Return to the Dark House (21 page)

There are numbers scribbled across the wall: 843.8, the call number for
Madame Bovary
. The digits glow in the dark. They’re written all over—again and again and again—in
different sizes, without spaces: 843.8843.8843.8843.8843.8843.8843.8843.8843.8…

Beneath a heading that reads B
E
C
AREFUL
W
HAT
Y
OU
D
REAM
are the images that
represent the nightmares of all of us contest winners: an eel (Parker), an ax (Garth), a bear (Taylor), a tombstone (Frankie), a broken mirror (Natalie), a noose (Shayla), and a pair of demon eyes
(me).

There are more images too: a carousel with a possessed horse, and a boy and a girl holding hands at the entrance gate to an amusement park, separated by bars.

“Ivy?” Taylor shouts.

“Hurry up now, Princess. Be a good girl and get into bed.”

My teeth clenched, I peel back the covers. There are glow-in-the-dark words there too, scribbled across the sheet.
Ricky was here, but now he’s dead. Nobody ever listened to a word he
said.

I wheeze—an air-sucking noise that doesn’t sound human.

“Ivy?” Taylor’s pounding on the door now. “Say something. Tell me you’re okay.”

“I’m fine,” I try to shout, but the words are barely audible.

“Are you all snuggled up now, Princess? Snug as a bug in a rug?”

I lay down and reach for my flashlight, just to know that it’s there. But I can’t seem to find it now.

“If you haven’t already guessed it, this was my room as well. I was the first student at August to be assigned to room F after Ricky. And so I slept in Ricky’s bed, wrote in my
diary at Ricky’s desk, put my clothes away in his drawers, walked in his same path.”

My mind zeroes in on the book on the night table. Could that be the diary he’s talking about?

“It wasn’t long before I became haunted by Ricky,” his voice continues. “All because he wanted me to find his note. I’d wake up to the sound of Ricky whispering in
my ear:
843.8, help me, find it
. I started to see flashes of that number everywhere: in class, on the radio, in phone numbers and zip codes. I’d look at the mirror and it’d be
scrawled across the shower steam. Then I’d blink and it’d be gone. Imagine what that was like for me, Princess—for a twelve-year-old boy to try to make sense of that madness:
843.8
,” he whispers.
“Help me, find it
.
843.8, help me, find it
.
843.8, help me, find it
.
843.8, help me, find it…”

“
Hello?
” Another voice; it calls out over his whispering.

I sit up, like a reflex, and rake my fingers over the bedcovers, still trying to find the flashlight.

“Are you there?”
the voice asks.

Shayla?

It sounds like it’s coming from somewhere behind me or under the bed.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
a voice sings.

“Garth?” I climb out of the bed and get down on my hands and knees. I reach beneath the bed—as far as I can stretch—picturing a scene in one of the Nightmare Elf movies,
when Annie’s Chatty Cathy doll comes to life, hides in the middle of the night, and stabs Annie’s searching hand with a pair of scissors.

“Hello?”
Shayla says again.

I crawl out and squat down by the bedpost. There’s glowing writing on the wall: 36 L. I touch the spot, running my fingers over a series of slats. This must be a heating vent.
“Shayla?” I call, suspecting her voice is coming from the other side of it. “Can you hear me? Is Garth there too?”

“I’m downstairs,”
she says.

“
Where
downstairs?”

“Come out here and I’ll tell you.”

“What? Out
where
?”

A knocking sound comes from the other side of the room—against the wall, by the door; a hard, frantic pounding.

“Taylor?” I shout, wondering if the sound is from her.

“Your role has been cut, Ms. Belmont,” the Nightmare Elf says, his voice coming from the heating vent.

A motor revs, making it hard to hear anything else. I recognize the sound. A chainsaw. Like in
Nightmare Elf
. It’s coming from the vent as well.

Shayla lets out a scream—a thick, throaty wail that rivals the rev of the motor and slices through my chest.
“No!”
she screams.

A few moments later, the chainsaw motor stops.

“Shayla?” I place my ear against the vent, desperate to hear even a breath. Instead, I hear music.

Instrumentals.

Song lyrics.

A woman’s voice.

An old tune from an old movie:
“Baby, can I play for you? I’ll dance and sing and play for you. Just pull my puppet strings, and I’ll do anything. Oh, Baby, I can play for
you.”

My nostrils flare. My lips bunch. A hand touches me from behind.

Taylor’s hand.

Her familiar face.

I can see.

“Ivy?” she says.

Her flashlight shines, fading the glowing words.

“What happened?” she asks, kneeling at my side. She pulls something from the wall, by the heating duct. An envelope with the number 13 inked onto it. She tears the envelope open,
revealing a tarnished key ring with two keys attached.

I don’t speak. I don’t have words. I just crumple into her arms and wait for the music to stop.

T
HE MUSIC HAS FINALLY STOPPED
. Ivy’s face has lost all color.

“Shayla’s here,” she whispers.

“How do you know for sure?”

“I heard her. She spoke to me.”

“Or it seemed like she spoke to you,” I say, ever the bearer of reasonable doubt. “What if it just
sounded
like her voice…like if it was an actor or something,
and the voice had been prerecorded?”

“You just don’t get it, do you? I heard Garth’s voice too.”

I bite my tongue and look down at the key ring in my hand. There are two keys attached, one bigger than the other. “Any guesses as to what these might go to?” I ask, dropping them
into her palm.

“Maybe room thirteen,” Ivy guesses. “Maybe that’s where the others are being kept.”

I bite my tongue harder and peer around the room. Without the candlelight, or aiming my flashlight at the walls, I can see pictures and writing everywhere—done with glow-in-the-dark paint.
The words WHY?, I CAN’T, and I HATE IT are splattered by the door.

“We need to go downstairs,” Ivy insists.

“Okay,” I say, getting up, checking my watch. Two and a half hours left.

“How did you get the door to open?”

I pull a hairpin from my pocket. It’s been bent into a lightning bolt. “In the words of Sebastian Slayer from
Forest of Fright:
‘Easy as squeezy. I love bein’
cheesy.’ A little trick I learned in acting camp to sneak into the green room after hours.”

“I think that’s the clue,” she says, nodding to the heating vent, not even listening.

I shine my flashlight over it, unable to see a thing. “Am I missing something?”

She points my flashlight away so I can see 36 L written across the vent in the alien-green paint.

“Okay, no doubts about it,” I say. “This is definitely part of a combination code for a lock or safe: twenty-eight R, thirty-six L…but we still need one more number.
I’m telling you, somewhere in this creepy-ass place, there’s a padlock with our names all over it.”

Ivy takes her notepad from her bag and adds the new clue to her list, as well as the date May 9.

“What’s that for?” I ask.

“The day of Ricky’s death. April showers bring May flowers….”

“Oh, right, how silly of me.” I roll my eyes, completely oblivious.

“We need to go down to the basement,” she says, ignoring my sarcasm, refusing to explain. “We need to—” She stops short, touching her earphones.

“What’s he saying
now
?” I scoot back down to listen.

“I haven’t even told you how Ricky died yet, have I, Princess?” he says. “Let me assure you that he made quite a statement. Awkward, introverted,
did-all-his-work/never-sneezed-too-loud-or-laughed-too-hard/ate-every-last-morsel-on-his-plate Ricky chose center stage for his death. On the night of his suicide, he went down to the locker room
and took a hot shower. If you haven’t already seen signs for the locker room, it’s two floors beneath you.”

“Downstairs,” Ivy says, her eyes wide with hope, no doubt imagining finding Shayla and the others. “Are
you
thinking what I’m thinking?”

“That I’m going to need serious therapy after today?”

“He seems to know a little too much about Ricky’s death…since he was a student here
after
Ricky, I mean. He wasn’t even around for the suicide.”

“Are you kidding? Rumors that potent stay alive for years. For instance, there was this one girl who’d attended the same arts camp as me. Rumor had it that after rehearsals for the
Wizard of Oz
, she skipped down the yellow brick road with both the Tin Man
and
the Scarecrow…if you know what I mean.”

“Not really.” Ivy makes a confused face.

“The point is that even though her attendance at the camp was years before my time, the story was still legendary.”

“Rumors in such detail, though?”

“He could just be elaborating.”

“Or he could be Ricky himself.”

“Except Ricky’s supposed deadness puts a wrench in that theory, wouldn’t you say?”

“Maybe it was only an attempted suicide.”

“And maybe we should get going. Ticktock, ticktock,” I say, reminding her. Our flashlights in hand, we scurry out of the room.

From the Journal of E.W.

Grade 7, August Preparatory School

W
E MOVE THROUGH AN EXIT
door at the end of the hall. There are tiny spotlights positioned in the corners of the ceiling, highlighting the stairwell.

Music starts playing. A peppy piano tune. A wiry male voice.
“Wanna play dress-up, little girl, little girl? It’s time for your makeup, little girl, little girl. Blanched-white
skin, like the dead. Lie still in a satin bed. Dark-red lips, be still your breath. Little girl, little girl.”

“Where’s it coming from?” Taylor asks.

It sounds as if it’s far away—in another part of the building. Meanwhile, photos of me—from age twelve until just last week—hang on the walls. Dozens of photos that show
me walking home from school, getting on a bus, playing tennis off a wall, reading on my front porch.

“Holy hell!” Taylor shouts out, shining her flashlight on my eighth-grade graduation photo—with my full-on braces, bright orange hair (an attempt to transform my chestnut
tresses into blond ones), and wire-rimmed eyeglasses.