The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall

 

 

“Pardon me, Delia,” she said, with an exaggerated, grotesque air of courtesy. “I was expecting someone else.”

 

I froze, terrified.

 

Then, as if it had been sucked out into a vacuum, the smoke left her body and the blackness disappeared from her eyes. My mother stood at the top of the stairs, looking around in alarmed confusion.

 

“How did I get here?” she asked.

 

“Mom?” I said.

 

But she didn’t answer. She couldn’t see me anymore, of course. Whatever controlled the smoke had the power to bridge the living and dead worlds. When it was inside her, she had been its portal. Now the smoke was gone, and my mother was herself again.

 

I wish I could say that made me feel better.

 

 

 

 

 

I ran back to the day room, where my sister was on her phone, leaving someone a message.

 

“Dad?” I heard her say. “It’s Janie. Listen, Mom and I are at the Piven Institute and there’s something weird going on. I know you’re busy in New York, but we need you—”

 

The door from the stairwell creaked as it opened a few inches.

 

“Jane?” Mom called, her voice faint.

 

Janie hung up without saying good-bye and dropped the phone on the piano bench. Then she walked warily in the direction of the stairwell. “Mom?”

 

When there was no answer, she pushed the door open another couple of inches.

 

My mother was on the floor, holding her head in her hands.

 

“Did you …” Mom’s voice trailed off in confusion. She looked shaky and ill. “I don’t remember. I don’t … I don’t feel very well. I think I might need to lie down. It must be a migraine or something.”

 

“Yeah, you don’t look good,” Janie said. “Let me drive you into town, okay? There’s an urgent-care place.”

 

Mom looked up and squinted, as if the dim stairway was painfully bright. “But you can’t drive.”

 

“Of course I can,” Janie said, doing her best to be cheerful. “I’m just not supposed to. Totally different.”

 

Mom didn’t look up, and Janie went rigid.

 

“Hey,” she said, leaning down. “Let’s just get you into bed for a few minutes.”

 

Mom groaned as she stood up, and then my sister shepherded her back to the ward and into the room where she’d slept the night before. Janie helped Mom lie down on the bed. Then she pulled over the stool and sat down, studying Mom’s face anxiously.

 

I stood in the doorway and sighed. So much for progress.

 

Eliza appeared next to me, holding the wrench I’d left downstairs. “Delia, something’s wrong with your mother,” she said. “I saw her in the main hall, and she was acting terribly odd.”

 

“She got possessed or something,” I said, my voice shaking. “The smoke, it was, like … inside her. She could see me.” I glanced at Mom, who was lying in the bed, her complexion a distinctly grayish hue. “And now she looks terrible.”

 

“I think I know what happened.” Eliza set the wrench down outside the door and went over to the bed, inspecting my mother from a few inches away. “She’s not in danger, but she probably feels awful.”

 

“What was it?”

 

“The house,” Eliza said. “Toying with her. Probably using her to get to your sister.”

 

I was expecting someone else, Mom had said.

 

She’d been expecting Janie—planning to push her down the stairs.

 

Instead, she’d pushed me. And I would have fallen, too, if it hadn’t been for Penitence.

 

Twice now, in a single hour, the house had tried to kill my sister. I was beginning to think there was no way to stop it from getting what it wanted. I thought all we had to do was get them out the door, but even that was beginning to seem impossible.

 

“We need to buy some time,” I said. “How did Cordelia survive here for so long?”

 

“Carefully,” Eliza said. “She used quite a bit of salt.”

 

It was unlikely that my mom and sister wouldn’t notice an invisible hand pouring copious amounts of salt around the house. “What else did she do?” I asked.

 

“I don’t know,” Eliza said. “We weren’t exactly bosom friends.”

 

I stared at my mother’s sallow skin and the exhausted way she drew her breaths—almost in two stages, an inhale interrupted by a stutter.

 

“Well, somebody here was friends with her,” I said, suddenly recalling something I’d read long ago. “She mentioned in her letter that there was someone I could go to for help.”

 

Eliza seemed flummoxed. “I have no idea who that would have been.”

 

“Maybe Florence?” I said.

 

“If it was, she never mentioned it to me,” Eliza said. “And I never saw Cordelia around the lobby or the parlor.”

 

“No, you wouldn’t have,” I said. “She spent most of her time on the third floor.”

 

“Then … that’s where you should look, I suppose,” Eliza said, sounding less than thrilled on my behalf.

 

We both turned to glance at Mom and Janie. My sister leaned forward as my mom struggled to sit.