Mandy scrolled through her contacts, then hit Katie’s number, dialing, and put the phone to her ear.
She waited a few seconds and, when it didn’t start ringing, she looked at the screen.
Call failed. Try again?
She hit Yes and put the phone to her ear again, but with the same result.
Call failed. Try again?
She got up and moved to the center of the hall, then hit Yes again.
Still no luck. She stood next to the doors and tried once more.
Nothing.
She tried sending a text, but it wouldn’t send, either.
“Where was I?” she said out loud, trying to remember where she’d been standing when she left the voicemail for Sam. That call had gone through just fine.
She hit Send on the text again, then moved around the area near the door, hoping to find the sweet spot. She ignored the voice in the back of her head that told her the building only let Sam’s call go through because it knew he wouldn’t answer. Katie would be there for her, Katie would help her, so it stopped her from getting through.
“Let. Me. The fuck. Out,” she said.
She tried the door again, but it was still locked.
Fuck it, she thought. There’s another phone around here somewhere, a landline. Even a pay phone. I’ll find it.
And she set off down the hall in search of it, not noticing how the lights began to dim behind her as she walked away.
She checked a few locked doors, hoping for an open office, but with no luck. She poked her head into the cafeteria. The lights in the dining area were out, but the lights around the service area were on, giving the room an eerie glow. She wanted to step inside the room, but with the lights like that, everything felt off balance, like she was walking on a ship in the middle of a stormy ocean. It made her eyes hurt and she had to look away and close the door again. She hadn’t seen a phone anyway.
She wondered if the common room had one. Surely a pay phone at least, she thought. But if Lynn and Jane were there, she didn’t want to have to face either of them, especially after how she’d acted just now with Lynn.
No, there had to be one in the hallway somewhere, didn’t there?
The kids didn’t have phones in their rooms, and surely, many of them being teenagers, they liked to keep in touch with their friends, so it just made sense, there had to be a phone.
She felt a sudden jolt in her pocket and she pulled her phone out, desperate to see who had just sent her a text, Sam or Katie. She looked eagerly at the screen, but there was nothing. No missed anything.
She looked in her messages anyway, just to be sure, but there was still nothing.
She dialed Katie again, but couldn’t get through.
She checked the switch on the side and saw the phone had gone to silent mode. She flipped it back so she’d hear the tone or the ring if someone tried to get through, then put it back.
The hallway swallowed her up and she looked behind her again to make sure the front door was still visible. She hadn’t got lost again. Yet.
She tried to remember where the nurse’s office was. Surely there had to be a landline in there.
“Down this way?” she wondered, and turned left down a side hall.
The building was so quiet. She felt, for a moment, like she was on the third floor again, but a quick look back around the corner showed the front door right where she’d left it. She went forward again, sure she was on the right path. She just hoped, if there was no nurse working tonight--Mandy couldn’t remember if there was one on all shifts or not, but there should be--that the door was at least unlocked. The desperation to get out of here grew stronger with every minute.
She felt a jolt in her pocket again and pulled out the phone, but still no missed texts or calls. The phone had flipped itself back to silent again and Mandy switched it back and put it away.
She hadn’t even pulled her hand out of her pocket before she felt it switch back again. Leave it, she thought. I can feel the vibration, so that’s good enough.
But who- or whatever kept sliding their hand into her pocket and switching her phone to silent, well that thought gave her the chills so she decided it was best not to give it reason to do so again.
She found the nurse’s office and was beyond relieved to see the door stood open. She ran down the hall to it, was almost there before she realized the lights were on and there were shadows moving on the walls. Someone was in there.
Hopefully it was the nurse, and hopefully Mrs. Beaman wouldn’t mind if Mandy used her phone. But when she got there and stepped inside, she thought, That’s no nurse.
A little girl sat behind the desk.
“Oh,” Mandy said. “Hello. Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
The girl stared at her. No, stared through her. Mandy stepped closer, studying the girl’s face, trying to remember if she’d met her already, and whose girl she was. The face was blank. The girl had her long black hair pulled back into a severely tight pony tail and she stared ahead with pale eyes and Mandy wondered for a second if the girl might be blind.
“Hello?” she said. “Anybody home?”
The girl snapped to and looked over at Mandy who had moved into the office and was creeping up alongside the desk.
“Can I help you?” the girl asked.
Mandy thought she sounded awfully official for someone who couldn’t be any older than fourteen.
“Yeah,” she replied. “Shouldn’t you be in bed? Are Jane or Bea going to come looking for you? I’ll take you back to bed if you want.”
“Why would I be in bed?” the girl asked. “If I’m in bed, whose going to watch the desk? Don’t be silly.”
“I’m sure we’ll manage, somehow,” Mandy said, and moved to help the girl up with a hand on her shoulder, but the girl shrugged her off and flinched to the side.
“Don’t touch me,” she said. “There are germs on you you’re not even aware of and I won’t have you spreading those things around this place.”
“Um. Right. Sorry. Okay, then. Come on, I’ll walk you back to bed, but if we get caught, it’s all on you. What are you doing down here, anyway?”
The girl slammed her hand down on the desk and said, “What am I doing here? What do you think I’m doing here? Where else should I be? I’m the one in charge of this department, the only one in charge of it, and this is where I’m going to be. You can run along and play teacher or whatever it is you all do out there, but this is where I am and, no, thank you, I do not care to come and watch your cartoons or share in your popcorn. My God, the germs those girls are spreading with all those hands in those bowls, hands I know for a fact they haven’t washed in days, and they go rooting around together in their food like that. The thought of it makes me want to be sick!”
“Well, you could be right about the germs,” Mandy said, “I don’t really know; I just got here. But the movie was over a while ago, and everyone’s in bed now, which is where you need to be.”
The girl didn’t respond and after a few seconds of staring each other down, Mandy got the feeling there was something very wrong with this girl. This wasn’t just some night owl who had decided to sneak down here and have some fun playing grown-up (grown-up wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs anyway, had been Mandy’s experience). There was something definitely off here.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
The girl smoothed out her shirt, a white button down that had seen better days, sat up straighter in the chair that was too big for her, and said, “I’m Nurse Willow.”
“How old are you?”
“As if that’s any of your business!” the girl nearly shrieked. “What kind of nerve!?”
“The kind from being an adult, now answer me.”
“I don’t have to answer anything you ask me,” Nurse Willow insisted.
“How long have you been here?”
The girl just looked away, defiant to the end. Mandy pulled the phone from her pocket, saw there were no missed calls or t
exts during the exchange, and said, “You know what, I don’t have time for this, and it’s not even my problem anymore, so what do I care.”
With that, she picked up the phone and started to dial. She hit the 9 for an outside line, then realized she didn’t have Katie’s number memorized and she opened the contacts in her phone to get it. Nurse Willow was staring at her the entire time as if Mandy had just thrown up all over the desk. Mandy punched in the first three numbers, but before she could dial the rest, Willow had grabbed a ruler in the desk drawer and slapped Mandy’s hand away from the buttons.
“What the fuck!” Mandy yelled, putting the handset back in the cradle and inspecting her hand. “What is your problem!?”
“I told you once,” Willow said, “this office is my domain. If you want to use my phone, you ask.”
“That’s it,” Mandy said, “you’re coming with me and we’re going to find out where you belong.”
She tried to grab the girl’s button down shirt, but Willow was faster and she ducked aside and skirted around the desk and was out of the office in a flash, down the hall and around the corner.
Without thinking, Mandy took off after her, letting her anger carry her feet along. The girl had a ten foot head start, which soon grew to twenty feet. She knew these halls better than Mandy and she took her turns with speed while Mandy felt as if she was stumbling behind, just trying to make the next turn before the girl vanished too far ahead of her.
The giggles floating back on the air weren’t from an angry grown woman, and the seeming change in personality and tone of voice settled very uneasily around her. She had a momentary vision of the girl stopping in the middle of the hall and turning to face Mandy with wide bulging white eyes and black veins crisscrossing a pale face. The girl would hold up clawed hands and leap at Mandy’s face while giggling like a lunatic.
But instead she just kept running, leading Mandy deeper and deeper until she was looking around and realizing she had absolutely no idea where in the building she was. Mr. Winters, or whoever he’d really been, hadn’t brought her here. She wondered if it might be the boys’ side of the facility. It was the only explanation she could think of.
“Get back here, you little brat!” Mandy yelled, mostly for effect; she had to do something to convince herself she was still in charge here. This little girl had scared her, but Mandy wasn’t going to give in to a delusional kid with a ruler just because she’d caught her off guard.
Well, it was a little more than that, wasn’t it? Yes, she had to admit. The girl’s whole demeanor had unsettled her. Almost like she hadn’t been playing, but had really believed herself to be the nurse. And not a nice one, at that.
Mandy chased her down another hallway and tried to close the gap a little more, but Willow dashed around another corner, taking it like one of those light cycles in the movie Tron.
“You are going to be in so much trouble,” Mandy threatened. And if she could catch that girl, she thought it might take a superior act of will on Mandy’s part to not beat the girl herself. She knew she couldn’t do it, and, having no kids had never spanked one herself, and if asked she knew the correct public response was that you shouldn’t hit children, but Mandy had grown up with plenty of spankings and they hadn’t killed her. In fact, she often thought the fear of a spanking had kept her from doing a lot of stupid things as a kid. And a little behavior modification was exactly what this little brat needed right about now.
She turned a corner and found herself, once again, alone in the Mertland Childrens' Home.
She stopped and tried to listen for the sound of running feet, but instead Mandy was stricken by how dead silent everything was around her. She looked up the hall, wondering if the girl was hiding from her, but all she saw were doors and . . . were those lockers? Why were there lockers here? Did the building used to be a school? That couldn’t be; Mr. Winters had said the place was built specifically to be the Home. Maybe each kid had their own locker once upon a time?
She had no idea and honestly didn’t care to know; the history of the lockers was the least of Mandy’s concerns right then. She looked behind her, wondering if the girl had hidden somewhere. Maybe Mandy had overshot and the girl was sneaking back the way they’d come. But the hall behind her was just as bare as the hall in front of her.
When she turned around again, she froze, her breath caught in her chest and her jaw dropped slightly.
This wasn’t the hallway she’d been in five seconds ago.
Posters and banners decorated the walls. She moved close to one and her shoes were loud on the tile floor. The first poster she came to was on bright pink poster board, covered in a collage of clipped magazine photos with the words WHAT I DID ON SUMMER BREAK at the top. The pictures showed roller coasters, bumper cars, water slides, a couple walking on a beach against a purple sunset. Another poster showed a series of book covers. The next poster had been made by someone with a sense of humor; each clipped photo showed a person sleeping. The fourth poster she came to, though, she had to look away from before she’d even taken it all in. Someone had raided their collection of Fangoria magazines for pictures of severed limbs and blood-splattered walls.
“Disgusting,” she said out loud. But then something caught her eye and she had to look again. She hadn’t noticed it at first but there was a uniformity to the bloody photos and when she examined them a little closer--but not too close--she realized what bothered her about their placement was that each one was perfectly rectangular. She touched one and it felt slick under her finger. She fingered the corner and it was thick.
Because these weren’t magazine photos, they were actual photographs someone had taken.
She backed away from the wall in horror and ran into a locker behind her, wondering “Who are these people?”
She looked around again, this time not just for the girl she’d followed down here, but for anyone who might be lurking nearby, because that was the sense she got, that feeling of being watched, of impending attack, that there was something she couldn’t quite see, something, someone just out of sight and she wouldn’t see them until the last moment.
The solitude closed in around her and she felt her heart begin to race. Her mouth was suddenly very dry.
She broke away from the wall and tried to go back the way she’d come, but as soon as she turned the first corner she realized the Youth Home was gone. She was in a school. She didn’t know where, or how, but the truth was unavoidable. She wasn’t where she was supposed to be.
The halls were dark, with very diffused light filtering from outside, into the classrooms and spilling meager illumination into the hall.
Then she wondered, “Maybe I can get out here. Schools have doors, I’ll find one and hopefully be able to get out.”
But they chain doors from the inside, don’t they? They used to when she was in school. Many times she’d had to stay after for whatever reason and then had to navigate a maze of hallways and chained doors to find the one door she could open.
So she’d look for the door. And she wouldn’t look at any more wall posters.
The classrooms glowed with eerie moonlight, and the sight of those empty desks made Mandy feel cold.
She kept her ears open for the sound of running feet in case the girl reappeared, or worse. But it was the “worse” she was trying not to focus on until it hit her full force in the face. She had stopped for a second and rested her head against the glass in one of the classroom doors, feeling the coolness against her skin and trying to soak in some light outside a class that she at first assumed would be empty like all the others, but then she noticed the dark cluster near the front of the room and she stopped and looked at it before realizing what it was.
It had to be ten bodies, maybe a dozen, all huddled together near the wall, on the opposite side of the teacher’s desk. She only saw their backs, but it looked like they were all standing together in a circle. She couldn’t make out individual features, no distinguishable hair color or style, they all
seemed to be wearing the same style of black coat. For a moment, she wasn’t even sure what she was looking at were live people until one of them moved.
She backed away from the glass, keeping her eyes on that mass of bodies, but feeling more surrounded than ever before. She could barely breathe.
She crept away from the door, wanting to get away from there before they turned around and saw her, and before she saw what they were doing. She didn’t know and after seeing the WHAT I DID ON SUMMER BREAK poster, she didn’t want to know.
Now getting out of here was even more important.
She passed another classroom and glanced in to make sure there wasn’t another mass of mysterious bodies huddled together in there. There wasn’t, but what she saw almost made her wish there had been because in this room she saw a dozen kids, standing in the same place the strangers had been in the previous room, only these kids were deathly pale and stood facing the door. But their eyes were focused toward the ceiling and Mandy, trying to hide in the shadow of the hallway, sensed something above her. She could see it in the kids’ expressions, they were looking at something on the wall, above the door, inside the room, maybe something on the ceiling. But in Mandy’s mind, anything she could possibly imagine that would be on the ceiling, and be able to command the attention of every kid in the classroom--a classroom, she reminded herself, that, at this time of night, should have been empty hours ago--was not something she needed to involve in her life.
She wanted to run so badly, but feared the sound of her panicking feet would just attract unwanted attention. So she eased back and kept moving down the hall, praying to God to give her a sign, show her the stairs, show her the administrative office, something.
She did find a door. It wasn’t the door to outside, but it was a set of double doors and that meant it wasn’t to a classroom. She looked at the placard above it and saw she’d found the gymnasium. She’d seen no exit doors so far, but a lot of gyms had doors so the students could go outside without filing through the hallways.
She had nothing to lose by checking.
The Ghosts of Mertland (An Angel Hill novel) Page 10
