“Jesus, Claire!” Owen pleaded. “Why the hell did you do that?” He banged on the door from the outside, kicking the locker at the base, wiggling the handle furiously.
“It was an accident,” Claire called. It was all she could think of. Why else would she put herself in a locker?
“Accident,” Owen growled. “Not again.”
Claire stared at her hands. In the tightness of the locker, with her shoulders squeezed, curving in toward her chest, she had no way to put her arms down. Her tiny gold satin clutch still dangled from her wrist, just a couple of inches from her nose.
Claire suddenly remembered the phone she’d tossed inside. She fumbled with the drawstring, turning the phone on. The new phone her father’d bought her, and had laid on top of her dresser.
911, she would dial, and the operator at the other end would ask, What is the nature of your emergency?
But the moment the phone came to life, her tiny bubble of celebration popped. She recognized the face in the picture being used as the phone’s wallpaper—both faces, actually. One girl with light blond hair, the other with thick brown hair, both in Peculiar High uniforms, their faces smashed together as they hugged. Becca and Serena.
Becca and Serena? Claire’s mind spun. How did they get on her phone?
Her thumb flew over the screen, as she discovered a folder of pictures labeled Basement Story. Photos of the janitors’ office, the vacant classrooms, the gym, the boys’ locker room. What the picture taker had seen walking down the deserted downstairs hallways. And what Claire had seen herself only moments ago—Owen and Isles, bodies tangled.
This wasn’t Claire’s new phone at all. It was Serena’s old phone. Claire remembered the pink scarf on top of her dresser, bunched in the middle. Serena always went to her old house. Wasn’t that what Becca’d said? Did Serena leave her phone there? Had the phone been beneath the scarf the entire time?
Yes, Claire answered herself. The whole time. Hidden beneath the bunched-up folds of the scarf. Just waiting to be found.
“She knew about you,” Claire called. “Serena. She knew about you and Isles. She saw you—when she came down to investigate her ghost-hunter piece. Her story about Casey. Didn’t she?”
Owen kicked at the locker again, as pieces of the puzzle came together in Claire’s head.
“Were you looking for it?” Claire asked. “Her phone? Is that why you said you’d clean out her locker?” But the phone wasn’t in her locker. And it wasn’t on her body. Because Serena didn’t have her phone with her the day she died. She’d already hidden her phone in her old house. Her favorite house. Of course she had. Almost as though she’d known—as though she’d had some sort of premonition—the same word Mrs. Sims had used when talking about her daughter.
Claire hurried through Serena’s apps, her hands shaking. She pulled up a writing app, found it filled with notes she’d taken for her story. The basement. Casey.
And Owen. Creep! read one of Serena’s notes. Chas couldn’t get away with cheating on me, and Owen’s not going to get away with cheating on Becca. Becca stood up for me. I’m going to stand up for her now.
Meeting w/ O., read another note. Basement. After school. CONFRONT HIM ABOUT WHAT I KNOW.
“You met her here,” Claire said, in a tone loud enough for Owen to hear. “You met her in the basement. She told you what she knew. That she had proof. That she saw you while she was researching her story about Casey haunting the basement.”
“Oh, shit,” Owen moaned, as the boiler cranked into gear. “It’s coming on again. The heat.”
He banged furiously against the locker. “Not again,” he begged.
Not again? Claire thought. The basement meeting. The heat. Worse in hot weather, Rich had said about Serena’s asthma. And the inhaler that had fallen out of Serena’s locker upstairs.
A fight—the locker—not again—no inhaler. An ice storm. The boiler. Heat. An asthma attack. Panic. Suffocation.
She touched the door in front of her, finding it full of large, fist-sized indentions. Like someone had beaten the locker, trying to get out. She imagined Serena fighting, the struggle only making the locker hotter, while the boiler came on again and again, the panic making her asthma attack worse. She pictured Serena, fists flying, beating the locker, beating her chest, beating frantically for something to open up—the door, her lungs.
Claire shuddered. This was it—this was where Serena died. Claire remembered lying in Serena’s grave, how cool it had felt. How it had fit.
This fits you now, too, she heard, as stripes of color began to pour in through the vents on the front of the locker.
The colors swirled, congealed, became the same face Claire had seen smiling at her during Serena’s funeral—the face on the blown-up picture propped beside the casket.
Claire squinted and squirmed, fighting her blurring eyes—now too hazy to dial Serena’s phone, 911, what is the nature of your emergency? Claire fought surges of nausea as the boiler kicked on again, and heat swelled—far hotter than it had been in ’Bout Out or Owen’s car. This was the heat of an infection, a blistered sore, the heat of fear, of panic. The heat of the moment of death.
“You can feel it, can’t you?” Serena asked Claire. “Your lungs are closing. That’s just like asthma. Owen pushed me in this locker, and in the heat, I had an asthma attack. The worst of my life.”
Claire began to wheeze, clawing at her throat. She had asthma too, it seemed—brought on by fear, by the power of suggestion—and by Serena. Serena had powers that Claire did not even fully understand.
“Would be nice to have an inhaler, wouldn’t it?” Serena asked. “But I left mine in my locker. I was only going to talk to Owen for a minute. Just a minute, I said. But once I was in here, the air just kept getting hotter and my lungs kept getting tighter. The ice storm had just started—it was so cold, and the boiler kept coming on. My asthma was always worse in the summer. And in here, it was far hotter than any August afternoon.”
Claire kicked at the door, whining.
Waves of hot air surged. Claire gagged, choking on the heat. As her body convulsed, fiery air wrapped its fingers around her throat.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
FORTY–THREE
Claire grew physically weak. Her breath became shallow as the space grew hotter, the air thinner.
She beat the metal locker door, begging with her fists to be freed. Trying to suck in a breath had become as easy as trying to move air through hardened mortar. And still, liquid fire from the nearby boiler invaded the locker. She clawed at her own throat, tearing her flimsy cardigan. Exposing her shoulders.
Claire knew how hard it had been for Serena to breathe—such a tight space, the heat, her asthma. No wonder she died, Claire thought.
A splash of black and white filtered in through the metal grates on the locker door. A new figure appeared, joining Claire and Serena in the heat. A boy with the same black-and-white face Claire had first discovered in the old Peculiar High yearbook—Casey Andrews. “You’re not supposed to be here,” Casey growled.
Fog began to filter in through the crack at the bottom of the door. The town dead, the spirits, here in the locker.
“You need to go with them, Serena,” Casey said. “Go with the fog.”
“No, I don’t,” Serena sneered. “I’m going to get in Claire, get a new body, a better body.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Claire said. “I know what happened to you now. I’ll let everyone know.”
“I’ll let them know,” Serena said. “With your voice. I’ll write the story.”
Serena’s eyes flashed as they scanned Claire’s scrunched-up shoulders, her scarred skin. Her surprise melted into a wicked chuckle. “That’s okay,” she said. “I had a couple of scars, too, and a scar is not the same as being dead. So what if I’ll have to put on a brave face and
pretend like it doesn’t bother me, all those times people will be repulsed by the look of me? I won’t be dead.”
“Please take her,” Claire begged Casey. “She’s out of the cat now. She got out—like in the woods. She wants in me. You can do it. Take her.”
Proof, Claire thought, her frenzied, frantic mind grasping at anything—any solution. Get proof.
“How would you like a picture, Serena?” Claire asked. “You took pictures on your phone to get proof for your own story. What if I had pictures on the phone of you?”
Claire snapped a photo, the flash illuminating the inside of the locker.
In the harsh, white flash of light, her own face filled the dusty mirror one of the old janitors had attached to the inside of his locker door. Her terrorized face, iridescent with sweat and tears. Her face and her raised hands and her gold satin clutch—and the four gray metal walls.
When the blackness returned, so did the rippling fingers of fog—and Casey’s black-and-white face—and Serena’s soul, curdled with rage.
Claire’s stomach lurched. Something startling had happened in that flash. But she couldn’t quite explain the revulsion that rippled across her body.
Tears searing her fevered skin, Claire took another picture, again seeing only her own image in the mirror. And in the darkness that returned, the fog swelled—far too thick, it seemed, to have ever really disappeared at all.
“Hey!” Claire shouted. “Don’t do that! Stop moving around!”
She took another picture, but Serena, Casey, and the fog disappeared in the flash.
“Don’t think I won’t get you,” she said, taking several rapid-fire shots, and finding only the gray walls on the screen.
“Come on,” she said, but her lip was wobbling because the locker looked so empty in the photos. As though Claire was the only one inside. But that couldn’t be true. Serena was there. Casey was there. The fog was there.
Claire trembled, tears increasing, flowing like tormented rivers. She took still another picture; in the blinding flash, her face was the only image filling the mirror on the locker door.
“No,” she sobbed. “No, no, no.” She snapped another quick cluster of pictures. And in the mirror, with each repeating flash, she saw only herself—only her own scars.
“Get back!” she heard Rich shout, bursting into the janitors’ office. “Get away from the locker!”
Claire made a limp fist, struck the inside of the door to her tiny prison cell. “Rich?” she called, through her tears. “Is that you?”
“I’m coming!” Rich shouted, tugging forcefully against the locker door.
“What’s going on in here?” Rhine shouted as he clomped into the room.
“The door!” Owen cried out. “I can’t get it to open!”
“Claire?” her own father’s panicked voice cried out. “Are you in there?”
“Dad?” she asked. How was it possible for him to be there? Where did he come from?
A steady light streamed into the locker, as though someone was holding a flashlight against the vents in the locker door. “Claire?” her father called again. “Say something if you’re in there.”
In the steady light, Claire could see everything—her own face in the mirror. And Serena’s necklace, dangling from her fingers. No fog. No Casey. No murdered Sims girl. Not in the light. She was alone, in the light and the mirror’s reflection.
“Here,” she called weakly. “I’m here.”
“The door is warped!” Owen shouted. “I can’t lift up on the handle.”
The light disappeared; feet stomped; metal rattled like hands were sifting through a drawer of wrenches.
In the darkness, Casey and Serena were still with her. In the darkness, Serena fought against Casey, ready to slip inside Claire’s body, take it for her own, ravage her in ways that even those boys in the Chicago parking lot never could have dreamed up.
As the search for a tool to free Claire continued, she sifted again through the pictures she had just taken on the phone: Her face. The locker. No Serena. No Casey.
Glancing behind the screen, she saw them all, still there, swirling through the darkness.
But what, exactly, did that mean? Maybe, she thought, they simply had a way to hide. Maybe the flash was so strong that it obliterated them. Maybe spirits just couldn’t show up in a picture. Of course that was it, she told herself. They were hiding. Surely they were. She didn’t make things up. She didn’t see things that weren’t there.
“Claire,” her father shouted, shining the light back against the grate. “Say something.”
In the light, she saw herself in the mirror again. Her terrorized face was the only thing filling the locker. No spirits. No fog. No dead girl.
What was happening to her?
“Please. No. It can’t,” Claire begged. But the light had illuminated the truth: she was alone in the locker. The fog and Serena and Casey were not there, crowding the tiny space where she was trapped.
Flashes of memory burst in front of her eyes, just as quickly and powerfully as the flash from Serena’s camera. In the basement, the reflection of her face in the doorway had erased the vision of the alley—and Casey. After the funeral, the reflection of her face in Serena’s temporary marker had erased the fog. Owen had been cleaning out Serena’s locker when the reflection of her face in the window had erased the ice in the hallway. Over and over it had happened: her reflection erased the fog—and the ice—and Casey—and now Serena.
She wailed. Because as she struggled to breathe, as she fought for her own life, she knew what she wanted most, what she had always wanted, ever since that night in April: her old life back. She wanted her old body. And if she could not get her old body back, she wished she could trade in her body for a new, better one. A body that did not look as scuffed and battered in her own bathroom mirror as the body of the old calico she’d met outside in the woodpile.
She didn’t want to be a half-dead thing lying in a parking lot. She wanted a second chance at that night back in April. She wanted to never leave the library alone. She wanted her old life back. The words echoed in her head. Didn’t that sound like something Serena had said?
We both want the exact same thing? How is it possible?
But Claire already knew the answer: it was possible because Serena had never existed beyond her death. There was no spirit manipulating Claire’s surroundings. The cats in her room really had just been after a place to get warm. Owen’s car really had just had an electrical malfunction—and the heat had frightened Owen because he knew how Serena died.
Claire gagged against the blasts from the boiler. Her lungs refused to open. She was suffocating.
Out in the woods, the spirit of Serena had tried to get inside her body. Back in Chicago, that was what the boys had wanted. To get inside her. Good God—it was all the same.
Serena and I want the same thing, Claire thought, coughing against the fiery breath of the boiler, wheezing as the remaining oxygen slipped away through the vents in the locker.
Serena wanted her old life back. Serena didn’t want to be reduced to a half-dead spirit rattling inside an awful body.
“Neither do I,” Claire moaned, hitting the door limply. “We are the same.” Serena had become the voice of everything Claire wanted. Everything she was afraid to say.
“Here,” Rhine shouted. “Stand back.”
He attacked the locker door—it sounded like he was hitting the handle with a hammer. A loud boom exploded as he knocked the handle off; the broken metal piece clattered against the tile floor below.
Metal claws of a couple of crowbars slipped into the side of the door. After Rhine shouted, “One, two, three,” both crowbars pulled at the same time, popping the door open.
Claire tumbled out, coughing and wheezing. Rhine and Rich both stood before her, crowbars in their hands. Rich dropped his tool, squatting down beside her. “Claire?” he asked, tilting his head, trying to get her to look in his eyes.
She pr
essed her palm against the cold tile floor to steady herself. In the harsh fluorescent office light, she glanced back at the locker—just one more look. Just to make sure. Empty.
The necklace tumbled from her hand, the cameo clinking against the tile floor.
Claire gasped, filling her lungs with cool air. Owen stared straight ahead, Isles’s lipstick still staining his mouth.
“Claire,” her father shouted, lunging for her, sprawled across the basement floor in front of the open locker. “Are you all right? Talk to me. Rachelle sent me about a hundred texts, and I came to the school right away.”
“Dr. Cain showed up in the gym right after you’d left,” Rich said, obviously still upset. “He told me something was wrong. We had to find you.”
Claire glanced up, finding Becca and Chas in the basement, too.
“Phone,” Claire coughed, wiping at her tears, her chest lurching as she tried to catch her breath. “It’s on Serena’s phone—proof—of them—together—in the basement.” She pointed first at Isles, who suddenly appeared in the doorway, then swiveled her hand back toward Owen. A tear building in Owen’s left eye rolled off his lower lid, down his face.
“You?” Becca whispered, staring at Isles. “You?”
Isles shook her head at Rhine, unaware that her lipstick was smeared into one of her cheeks. “I didn’t know what was going on,” she tried to tell him, pretending to have only just arrived in the basement herself. “I was just—I was—there were noises. So I came. To check on them.”
Owen turned a wounded face toward Isles. “It’s out,” he shouted. “They know.”
“I have no idea what he’s talking about,” Isles said.
“Are you really going to do that?” Owen wailed, through the lipstick stain on his mouth. “After everything I did? I tried to hide it all for you, but now that it’s out, you won’t stand up for me? Huh? I love you, and you said you loved me. And now, you won’t stand up for me?”
“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Isles repeated.
“He met with Serena,” Claire coughed. “The afternoon of the ice storm.”
Feral Page 27
