Chapter 23 - The Girl in Green

We stayed still in the shadows for a moment before dashing for the stairs.

Every nerve frazzled.

“The monster,” Barlow said in a shaky voice. “She was wearing a hospital gown.”

“Gay-Lynne Sims,” I said. “That’s her. The woman I saw in the picture.”

“She’s a shapeshifter,” Barlow whispered. “A glaistig, like Dr. Jacobsen said. She must have taken her face.”

I shuddered at the idea of poor Gay-Lynne Sims, her brain not her own, her face used by a monster. And Ava . . .

The thought of Ava, leaving a hiding place hoping for an escape, finding the door to the incinerator locked—because we’d turned our backs on her—was terrible.

But Ava wasn’t coming back. I knew that.

So much blood.

Barlow turned to look toward me. “The iron should stop her from coming into the school.”

“Just like the statue?”

“Maybe,” he said.

A terrible thought occurred to me. Ava and I had left the incinerator door open. I’d seen the girl in green in the dining hall because she’d followed me through the incinerator. What if the iron didn’t hold the monster? The back of the incinerator curled inward, as though someone—or something—had pushed through it with great force.

“What if it doesn’t hold?” I murmured.

“I don’t know,” he said.

I leaned into Barlow and he wrapped his arms around me. He was shaking—or maybe I was. For all his talk of the girl in green, Barlow hadn’t been prepared to meet her again.

Neither of us were.

* * *

We made our way back up the stairs and through the service corridor. The dining hall was empty, and we waited behind the wall between the dining room and the foyer until we heard the guard emerge from his office. When we heard his steps echo down the right hallway toward the library, we waited until he turned the corner and the light from his flashlight disappeared.

Barlow and I stepped lightly across the tiled foyer and then moved quicker up the stairs.

We stopped at the landing to the second floor, outside the girls’ dorm.

Barlow stood close to me, head bowed.

“Are you going to be okay?” he whispered.

“Yeah,” I said. “And you?”

Barlow nodded slowly.

He didn’t want to leave. I could tell. And I didn’t want him to leave either. I wanted to drop into a couch with him somewhere, side by side. No words, no thoughts—just knowing proximity. No one else would ever know what we’d seen. Once he went upstairs, I’d be alone.

Except not. I had to tell Kenzie.

Kenzie was waiting for me in my room, slouched on Ava’s bed. She sagged as I came through the door, alone.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the phone.

“Ava wouldn’t have left it behind,” Kenzie said, her eyes filling with tears.

“No, she wouldn’t have.”

I went to the closet and dug through my backpack for the last of my phone chargers. I hoped that it had enough charge to boot my phone up. I didn’t have any way of charging the charger, so once it was dead, my phone was a brick to me.

I sat down on Ava’s bed next to Kenzie and handed her the plug.

She carefully wiped the dust and ash off my phone. We waited for a few minutes until the phone turned on enough to show a red bar with 4 percent charge.

Then 18.

“I don’t know if you want to watch this,” I said.

Kenzie lifted her face and gazed levelly at me.

“Whatever is there, I have to know,” she said.

There was a new video on my phone, a splintered shot of the boiler room. It was hard to make out details on the cracked screen of my phone, but Ava’s voice was unmistakable.

“This wall was put up to block off the old hospital,” Ava said on the video. “But as you can see, there is a way in. My brilliant roommate found it. She’s one of those touch-everything types.”

Beside me, Kenzie chuckled slightly.

I felt the sick tightness of dread in the center of my chest as she approached the open door of the incinerator. The screen went fuzzy as Ava made her way through the barrel.

Then a splintered shot of her face filled the screen, cheekbones catching the somber red glow of the exit sign.

“I’m in,” Ava whispered.

Her voice had a slight quiver, her eyes darted nervously as though she already suspected she wasn’t alone.

“Oh, Ava,” Kenzie murmured. She grabbed my hand and held it tightly.

The screen was so dark and splintered, it was hard to make out the walls of the corridor. A gurney appeared briefly at the unbroken corner of the screen. All was quiet except for the sound of Ava’s breath coming fast and ragged. She turned a corner and flashed the camera over the three tables in the operating room, ran her hand over the dust-free sheets.

“This is the surgery room. You can see these sheets are new. And this is Layla’s hair. She was down here and they did something to her.”

Ava pointed the camera toward the floor. She lifted the sheet with her free hand. The view fuzzed out and then came in to focus on the small piece of scalp and long black hair.

“Was that really Layla’s hair?” Kenzie asked. “She was down there?”

“I think so,” I said.

Ava reached over with her other hand and picked up the hair. As I’d imagined, she’d pocketed it.

“Can you believe this?” Ava said. “What kind of monsters do something like this?”

In her excitement, Ava forgot to be quiet. She forgot that strange, instinctive fear of the thing lurking in the dark. She was the Ava I’d first met, the Ava who had called me a feral. She was knowing and sly, righteous and invincible, at least in her own mind.

“Help!”

A small voice came from outside the room, muffled and almost unrecognizable.

But I knew.

“Fuck!” Ava whispered to the phone. “There’s someone here.”

I wanted to tell Ava to run in the opposite direction, to hide. Anything but acknowledge that small, pathetic voice in the dark.

It was too late.

Ava turned the camera toward the door, shaking the camera, making everything a muddy blur. She was shaking. She stepped out of the operating room and turned toward the red exit sign, its arrow pointed toward the tunnel below.

“Run,” I murmured. Hoping against hope that Ava had dropped the phone right there and had escaped.

Beneath the red exit sign hunched a pathetic figure in a green hospital gown, bowed head, dark hair covering all of her face except one eye. It was hard to see much through the spiderweb of my phone, but the unbroken corner landed on that one exposed eye for a moment.

The watchful eye of a predator.

Staring directly into the camera as though she could see through time and space to where we were.

“Oh no,” Kenzie choked out. “What is that . . . ?”

“A monster,” I answered, my voice little more than an exhale of breath. My heart was a lead weight in my chest. I wanted to turn the video off, feeling that if we didn’t watch what happened next, it could all be undone.

If we didn’t watch, we could bring Ava back.

Kenzie squeezed my hand so tightly, I could feel her nails digging into my skin, but I welcomed the pain. The pain was real and immediate. It was now and not something that had already happened.

It reminded me that I was still alive.

“Are you okay?” Ava asked the girl in green in a tremulous voice.

The girl in the green hospital gown, already splintered in the broken glass of my phone, shook and became an unrecognizable blur in a sea of black as Ava stepped closer to her.

To the monster.

“Ava, don’t,” I whispered. I couldn’t help it, even though I knew it was too late.

Ava stopped a few steps away, still holding the camera on the girl in green.

The girl looked up but her face was—wrong. That one eye too big, in the wrong place.

“Help me.”

Her lips parted slightly but not enough to say the words. The sound came from somewhere else.

Ava shifted her feet slightly, and the light from my phone caught and glinted on . . . teeth. Sharp, pointed, too many teeth in her mouth.

Ava made a horrified, guttural noise, worse than a scream, and dropped the phone. The phone fell and cracked, bounced face up, revealing nothing but a confusing blur of motion accompanied by the sound of an abbreviated scream cut short by a snarl and a thump.

Ava landed on top of the camera. The side of her face, her hair, visible on the screen. She lifted her head and moaned. She put her hand down on the other side of the camera and tried to sit up.

A scrabbling noise, and a terrified shriek, and a blur of motion filled the camera.

The video went silent.

The only sight, the ceiling lit by a dim red glow.

The sound of a body being dragged slowly across the floor.

Toward the tunnel.

Kenzie shut the phone off.

I stared at the phone in her hand in stunned silence.

Kenzie was sobbing.

I wished that I could cry too, but it had never come easily for me.

Never as easy as anger, or despair.

Denial.

But there was no denying this.

Ava was dead.