Chapter 19 - The Girl in Green

I woke fully dressed on top of my bed at some undetermined time. Ava was in her bed, asleep on her side, covers kicked off. Arms folded in, Tyrannosaurus-style, her head held over her hands as though in prayer. For someone who exuded a brash physical confidence in daylight, she slept like she expected an animal attack: back against the wall, huddled over her core. I felt an unexpected wave of tenderness for her. Ava had such a big presence, but asleep she looked surprisingly small and vulnerable.

I reached over to a nonexistent side table for a phone that wasn’t there. Reaching for my phone happened approximately four hundred times a day.

My teeth were fuzzy.

I was hungry.

I needed to pee.

Not in that order. I left the room to head to the bathroom.

There was a dim glow of an exit sign in the hallway, and some sort of low-level floor lights like they have in theaters. The red glow made me think of the old hospital and I shuddered reflexively. I walked back from the bathroom and hesitated at the door to our room. I had no idea what time it was, but suddenly I was wide awake—anxiously and stupidly awake. Our tiny room felt like a prison cell. I couldn’t go back in.

Normally, the only thing that would put me back to sleep if I woke up in the middle of the night was a carb-heavy snack. At home we didn’t eat a lot of junk food, but Mom kept cheap boxes of ramen in the cupboard for just such an occasion.

I made my way noiselessly downstairs to the dining hall, hoping for a leftover sandwich, maybe even a protein bar, as long as it wasn’t cherry vanilla.

I stopped halfway down the bottom stairs and peered over the railing toward the security office. The light was off.

The security guard wasn’t there.

He could have been making the rounds. Or maybe he just didn’t come in to work that night.

The dining room was mostly dark. A dim beam of light from the foyer gave outline to chairs and tables.

The front door was right there.

No security guard.

It would be so easy. I was only lightly dressed, but I had slipped on jeans in case I ran into anyone, and my sneakers too because the tile floor was cold. I could tie my shoes and make a run for it. If I’d known that the opportunity to escape would present itself, I would have put on a sports bra and thrown on my wool sweater.

It was too late to worry about that now.

I had a chance to leave before I ended up on a gurney downstairs, like Layla.

It wouldn’t come around again.

I took a step toward the front door and hesitated. I knew floodlights would come on the moment I stepped out the front door, but that wasn’t what stopped me. The air had a silent thickness, a quality of waiting, as though someone was there.

I felt . . . watched.

“Help.”

The sound was a small bleat, an almost inhuman cry.

I froze, waiting in a thick silence for so long, I began to wonder if I’d imagined the sound.

“Help me.”

The voice came from my right, from the dining hall. A voice full of sorrow and a pain so vivid, I felt a sob bubble up in my throat.

My first thought was that no one could suffer that much and survive.

I didn’t want to move.

A wave of revulsion and fear passed over me. Once, I’d been in the car with Michaela when we were the first to stumble across a terrible accident. Someone walking on the interstate had been hit by a car that didn’t have time to brake. Michaela pulled over to call 911, to see if she could help. She told me not to look.

A severed leg by the side of the road.

I didn’t have a choice.

I had to look.

I felt that way now.

I took a halting step forward, knowing that I should turn and run.

And then another step. And another until I stood at the entrance to the dining hall, waiting for my eyes to adjust. Waiting for shapes to form out of the darkness.

A shadow coalesced out of the darkness, an oblong shape leaning against the wall. It could have been anything.

But it wasn’t just anything.

It was someone hurt, someone mired in pain and confusion.

The air was thick with a waiting presence.

I had to look.

I didn’t want to move.

A ripple of shock ran along the back of my spine, and I knew I should be quiet.

Completely still.

But I couldn’t stop.

Another step forward.

What if it was someone from the school?

“Hello?” I called.

My voice was a harsh croak.

The minute I called out, I knew I’d made a horrible mistake.

Despair washed over me and pulled me away from the front door, away from my chance at escape, like the tide rushing out. I was no more than an empty Styrofoam cup adrift in the surf, floating without will, but not aimlessly. I was pulled inexorably toward the despairing figure on the other side of the room, and as I cleared the doorway, my view of the room widened, and I saw her.

She was sitting on the floor near the door that led to the service hallway between the kitchen and the boiler room. Her knees were drawn up to her chest, her face shrouded in darkness, her lank hair hanging around her shoulders. She wore a dark, shapeless dress. A faint beam of light from the cleanup pass-through in the kitchen crossed the floor in front of her.

She shifted slightly and the corner of her dress passed into the beam, a deep teal green. The light revealed the side of her face, a high cheekbone reddened from a recent bruise, full lips, a delicate jawline.

She was beautiful.

She was lost, so lost.

She wasn’t from school, but I had the dim awareness that I’d seen her somewhere before.

I took a step forward.

She needed me.

My eyes adjusted to the gloom revealing details. Her dress was an oversized green hospital gown, dirty and torn in places, as though she’d been wandering through underbrush for days. Her bare feet were covered in mud.

“Help me,” she murmured.

I felt like I’d slipped beneath the surface of the water, drowning in a well of hopelessness. She was lost and confused. My own mother had abandoned me here and all I could do was claw my way to the surface, but at least I knew who I was.

She didn’t know.

She was lost.

She was alone.

Hungry.

So hungry.

She needed my help.

“Are you okay?” I asked, taking a step closer.

She didn’t say anything.

Her hospital gown, frayed and tattered at the edges, appeared to be splattered with dark mud or . . .

Hospital gown.

Why was she wearing a hospital gown?

She was so still, she didn’t appear to be breathing.

I moved closer still. Her feet were stained dark, not with mud as I’d previously thought, but something thinner and more viscous.

Blood.

Forgotten.

Alone.

“How can I help you?” I asked in a voice barely more than a whisper.

She lifted her face slightly, revealing a bandage over one brow. Cheeks pale and underneath her eyes bruised and puffy as though someone had used a surgical tool for . . .

The word came to me suddenly, unbidden.

Orbitoclast.

A device resembling an ice pick driven between the eyeball and the socket.

Even in the gloom of the dining room, I recognized the face.

I’d never forget the moment I’d first seen her face in a picture.

Gay-Lynne Sims.

But it couldn’t be.

She’d been dead for seventy years.

“Help,” she said, her voice so small and plaintive, it seemed to float up from the earth below.

Her lips hadn’t moved.

“What do you want to tell me?” I asked, my voice barely a squeak.

She said nothing. Her eyes held a horror so deep, I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t.

She lifted her hand, slowly.

She wanted to share the pain and confusion of her last moments on earth as the ice pick slid under her eye socket heading for her brain.

I didn’t want to know.

My hand lifted toward hers.

I didn’t want to.

I didn’t want to feel the ice pick slide into my eye socket.

I didn’t want to touch her hand.

A beam of light roamed across the room.

“What are you doing out of your room?” a young male voice said.

It was a security guard.

Startled, I turned and stepped aside, getting my feet tangled in a nearby chair. I fell hard, hitting something with my cheek on the way down. Stars blossomed behind my eyes in the darkness, followed almost instantly by the sharp, angry pain that comes from a blow to the brain.

The roving light came to rest on my face, blinding me.

“Did you see her?” I asked.

But I knew that answer, almost before I asked the question.

The ghost of Gay-Lynne Sims was gone.