Lissy pointed to the GhostConnector. “Voice.”
Dorsey sucked in her breath. She pressed a button, replaying the gurgle.
Kim bent down and grabbed her knees. “Oh, god, I’m so freaked out right now.” But she picked up the camera, anyway, and turned it back on.
Dorsey said, “So then, we press this . . .” She pressed a tiny green button. “And the GC searches a database of vocal patterns to find . . .” She turned a dial.
Kate felt like she might faint. Angie had been like a ride at the fair, spinning and spinning. Lissy stepped closer to her. Her body was ice cold and Kate flinched. “For god’s sake, I told you to bring a jacket, you jerk.”
Kim frowned. “You don’t need to be so mean, Kate.”
“Shut up, Kim. You don’t know—”
Dorsey held up her hand. “Listen.”
The sound from the GhostConnector was muffled, like a voice coming through cloth.
Hurts.
Hurts.
The next thing they heard was the camcorder hitting the ground, Kim’s head smacking the tile next to it.
Lissy fanned Kim with paper she found on the floor. Kate splashed drops of water from a bottle onto Kim’s face. Dorsey tried to piece the camcorder back together.
Kim’s eyes fluttered.
“Hurts,” she said.
They all flinched, even Dorsey. Kim’s eyes were glassy.
“We should go,” Kate whispered. “This has gone far enough.”
“I’m not going,” Dorsey said firmly. “If you guys want to wait out by the car, in the dark, until I’m done, that’s fine. But we have something and I think we can get more. Someone spoke.”
“Probably just your stupid machine,” Kim said haltingly. “Piece of crap somebody uploaded with voices to fool you.”
“Doesn’t explain the chair, though,” Kate said quietly.
“It’s busted,” Dorsey sighed, shoving the camcorder in her backpack. “But we have the GhostConnector and the data is saved and we can use our phones to film. I’m going to keep going. Anyone with me?”
Kate helped Kim up. There was a thin trickle of blood at Kim’s temple and Kate tried to wipe it away. Kim pushed her hand down.
Dorsey shined her flashlight on them. “Agreed?”
They nodded, following her to the door.
Lissy trailed after them. She looked back at the chair and for an instant, she saw a woman in a loose gown, her head lolled to the side, her eyes wide and frightened.
Lissy’s heart jumped. She rubbed her eyes. When she looked again, the woman was gone.
They walked the corridor in silence, their shoes shuffling. Some rooms were filled with beds, the empty metal frames like webby carcasses. Bedpans piled in corners. Lissy found a hairbrush and petted the hairs that hung from it. That was the thing that made her parents send her to the doctor. The hair thing. The girls at school in the bathroom, always brushing their hair, leaving tendrils in the sink, which Lissy wrapped in paper towels and put in her pocket. Sometimes, when she couldn’t help herself, when a girl with particularly pretty hair, soft and silky, was near, she would reach out and gently tug some strands away. She had a sewing kit she kept in her closet and that’s where she made the dolls. Cut out patterned fabric for dresses, built bodies out of cotton balls and twine, buttons and yarn for eyes and mouths. Then she sewed the hair on and that was it. Instant friends with real hair she could pet. It made her mother cry when she found them. She was sorry when her father threw the dolls away.
Kate took the brush from Lissy and threw it down the hall.
Something yowled.
Two eyes gleamed at them. The girls screamed. Dorsey laughed.
A gray, matted cat hissed and ran at them, the teeth it still had bared and sharp. Kim tucked Lissy behind her. Dorsey’s GhostConnecter emitted a soft ping. The cat turned right and disappeared down another long, dark corridor.
Dorsey fiddled with the GhostConnector.
Can’t have it.
Kim frowned. “Can’t have what?”
Dorsey shrugged.
The machine whirred. Hurts.
“Just one more room, okay?” Kate asked. The cat had spooked her, but she had other feelings, too, like something that was not Lissy had been touching her. The air was weird in this part of the asylum, thicker, and when she walked, it felt like moving through spiderwebs, sticky and unsettling. She said this out loud.
Dorsey nodded. “I felt that. The GC was making noises, registering heat. I mean, ghosts are supposed to draw energy from people. Maybe there are . . . more in this part? Moving around us.”
“I cannot believe you aren’t scared,” Kim said. “I feel like I’m going to pee myself.”
“Think about it,” Dorsey said. “People die everywhere. They probably died in the house you live in now, way back when. They’re everywhere. Why wouldn’t they be? We just choose not to listen.”
She looked at the GhostConnector. “It’s going crazy.”
Indeed, the toylike machine was emitting beeps and clicks at a rapid rate. Dorsey held it in front of her, and turned into another room.
Lissy’s hand slipped into Kim’s and Kim let her. She felt sorry for the kid, really. All that messed-up stuff at school and her and Kate’s mom dying. She had no idea what she’d do if her mother died. Her mother meant home-baked cookies, a heating pad when Kim’s periods were awful, Bollywood movies on Friday night. It had always been just the two of them. If she lost her, what then? She hoped her mother would come back to her, maybe say something about where she was and what was happening there. She’d like that.
Lissy’s hand in Kim’s was warm. Kim gave it a squeeze. Kate didn’t need to be so mean to her sister.
Lissy held tighter, her fingers growing hotter. Kim shook her hand free. “Let go, kiddo,” she said. “Too tight.” Her hand was burning up, the skin stinging in an awful way.
But Lissy was across the room, standing in front of a series of shelves with glass jars, and Kim’s hand was empty.
Kim’s heart flailed. She held her hand in front of her face. Blisters bubbled on her palm.
Angie had run so fast and so blindly that when she stumbled, she slid halfway across the floor on her stomach, her body raking broken glass. She had pushed herself up, glass grinding into her palms, and tried to remember which way the front doors were. When she finally found them, she gasped in the cool night air, soft rain falling on her face. She slammed the doors shut.
Dorsey hadn’t locked the car and Angie sat in the driver’s seat, breathing heavily, staring at Bedford. She tried to send a text to her mother, but there was still no service. She tried to calm her breathing, but every sound, even her own body moving, startled her.
Just calm down, she told herself.
She started to cry, great heaving sobs that echoed in the small car.
When she finally looked up, the windows of Bedford were alive with movement.
Angie screamed into her hands and closed her eyes.
When she opened them, the window movement had stopped, but she heard screaming from the building. “Please stop,” she whispered. “Please just stop.”
It was Kim screaming, flinging open the big double doors and running toward the car with her strong sprinter’s legs, her eyes wide. She slipped and fell in the rain.
Angie’s body drained in a cold way. There was something following Kim from the building, a cloud-like wave pouring from the doors that undulated and shuddered.
Angie had always thought ghosts, or whatever spirits were, would be white, but this wasn’t that and there wasn’t just one cloud, it was a series of them, pinkish and long, rippling like the lake’s water.
“Get up,” Angie whispered. “Get the hell up and shut the doors, Kim.”
But Kim couldn’t hear her. She stumbled up and ran for th
e car again, the pink waves swimming around her. She yanked open the passenger-side door and slammed it shut. Her face was caked with mud and blood.
“My hand,” Kim stuttered. “My hand. Burning.”
The blisters were the size of quarters. Some of them had burst, the gooey liquid pouring down Kim’s palm and onto her wrist. Angie grabbed Kim’s backpack, where she always kept creams and bandages for track practice. Kim said, “Gotta get out.”
Angie stared at her. The voice that came from Kim didn’t sound like Kim.
The voice repeated gotta get out, gotta get out in a low growl.
Angie slapped Kim’s face.
“Help me,” Kim whispered, in her own voice now.
Hands shaking, Angie spread cream on the blisters as Kim cried.
The car began to rock, at first gently, and then hard.
Dorsey shook her head. “Two down. Only the brave remain.”
She had a file cabinet drawer open and was reading from a medical record. Lissy and Kate stared at the rows of specimen jars and the objects that floated within.
“ ‘Beatrice S. complained of stomach ailment. Appendix removed, found healthy. Refer organ for further testing. BS deceased, infection of wound.’ ”
Kate looked at a blob in a jar, her flashlight catching the porous pinkness of it. It was perfectly preserved, floating in a netherworld.
Dorsey made a strange sound. “Oh, wow. Listen to this: ‘Annabelle Carpenter, seventeen, received April twenty-second, 1921. Extreme mania, refuses nourishment. Mania resulted from broken engagement and refusal to return ring. Patient’—”
Dorsey stopped. Kate looked over at her.
Dorsey’s face was pale and she was blinking fast. The GhostConnector began to beep, a soft sound trickling from it.
Kate said, “What?”
Dorsey cleared her throat. “ ‘Patient secured medical shearing device and removed hand at wrist during unmonitored activity. Hand located in lower level of institution several days after severing. Patient deceased April twenty-second, 1962.’ She cut it off, my god, she cut it off.”
Dorsey didn’t have to press a button this time, because clear as day, the GhostConnector said
Give it back
Dorsey dropped the file. Kate dropped her flashlight.
The room erupted.
Angie and Kim were soldered together in the front seat of the car when Dorsey and Kate ran from Bedford, Kate helping Dorsey in the muddy grass. Dorsey was screaming, which scared Kim, because Dorsey was always cool as a cucumber. The car had stopped rocking, but the windows of Bedford were alive with lights of all different colors.
Dorsey shoved Angie out of the driver’s seat and into the back. She started the car with Angie’s feet still half in the front, over the gearshift. The car lurched, and Angie’s head hit the back passenger window. Kate pulled her to a sitting position.
From the corner of her eye, Kate saw movement on the lake.
It was no longer still, like it had been earlier in the night. It was roiling, waves undulating in pinkish bursts, and when she looked to the doors of Bedford, what she saw made her heart stop.
Angie was screaming at Kim. You let them out. You let them goddamn out.
Dorsey peeled across the grass and down the dirt road, Angie’s screams shattering her ears.
They were flying down the road, parallel to the lake, rain plastering the windshield, Dorsey swearing, Kim crying, and Angie moaning, when Kate felt it.
An absence.
She patted around the backseat, looked at the floorboards. Her heart calved in two.
“Stop,” she said. “We have to go back. We forgot Lissy.”
Dorsey said, “No.”
Kate felt the car heave forward as Dorsey pressed the gas. She said Dorsey’s name.
When Dorsey didn’t answer, Kate lunged forward and grabbed the steering wheel, turning the car to the right.
The car flew through the trees toward the gleaming, hungry lake.
In the specimen room, Lissy picked up the GhostConnector.
Home
Hurts
Give it back
Hurts
She didn’t mind the voice, or voices. Maybe there were several, she couldn’t tell. The room wasn’t dark, anymore, like when Dorsey and her sister, Kate, ran away. There were a lot of lights now and they were very pretty, pink and purplish and white, like the watercolors she made at the doctor’s office. She put the GhostConnector back on the floor, the words floating around her.
The jars were full of liquid and fleshy objects. Round things. Twisted fleshy tubes. The objects hung in the liquid, still and perfect.
Home
Soon, Lissy answered. She didn’t say it out loud. She knew they could hear her. It felt kind of nice this way. Talking without opening your mouth. The way her dolls talked to her.
At the far end of the wall, she found it.
The hand, suspended, the fingers tipped upward toward the top of the jar, as though reaching for it. A gold ring circled one finger. The hand looked soft and delicate, like her mother’s.
Her mother lotioned her hands every night and sometimes she put just a spot of lotion on Lissy’s nose, rubbing it in gently.
Lissy could almost feel that now, the sweet press of her mother’s finger on her nose.
She put her hand on the glass jar, matching her fingers against the fingers inside, like pat-a-cake. She wasn’t frightened at all when the fingers inside the jar twitched.
“I know,” she said, softly. “I know.”
Hurts
Home
The glass of the jar was growing warmer beneath Lissy’s palm. She closed her eyes. She liked the voices. She wished she could keep them.
Hurts
When the jar shattered, spilling the hand on the floor, Lissy didn’t startle or scream. She just looked at her palm, and her arm, now dotted with flecks of glass and blood. She looked around for something to wipe the blood away with, but it didn’t matter.
She could feel them, other hands, patting her clean and safe.
Good girl
She picked up Dorsey’s backpack and rooted around inside, throwing out the cigarettes and makeup pouch and sparkly phone case. She dropped the GhostConnector inside and stood up.
Home
The hand lay on the floor at her feet.
Very slowly, the forefinger touched the toe of Lissy’s thin shoe.
“Okay,” she said. “Home.”
Outside, the rain had gone away. The lake was rippling, releasing pinkish-white and violet shadows that hovered over the surface of the water. Over the soft hills, the glow of the sunrise was beginning, and Lissy watched the women of the hospital step carefully on the dewy grass, holding their gowns up over their ankles. Some of them couldn’t walk very well, so others helped them. Were they smiling? She thought so.
Lissy thought a long walk would be fine. She wasn’t afraid. She would follow the road and perhaps someone would stop for her, or Kate might remember her, and come back, or not, and that was fine, too. She wasn’t alone. She’d tucked the hand inside her sleeve, so her wrist matched Annabelle’s wrist and Annabelle’s fingers were firmly clasped in her own. Lissy wasn’t worried about what would happen to her, anymore.
What About Your Friends
by Brandy Colbert
Michaela hadn’t counted on being drenched in sweat the next time she saw her best friend.
Former best friend.
Was that right? Former seemed too proper.
Ex–best friend?
No. That sounded too official, like there’d been a breakup. Like they were mad at each other, when in fact, they had simply grown apart.
And now here they were, both freshmen at Brockert College, both participating in the school’s annual dance marat
hon with entirely separate groups.
Technically, Michaela wasn’t supposed to be there. She was supposed to be on a trip halfway around the world, exploring other cultures and customs and expanding her mind before she started her first year of college, according to her parents. A gap year, her high school guidance counselor had called it.
Michaela had thought it all sounded pretentious, and she’d tried to shut down the idea when her parents first brought it up. Her mom and dad had exchanged amused looks.
“Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?” her father had said, laughing. “Aren’t you supposed to be the one begging us to go away and we’re supposed to be the ones you have to convince?”
It wasn’t that Michaela didn’t want to see the world. She did . . . someday. But she wasn’t sure about traveling alone for months, and what if starting school a whole year later than her friends messed up the whole trajectory of her college career?
But once her parents had started leaving pamphlets around the house and sending her links about cities, museums, and other places they thought she might like to see abroad, she began to soften. And, soon, she was excited to go. Maybe her dad was right—what kind of eighteen-year-old would turn down the trip of a lifetime? Especially one funded entirely by her parents.
Still, Michaela had told almost everyone but Eleanor that she was simply “taking time off” before she started school.
“Who are you staring at?”
Next to her, Harper was doing a two-step that barely qualified as dancing. Michaela pretended not to notice as she said, “No one. Just zoning out.”
“Well, make sure you keep moving,” Harper said, holding her brown hair in a makeshift ponytail as she fanned her neck with her other hand. “We’ve got another fifteen minutes before we can swap out.”
Michaela nodded and did a little spin that moved her away from Harper. They didn’t have partners, not official ones, but Harper had made it her job to look after Michaela for reasons Michaela didn’t entirely understand. They weren’t much more than acquaintances. Michaela hadn’t planned to join the team when Harper shoved the sign-up sheet in front of her before their bio lab. Not until she saw the marathon was raising money for the local children’s hospital. Something she wouldn’t feel connected to if it weren’t for Eleanor.
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