The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall
By: Katie Alender
In the sticky silence that followed, we realized that Janie had taken my father’s instructions seriously and left the apartment altogether. Dad talked Mom out of going to look for her, but I was on edge, picturing the words on the floor, the light dancing on the walls, and my oblivious little sister in the middle of it all.
A few minutes later, she showed up, dusty but unharmed. The keys clanked as she dropped them on the table. On her face was a wide-eyed expression I couldn’t decipher. She’d always been delicate, like a ballerina. Now I had the urge to stand in front of her like some sort of bodyguard.
I went over to her. “Did anything happen?”
“Yeah,” she said, her voice hushed.
“What?” I asked.
She glanced around. “Come closer,” she said. “I’ll whisper it.”
I leaned toward her, my heart pounding, as she stood on her tiptoes and raised her mouth to my ear.
“It was …” Her voice trailed off.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t be afraid to tell me.”
“It was … BOO!” she shouted directly into my eardrum, deafening me. Then she (wisely) rushed away as I stood frozen with rage. Her gleeful laughter bounced off the walls.
I couldn’t believe I’d been worried about her.
“You are such a jerk,” I hissed.
“At least I’m not a scaredy-cat!” She danced farther away. “You’re just mad because I’m braver than you.”
Then she (very wisely) ducked out of my reach and ran for the kitchen, just as Mom stuck her head out and said, “Time to eat. Has anyone seen that tray that was in here before?”
After our tense dinner of gas-station gourmet, I stood up. “So where are we sleeping?”
“We can put the air mattresses over in the corner by the TV, I guess,” Mom said.
“No, not there!” Janie said. “I found someplace better!”
She was wiggling like a delighted puppy.
“Upstairs,” she said. “I found a place called Ward. It has bedrooms. And real beds!”
I thought of the door in the day room marked WARD—the one I’d been too afraid to go through. Maybe Janie was actually braver than me (but that didn’t make her any less of a jerk).
“If there are beds up there, they’re a hundred years old,” I said. “They’re probably full of maggots and bedbugs.”
“No,” she protested. “I sat on one. It was nice.”
Mom and Dad exchanged a dubious look.
“You can’t seriously be thinking of letting her sleep up there,” I said.
“Oh, Janie, I don’t know,” Mom said to my sister. “If Delia would go, then maybe … but the rooms must be so … old. And dusty.”
Not Delia doesn’t like it up there. Just a general distaste for dust and oldness.
“We brought clean sheets,” Janie said. Then her eyes cut over to me, and in them I saw expectant curiosity, like she was waiting for my reaction.
Thirty minutes earlier she’d been scared enough to want to run away with me. Now she wanted to spend the night in some weird part of the house. This was just a bratty dare, designed to get a rise out of me, and I refused to give her the satisfaction. What difference did it make? I wasn’t planning to sleep there, anyway.
So I shrugged. “I’m beyond caring at this point.”
Maybe we’d get lucky and the ghost would eat my sister.
*
The ward hall, which I’d expected to be starkly institutional, with concrete and metal and straitjackets, appeared to be a perfectly normal hallway—the kind you might find at a posh boarding school. There was a communal bathroom and six individual patient rooms, which Janie had actually been right about—they seemed pretty nice, furnished with matching dark wood nightstands, dressers, and vanity tables. The closest one to the bathroom—Room 1—had a pastel-pink bedspread and a dresser with a missing drawer.
“I’ll take this one.” The words left my mouth before I knew they were coming.
“I thought you hated pink,” Dad said, moving past me with my suitcase.
That was true. And the broken dresser reminded me of a sinister, toothless smile.
“I like the view,” I said. “Plus, it’s as far from Janie as I can get.”
And as close to the exit.
“I heard you!” Janie shouted from the room she’d chosen—Room 6, the one at the very end of the hall.
After Mom and Dad headed back downstairs, I loaded up my messenger bag with everything I’d need to hit the road. It might be a long, rainy walk to town, and a suitcase would just slow me down. I wished I’d thought to bring an umbrella.
Down the hall, Janie was singing softly to herself.