The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall
By: Katie Alender
“No way,” Carlos said. “Look, dude, we’ve been here for five hours. It smells and it’s giving me a headache, so I’m going back to the hotel. You’re welcome to stay and host a séance. But I’m leaving. This place is clear. There are no ghosts here.”
Were Carlos’s words true? Were my parents going to sell this property to a developer who wanted to put another mental hospital here?
I thought about getting up out of my chair, creating a disturbance, getting their attention somehow. I tried to will Jason to stand his ground.
And then, behind me, I heard one clear note from the music box.
Jason tensed. “What was that?”
But Carlos laughed and ran a hand through his scraggly hair. “Buddy, you’re getting paranoid. Let’s go.”
No.
Wait.
Stay.
But no part of me took action to keep them there. To draw their notice.
The door closed behind them, and I remained in my seat. The music box played a couple of enticingly clear and lovely notes, and in spite of my intentions to do otherwise, I reached over and gently picked it up, holding it in my lap.
I’d been holed up in that room for two years. Was that even possible?
Briefly, I considered going downstairs and finding Eliza or Florence. Telling them about what the ghost hunters had mentioned—that the house would soon have more troubled young adults in its grasp. And while I wasn’t sure exactly what would happen, I knew to my core that it would be bad.
The house holds on to troubled girls, I thought. It doesn’t want to let them go.
The thought hit me with such clarity that I recognized it immediately as a solid truth.
That was why the house—the presence—the dark smoke, whatever it was—had come after me. Killed me. Because I was trying to leave … when I “belonged” here. So what would happen when more troubled teens came?
Disaster, that’s what.
But what was I going to do? I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t save anybody else. I couldn’t even save myself.
Without thinking, I’d begun to turn the crank on the music box again.
Out front, Jason and Carlos were packing up their car to go. Theo stood a few yards away and watched them. Then they started the car and drove straight through him.
Worst ghost hunters ever.
I didn’t move from my chair. The grass in the fields grew strong and tall and green, and the days got longer. The sun’s path widened in the sky, and the stars made arcs over the horizon. I half believed that I wasn’t stuck in a house at all, but on a journey across the ocean, on a huge, creaking ship. And the rippling grass below me was the moon frosting the tips of the indigo waves.
My body, buried somewhere hundreds of miles away, gave itself back to the earth.
My soul began to peel away from my consciousness, until I began to feel that there was nothing left of me.
The music was everything I needed or wanted. It was all.
In this way, lost in my daydreams, bearing witness to the seasons on the hillside, and always, always carrying in my mind the lilting song from the music box, I passed another year and a half as if it were a single mildly interesting day.
*
A car door slammed.
I sat stunned and motionless, looking down at the music box in my hand.
A choice lay in front of me. If I kept turning the crank, I would never need to go and see who had come here. I would never face the uncertainty or heartbreak of being reminded at every turn that I was gone, forgotten. So what if the house wanted more victims? Why was that my business?
The temptation to ignore the living altogether, to let the fog of death rise around me and contain my existence, was real and nearly irresistible. I didn’t have to resist—I could be one of the ghosts who sat in the background, counting her fingers.
I’d be the one on the third floor with the music box.
It would be so simple, just to surrender myself and my thoughts. Let the house have me, let time carry me forward like a river. What difference did it make? Besides, what was the alternative?
Pain and rejection. Sorrow and heartbreak.
How could you know that? You haven’t even tried.
All I’d ever done was mess things up. Massively.
Maybe you were a dumb kid. Maybe you did make stupid, irresponsible choices. But you don’t have to be that person forever.
But the person I decided to be right here, right now—that would be the person I was forever.
I looked out the window. All I could see was a red car, an unfamiliar model that hadn’t existed when I’d died. With a flutter of anxiety, I wondered if it was some hapless troubled kid forced here by her parents. But the grounds were still decrepit, the grass still dead.
A few feet from the car, watching it carefully, was Theo. He glanced up at the house, and he noticed me and waved.
Slowly, I waved back.
And then I stood up and left the music box behind.
I skipped down the stairs two at a time, and the air moving through my body felt warm and inviting. Some distant part of me recalled how it felt to step outside on a summer day and feel the sun kiss my skin.
I made my way to the lobby, where Florence and Eliza stood at the window, looking outside.