Room 13 (10 page)

This time she got to the bathroom first. Trot and Gary came nearly straightaway, but it was nineteen minutes to twelve when the door of room eleven opened and Lisa slipped out.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ she whispered. ‘I fell asleep.’

‘It’s OK,’ Fliss told her. ‘I fell asleep too – twice.’

‘I was spark-out,’ admitted Trot. ‘This div had to shake me like a madman to wake me up.’ He looked at Gary. ‘Didn’t you, Gaz?’

Gary nodded. ‘You should’ve got yourself a stick of rock like mine. I sucked that from ten o’clock and didn’t nod off once.’

‘Dirty pig!’ shuddered Lisa. ‘I don’t know how you can.’

Gary grinned. ‘You should see it – it’s getting a really good point on it now.’

‘Tell you what I do want to see tonight,’ said Fliss. ‘I want to see how the thirteen gets on that door. I want to be watching when the clock starts striking midnight – see the exact moment the number appears.’

‘Yeah.’ Trot nodded. ‘Good idea. Let’s do that.’

‘I’ve brought my torch,’ said Lisa. ‘We can shine
it
on the door – right where the number will be. We’ll see really clearly then.’

They waited. Gary, sitting on the rim of the bath, looked at his watch every few seconds. Fliss went to the hand basin, ran a trickle of cold water into her cupped hand and sucked it up, watching herself in the mirror. Trot stood by the window, gazing out. The patterned glass splintered the light from a streetlamp. Lisa leaned on the wall by the door, switching her torch on and off.

After a while Fliss whispered, ‘Maybe she won’t come.’

‘It’s only five to,’ Gary told her. ‘Plenty of time yet.’ He hoped Fliss was right.

When his watch told him it was a minute to midnight, Gary got up and went over to the door. The others joined him, jostling quietly till they could all see and Lisa was at the front with her torch. ‘Thirteen seconds,’ he hissed, and began counting down. At fifteen seconds Lisa switched on and steadied the disc of light on the right spot.

It was not spectacular. As Gary whispered, ‘Zero,’ they heard the town clock chime, then strike. At about the fourth stroke they noticed a small shapeless mark on the door, and Lisa moved the torch slightly to get it in the centre of her beam. It was like a stain, lighter than the surrounding woodwork. As stroke followed stroke, the stain
seemed
to shrink and become paler, and then to divide, becoming two whitish blobs whose shapes altered until, by the twelfth stroke, they formed the figures one and three. As the echo died, they heard a door close somewhere below.

‘I think she’s coming,’ warned Fliss. ‘Switch the torch off, Lisa.’ She did so, plunging the landing into darkness. They withdrew and half closed the door again.

‘Did you see that?’ breathed Trot. ‘It just came out of nowhere. I can’t believe it.’

Fliss snorted. ‘You’ve got to believe it, you div – you saw it. The point is, what do we do when Ellie-May gets here?’

‘We stop her,’ hissed Gary. ‘By force if we have to. We agreed.’

‘OK, but which of us actually goes out there and grabs her – or do we all go?’

Lisa shook her head. ‘We can’t all go. It’d scare her to death. It should be a girl, Fliss – you or me. But I think we should try calling her first – from here.’

‘Sssh!’ Trot pressed a finger to his lips. ‘She’s here.’

They looked out. Ellie-May was standing on the top step, looking at the door to room thirteen. She hesitated for a moment, then moved forward. Lisa nudged Fliss. ‘You, or me?’

‘Me.’ As Ellie-May drew level with the bathroom, Fliss cupped her mouth with her hands and hissed, ‘Ellie-May!’

The girl didn’t turn or pause, but continued walking slowly towards the cupboard. Using her full voice this time, Fliss called out, ‘Ellie-May – over here!’

It made no difference. The girl was standing before the door now, reaching for the knob. Fliss felt a push in the small of her back and Lisa hissed, ‘Go on, for heaven’s sake – before she opens that door!’

She left the bathroom and moved across the landing, approaching Ellie-May from the rear. As the girl’s hand closed round the knob, Fliss took a gentle grip on her shoulder and said, ‘Ellie-May – You don’t want to go in there.’

She felt the thin shoulder stiffen under her hand. Ellie-May’s head turned, slowly, and Fliss found herself gazing into eyes which were dead as a shark’s. The girl’s lips twitched. ‘Let go of me,’ she hissed. ‘Leave me alone.’

‘Ellie-May!’ Fliss swung her round and held her by both shoulders. ‘Listen. We’re trying to help you. If you go in that room, you’ll die!’

Ellie-May snarled, shaking her head. ‘Never die. Never. You, not me.’ She tore herself from Fliss’s grip and turned, scrabbling for the doorknob.

‘Gary!’ cried Fliss. ‘Lisa. Quick – I can’t hold her!’ There was a scampering of bare feet on carpet and they were with her, the three of them. Hands reached out, snatching fistfuls of Ellie-May’s clothing, circling her wrists. She hissed and fought, amazingly strong, freeing one hand to twist the doorknob and push.

The door swung inward. Fliss, one arm crooked round Ellie-May’s neck, glanced inside and saw not a cupboard, but the room of her dream. There was the table with the long, pale box upon it and beyond, a small, curtained window. A window which wasn’t there in the daytime. The eye that sleeps by day! She dug her heels into the carpet, threw her weight backwards and fell with Ellie-May on top of her.

‘Quick, one of you – close that door!’ She flung both arms round Ellie-May’s waist and held on as the girl bucked and writhed. Lisa dropped to her knees, grabbed Ellie-May’s legs and fell forward, pinning them under her. Fliss heard the door slam, and then the boys were there, catching the girl’s wildly flailing arms. Ellie-May fought on for a moment but they were too many for her. Fliss felt the thin body go limp, and the girl began to cry. When they let go of her she lay curled on her side with a thumb in her mouth, moaning softly.

They got up and stood, looking down at her. ‘What do we do now?’ asked Lisa.

As she spoke, they heard voices below and footsteps on the stair. ‘It won’t be up to us,’ said Gary. ‘Here comes the cavalry.’

‘
WHAT ON EARTH’S
going on here?’ The landing light came on, and there stood Mrs Evans, unfamiliar in a quilted dressing-gown and no make-up. She saw Ellie-May on the floor and hurried forward, dropping on one knee beside her.

‘She was – we were –’ Fliss floundered, seeking words which might make their story credible, while the teacher lifted Ellie-May’s head on to her lap and checked with hands and eyes for damage. Mrs Marriott appeared in a beige nightie, followed closely by Mr Hepworth in maroon pyjamas. The door of room ten opened and Marie’s sleepy face peered out.

‘Marie Nero!’ snapped Mr Hepworth. ‘Get back into bed – now!’ The door closed. He looked at Ellie-May, sobbing in Mrs Evans’ arms, then at Gary, then at Fliss. ‘What’s all this about, Felicity Morgan – what’s happened to Ellie-May?’

‘Sir, she came up again. To go in the cupboard, only it’s not a cupboard. Look.’ She pointed, and then her heart sank. There was no number on the door. ‘There was a number, Sir. We all saw it. Thirteen. And Ellie-May opened it and it opened inwards, and inside –’ She stopped. There was disbelief in the teacher’s eyes, and the hard glint of anger. She dashed across to the door, twisted the knob and pushed.

It was locked. She pulled, but the door didn’t move. She turned, pointing. ‘Look at Ellie-May’s neck, Sir!’

‘Yes, look at it,’ said Mrs Evans, grimly. She tilted the girl’s head to one side and lifted the hair. Ellie-May’s neck was bruised and scratched.

‘She was fighting, Miss – fighting to get in the room. We had to stop her, Miss.’

‘That’s enough!’ Mrs Evans glared at Fliss. ‘If Ellie-May came up here of her own accord, then she was obviously walking in her sleep. It’s quite common among young people, and all you had to do was come down and tell me or one of the other teachers. Instead, it seems to me that you woke her in a sudden, violent way and she panicked, as anybody would. You’ve been silly and irresponsible, and there’s to be no more of it. Go to your beds, and in the morning I’ll want to know what you, Gary Bazzard, and you, David Trotter, were
doing
up here on the girls’ landing in the middle of the night.’

Ellie-May was helped to her feet and taken away, supported by Mrs Marriott on one side and Mrs Evans on the other. Gary and Trot followed a grim-faced Mr Hepworth downstairs, and Fliss and Lisa were left gazing at each other, nonplussed.

‘What can we do?’ whispered Lisa, almost crying. ‘Nobody believes us.’

Fliss sighed and shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Lisa. I’m too tired and fed up and scared to think. We’ll talk in the morning.’

She crept into bed, and jumped when Marie’s voice came out of the darkness. ‘What happened?’

Fliss sighed. ‘Nothing, Marie. Nothing much, anyway. I’ll tell you tomorrow, OK?’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’

‘OK.’

She expected to lie awake till dawn, but she didn’t. She had just time to wonder in a muzzy way what she was going to tell Marie, before sleep rolled in like a black tide and bore her away.

THURSDAY DAWNED CLEAR
and sunny after the rain. Ellie-May appeared at breakfast, smiling wanly and saying she was feeling much better. Fliss watched her across the dining-room and wondered if she remembered anything at all about last night. From the way she was behaving, it seemed she did not.

Practically everybody had heard something of the disturbance – even the boys on the first floor – and the talk over breakfast was mostly about sleepwalking. Fliss had told Marie that Ellie-May had been found on the top landing, sleepwalking, and had reacted badly to being woken up. Trot and Gary, she said, were in trouble because they had done the waking. When Marie asked what the boys were doing on the top landing in the first place, she said they’d seen Ellie-May pass their floor and followed her up. It didn’t sound too convincing to Fliss, but it had got around.

Trot and Gary had been interviewed by Mrs Evans before breakfast. When Trot started to tell her what he saw as he reached for the door to pull it closed, she cut him off, saying, ‘The door opens outwards, David, and anyway it was locked.’ And when Gary said there was a vampire in the hotel, she told him not to be so stupid. ‘If I catch you spreading that story among the other children,’ she said, ‘a letter will go to your parents the minute we get back to school.’

They were lucky in a way though. Mrs Evans decided they’d gone to the top floor because they were worried about Ellie-May. ‘There was absolutely no need for you to worry,’ she told them, ‘but I can see you were trying to be helpful, so we’ll say no more about it.’

So, in spite of the midnight rumpus, and against all the odds, the four found themselves back in favour, free to join in the day’s activities. It was to be a busy day, and Fliss hoped this might help her to forget the horrors of the night. This morning they were taking the coach six miles to Robin Hood’s Bay where, according to Mr Hepworth, there was a good beach and quaint, narrow streets. At twelve o’clock they would return to Whitby for a fish-and-chip lunch on the seafront, before being turned loose to do their shopping in the afternoon.

Robin Hood’s Bay was good. The sun shone all morning and they ran along the sand and played hide-and-seek up and down the little streets. By the time they piled back on to the coach, everybody had worked up an appetite and fish and chips sounded just right.

When they arrived back in Whitby, the teachers got the children settled on some benches not far from the jetty, and Mr Hepworth chose a boy and a girl to go with him to the chippy. Fliss knew he wouldn’t pick her – not after last night – and he didn’t. He chose John Phelan and Vicky Holmes, and the three of them went across the road and tagged on the back of the queue. Fliss watched. The service was fast, but the queue didn’t get any shorter because people kept joining it. She smiled to herself, wondering what the people behind would say when old Hepworth ordered fish and chips thirty-four times with salt and vinegar.

It took them ten minutes to get served and come staggering back with armfuls of greasy little packets. Mrs Evans and Mrs Marriott gave out the portions, and everybody sat in the sunshine munching, chatting and throwing scraps to a gang of gulls which appeared out of nowhere, on the scrounge.