Chapter 34 - The Girl in Green

Alarm bells rang throughout the school and students streamed out onto the lawn and the cold early morning light without jackets or sweaters. Teachers weaved through them, counting heads and trying to calm students, conferring together in hushed, frantic voices. They seemed as shocked as everyone else. I wondered how many teachers beside Coach Mullins actually knew what was going on underneath the school.

But then again, no one knew how the fire had started in Ms. Burton’s office but us.

I held tight to Barlow’s hand as we ran from the school.

In the chaos, we lost track of the others as we made our way down the broad walkway into the yard, in the midst of the crowd.

When we reached the low stone wall that edged the street, we stopped. Barlow slumped onto the wall panting, more from pain than exertion. I peeled back what remained of his shirt to reveal three deep gashes in his shoulder.

“We need to get you to a hospital,” I said.

“I don’t see that happening right away,” Barlow said.

“Barlow, what happened?”

I turned. Dr. Jacobsen stood behind us on the lawn, a look of deep concern on his face.

“Let me help,” he said. He had on a flannel shirt over a short sleeve T-shirt, and he pulled the shirt off and wrapped it around Barlow’s arm, using the sleeves to tie it firmly.

“Those look like claw marks,” Dr. Jacobsen said. “Do you two want to tell me what happened here?”

I glanced over at Barlow. There was no way to know who else at the school had been involved, besides the nurse, Coach Mullins, and the headmaster. But Dr. Jacobsen seemed genuinely overwhelmed by all the chaos.

Barlow met my eyes and nodded. We had to trust someone.

We told Dr. Jacobsen everything. About Burton. About the monster. About Ava. Madison and Soren. I told my part of the story like a four-year-old relaying the plot of a long and complex movie, in a rush of words that didn’t make any sense.

Dr. Jacobsen listened over the sound of arriving sirens, over other teachers yelling for students to stay calm. There were parts of the story where he shook his head in disbelief, but his eyes repeatedly went back to Barlow’s arm. Those claw marks were deep.

A wave of smoke wafted over us, acrid and smelling of burnt wiring and years of shellac. Mercifully, the wind shifted, and the smoke blew the other way, but it was cold.

“I’m going to go find the nurse and see if she can’t do a better job with your arm,” Dr. Jacobsen said.

“Not the nurse!” I said quickly. “She’s part of it.”

I remembered the nurse dragging me to Burton’s office.

You’re overfeeding it.

The nurse had said that.

I looked around the school yard, people fleeing in all directions. It was hard to believe that only a few hours ago, I’d been trapped underground, afraid to turn on a light for fear a monster would devour me. I saw Kenzie and Star in the crowd and felt a surge of relief. I’d assumed we’d all made it out of Burton’s office, but it felt good to see them both.

“I’ve been studying this place for a long time,” Dr. Jacobsen said. “There have been so many stories of disappearances, but I thought they were apocryphal.”

“Um, okay,” I said. I had no idea what that word meant.

“Why didn’t you tell me when Ava disappeared?” Dr. Jacobsen said. “I could have helped.”

“I thought about it,” Barlow said. “But you thought the girl in green was a myth.”

“A glaistig,” Dr. Jacobsen shook his head sadly. “I came here to study the correlation between the history of the hospital and the local folklore, but I never imagined that the girl in green was real.”

Dr. Jacobsen shivered in his thin damp shirt. I thought of Ava hiding in the research library. Of all the files and the pictures of Gay-Lynne Sims—the girl in green.

I looked down at my hands in my lap. They were covered with a mixture of blood and cave dust. The world smelled of fire, but if I blinked, I could imagine the scent of rotten flesh permeating my clothes.

“She took Gay-Lynne Sims’s face,” I said. “The girl in the lobotomy photos you had.”

Dr. Jacobsen let out a strangled cry. “She was a victim?” he said. “That poor woman.”

“Yeah,” Barlow said solemnly. “This has been going on here for a long time.”

Dr. Jacobsen had a sudden sharp look in his eye. He reached up to the spot on my head—shaved, tiny cylinder under the skin.

“What is that?” he asked.

“It’s a tracking device.”

“The headmaster did this to you?”

I’d forgotten this part of the story.

“No. I think it was Coach Mullins.”

Dr. Jacobsen stiffened. He inhaled sharply and got a far-away look in his eyes, a mixture of disgust and sadness.

“Excuse me, for a moment,” he said in a clipped and formal tone of voice. Some weird barrier between student and teacher that had come down while we told our story had just slid back up. “Jess, you’ll stay with Barlow until an ambulance arrives?”

I nodded. I wasn’t going anywhere until Barlow got stitches. Maybe not even after that.

Dr. Jacobsen turned and strode toward the back of the school, in the direction of the field and the locker rooms. The front of the building was truly on fire now, all that carpet and wood burning on the inside.

I wondered what Dr. Jacobsen would do, but not enough to leave Barlow and find out. I was worried about him. Not only was he injured, but he looked shell-shocked.

I realized that he’d also lost someone. Soren had been his roommate.

Barlow stood up. “I can’t sit still anymore,” he said. “I want to walk. Will you come with me?”

“Of course.”

I understood the need to move. The worst feeling in the world is to be still while the world collapses around you. It was the thing that always set me on the run, but this time was different. I wasn’t running away anymore.

We walked, my arm around his waist, out of the parking lot and down the road, which was now filled with a few local police cars but mostly pickup trucks, locals attempting a bucket brigade method of putting the fire out. Hard to tell if it was working or not. We walked past all the chaos, down the road around the bend.

“This all started with me,” he said. “Delilah decided to reopen the school after I was attacked.”

“It wasn’t just you,” I said. “She wanted to keep the whole valley safe.”

“But not us, here at the school.”

I thought about what Ms. Burton had said in the office. One day it would be Barlow’s turn to protect the valley. She must have brought him to the school to let him in on the horrible family secret. I imagined the same thing had happened to her, a family legacy that traced all the way back to Calvin Burton.

“You said it yourself, Barlow—this has been going on for a long time.”

I squeezed his hand. We stood by the side of the road in a pile of wet leaves, the rain slowing to a bone-chilling mist, as trucks traveled up the road.

Barlow sighed and leaned his head against my shoulder.

“You couldn’t have known,” I said.

“But I did,” he said. “I grew up here. And I saw her. I knew about the monster.”

“You knew about one monster,” I murmured. “But you didn’t know about the other.”

I wrapped my arms around Barlow as he cried. I thought about eleven-year-old Barlow, coming face to face with a monster and deciding that the whole thing was now his responsibility. The town, the valley, the monster. How the family that he revered had been responsible for atrocities.

State vehicles came up the oncoming lane, issuing warning beeps. A lot of state vehicles. Someone must have called in the big guns. I hoped for an ambulance among all the cars and trucks making their way to the top of the mountain.

Dr. Jacobsen’s flannel shirt was soaked through with blood. Barlow was bleeding again.

His mom was over the mountain in a regional hospital, ready to put all her practice on chicken skins to work, if there wasn’t a doctor around. I had to get Barlow to her, whatever the cost.

I was contemplating stepping in front of a state trooper, and demanding a ride, when a small white truck driven by a woman with mahogany red hair stopped in the middle of the road.

It was Tree.

The passenger door to the old truck creaked open, and Mom flew out.

Mom! She was here for me, now when I needed her most. How did this happen?

She stood in the middle of the road shaking her head. I don’t think she believed she would find me alive.

“Mom, we have to get Barlow to the hospital,” I said.

“Of course,” Mom said, looking Barlow over. “Tree will know the way.”