The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall
By: Katie Alender
“You kept hoping someone from your family would come back for you?” I asked. “Really? Is that actually what you’ve been telling yourself all this time? Because I have news for you. They were never going to come, Eliza. You killed children. And you should have been hanged for it, but your father pulled some strings—”
“No,” she said, her voice dull. “I wouldn’t have hanged. They’d changed over to the electric chair by then.”
I didn’t reply.
“How do you know all this?” she asked. “What did you find?”
“There were newspaper articles in your file,” I said. “After your father arranged for you to be committed here, he and the rest of your family went back to England. That’s why they never came to visit, in case no one ever told you. They weren’t even in this country.”
“Ah,” she said faintly, biting her lip and nodding. “No, I didn’t know that. No one ever told me.”
“You lied to me, Eliza. You’re a murderer … You’re as bad as Maria.”
Eliza’s face seemed to crumple, and her mouth opened. She took a gasping breath in, and it came out as a sob. “No—worse than Maria,” she said. “She only killed adults. I killed innocent children.”
Disturbing, disturbing, disturbing. I didn’t need to hear this.
“But it was an accident,” Eliza said. “You have to believe me.”
“You ‘accidentally’ set their bedroom on fire?” I asked.
“They weren’t supposed to be sleeping in there!” she cried. “They always, always slept in the night nursery with Nanny. I only needed a small distraction so I could sneak out of the house to meet Arthur. But they—”
“Stop,” I said. “Please, honestly, just stop. It makes me sick to think about it.”
“How do you think it makes me feel?” She wept uncontrollably, from someplace deep inside herself. The way you might cry if—just for instance—you’ve held a horrible secret inside for almost a hundred years and it was suddenly laid out before you.
“Stay away from me,” I said. “And my family. Okay?”
“You don’t … you won’t … are you going to tell Florence what I’ve done?” Eliza sobbed.
I felt a mixture of pity and frustration, and turned back to look at her. “No,” I said. “If you want to go on lying to your best friend, that’s your business. But you’re done lying to me.”
Then I walked away.
*
Janie was in the day room, sitting at the piano, tapping out a slow melody of flat, tired notes.
“Penitence,” I said, standing over her table. “I know you’re here.”
But she didn’t appear.
“And I know who you are,” I said.
The notes from the piano slowed slightly, and I turned to check on my sister. She seemed fine, though, and when I turned back, Penitence was sitting at the table.
“You were the wardress here?” I asked.
She didn’t look up from her work. “I don’t talk about my life. Or my death.”
“Your father built this place, didn’t he?”
Her lips flattened.
“When did he die?”
She shook her head. “No one knows. He went out one night and never came back.”
“But you must know if his spirit is here. Is he the one who killed me?”
“His spirit?” Her eyes went wide. “It couldn’t be.”
“Why not?” I asked. “He wanted to control people, didn’t he? Maybe he’s controlling all of us.”
She looked up at me through miserable eyes. “What’s here,” she said, “what’s in the house … is bigger than my father. And he was an evil man, but what’s here is more than evil. What’s here is …”
A sound caught my ear. Or, more precisely, a lack of sound.
Janie had stopped playing the piano.
“It’s hungry,” Penitence said. And then she vanished.
I looked at Janie as she closed the piano and ran her finger along the top, collecting a big pile of dust and then closing her eyes and blowing it away, as if she were making a wish. After a moment, she opened her eyes, and, staring out the window at the hillside, began to hum.
I knew every note of the song. Every single note. It was “Beautiful Dreamer.”
Then she started to sing, her soprano voice filling the room. “Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me …”
Something was wrong.
She walked toward the window, still singing, her eyes focused on some spot in the distance.
Something was terribly wrong.
When she reached the window, her eyes never wavered from the view, but her fingers began to claw at the metal grate that covered the glass.
“Janie!” I gasped.
Her voice descended to a rasp. “Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee …”
Then a movement above her caught my eye. A faint, swirling black fog had begun to seep out of the seam where the ceiling and wall met.
Oh no.
“Janie!” I said again, rushing to my sister’s side. I tried to shove her, to wake her up somehow, but my hands went right through her body.
Why now? How could I fail now?
I could do this. I knew I could. I had to.
I kept pawing at her, trying to grab her attention … and I kept failing.