House of the Damned

My stomach twisted with dread as my feet slapped against the wooden flooring, carrying me over to the adjacent wing of the house where I’d heard the sound. There was a reason that Miss White had screamed like that, and I had a terrible idea of why she did.

It was too easy to find the room it came from. There was already a small cluster of children—it was where the kindergarteners slept—huddled by the doorway and talking in hushed whispers. It was still dark in all the halls, but there was one crackling light above the shut door.

I turned to one of them, a freckle-faced girl named Bea, and asked with the most controlled tone I could manage, “What happened?”

Her eyes widened. “It’s Alexander’s bedroom.”

Amanda’s brother? If anything happened to him…

It suddenly felt very cold in the hall. I shuddered. What if the woman had kept her word?

The door creaked open just then, and Miss White stumbled out, ashen and sweating, with three other caretakers—Marissa, Jasmin, and Cooper—directly behind her.

“Call the police,” she instructed to them weakly. “Children, please, go back to your beds. Marissa, could you—?”

Taking on an air of authority, Marissa swept back her hair and calmly ushered the younger kids back to bed. I remained standing against the wall. Jasmin and Cooper gazed at me curiously.

“What happened?” I repeated this time to Miss White, dreading the answer.

She glared at me suspiciously. “It doesn’t concern you, Karen. Return to your room.”

I did my best to stand my ground. “Tell me what happened.” This time, I could hear the fear in my own voice.

She bristled. “Go now, before I make you!”

So for the second time that night, I had no other choice but to go back to my room.

I stole a glance at the clock as I came in and flicked on the lights. Two thirty-eight in the morning.

There was a tiny window cloaked in an emerald curtain in the corner of my room, which I had seen before but never used. Now I opened it, and tried to take a look at the mansion lawn. Everything was completely dark, except a lone lamppost—which was nothing but a pinprick of light in the blackness. I was hoping to stay awake long enough until police showed up—maybe that would give me a hint as to what happened.

Sure enough, half an hour later, I saw flashing neon blue and red coming from between the panes. I jumped out of my bed, and walked across the room to press my ear against the door as silently as I could.

I heard several men’s voices coming from what was probably the entry hall. It was too muffled for me to understand anything they were saying, though. There were some clacking footsteps as they ascended the stairs heavily, but that was all.

Disappointed, I crawled back into bed. Even though I was still worried for Amanda and her brother and desperate to think, I was completely exhausted after staying up until past three in the morning, so I was soon carried off into a dreamless sleep.

I woke up at nine the next morning, much to my own surprise. I knew I would be dragging my feet all through next week again because of fatigue, but for the moment, I only cared about finding out what had happened. After all, Amanda cared for her little brother more than anything in the world. She’d shown up at the orphanage with him when she was thirteen years old, clothes torn and face dirty, after living on the streets and sometimes sacrificing her own food to keep him healthy.

After hastily dressing in a plain beige shirt and blue jeans (mostly courtesy of the donations to Saint Joan’s we received), I came down to the living room. I didn’t know what else to do with myself, since the regular Sunday breakfast almost certainly wasn’t going on, and it was thirty minutes too early to go to the dining area to eat something.

About half the orphanage was there, quiet and tense. No one was sprawled onto the couches, fighting over who sat where, or fooling around at all. They all spoke in hushed voices, clustered over tables in small groups of four and five. For the first time in a while, no one seemed to notice my arrival.

I wandered over to Amanda and Carey. Elise wasn’t with them today—rather, she sat with her normal friends, and hadn’t even glanced at me when I’d come through the doorway. Both looked up to acknowledge me, but neither one smiled.

I immediately launched into my question before either one could speak. “Do you guys know what happened in Alexander’s room last night?”

“Well…” Carey hesitated. Amanda remained silent, her stony gaze fixated on her twitching palms.

“They found…they found his body. In his room. They just came out and told us,” she quavered.

“What?” Even though I had been expecting it, my heart wrenched. I was never that close to the kid, but I had talked to him many times…he was as sweet as could be. He didn’t deserve this, and neither did the girl sitting opposite me who now shook with repressed tears. She buried her face in her hands, clearly shattered from the inside out.

“I…just don’t understand it,” she whispered. “Just...doesn’t seem possible…he’s dead.”

I thought of that face, those shining hazel eyes opened in terror, that delicate frame of a child frozen white, cold, suffocated to death, and held back a shiver.

But not completely gone, no…I grimaced in realization. No, he wasn’t cut off from the world yet.

There had been another addition to the ghosts that haunted Everett Mansion last night.