Текст книги "Within These Walls"

Автор книги: Ania Ahlborn

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

13

VEE SPENT THE rest of the day in front of the television with a ziplock bag full of ice pressed over her right eye. Both her dad and Uncle Mark took the opportunity to introduce her to one of their favorite movies, Heathers. And while she found Christian Slater gorgeous and Winona Ryder’s style awesome enough to emulate, she just couldn’t focus.

Her head hurt, and the girl in the mirror continued to open her mouth wide, wider still, while her ratty old sweater bloomed red with blood.

Vee told herself that what she’d seen had been a figment of her imagination. It couldn’t have been real. No way. But the more she replayed in her mind what she’d seen, the more she was sure she had felt her own shirt go wet and sticky with something warm. She could swear that, when they had opened their mouths to scream, they had done so in unison because they had somehow, if only for a moment, merged into one.

That’s impossible, she told herself. Just forget it. You’re going crazy.

She grabbed her phone and texted Heidi.

What if I told you this house is haunted?

A minute later, a reply:

Haha. R U really that bored?

She closed her eyes, bit back her sudden urge to cry, and let her phone tumble between the cushions of the couch.

Twenty minutes into Heathers, Uncle Mark took a call. He left a few moments later, called back to Seattle. Vee’s dad tried to watch the movie after Uncle Mark left, but Vee could tell his mind was wandering. Eventually, he murmured about needing to check something, went into his study, and failed to return. She could hear him on the phone, discussing a meeting that was supposed to occur the next day.

When Vee’s headache grew worse, she considered telling her dad. The previous summer, she had marathoned a few seasons of House M.D., and now knew about all sorts of mysterious medical conditions. Concussions could be dangerous, which meant the chance of her dad taking her to the hospital if she did reveal her worsening headache was more than likely ninety percent. And while Vee loved Dr. House, she hated hospitals. She waited a little longer for her dad to come back. When he didn’t, she fished her phone out from beneath the cushions, turned off the TV, took a couple of Tylenol, and kept herself busy with hauling boxes up the stairs, ignoring the pain.

Because if her dad didn’t care that she was hurt, maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe she wasn’t important enough to worry about.

·   ·   ·

A few hours later, Vee’s dad stepped into her room. She almost told him to get out, angry that he’d ditched her for so long without making sure she hadn’t died. “We should go,” he told her, only to be derailed by the fact that she was already in bed. The last thing she wanted to do was socialize with Uncle Mark and Selma. Hugging a pillow to her chest, she gave him a weary glance.

“I don’t feel great,” she told him. “Can I just stay here?”

He approached the bed, lifted the makeshift ice pack she’d made out of a Ziploc and ice cubes off of her eye, and frowned. “You’re going to have a pretty fancy shiner, kid.”

“Great,” she murmured. “I’ll be sure to take a picture and email it to Mom.”

“That would be perfect,” he said, giving her a rueful smile. “Be sure to tell her I socked you a good one, will you?”

“Planning on it.” Turning her face back into her pillow, she could sense him vacillating between staying with her and going downstairs. After a moment, he drew the curtains over the orange sunset and left. Figures, she thought. He hasn’t even considered the hospital. For all he cares, I may as well die in my sleep. She listened to the soft tones of another phone call—her dad talking to either Selma or Mark, apologizing. Jeanie doesn’t feel too hot after taking that fall.

She considered telling him about what she had seen, if only for the attention, but her dad didn’t believe in ghosts and she didn’t want to come off as a lunatic. She already felt stupid enough about sobbing in front of Uncle Mark. The last thing she needed was her father looking at her like she’d lost her mind.

But the darker her room got, the more overwhelmed she was by a feeling she couldn’t place. It wasn’t fear, but more of a sensation that came from deep within her gut. It was like static electricity. Maybe if she moved too fast, she’d light up the room with a trail of sparks. And the air, it felt thick, hard to inhale, pushing her toward mild panic because what if it wasn’t the room, what if it really was her? What if she had a brain bleed and her lungs were on the verge of collapsing? What if she had waited too long to tell her dad she needed help and now, if she tried to get up, she’d be dead by morning?

That was the problem with House M.D. It’s why her dad had blocked WebMD on her laptop. She’s a hypochondriac, her mother had said. She’s got a new type of cancer every day of the week. It was an exaggeration. Vee knew she didn’t have cancer, especially not every day of the week. But a brain bleed was a definite possibility, and the block on her computer didn’t matter. They could freeze her out on the laptop, but not her phone.

The longer she lay on her mattress in the darkness of her new room, the more convinced she was that it wasn’t her, it was her surroundings. There was popping coming from the insides of the walls, the kind of noise that comes with settling and temperature shifts. Normal noises, she thought. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just an old house sagging on its weary bones. Except the shadows that lurked in the corners of Vee’s room seemed darker than they should have been.

She tried to keep her eyes shut, to ignore the strange feeling and forget the girl who kept flitting in and out of her memory like a dying lightbulb. The stringy blond hair. The way her eyes had rolled into the back of her head. Her pale blue skin. Her gaping mouth and the blood that soaked into her sweater, so dark it looked more black than red. And then the disembodied baby’s cry just before the scream that had come from Vee’s throat.

The reflection’s eyes had rolled forward, snapped into their rightful position, and they had stared. The fact that their gazes had met was what scared Vee the most. She’d seen something in that girl’s face that almost seemed as though the stranger in the mirror knew who Vee was.

As though the leering boy in the orchard had announced Vee’s presence and the girl had now come around to say hello.

Hours passed. She tried to sleep. But the bumps and creaks that emanated from the surrounding walls kept her eyes wide open. That, and the glass of water she’d gulped down along with her final dose of Tylenol was coming back to haunt her.

She hated the fact that she was so scared; it made her feel like a fraud. All those times she’d talked herself up to Tim, how casually she had said oh, I’m totally in when he had suggested they explore abandoned buildings during the summer—before she knew she’d be spending that time thousands of miles away. The way she had laughed along with Tim and Heidi when they had watched the Paranormal Activity movies, as though the stuff that was happening on screen wouldn’t have fazed her at all. Back then, she was sure she had the guts to deal with shadows and unexplained noises. She had convinced herself that if she was ever lucky enough to see a ghost, the last thing she would do was run. But all that bravado had been a lie. Because talking about fear was a lot different than actually facing it. The unknown was exciting until it was time to step into the void.

She needed to pee. Her back teeth were starting to swim. With no choice but to take a deep breath and roll onto her side, she let her gaze dart across the night shadows that swallowed up her room. She searched the darkness for the mirror girl she was sure would be there somewhere, watching her sleep.

Her heart sputtered up her throat when her gaze fell on the closet door. She gaped at it, sure that it was slowly swinging inward.

The receding thump of her headache flared up with the hiccup of her pulse. A flash of pain lit up her head from the inside out, and she pinched her eyes shut against the discomfort. When she reopened them, the closet door was closed.

It was always closed, she thought. You’re acting like an idiot, totally freaking out.

Pressing her lips into a tight line, she hummed deep in her throat to keep her nerves in check while reluctantly rising to her feet. She wobbled toward her bedroom door—which she had left open but, it seemed, her father had shut. She slogged toward it, her mouth sour with remnants of acetaminophen and pain.

When she stepped into the hall, she found the house silent—nothing but the patter of rain against the roof. Glancing over the upstairs hallway banister, she could see the lights in her father’s study were off. There was no soft tapping of her dad’s laptop keys, no quiet music he’d play when the mood hit him just right.

Her bladder clenched. She turned away from the living room one story below. But when she reached for the knob of the bathroom door, her fingers tingled with tiny needle pricks. She snatched her hand away. Don’t go in there, the sensation warned. There’s something wrong with that place.

Shooting a glance down the hall, she considered sneaking into her dad’s room and using the bathroom there. But he was a light sleeper. She was bound to wake him. And what will you tell him when he asks why you’re using his bathroom instead of your own? How will you explain it away when he sees that you’re scared? If her dad saw the fear in her eyes, he’d demand to know what was up. She’d have to tell him about the girl, and while that would possibly win her a one-way ticket back to Queens as soon as her mom returned from her business trip, she wasn’t sure she was ready to leave just yet. If she sucked up her fear, she’d have something no other girl could touch. A damn good story about how she’d spent the summer in a haunted house was bound to win Tim’s heart.

She turned away from the blue bathroom and slunk down the stairs, nearly tumbling down the top few risers when her foot skidded across the carpeted edge. Catching herself on the banister, she shot a wide-eyed glance up to her father’s door. She waited for him to come rushing into the hall. What the hell is going on? Why are you up? What are you doing? When he didn’t appear in the doorway, she exhaled a quiet laugh. Of course he wasn’t coming.

She continued to descend the steps, more carefully this time. Her head felt fuzzy, as though soft tufts of grass had sprouted along the inner curve of her skull. She imagined blood pooling along the wrinkles of her brain, coating it like a bucket of red paint. Because while she felt silly being so scared, perhaps what she’d seen in the bathroom was a symptom of something bigger. Maybe there really had been no girl.

“No, she was there,” Vee whispered to herself. She was there, just as clear as the boy in the orchard, as unmistakable as the scream Vee had heard in the trees.

The third bathroom was across the living room from her dad’s writing den, and while she was positive he was upstairs in bed, she poked her head inside the room anyway. The mess of it took her by surprise. He had spent the whole day in there, but it looked like he had yet to organize a thing. It was the most crowded room in the house, the entire far wall crammed with boxes filled with books. His giant desk sat in the middle of the room, glowing in the moonlight.

Pivoting where she stood, she crossed the length of the living room toward the half bath. Her right arm pistoned out and slapped the wall just inside the door. The overhead light flickered on, revealing a sunshine-yellow toilet and sink. At least there was no tub in here, no place for someone to hide behind a shower curtain. As long as she avoided looking in the mirror, everything would be okay.

Vee had never tried evoking the spirit of Bloody Mary herself, but she knew the story: stare into the mirror, chant Mary’s name three times, and she’d appear right behind you, ready to slash your throat. Both Heidi and Laurie had tried it a few summers ago—at least that’s what they had told her—and they both swore they saw a woman standing against Heidi’s bathroom wall. But Vee hadn’t believed them. If that had really happened, they wouldn’t have been giggling at the story. If they had really seen her, they would have been pale as sheets. Possibly having gone crazy with the experience, locked up in rubber rooms. And that’s exactly why she wasn’t going to tell her dad a damn thing.

Squaring her shoulders, she stepped inside but left the door open behind her. She tugged down her pj pants, sat, and didn’t dare look away from the door. That was when a strange seed of an idea turned over inside her head, fed by the imaginary brain bleed that throbbed red and angry beneath her skull. What if some stupid kid who had lived here before had called out the girl Vee had seen? Like, if Heidi and Laurie really did call on Bloody Mary the way they said they had, they’d done it without any precaution. What would they have done if Bloody Mary had actually shown up? What would any kid do if one of their harebrained incantations worked? Vee had an entire box of ghost books upstairs, waiting to be unpacked. She’d spent countless hours reading paranormal websites, spent even more time watching grainy video footage of ghosts on YouTube. And while she’d never tried opening a portal between the worlds of the living and the dead, she was sure it was possible. It seemed that people who didn’t know what they were doing did it all the time. But closing the doorway afterward? Far more difficult. If a door was opened, it would remain that way for a long, long time.

Her heart flipped at the revelation. If that’s what happened to the girl in the bathroom, if she was stuck, what if Vee could help the girl cross back to the other side? Imagine the story that would make. And if Vee could help the dead find peace, maybe it meant that, if she tried hard enough, she had a shot at figuring out how to bring peace to her family, too.

She finished in the bathroom and slapped the light switch. As she crossed into the living room, her excitement momentarily blurred her fear of the dark. But the sudden barrage of thoughts tumbled to a stuttering stop when she noticed something off. The carpet felt weird beneath her feet. She didn’t remember it being this fluffy before. Peering at it through the faint glow of moonlight, she couldn’t quite make out what was different. And while she wanted to ignore it and get back to her room, she squatted midstep to draw her fingers across the ground.

It felt as though thousands of inch-long strands of yarn made up the rug. It reminded her of the vintage Rainbow Brite doll her dad had gotten her for one of her birthdays years earlier. Spurred on by her father’s love for all things eighties, she had been on a retro cartoon kick. Thick yellow string had made up Rainbow’s head of hair, but the carpet beneath her feet was supposed to be a low-pile beige.

She tried to remember where she and her dad had dropped the few rugs they had brought from home, tried to remember if they even had a rug that felt the way the carpet felt now. Maybe it was one of the things her dad had scored on sale? But before she could figure it out, she noticed something out of the corner of her eye. There, in the faint iridescence of night, their overstuffed leather couch was gone. So was the old armchair her mother had surrendered to “the cause,” and the glass-top coffee table her dad had bought off of a neighbor was missing too. Even the entertainment center and their flat-screen TV—the one thing her dad had refused to budge on when it came to material possessions. All of it was replaced by stuff she’d never seen before.

An ugly couch with a blanket thrown over the back of it stood where the leather sofa should have been, its orange-and-brown plaid pattern marking it as not their own. A worse-for-wear beanbag chair sat next to it, and a kind of TV she’d never seen before stood against the wall. It looked like it was stuck in some sort of stubby-legged wooden cabinet with dials on the side. A woven tapestry hung on the wall above it. It, like the carpet, looked as though it was made of yarn. The knotted strings displayed a meticulously constructed bouquet of flowers. Little wooden beads hung from the ends of the weird artwork, tapping against the wall, pushed by a fan that didn’t exist.

Vee blinked a few times, but the weird furniture refused to go away. She shot a look across the living room toward the kitchen. She couldn’t see it from where she was standing, but she was almost positive that it would be just as foreign to her as the stuff that had taken over the living room.

Shaking her head, she decided that this had to be one of those strange waking dreams her dad had a book about—something about feeling completely awake despite being in a totally different state of mind. Vee hadn’t understood a word of what she had read, but she now realized that this must have been what “lucid” meant. A sense of parallel reality, where you know where you are, but aren’t where you should be. It’s just a dream, she thought. Just your imagination. Just the headache twisting up your thoughts. But the steady tap-tap-tapping of wooden beads promised that she was awake.

And then there was the shadow figure in the corner, still as marble and dark as midnight. The curve of a shoulder. The delicate line of an arm.

It wasn’t real. She had to be hallucinating. But her mind screamed, It’s the girl!

She fell into a run. Grabbing the stair banister, she bolted up the steps, winded by the time she reached the landing. The upstairs hallway looked different too. The photos she had hung along the wall were gone, replaced with cheap painted landscapes in wooden frames.

“Dad!” The word left her throat in a sudden burst. She nearly tripped over her feet as she ran for his door and burst into the room. Her father bolted upright in bed. He fumbled with a bedside lamp, his eyes wide when it finally illuminated his face. “Dad, I . . .” I think all our stuff is gone, replaced by other stuff. And there’s a person . . . It was stupid. Ridiculous. Crazy and she knew it.

“What?” Her dad looked as freaked out as she felt. His hair was wild with sleep. His face pulled tight with alarm.

“My head.” It was the first thing that came to mind. “It still hurts.”

He rubbed a hand across his face.

“What if I have a brain aneurysm?” she asked, predicting his reaction before it came.

He leveled his gaze on her, his worry melting into a knowing sort of stare. “Oh, Jeanie. Are you going on that website again?”

She didn’t reply.

“Jeanie . . . I promise, you don’t have a brain aneurysm.”

Except maybe she did. Maybe that was why she’d been experiencing everything since what she saw in the bathroom. It was one thing to think that she’d seen a ghost, but altogether another to see an entire room rearranged. Perhaps her brain was misfiring. The knock she’d taken had jostled something loose.

“Here,” he said, pulling open the bedside table drawer. He lifted out a bottle of Tylenol and shook it at her like a rattle. She dragged her feet along the rug as she approached, held out her hand as he dropped two tablets into her palm.

“But what if you’re wrong?” she asked, staring at the pills. “What if I die in my sleep?”

He watched her for a long while before tossing aside his sheets. “Okay,” he said. “Get dressed.”

“What? Why?” She took a few steps away from his bed.

“Because you’re right,” he said. “I should have taken you to the hospital right off the bat.”

“No.” She shook her head. “No, forget it. I’m fine.”

“Except you’re worried about dying? Work with me here, kid—what is it that you want me to do?”

“Just forget it,” she said again. “Really, Dad. It went away earlier. If it was an aneurysm, it wouldn’t have gone away with pills, but it did, which means I’m okay. I don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s just a headache, that’s all.”

He frowned at her.

“Sorry for waking you up,” she murmured, closing her fingers around the medicine in her hand. She turned toward his door, and for a split second she hoped he’d tell her to sleep in his room, just in case. But he didn’t. And while she reasoned that he hadn’t offered because she was too old for that sort of babying, she couldn’t help but feel a flash of resentment as she sulked out of the room.

She wandered down the hall that was now devoid of the cheap landscapes she had seen hanging only minutes before. And while she clearly remembered leaving her bedroom door open, it was closed again. She hesitated, forcing herself to step inside despite what may have awaited her.

The room was just the way she left it. Nothing out of the ordinary. And while she should have felt comforted by its familiarity, all she wanted to do was cry.

Because she wasn’t crazy.

The girl in the mirror had been there. That shadow downstairs had probably been her. The house beyond her bedroom door had been all wrong. If there was nothing off with her head, what she’d seen had been real.