The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall

 

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me.

 

Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee.

 

The notes were so simple and lovely. And it was so comforting to have something, at last, to do—to actually do with my hands, with my fingers, with my time.

 

I sat on a little wooden chair by the window, leaning forward to look over the grounds again, my fingers still turning the tiny crank.

 

Theo was gone. Off to wherever he went, to do whatever he spent his days and months and years doing.

 

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me.

 

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me.

 

The gray sky began to glow with moonlight reflected off the snowy earth.

 

And I went on turning the handle of the little music box.

 

The snowdrifts melted away, revealing dead, brown grass and puddles of mud. Rainstorms rolled through and coaxed new, green life out of the hillside. A bird searched for twigs for her nest and then worms for her babies, and a raindrop fell, millimeter by millimeter, from the eaves.

 

And still I played the song.

 

 

 

 

 

Wow,” said a voice. A man’s voice.

 

I didn’t turn from the window. But I let the music box rest silently on the windowsill.

 

“Carlos, come check out these suitcases,” the voice said. “Wild.”

 

“Hang on,” said a second voice. “I’m just checking the readings …”

 

I looked over at the entrance to the room, where two men in their late twenties stood studying a complicated-looking handheld meter, the kind with the needle that swings from red to yellow to green.

 

“Clear,” the scruffier one—Carlos—said. “Dude, I’m telling you, this place is clean.”

 

They were both wearing khaki cargo pants and long-sleeved T-shirts. Carlos’s was from some event called Phoenix Conspiracyfest 2013. The other guy’s shirt read I WANT TO BELIEVE. He was clean-shaven with a buzz cut and carried a camera. Over his shoulder was slung a backpack labeled JASON.

 

“Is this the last room?” Carlos asked. “There ought to be stairs out that door.”

 

Jason nodded, then raised the camera to his face and began taking a video of the room. He panned across the suitcases, toward me.

 

I froze, wondering if he would somehow sense my presence. But he didn’t seem to.

 

He finished the pan, holstered the camera, and shrugged. “I agree. Clean.”

 

Carlos looked troubled. “How do we explain the Christmas incident?”

 

“I don’t know,” Jason said. “Those were just dumb high school kids. They probably trashed the place and then made up a story to keep from getting in trouble.”

 

High school kids? Were they talking about Nic and Landon?

 

Did that mean she was alive? Surely they would have said something if she wasn’t.

 

“It’s been two years since then, with no other reports of sightings. The repair guys were here, the insurance guys, the cops … nobody’s seen a thing.” Jason sniffed. “Not to mention our readings show zero paranormal activity.”

 

Wait a second. They were measuring paranormal activity? These guys were ghost hunters.

 

“Let’s send the report to the investors tonight,” Carlos said. “And tell them to put the check in the mail. There are no ghosts here.”

 

… Really, really incompetent ghost hunters.

 

Jason wandered over to the shelf of suitcases and cracked one open. “Why’d they shut this place down, anyway?”

 

“If you read the articles I sent you—”

 

“I didn’t,” Jason said.

 

“It was a private sanitarium,” Carlos said. “The old-fashioned version of what the developer’s looking to do with it now. Designed mostly for short-term rehabilitation. But at some point the state noticed that people weren’t being rehabilitated. They just got worse with time. That was back when they’d lock you up for being a party girl, you know, just to scare you back to good behavior. But the party girls went crazy. They all went crazy. And more than a few of them died under mysterious circumstances.”

 

Jason was holding an old shoe he’d pulled from one of the bags. It was coffee-colored leather, with a sturdy two-inch heel, and it looked stiff and shrunken with age. Suddenly, it seemed to occur to him that an actual person had once worn that shoe—a person who may have met a terrible end in this very building. He shuddered and gently put the shoe back.

 

“This place should be haunted, then,” he said, looking around. His demeanor had changed. He looked uneasy. “Shouldn’t it?”

 

Carlos was making a notation on his phone. “It’s not.”

 

“But maybe we should do one more walkthrough,” Jason said. “Since we’re talking about bringing more troubled kids here. If we missed something—if there were some kind of supernatural presence—it could easily feed off—”