The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall

 

I turned around. A girl about my age stood a few feet away, wearing a pair of long, silky ivory pants and a matching tunic top. Her black hair was cut in a sleek bob that barely grazed her chin. She had a striking look—a thin uniformity to her eyebrows, a distinctive pink glow on the apples of her cheeks.

 

Around each of her wrists was a thin leather strap with a pair of jingle bells attached to it.

 

She folded her arms, sending a fresh peal of ringing through the air while she grimly surveyed the room. Then she stepped closer to the window and peeked out. Seeing the body below, she bit her lower lip and glanced at me.

 

“I see we both died in our pajamas.” Her voice was crisp, with a lilting British accent. Her large brown eyes were keenly intelligent as they flicked from my booted feet to my face. “I tried to get you to leave. Guess I didn’t try hard enough.”

 

I didn’t answer. I was mesmerized by the light coming off her alabaster skin, and the way her body seemed to flicker slightly … as if she was constantly having to catch herself to stop from fading away.

 

“Eliza Duncombe,” she said, stepping toward me with her hand extended. “Welcome to Hysteria Hall.”

 

When I didn’t reach out and shake her hand, she smoothly drew it back and gave me a cool smile. “Just a little joke we have among ourselves here. Obviously, it’s quite a rude nickname for the place. What year is it now? Is it the nineteen eighties yet? The last time I asked someone, it was nineteen forty-three. It could be the eighties by now, right? I died in twenty-two. Very difficult to keep it all straight, you know. Well, you wouldn’t know, would you?”

 

I took a step back.

 

Now she considered me as if I might be a little slow. “Aren’t you going to talk to me?”

 

No. I was not, in fact, going to talk to her.

 

What I was going to do was scream.

 

I screamed until Eliza Duncombe turned away and vanished into thin air. I screamed until the body on the ground became a blur. I screamed until I collapsed in on myself.

 

Until the whole universe collapsed around me.

 

*

 

At some point, I stopped screaming and fell to vacantly staring around the room. The ceiling looked like a normal ceiling. The walls looked like normal walls.

 

I can’t be dead. This is only a dream.

 

But there was nothing dreamlike about the flurry of activity that soon took over my room. Police officers and paramedics crawled all over the place. My mother’s sobs carried in from the hallway. A woman in a suit stood at the open window, taking pictures of the body.

 

Yes, the body. It was no longer me—my body—but just a thing, separate from me.

 

Of course the fact that there was a dead body on the ground, one that looked exactly like me, was intensely, soul-shakingly disturbing. But that body wasn’t mine anymore. I didn’t feel the urge to link back up with the pitiful corpse lying on the ground any more than you would throw yourself onto an old sofa you’ve hauled out to the curb.

 

I wasn’t ready to let go of my life—at that point I hadn’t even contemplated the remotest possibility of doing so—but my body was a different story. I could watch the guys in the COUNTY CORONER shirts load it onto a stretcher without breaking down.

 

My parents, however, could not. Mom gripped her hair in her fists, twisting and pulling as if she were trying to scalp herself. Dad’s chest rose and sank so quickly that one of the paramedics finally told him to sit down and take deep breaths or he was going to pass out.

 

Seeing their reactions, a very un-dreamlike stab of pain pierced right through the center of my chest. So I turned away and watched the body below being loaded into a van. Then I followed a pair of detectives as they made their way downstairs, pretending as best I could that I was just another onlooker, a member of the team.

 

But as I moved through the house, it began to sink in that things were capital-D Different now.

 

Walking, for instance—I could walk on the floor, no problem. It felt solid under my feet, just like it always had. But going down the hallway, I could actually feel the air go through me. It was almost like walking in the rain and feeling the water against your skin, except I felt it on the inside of my skin, too.

 

As I wove between all the people gathered in the lobby, the shock began to set in. I caught sight of Janie hunched on the couch, looking impossibly frail and thin, wrapped tightly in the arms of a female police officer. The woman spoke quietly into my sister’s ear, but Janie didn’t seem to hear her. Her face was red and puffy, her eyes glazed. I’d never realized how much life had been in my sister’s face until it was replaced by this dull, depthless sorrow.

 

I drifted by a group of paramedics talking about how “Hysteria Hall” gave them the creeps.