next day, before I even had a chance to ask Jody about it, she came up to me and said that Elliot was happy that I saw him. He hoped I would play next time.”
A shiver went down my spine. I remembered my dream, the bouncing ball, the girl asking if I would play.
“Did you?” Dex asked.
She smiled sheepishly. “Not really. Next time it happened—it was also when everyone had left one night—I tried kicking the ball back but he wasn’t too interested. He laughed that time, which I took as a good sign.” She exhaled and looked down at the floor. “For a few weeks that was the extent of it. To me, the only thing haunting this place was Elliot, and he was harmless. That was until Jody started…getting sick. Well, acting sick.”
“Which was it?” I asked. “Was she actually sick?”
She shook her head. “It’s hard to say. She started exhibiting all the symptoms that TB patients used to but when it came time to examine her, nothing was wrong. She’d act like she couldn’t breathe, yet Kelly would listen to her chest and say she was fine. She was kept home for a few days and when she finally came back…she wasn’t the same.”
I leaned forward in my seat, a chill on my limbs. “What do you mean, wasn’t the same?”
Brenna frowned. “I don’t know. She just…changed. When she came back, she was no longer the smiling, happy Jody. She was tired-looking, depressed. Scared. That’s really what it was, she was scared. She started painting things, beautiful images that were so…disturbing.” She got up, her chair pushed back with a loud groan, and went over to her desk drawer. She came back to us holding a stack of thick paper.
“It started with this one,” she said, holding out the first picture. It was of the school, from the outside. There was no doubt that Jody excelled at watercolors. The painting was fairly accurate and there was even some realistic shading.
“Nice work,” Dex said.
Brenna pointed at one of the upper windows. At first glance I thought Jody tried to paint in a window glare but I could see it was the face of a little girl, complete with a bow in her hair.
“Who’s that?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. I didn’t know how accurate the painting was, but it looked like the girl I saw in my dream.
“Jody said that was Shawna,” Brenna explained. “Which was fine. But then she said Shawna was stuck on the fourth floor because of the bad thing. She smiled after she said that, too, like she was happy about it. I asked about the bad thing but she shrugged and ran off, like she didn’t care anymore.”
She handed me the next piece of paper. “This is what she drew the next time.”
It was the school again, almost the exact same picture, only this time a few red lines were coming out of the fourth floor windows. The face of Shawna was now on the third floor. Though it was still just a kid’s painting, Shawna’s eyes were cold, hard dots.
“Plumbing problem?” Dex asked from behind the camera.
Brenna didn’t smile. “No. Jody said that was the blood of all the dead children. She said it came from the room with the big lights. Now, Jody has never been upstairs to the fourth floor—none of the students here have—so I don’t know how she knew that there’s an autopsy room there, complete with big lights and a table where they put the bodies.”
“Does the same table have a gutter around the edges to catch the blood from the, uh, deceased?”
She nodded. “You’ve done some reading.”
He shrugged. “Dikipedia.”
Finally she smiled. “What else? But you’re right. They used to bleed out the bodies and the blood would collect around them. Super disgusting.”
“I’m guessing she didn’t know about that,” I ventured.
“No. I thought maybe she heard it from someone so I asked her. She said she’s been there, in her dreams, and that Shawna was making her go up there. Then she said that Shawna was on the third floor now because the bad thing wanted to be closer to her.” She took in a shaky breath and looked at me. “And closer to me.” >
“What does the bad thing look like?” I asked. “I mean, what exactly is it?”
“You can see here,” she said, holding out the third piece of paper. We all leaned in to get a closer look. It was nearly the same picture as before, only now Shawna was on the second floor and there was another face the next window down from her. This face was completely black and oblong, with long black hair and two white dots for eyes.
“That,” she said, tapping beneath the face, “is the bad thing. And when I asked Jody if it was still on the second floor, she said it was already here. She said it was standing behind me.”
I gulped loudly, nerves prickling down my back. “Did you look?” I whispered, totally terrified and totally enthralled.
She shook her head and gave us an embarrassed smile. “I couldn’t. I was too afraid. I could almost feel it there. Even the rest of the students in the room grew quiet, like they could sense something else in the room, something…not of this world. I told Jody I’d look some other time and she said it would be back.”
“And was it?” asked Dex.
Brenna looked down at the floor. She took in a deep breath and opened her mouth to talk.
Before she could say anything, there was a loud rap at the door. We all jumped in our seats at the noise, Dex swearing under his breath. I thought my heart was trying to make a run for it.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Ms. Davenport said, standing stiffly in the doorway and eyeing us with mild interest. “Brenna, can I have a word with you?”
She shot us an apologetic look. “Yes, of course. My class will start soon. Mind if we pick up with this tomorrow?”
“Not at all,” Rebecca said. We got out of our chairs and gathered in the hallway while Davenport stepped into the room, one fleshy hand on the door knob.
She paused there. “If you want, you can wait for me in my office. Or start making yourselves at home. You are staying here, aren’t you?”
My partners both looked at me. It was my decision, my call—Perry was the precious one.
“Sure,” I said, trying to sound breezy about it. “We can stay here. Will be a lot easier.”
“You sure?” Dex asked, stepping forward and putting his hand on my shoulder. “We can stay in the motel, no big deal.”
“I’m fine,” I said, harder this time. “Really.”
Dex didn’t seem too satisfied with that answer, watching me closely to see if I was lying. I stared right back at him. Obviously staying in a haunted sanatorium with the bad thing was asking for trouble, but trouble was exactly what we needed for the show. I’d been down this road a hundred times; it felt like it anyway, and this wasn’t any different. In St. Augustine, we stayed in a haunted B&B; in Eureka, we camped out in the library. Sure, I had those weird Pippa dreams that put me off the idea a bit, but Dex didn’t know about those dreams. I had to wonder if he was the one who was scared then.
“Well, good,” Rebecca said with a loud clap of her hands, trying to diffuse the strange tension. “Let’s take over this joint.”
We headed back outside to the Highlander and started unloading our gear. I couldn’t help but glance up at the top floors again, as if expecting to see a little girl’s face or rivers of blood streaming from the windows.
There was nothing there, just the glare from the windows, reflecting slices of the foggy sky.
And still, I knew something was there.
Watching me.
And waiting.