Ashes to Ashes (Experiment in Terror #8) (12 page)

Brenna’s mouth turned
down, her eyes becoming rounder. “No. No, not at all. This is all
real. And it’s only happening to me. No one else. They all feel it,
they all believe me, but they don’t see it like I do. In fact, it’s
gotten worse since I got here, at least that’s what some of the
assholes here say, like it’s my fucking—sorry—my
damn
,
fault. But I’m still the only one who gets haunted here. Me and a
few students.”

“
Jody,” Dex
said slowly.

She nodded fervently. “Yes,
Jody. They love her. Kyle too.” She stopped and looked at me. “You
have to believe me, this is happening. I want to leave. I want to
go to the new school. And if you guys can’t make the haunting stop,
then at least the show will push the parents to make the move
happen.”

“
You do
realize that we aren’t ghost whisperers,” Dex said sternly. “Perry
and I, we just see them. Our job isn’t to fix anything, it’s just
to record it, report it.”

“
Like batshit
journalists,” I filled in. “Hacks. But we don’t banish anyone or
anything.”

Except for
that one time
, I thought back to The
Benson. I had to say that felt pretty good.

“
I know that,”
she said, and for once her expression wasn’t so jovial. “I’m just
getting tired of this. And desperate. Please, you have to believe
me.”

Rebecca walked over to a chair
and pulled it out. “Here, love. Why don’t you sit down and we’ll
start getting to the bottom of this.”

Brenna smiled gratefully and
took a seat. “Okay. We have about an hour until my next class, but
I should be able to wrap it up by then. If I start wasting footage,
just let me know.”

Dex quickly got the camera set
up and I pulled up a chair next to Brenna, feeling like a chump in
my hoodie. Rebecca put wireless mics on the two of us and we got
started.

I asked Brenna to go back to
the beginning, from when she first started at the school. She’d
only been hired at the start of the semester. The last teacher quit
and no one really knows why. One day she had a nervous breakdown
and resigned. According to her student Jody, it was someone called
Shawna that made the teacher leave. Brenna said she eventually
found out who Shawna was, along with Elliot. Both of them Jody
described as her imaginary friends. When teaching first graders,
imaginary friends weren’t normal but they weren’t that uncommon,
either.

“
At first,”
she said, “the only odd things that happened were just Jody talking
about Elliot and Shawna as if they were real people. Often children
with imaginary friends still know that they are imaginary. But Jody
acted like they were as real as her other classmates. Only…” she
trailed off, her brow furrowing. “Only Shawna wasn’t someone that
Jody liked…Jody feared her. That was another thing I found odd –
I’d never heard of an imaginary enemy before.”

“
Not unless
the kid is batshit crazy,” Dex commented. I shot him a dirty look
to which he shrugged.

She nodded. “I know. But Jody
seemed well-rounded. And then when her classmate Kyle started
talking about Elliot, I knew something was happening. They weren’t
messing with me, either. I’m pretty quick to see through children’s
games.” She paused to look us each in the eye, playing with the
timing of the story like a good teacher would do. “Then, I saw
Elliot for myself.”

I sucked in my breath as she
continued.

“
It was back
in February, a month after I started. A huge snowstorm had set in
on the coast, which was unusual. We get a lot of bad storms here
throughout the year, but snow was rare. And so the power went out
at the school and the kids were all sent home around noon before
the snow really got going. We have a generator here but Davenport
was worried about the roads becoming impassible.”

I’d been given a ride in by my
boyfriend because his car was the only one with four-wheel drive
and so I was waiting for him to pick me up, just hanging out in the
teacher’s lounge with a few other staff and watching the storm blow
in. When the last staff member left, my boyfriend called to tell me
he was about fifteen minutes away. I went back to my classroom to
make sure everything was okay and that the lights wouldn’t come
blazing on when the power returned. At that time, my classroom felt
safe to me. The rest of the building, with the wind shutting open
doors and howling through the halls, made my hair stand right
up.”

Finally, when I thought I
should be waiting outside, I left the classroom and walked back
down the hall. Suddenly the air turned as cold as ice, as if the
storm itself had reached inside, and I heard a kick and the sound
of a ball bouncing after me. I turned around to see an orange ball
rolling down the hall. And, further down from that, was the
silhouette of a young boy, backlit from the windows of the
classrooms and the gauzy snowstorm outside. I asked who the boy was
and he quickly turned around, as if spooked himself, and ran off
down the hall until he disappeared.”

“
That was all
fine,” she said, catching her breath. “I was scared in a way but I
wasn’t creeped out. It was weird. It was interesting. I’ve always
had weird things like this, unexplained things, happen to me before
so it wasn’t like it threw me for a loop. I just thought, oh, so
that boy must have died here from TB. I was actually sad. Then the
next day, before I even had a chance to ask Jody about it, she came
up to me and said that Elliot was happy that I saw him. He hoped I
would play next time.”

A shiver went down my spine. I
remembered my dream, the bouncing ball, the girl asking if I would
play.

“
Did you?” Dex
asked.

She smiled sheepishly. “Not
really. Next time it happened—it was also when everyone had left
one night—I tried kicking the ball back but he wasn’t too
interested. He laughed that time, which I took as a good sign.” She
exhaled and looked down at the floor. “For a few weeks that was the
extent of it. To me, the only thing haunting this place was Elliot,
and he was harmless. That was until Jody started…getting sick.
Well, acting sick.”

“
Which was
it?” I asked. “Was she actually sick?”

She shook her head. “It’s hard
to say. She started exhibiting all the symptoms that TB patients
used to but when it came time to examine her, nothing was wrong.
She’d act like she couldn’t breathe, yet Kelly would listen to her
chest and say she was fine. She was kept home for a few days and
when she finally came back…she wasn’t the same.”

I leaned forward in my seat, a
chill on my limbs. “What do you mean, wasn’t the same?”

Brenna frowned. “I don’t know.
She just…changed. When she came back, she was no longer the
smiling, happy Jody. She was tired-looking, depressed. Scared.
That’s really what it was, she was scared. She started painting
things, beautiful images that were so…disturbing.” She got up, her
chair pushed back with a loud groan, and went over to her desk
drawer. She came back to us holding a stack of thick paper.

“
It started
with this one,” she said, holding out the first picture. It was of
the school, from the outside. There was no doubt that Jody excelled
at watercolors. The painting was fairly accurate and there was even
some realistic shading.

“
Nice work,”
Dex said.

Brenna pointed at one of the
upper windows. At first glance I thought Jody tried to paint in a
window glare but I could see it was the face of a little girl,
complete with a bow in her hair.

“
Who’s that?”
I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. I didn’t know how accurate
the painting was, but it looked like the girl I saw in my
dream.

“
Jody
said that was Shawna,” Brenna explained. “Which was fine. But then
she said Shawna was stuck on the fourth floor because of the
bad thing
.
She smiled after she said that, too, like she was happy about it. I
asked about the bad thing but she shrugged and ran off, like she
didn’t care anymore.”

She handed me the next piece of
paper. “This is what she drew the next time.”

It was the school again, almost
the exact same picture, only this time a few red lines were coming
out of the fourth floor windows. The face of Shawna was now on the
third floor. Though it was still just a kid’s painting, Shawna’s
eyes were cold, hard dots.

“
Plumbing
problem?” Dex asked from behind the camera.

Brenna didn’t smile. “No. Jody
said that was the blood of all the dead children. She said it came
from the room with the big lights. Now, Jody has never been
upstairs to the fourth floor—none of the students here have—so I
don’t know how she knew that there’s an autopsy room there,
complete with big lights and a table where they put the
bodies.”

“
Does the same
table have a gutter around the edges to catch the blood from the,
uh, deceased?”

She nodded. “You’ve done some
reading.”

He shrugged. “Dikipedia.”

Finally she smiled. “What else?
But you’re right. They used to bleed out the bodies and the blood
would collect around them. Super disgusting.”

“
I’m guessing
she didn’t know about that,” I ventured.

“
No. I thought
maybe she heard it from someone so I asked her. She said she’s been
there, in her dreams, and that Shawna was making her go up there.
Then she said that Shawna was on the third floor now because the
bad thing wanted to be closer to her.” She took in a shaky breath
and looked at me. “And closer to me.”

“
What does the
bad thing look like?” I asked. “I mean, what exactly is
it?”

“
You can see
here,” she said, holding out the third piece of paper. We all
leaned in to get a closer look. It was nearly the same picture as
before, only now Shawna was on the second floor and there was
another face the next window down from her. This face was
completely black and oblong, with long black hair and two white
dots for eyes.

“
That,” she
said, tapping beneath the face, “is the bad thing. And when I asked
Jody if it was still on the second floor, she said it was already
here. She said it was standing behind me.”

I gulped loudly, nerves
prickling down my back. “Did you look?” I whispered, totally
terrified and totally enthralled.

She shook her head and gave us
an embarrassed smile. “I couldn’t. I was too afraid. I could almost
feel it there. Even the rest of the students in the room grew
quiet, like they could sense something else in the room,
something…not of this world. I told Jody I’d look some other time
and she said it would be back.”

“
And was it?”
asked Dex.

Brenna looked down at the
floor. She took in a deep breath and opened her mouth to talk.

Before she could say anything,
there was a loud rap at the door. We all jumped in our seats at the
noise, Dex swearing under his breath. I thought my heart was trying
to make a run for it.

“
Sorry to
interrupt,” Ms. Davenport said, standing stiffly in the doorway and
eyeing us with mild interest. “Brenna, can I have a word with
you?”

She shot us an apologetic look.
“Yes, of course. My class will start soon. Mind if we pick up with
this tomorrow?”

“
Not at all,”
Rebecca said. We got out of our chairs and gathered in the hallway
while Davenport stepped into the room, one fleshy hand on the door
knob.

She paused there. “If you want,
you can wait for me in my office. Or start making yourselves at
home. You are staying here, aren’t you?”

My partners both looked at me.
It was my decision, my call—Perry was the precious one.

“
Sure,” I
said, trying to sound breezy about it. “We can stay here. Will be a
lot easier.”

“
You sure?”
Dex asked, stepping forward and putting his hand on my shoulder.
“We can stay in the motel, no big deal.”

“
I’m fine,” I
said, harder this time. “Really.”

Dex didn’t seem too satisfied
with that answer, watching me closely to see if I was lying. I
stared right back at him. Obviously staying in a haunted sanatorium
with the bad thing was asking for trouble, but trouble was exactly
what we needed for the show. I’d been down this road a hundred
times; it felt like it anyway, and this wasn’t any different. In
St. Augustine, we stayed in a haunted B&B; in Eureka, we camped
out in the library. Sure, I had those weird Pippa dreams that put
me off the idea a bit, but Dex didn’t know about those dreams. I
had to wonder if he was the one who was scared then.

“
Well, good,”
Rebecca said with a loud clap of her hands, trying to diffuse the
strange tension. “Let’s take over this joint.”

We headed back outside to the
Highlander and started unloading our gear. I couldn’t help but
glance up at the top floors again, as if expecting to see a little
girl’s face or rivers of blood streaming from the windows.

There was nothing there, just
the glare from the windows, reflecting slices of the foggy sky.

And still, I knew something was
there.

Watching me.

And waiting.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Our new sleeping quarters
didn’t get any less sterile once we started to unpack. For some
reason the cloth partition between the beds wasn’t movable, so when
Dex and I picked our beds, it seemed like we wouldn’t be able to
push them together.