The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall

 

I slumped back against the wall, my energy almost totally gone. Being tired as a ghost was different from being tired as a person—it almost felt like I was beginning to fade away, to lose parts of myself. My body seemed somehow more translucent, and my thoughts jumped around. I couldn’t focus.

 

I need to rest.

 

I walked through the day room, noticing as I did that a woman about my mom’s age now occupied one of the benches. She was wearing a flimsy cotton nightgown, carefully counting her own fingers. I tried to get past without attracting her notice, but she looked up as I passed by. Her eyes were empty and hopeless, her expression blank. She didn’t seem angry, or sad, or even confused. She was just … there.

 

I averted my eyes, like you’re supposed to do around an aggressive dog. But it probably wasn’t necessary. The next time I dared peek at her, she’d gone back to counting.

 

Then something caught my attention …

 

Music. A simple melody so sweet and soothing that it might as well have been the smell of freshly baked cookies.

 

It was coming from behind the other door—NO UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE.

 

I went through it and slipped down a long hallway. As I passed each doorway, I only paused to peer inside—I didn’t want to stop. I had to find the source of the music.

 

This was the part of the building where the patients had been treated—doors labeled EXAM, HOLDING, and THERAPY. The exam rooms each held a hospital-style bed with straps just like the ones in the bedrooms. But there were also counters and cabinets still stocked with antiquated medical supplies.

 

The holding room was a full-on padded room, where you stash people who are so crazy you’re afraid they’ll bash their own brains out against a regular wall. Every visible surface was covered in rough-woven fabric—canvas, maybe—tattered and rotten with age.

 

The therapy room was closed, as were a few unlabeled doors on either side of the hall past it. Which was fine with me. I wasn’t exploring—I was chasing that song.

 

The music grew louder as I followed it down to the last door on the left: PROCESSING. As soon as I went through the wall, the song cut out discordantly, leaving me standing in a room that was quiet and cold and filled me with prickly revulsion.

 

Shelves lined one wall, holding a Tetris-like arrangement of antique suitcases. On the other side of the room was a cabinet whose worn doors gaped open, revealing stacks of folded cotton garments. A few had fallen to the floor, and despite their shapelessness I could tell that they were the same as the nightgowns some of the ghosts were wearing.

 

In the far corner was a curtain on a metal frame that reached about neck-high. A new patient would be sent behind it to take off her old clothes and put on one of the cotton nightgowns, at which point her old things would be packed away and set on the shelf until the day she claimed her suitcase and left …

 

Or the day she didn’t.

 

Staring at the squared-off leather and canvas bags, I wondered which ones might have belonged to Eliza and Florence and Maria. Or the other ghosts I’d caught glimpses of in my time there.

 

A sick feeling rose in my stomach again, and I wandered over to the small window in the corner in hopes of quelling the trapped, boxed-in sensation that had come over me. Squares of pale winter light formed a grid on the walls. I rested my forehead against the glass and looked out over the snowy landscape.

 

Off in the distance, a figure moved across the snow, casting no trace of shadow on the white ground.

 

Theo.

 

I thought for a second about going down to talk to him, but what if he didn’t want anything to do with me? He must have seen what I did to Nic. What would he think of me? The same thing Eliza did, probably—that I was immature, out of control. I was afraid he would look up and see me watching him, so I started to back away from the window. But as I did, I tripped over something.

 

I was so captivated by the cascade of delicate musical notes that spilled into the air that I forgot my inability to interact with the physical world. I’d done it when I was angry, but that was different. That came from some dark force inside me—a force I couldn’t control and didn’t intend to release again.

 

This had been accidental. I told myself it was a fluke. But when I bent down, I was able to pick up the object I’d tripped over: a tiny silver music box, with a cylindrical barrel and a miniscule handle. When I turned the handle, little nubs on the barrel pinged against a row of thin metal strips and softly played a few musical notes.

 

It was such a novelty to hold something in my hands that I turned it over and over, enjoying its weight and texture, the cold hardness of the metal.

 

Then I started slowly turning the handle.

 

The song began as one note … then another … slowly, slowly, they rang through the quiet room, and only once I started turning the handle more quickly did I start to comprehend what I was hearing.