Greyfriars Reformatory

by Frazer Lee

  “Quiet down, girls. Lights out,” she says in that officious way of hers.

  Victoria still stands next to her bed, with her back to Quick. Our eyes meet. She looks pleadingly at me. I feel kind of sorry for her.

  “Victoria?” Principal Quick prompts.

  But Victoria doesn’t budge.

  I hear Saffy chuckle evilly, under her breath. As Victoria’s expression grows all the more pained I break eye contact and then pull my covers around me.

  “Into bed this instant,” the principal commands.

  From behind the protective barrier of my blanket I see angry tears well up in Victoria’s eyes. She has no other option but to climb into her sodden bed, to the quiet delight of her tormentors.

  “Settle down now, girls.”

  Principal Quick stands watching from the doorway as each of us – except Victoria, of course – gets comfy in bed.

  I lie down on my side and slip my hand under my pillow. I can feel the reassuring shape of the little chrysalis against my hand. I have my face turned toward the doorway. The principal glances at me and I see her sniff at the smoky air, a smile curling her lips. She says nothing further. Then, she turns out the lights and closes the door.

  In the half light, Saffy whispers. “You did good today, Emily.”

  I prop myself up on my elbow and I’m about to ask Saffy to toss the cigarettes and matches back to me when I see Victoria, her body shuddering with heavy sobs. I don’t expect Saffy to hand over the smokes, you understand, it’s just that I sense I can make her feel even more trusting of me if I ask for them back – and then accept her inevitable refusal. Mind games. They’re Saffy’s stock-in-trade after all, aren’t they? But when I see Victoria, sobbing into her pillow like that, my bravado falters and I fall silent. Somehow, any business with Saffy seems trivial compared to how much Victoria is suffering. I know I can’t do anything to help, though. She hardly…welcomed my advances in the refectory, after all. And any demonstrative attempt to show kindness to Victoria would undermine my progress with Saffy. These interpersonal interactions are becoming so complex to me that I’m beginning to wish I was locked away from the lot of them in solitary confinement, when I sense someone looking at me.

  From across the room I can see Jess – her eyes twinkling with fury in the gloom. She glares at me, then pulls her bedclothes tightly around herself before she turns over, and curls up into a fetal position.

  Chapter Seven

  Jess

  Jess awoke with a jolt. She sat up and blinked at her surroundings. The room was as clinically clean and white as the hospital bed she lay in. Jess felt a familiar burn and scratched at her sore, dry knuckles. They began to bleed again.

  She reached under her pillow and pulled out a fresh tissue to swab the blood with. As she did so, her fingers found a candy bar tucked beneath the pillow. Forgetting her bleeding knuckles and the tissue, Jess took out the candy bar. She stared at the confectionary, its bright wrapper tempting her to indulge in the pleasures beneath. Jess bit her lip, trying to resist. No use. She glanced at the door as if to remind herself that it was shut. Then she ripped open the candy bar wrapper in one, swift movement.

  The first bite was heavenly – a thick layer of milk chocolate giving way to gooey caramel that oozed sweetly across her tongue. She shoveled more candy into her mouth. Within a couple more bites, it would be gone. The pleasure spike would be over all too soon. But Jess knew there was yet more hidden food beneath her pillow. She pulled back the pillow as though it were the lid to a treasure chest, and dived in.

  Jess tore open the wrappers, gorging herself on candy bar after candy bar, tearing into and adding packets of chips and fistfuls of popcorn to the feast, before sloshing it all down with a can of soda that she had carefully concealed behind the leg of her bed. She let out a triumphant, celebratory belch. Then, just as suddenly as it had started, her gluttonous reverie stopped as she heard another sound from across the room.

  The door creaked open. A sudden breeze blew through the room, lifting empty foil wrappers and plastic packets off Jess’s bed and onto the floor. How could she have eaten so many? There were hundreds of them – a dizzying rainbow blur of colors.

  Jess launched herself from her bed and scrambled to the floor. The breeze had gathered in strength, becoming a howling vortex of wind. She reached this way and that in a vain attempt to catch the fluttering candy wrappers. Dropping just as many as she picked up, Jess was desperate to hide the evidence of her weakness, before anyone came into the room. Before they saw the remnants of her shameful binge. Her fingertips brushed the edge of a particularly large candy bar wrapper, but she only managed to send it flying underneath the bed.

  Reaching beneath the bed to retrieve the wrapper, Jess saw a shadow. And the shadow moved. Something else was beneath the bed. Something much larger than a candy bar wrapper. Jess’s heart began to beat harder, a warning signal to recoil from whatever was lurking under her mattress. She felt her breathing becoming ragged as the shadow began to take on a more discernible shape as it darted toward her – and into the light.

  A hideous apparition was clawing at her. A gray-skinned girl, with dark hair covering her face. Jess screamed as the foul apparition grabbed at her and clamped its cold, clammy hands around her face. Each fingertip was as shockingly freezing as an icicle and her nerve endings became conduits to a flow of icy despair that seemed to flow – unstoppably – into her entire body through her face.

  Jess gasped as a flood of flashing images invaded her mind, carried by the rush of cold.

  She felt herself convulse, and then saw herself reflected in a mirror of sheet ice. Only it wasn’t a reflection of how she looked now. She was as thin as a rake, her skin pale and mottled. Her lips were yellowed and dry. Heart rate monitors flatlined with a steady, piercing whine. In the reflection, she saw a medic pumping frantically at Jess’s bony chest, trying to revive her heart. The medic leaned over her on the gurney and administered the kiss of life. But to no avail – the heart rate monitors continued flatlining. The reflected image shimmered to reveal another figure standing, watching her. With a jolt of raw emotion, Jess recognized her mother. She recognized the stricken look on her mother’s face as she cried in anguish, unable to do anything to save her teenaged daughter, her baby.

  The searing cold and the painful images were all too much for her now, and Jess clamped her eyelids shut for a second. She opened them again and the reflection shattered – the ice of memory dissipating into a desiccated whiteout of snow.

  Jess’s vision cleared, and she was looking once again at the terrifying gray girl from under the bed.

  Jess recoiled against the clammy fingers clutching her face, trying to wrestle free from their unwelcome touch. She scrambled back on her hands and heels, then lashed out with her left foot. She felt those ice-cold fingertips disengage. Propelling herself backward and then up against the wall, Jess turned toward the door. She grabbed the handle and, after wrenching the door almost from its hinges, launched herself out of the room.

  She was already standing in the bathroom before she fully recognized where she was. The tiles were cracked and grimy. The grouting was a moldy green color. A broken lamp flickered overhead. The leaky faucet dripped, echoing off the hard surface of the sink in time with her pulse. Then she heard the eerie sound of sobbing coming from a stall closer to the far wall, where mirrors hung.

  Jess walked over to the stall and pushed the door open a crack so she could see inside. The stall was empty. She was about to close the door and retrace her steps out of this creepy old bathroom when she heard the toilet flush. She hadn’t touched the handle. She wasn’t anywhere near it, still standing in the doorway to the stall. But sure enough, the water was spiraling around the toilet bowl. She took an instinctive step forward, and saw that the water in the bowl looked odd somehow. It was still spiraling around, but in the opposite direction to how it normally
did.

  Intrigued, she entered the stall fully, and heard the door slam behind her. She turned on her heels and tried to unlock the door, but the mechanism was jammed shut. The spiraling water behind her seemed to howl, hurricane-like, and she turned around to see that it had escaped from the toilet bowl. The tornado of water had brought something with it, too – a chaos of candy bar and other snack wrappers. Then, the spiraling column of water dropped back into the bowl, scattering the wrappers across the stall. Strewn all around her on the filthy floor were enough confectionary wrappers to fill a dumpster. Jess felt her stomach heave and raced to the toilet, falling to her knees before throwing up.

  She felt her stomach muscles convulse one last time and heard her throat expel the last remnants of her binge. The sound of her own sobs echoed around the cramped bathroom stall. She flushed the toilet. Exhausted, she brushed her sweaty hair away from her face and sat back against the stall partition. Her breathing slowed. Disgusted with herself, her sobs became a full-on torrent of tears.

  Then, inexplicably, the door to the stall creaked open.

  As though nothing had happened.

  Jess exited the stall and trudged to the sink. She opened the faucet and took handfuls of water to rinse the acid aftertaste of stomach bile from her mouth. Spitting into the sink, Jess splashed more fresh water on her face. She watched the water swirl away down the plughole. Closing the faucet, Jess looked at herself in the broken mirror.

  The faucet dripped. She looked dreadful – as though ravaged by a wasting disease.

  Drip.

  She stroked the skin on her lips with her fingertips, then her cheeks, before running her fingers across her throat.

  Drip.

  She felt a dryness at her throat. Something more than the aftereffects of her old binge-and-purge routine. The dryness quickly became a scratching sensation. Her breath began to rattle as she gasped for air.

  Suddenly she choked, as if all the air had left her body.

  Drip.

  She gagged, clutching at her painful throat. Surely there was nothing left to throw up?

  Drip-drip-drip.

  Watching herself in the mirror, Jess’s eyes filled with terror as – impossibly – a dead, gray hand pushed its way out of her mouth. The momentum of the hand pulled her face with it toward the mirror and she made a strangled screaming noise as her forehead smashed into it. Broken glass fell into the sink. Jagged shards of it hung in front of her disbelieving eyes. From between her lips, the gnarled fingers reached desperately for the mirror. They grabbed at a piece of the broken glass.

  Jess tried to scream – but only a dry gagging sound would come. She bit down, as hard as she could, tasting cold flesh between her teeth. But the hand protruding from her mouth did not flinch, instead making a fist around the section of broken glass. Jess watched the reflection in the fractured mirror, in mortal dread of what was to come next.

  The gray-skinned hand yanked the shard of glass violently down into Jess’s throat. Jess began choking on blood. Her eyes widened. She saw the gray girl looking back at her from inside the mirror – the broken glass multiplying her malevolent eye into a legion of hatred.

  Jess’s throat gushed blood, and pain, and total fear.

  And, with a final bloody gasp, she lost consciousness.

  Chapter Eight

  The Other Inmate

  I wake up and feel sleep trying to pull me back down again, but for some reason I fight it off and sit up. The vague light of daybreak casts a dirty halo around the high window opposite my bed. Around me, the other girls are asleep. Lena is snoring softly, and I wonder how she can do that without waking herself. I quickly check under my pillow for the chrysalis. It’s still there. Feeling its surface against my skin connects me to the outside world somehow, to the soil and the trees beyond the window. Perhaps I’ll walk among them again one day. Sleep has well and truly lost its hold on me now. I yawn, then clamber out of bed. I grab my towel from the little bedside cupboard, along with my toothbrush and toiletries. As I cross to the door, I realize that I’m not the only one awake after all. Jess’s bed is empty.

  The bathroom door squeaks open as I enter. One of the lights is flickering, and I hear the steady dripping of a leaky faucet. The flickering light reveals something else – something major. One of the mirrors is smashed to bits. Shards of it lie on the washbasin and floor. I walk toward it, treading softly. Don’t want to cut my bare feet on the broken glass. Then I see red. Pooling from beneath the bathroom stall nearest to the mirror.

  I walk on tiptoe to avoid the glass, then push against the door to the stall. It creaks open slowly, and the sound seems to stretch out across time. Jess is on the floor of the stall, lying in a bloodied heap with her throat cut. The gash across her neck is a deep, wide, scarlet rictus. A broken piece of bloodstained mirror lies on the floor next to her. I stare at Jess’s body, and the creaking of the door—

  (Horrid sound, why won’t it just damn well stop?)

  —becomes a ringing in my ears. My vision turns watery. The palms of my hands become cold and wet. I think I’m still standing on tiptoes, but I can’t be sure and now I feel distant from the floor tiles like I’m levitating above them. The ringing is all around me, and it’s as though I’m in a bell jar. Maybe I formed my own chrysalis in bed last night and now that I’ve awoken I’ve taken flight, only to become trapped under glass.

  Another sound cuts through the ringing, sharp and intrusive. The shrill, unwelcome sound wants to drag me back into the present, and I don’t want to go. But it’s too late. I can hear her now. I can hear Saffy scream.

  “Emily? Jesus fucking Christ.”

  Saffy is right beside me at the door to the stall. I turn to look at her. She’s looking at Jess’s body. Then she looks at me. Her eyes are wet. She looks really scared, and I wonder why.

  * * *

  Quick watches over us as we scrub the last of the blood away from the wall and floor. I return my cloth to the bucket of soapy water. There are hardly any bubbles left, and the water has turned red. I squeeze the cloth over the bucket and see Quick’s face reflected in the surface of the water. The drips from my cloth make the water ripple, distorting her face. I wipe around the base of the toilet bowl, where a couple of blood smears remain untouched. Quick’s shadow falls over me.

  “Better,” she says, surveying my work. I get to my feet and she passes a broom to me.

  “Sweep up the last of the broken glass, Emily. There are a few pieces under the sink. We can’t have anyone cutting their feet.”

  Or their necks, I think, trying to dispel the image of the red gash from my memory.

  I sweep up the remaining broken glass from the mirror. Victoria crouches beside me, collecting up the tiny fragments of mirror with a dustpan and brush. She moves the brush in slow, deliberate strokes, like she’s an automaton.

  “Well done, girls. As good as new.”

  (Like nothing happened!?)

  “Report to the recreation area for your morning’s exercise.”

  “We’ve had our exercise already,” Saffy pipes up, “helping you carry Jess’s dead body outside. Then mopping up all this blood.”

  Much as I hate to back Saffy up, she does have a point.

  “Do not cross me.”

  I look at Principal Quick and see her face wrinkle with barely suppressed anger. A chink in the armor.

  “Courtyard in five minutes,” the principal says, “or you will all be confined to your dormitory.”

  “We’re just going to carry on as though nothing happened?”

  Saffy and Lena look just as surprised as I am to hear Victoria’s voice.

  Principal Quick looks really livid now. She purses her lips, and then releases a controlled breath. “We shall continue with your rehabilitation. Discipline is what matters. All that matters. Now more than ever.”

  The pri
ncipal moves over to the stall where I found Jess. She shuts the door with an air of finality. Discussion over, I guess.

  Victoria throws me a troubled glance. I can’t read her look, so I just look back at her.

  Principal Quick says, “Give the floor a thorough mopping, girls. And then pack away the cleaning equipment.”

  Then she fixes her cold gaze on me. I wish she wouldn’t.

  “Emily, you will come with me,” she says.

  * * *

  That stale tobacco smell still lingers in Principal Quick’s office, but the bleach notes seem even stronger this time. After a little while, I realize the smell is coming from my skin. Scrubbing the bathroom has made me stink of it. But I can’t shake the metallic scent of blood that lurks somewhere beneath all the competing sensory layers. I blink and recall how wet Saffy’s eyes looked. Like she was going to cry, which is ridiculous because, well, because Saffy. I cross and uncross my legs, and then rearrange my hands in my lap. I don’t know why I can’t sit still. I guess it’s because Principal Quick is making me feel nervous. She hasn’t said a single word to me since telling me to sit down. I sneak a glance at her and see that she’s hunched over a drawer. She’s rooting around in it, searching for something. After a while, she stands, and I see what she was looking for. In her hands is a tall metronome. It has a little lightbulb on top. She carries it over to the desk and positions it in front of me. She unclips the slender metal arm on the front of the device and sets it off in a rocking motion. Then she reaches around the back of the device and I hear the click of a switch. The little lamp on top lights up, pulsing in time with the metronome arm.

  Principal Quick crosses to the window that looks out onto the recreation yard. She operates a thin, metal pulley and closes the window blind. The room becomes gloomy, save for the rhythmic, pulsing light from the metronome.