The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall
By: Katie Alender
I got the feeling it kind of was, but he did his best to be polite. “I was coming across the property over to the west of the house—through the graveyard—and I fell,” he explained. “Ended up underwater somehow. Don’t remember much after that.”
My granddad’s twin brother got sucked into a ditch and drowned, the paramedic had said.
So that had been Theo.
“There’s a graveyard?” I asked.
Theo pointed off to the part of the grounds that would be visible from the day room window. “It’s well populated.”
“So’s the house,” I said.
He gave me a half smile. His still, quiet nature was like soothing balm on an itchy bug bite. I realized that by fraternizing with another ghost, I was breaking the pledge I’d made to myself. But Theo didn’t seem particularly ghostlike. He was just a normal person. And the opportunity to talk to a normal person was too tempting to pass up.
“I’m really the first one who’s come out here?” I asked. “Then who do you talk to?”
“I don’t,” he said. “Sometimes I see them through the windows, but we never meet.”
“Could you go inside the house?”
“I wouldn’t, even if I could.” He shot me a sharp look. “I have no interest in what lies there.”
“What?” I asked. “What lies in the house?”
“Many things,” he said. “None of them good.”
Even with my limited experience, that sounded like a fair description.
I glanced over at the car. While Theo and I had been making our introductions, Janie had turned to look out the window. The sight of her grief-stained face was like a thousand tiny pickaxes chopping at my heart. Feeling drained, I sat down on the grass with my chin on my knees.
Theo eased himself to the ground next to me. “You’re not from around here?”
“No,” I said. “We live in Georgia. What about you?”
“Born in Philly,” he said. “But since I started with the Geological Survey, I rent a place in Faust, about ten miles from here … I mean, I did rent a place.” He shook his head. I wondered if ghosts ever got used to using the past tense. “I guess I’d be surprised if it even exists anymore.”
“When were you born?” I asked him.
“Nineteen twenty-one,” he said, which sounded crazy to me. So, so far away. “Died in nineteen forty.”
I thought back to history class, to what I knew of that time period. “So right before the war,” I said.
His brow furrowed. “There was a war going on in Europe when I died. Did we get into that?”
“In a big way.” I leaned back on my hands. “And there have been a lot more wars since then.”
“Too bad.” Theo hesitated, then leaned back, too. “The living don’t know what they have. They waste it. I know I did.”
His words hit a little too close to home. I glanced at the car again. It still hadn’t moved. If only I could get in there with them, if I could stay with them and be part of their lives. It might somehow make up for the things I said before I died—things that were too painful and horrid for me even to remember.
“Did you ever get to see your family … after?” I asked Theo.
“After I died? My twin brother came,” he said. “Once. But it didn’t go well. And he never came back. Dead now, I suppose.”
“Didn’t go well?” I asked.
“Long story.” He might as well have said, The end.
After that, silence grew like a wall between us. So I got up, brushed off my hands—out of pure habit, because they didn’t have a speck of dirt on them—and studied the side of the car, trying to reason out what could be the trick. It should work. A car was an object, not a barrier.
I turned to Theo. “Can you touch things? Make them move?”
In answer, he ran his hand over the grass, flattening it out. Because of the time slip, it didn’t spring right back up—it would rise gradually over the next several minutes, a fraction of a millimeter at a time.
“Teach me how to do it,” I said. Something about Theo made me feel more at ease than I had with Eliza or Florence. His spirit was calm and down-to-earth. I actually enjoyed being around him, I realized. If I weren’t leaving, maybe we could have been friends. “Teach me how to interact with things, so I can get in the car and go home.”
Up to that point, Theo’s face had been haltingly, politely curious, but when I stated my intention flat out, his features hardened. He broke our eye contact and reached over to set the flattened grass upright again.
I’d said something wrong.
“Theo?” I asked.
“No,” he said, abruptly standing up. “I can’t.”
I was too shocked to reply.
He looked at me with a mixture of pity and impatience. “It’s not going to work, Delia. Even if you could get in the car—which you aren’t powerful enough to do, not yet—you can’t leave.”
“But—” I cut myself off, taken aback by the expression on his face. He looked almost offended.
“If we could leave,” he said, “do you think any one of us would still be here?”