by Frazer Lee
(Luckily we held on to some cigarettes we’d hidden in our clothing.)
—it was lights out and lockdown for all of us. Victoria has been keeping this revelation of hers all bottled up, and now it’s exploding out of her.
“Take a look if you don’t believe me,” Victoria says.
Then Victoria does the exact thing I was hoping she wouldn’t do. She looks straight at me. Like I know what she’s talking about. Like we’re co-conspirators. Principal Quick catches the glance, of course. She never misses a trick, that one.
“Emily?”
Great. They are all staring at me now, and I wish I could be away from this room.
Pretty soon, I get my wish.
* * *
Principal Quick’s office looks bigger in the muted daylight from the exercise yard window than it did during the smoke run. Victoria stands next to me, and directly opposite Principal Quick, who is flanked by Lena and Annie.
“I don’t imagine I need to show you where the key to my closet is?” Principal Quick says, her voice dripping sarcasm.
She takes the closet key from her desk drawer and hands it to Victoria.
“Show me, Victoria.”
Victoria winces and carries the key over to the closet door.
“We will address the matter of why you girls were here at all, in due course,” Principal Quick reminds us.
With a trembling hand, Victoria inserts the key and unlocks the door.
“Be so kind as to open it up for us,” Quick says. “Come along, girls, let’s take a peek, shall we?”
As Victoria opens the closet door, the principal walks around the desk to join us. Lena and Annie follow. Victoria throws me a meaningful look, then takes a deep breath. Dropping to her knees, she looks under the bookshelves.
“Well?” Quick says. “We are waiting.”
Victoria starts pulling the books away, then stops abruptly. She looks up at me, panic in her eyes.
“It’s…it’s not there anymore…I can’t even….”
“What isn’t there anymore?” Principal Quick says. “Stop babbling, girl.”
“The opening! It’s gone…just completely gone!” Victoria sounds tearful.
I enter the closet and kneel down next to Victoria. The opening we discovered last night is no longer there, just a neat row of books and papers. And behind them, a solid bookcase.
“I swear it was here, I crawled through! So did you,” she says to me. “Tell them, Emily.”
It is truly strange. But before I can say anything—
(And I’m not even sure what to say.)
—Principal Quick cuts in.
“You came here to steal from me,” she says, her voice rising in pitch, “to break my trust. And now you concoct a wildly unbelievable story to cover your guilt.”
Victoria gets to her feet, and I do the same. It’s intimidating, to face the principal’s stern expression. I flinch, but Victoria isn’t done yet.
“We came here for some cigarettes…”
(Now Principal Quick is the one who flinches.)
“…that’s true. But I dropped your lighter and, you have to believe me, I crawled through and fell down the steps. That’s when I found her lying there…poor Jess….”
Victoria begins to sob.
I remember what her frightened face looked like last night after I helped her wriggle through that dark, cramped crawlspace. She looked too terrified for words. Like someone had turned the lights off behind her eyes.
But the solid wall beneath the bookcase now contradicts all of that. I’m beginning to wonder if we didn’t somehow collectively dream the whole escapade. But that doesn’t make sense either. Principal Quick confiscated the vodka bottle after all. And we still had the cigarettes on us. Still do. When we returned to the dormitory after…Saffy…we hid them behind our bedside cabinets.
“I’m not quite sure that I follow what you are saying,” Principal Quick replies, and the patience in her voice is stretched to its maximum. “You say that there’s a basement, and you climbed down there and saw…. Well, what exactly?”
“Jess!” Victoria shrieks, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone sounding so scared.
I look at Principal Quick’s reaction and beneath the icy exterior see a momentary flicker of emotion in her sharp eyes.
“She’s still rotting down there. All bloody!” Victoria cries.
She’s really losing it now.
And she’s not the only one. Principal Quick puts herself between Victoria and the closet. She raises her hand and slaps Victoria hard across the face.
(Whoah.)
Lena and Annie gasp in shock.
Victoria puts a hand to her stinging face. Fresh tears well up in her eyes.
“How dare you try to scare the others?” Principal Quick stares Victoria down with glassy eyes. “You selfish, attention-seeking girl.”
Then she glares at me, as though daring me to contradict her. I swallow dryly and lower my head as Principal Quick speaks on, the control in her voice making her even more frightening.
“Upsetting the others with these fantasies. It is heartless, thoughtless, and cruel. Always blaming others for your weakness. For your failings.”
Principal Quick turns to Lena and Annie. “You may go. You are all confined to your dormitory.”
That’s done it. Lena and Annie both file out of the room quickly, but not before looking absolute daggers at Victoria. And Victoria just looks destroyed, really. I guess I should be feeling sorry for her. But I don’t know what to say or do to make it any better for her. Either our imaginations got the better of us, or Principal Quick managed to board up the crawlspace in her closet overnight to make fools out of the both of us. Trying to figure out the solution is sending my poor, sleep-deprived brain into a downward spiral.
“Victoria, Emily, you will both accompany me,” the principal says.
Chapter Thirteen
I Must Not Tell Lies
I hear Victoria sobbing in frustration as I follow Principal Quick out of her office.
“Stop sniveling, girl,” the principal says as Victoria ducks past her.
Quick locks her office door, using the key from her belt, and then leads us down the corridor. We walk in silence until we reach the classroom door. The principal opens the door and beckons us inside.
“Sit at your desks,” she says.
We do as she says, Victoria still fighting back her sobs. I glance at her but she won’t make eye contact. She just wipes her nose on the cuff of her sleeve.
Principal Quick takes something from her desk, which she carries over to us. She drops a notepad and a pen onto Victoria’s desk, and then the same items on mine.
“If you are going to behave like unruly schoolchildren, you will be punished accordingly,” Principal Quick says.
I try not to look, but I can see a vein throbbing wildly at her temple. It looks like it might pop, there’s so much blood and anger coursing through it. I catch the same aspects in her eyes and look away quickly.
“You will write lines,” she says, “until your notepads are filled. Then, and only then, will you be allowed to go to bed.”
I look down at the notepad. There must be at least a hundred sheets of paper in it, maybe more. We’ll be here all night long if the principal wants the notepads to be filled.
She leans over my desk and turns the notepad around until it’s facing her. She picks up the pen and writes something in the same elegantly spidery handwriting I saw on the manuscript in her office.
I MUST NOT TELL LIES.
“There,” she says, before walking back to Victoria’s desk and doing the same on her notepad. Victoria sniffs wretchedly, and Principal Quick shoves the pen into Victoria’s hand.
I am just about to remind Principal Quick that I didn’t ac
tually tell her any lies when I see that vein in her head again, throbbing, and I decide that maybe the best course of action is to remain quiet.
“I shall leave you both to it,” the principal says.
We sit in silence as Principal Quick leaves the room and shuts us in. The wall clock marks each passing second as I write line after line. By the time I’m done with a few pages my wrist is aching, and the ticking of the clock seems to have gotten louder.
I risk a glance across at Victoria, who seems to be getting more and more agitated. She’s writing her lines, but so frantically that I can hear the paper tearing beneath her pen. I try to catch her attention, hoping I can help her to calm down before Principal Quick returns, but it’s no use – Victoria doesn’t even seem to see me. She starts stabbing into her notepad with the pen, tearing up the paper. Then she hurls the pen across the room in the direction of the ticking clock.
I see a shadow on the wall beneath the clock. Victoria’s pen meets the shadow and then, impossibly, just hovers there – as though the shadow has caught hold of it. I can’t quite believe my eyes, but that is exactly what the shadow has done.
Victoria screams as the shadow reveals itself. The gray girl peels herself away from the wall as though she is somehow made of the shadows. She holds out her dead, gray hand, showing us the pen. Then she turns her hand over and drops the pen to the floor.
With one swift, dark movement, the gray girl is at Victoria’s desk. But, because she is holding her head in her hands and freaking out uncontrollably, Victoria fails to see the gray girl looming over her.
I look, and see, and feel a cold stab of fear as the spectral girl glares at me from behind her matted hair. I hear a ghastly sobbing sound and for a moment I think it’s Victoria. But then I realize it is coming from behind that dark, straggly hair. I hear another sound – one that gives me the creeps. A sharp, scratching noise, like fingernails on a coffin lid.
Looking down at my desk, I see letters being carved into the desk as if by an invisible knife point. I look to Victoria, eager to know if she can see it too. Because if she can then it will mean that I’m not stark-staring mad. But Victoria still has her face buried in her hands. I’m on my own here.
The letters form in my desk. ‘G…I’.
I stand up, recoiling from the desk and from the horrible scraping noise, which continues as more letters form.
‘R…L’. I knock my chair backward and it topples over with a crash.
‘A…’.
Feeling terror clawing at my heart, I look at the carved words:
‘GIRL A’.
I back away, still hearing that ghastly sobbing sound from the gray specter looming over Victoria. Without realizing it, I’ve backed up all the way to the classroom door. The door opens and I feel a hand on my shoulder. I turn to face Principal Quick. She does not look pleased.
I turn back to survey the room. No one there except Victoria. The gray girl has vanished – as though she’s been carried away by a cold draft that blows through the room.
Principal Quick frog marches me back to my desk, keeping my shoulder in her grip. Once there, she shoves me down into my seat. I see that she holds Victoria’s discarded pen in her other hand.
“Careless, Victoria. You seem to have dropped your pen,” Principal Quick says.
Then she crosses to Victoria’s desk. I see her frown at the unruly state of Victoria’s torn pad.
“Back to work, girls,” the principal says before dropping the pen on top of Victoria’s notepad. She strolls over to her desk at the front of the class and picks up a textbook. She sits down and begins to read in silence.
I watch as Victoria picks up her pen and starts writing her lines again.
I do the same. No point arguing with Principal Quick keeping us company. I take one more look at the shadows, to make sure the gray girl really has left us. When I look down at my desk, the letters that were scratched there have also disappeared.
* * *
It’s the early hours of the morning by the time we’re done. As we march along the corridors in pronounced silence, following Principal Quick back to our dormitory, I see dark clouds parting outside the windows. A chill wind lifts leaves from the trees, sending them swirling across the sky in an ever-shifting question mark.
Dawn is breaking over the reformatory.
* * *
We sit on our beds and no one is speaking much, except for Victoria, who won’t let go of what she says she saw in the basement.
“So neither of you has seen her?”
Lena and Annie shake their heads. Annie looks thoughtful for a moment. I see her hesitate before speaking up.
“I did have a dream. Our first night in here. I think there was a girl like the one you described in my dream, but….”
“A gray girl?” I ask.
“I don’t remember. Maybe,” Annie says, unhelpfully.
“You?” Victoria asks Lena.
“I don’t have dreams,” Lena says in a low voice. “Not the kind you’d want to remember, anyway. Gave up on those years ago.”
Victoria nods in solidarity. “I know how that feels.” She glances at the locked door. “Hey, how long do you think she’s going to keep us locked in here?”
“We stole from her,” I say, “and you accused her of stashing Jess’s dead body away. I think she’ll take her time.”
“You could have backed me up,” Victoria counters.
“I didn’t see anything,” I remind her. “I was on the other side of the bookcase, until I helped pull you back through, remember?”
I think back to earlier, when the gray girl emerged from the shadows. How she loomed over Victoria’s desk. The letters carved in my desk, letters that disappeared when the principal returned. If only Victoria had looked up to see what I saw. Then we would be able to agree on something. But we can’t. It is as though the phantom – or whatever the hell she is – has us divided. We’re weaker that way, I realize.
“Well, at least you acknowledge there was an opening,” Victoria says, “but I know what I saw down there, however weird it sounds.”
Annie gets up off her bed and starts pacing the room, between Saffy’s and Jess’s empty beds. It’s almost as though by acknowledging their absence she can somehow pluck answers out of thin air.
I’m skeptical.
“There’s a lot the principal isn’t telling us,” Victoria says. “About why she’s running this place on her own. She said it’s experimental. But what does that mean, exactly?”
Annie looks at me, and I know what’s coming. “You were here once before, Emily,” she says. “What happened? And why did you get sent back here?”
“I don’t remember,” I say.
“You must remember something.” Annie sounds exasperated. “Anything?”
I don’t. And just trying to remember is making my head throb real bad. I can almost hear Quick’s metronome, ticking away like some screwed up clock inside my head.
“Jesus Christ, Emily,” Annie says, her frustration igniting into anger.
“Fighting each other won’t help,” Victoria says, diffusing the tension. “I want to know what Quick is up to. Like, why didn’t she call the cops about Jess? Or an ambulance? I mean, what kind of fucked up experiment is she running here? And what about the strange girl we keep seeing?”
“Some of you keep seeing,” Lena says.
“Hey, I’ll make it easy for you guys,” Victoria says, “the elephant in the room.”
Annie smirks. “That’s…you, isn’t it?” A cruel smile curls her lips.
“Oh, fuck you,” Victoria retorts, making Annie snort with laughter. “No, I mean…the gray girl’s a ghost, isn’t she?”
Annie scowls. “Jesus. Don’t start that fucked-up shit.”
But Victoria is in full swing now. “Emily saw her – I know you
did, Emily, so don’t try to deny it. I think Jess saw her, and Saffy too – and now they’re dead.”
I have to state the obvious. “And yet we’re alive and well.”
“Right now we are, yeah. But….” Victoria’s eyes darken. “Once you see her, you’re dead soon after.”
Annie rolls her eyes – and lets rip with the sarcasm. “And you say that like it’s a bad thing? Okay. So we’re locked in here, at the mercy of a homicidal ghost. Now what?”
“I say screw being cooped up in here,” Lena answers.
Lena rises from her bed and crosses to the door. She crouches down and starts examining the lock. After a few moments, she returns to her bed, and then grabs her mattress with both hands and tosses it to the floor.
“What the hell are you doing?” Victoria asks.
“She’s going completely freaking nuts, that’s what she’s doing,” Annie says.
Lena drops to her knees and starts twisting one of the bedsprings.
“I might join her,” Annie jokes.
It takes some effort, but Lena is determined and strong. She manages to twist the spring out of its hole, then removes it from the bed frame. Next, she lifts the bed, traps one end of the spring underneath. She looks at each of us, breathing heavily from her exertions.
“You. Come sit on my bed. All of you,” she says.
She says it with such authority that we each do as she says without any further questions. With the spring trapped under our combined weight, Lena pulls on it with all her might, straightening it out. I watch as she twists the spring between her strong fingers, and snaps it into two pieces.
“Now I have something I can work with,” Lena says. She crosses to the door and crouches next to the lock. She starts picking the lock with the wire from the spring.
“Can you really get that open?” I ask.
Lena just grunts, too intent on her lock-picking work to reply properly.
“So we bust out of here,” Victoria asks. “Then what?”
