The Fall of Never(104)

They’d gone up after everyone was asleep. The corridors were uncomfortably silent, pierced by the occasional muffled shout in the night. Mouse had led the way, her thin and spindly form just a few steps ahead of Kelly on the stairwell going up. And when they reached the third floor, Mouse had crept on ahead of her in the darkness, her eyes alight with something too close to insanity, her mouth twisted into a bizarre grin. The look in her eyes that night frightened Kelly more than the actual trek to the third floor. Even more than the stories about the dead girls.

“What do you think they did in that closet?” Mouse had asked, leading the way down the hall. “You think they did sex?”

“I don’t know,” she’d answered.

“You think they went in there a lot? To do sex?”

“I don’t know.”

Their bare feet padding along the cold floor, Kelly had followed Mouse to the end of the hallway. Mouse stopped just in front of the closed broom closet.

“This is it,” Mouse had said.

“So now what?”

“Open it.”

“No.”

“I want to look inside.”

“No.”

“I’ll do it.” And she did—Mouse reached out and turned the knob. The door stuck a bit, warped from age, but when Mouse administered more force, it popped free of its molding and creaked open. Blackness inside—

Mouse had screamed, jumped back. Startled, Kelly had cried out and stumbled backward. She tripped over her feet and crumbled to the floor, twisting her ankle in the process, her heart thudding mechanically in her chest.

Mouse had broken out laughing. “Gotcha,” she’d said.

“Bitch,” said Kelly.

“Bitch you.” Mouse peered back inside the closet. “This is it,” she said again. “This is where they died.” And after a length of silence: “What do you think it was like for them to die in here like that?”

She had no answer for Mouse, too afraid to let her mind summon the corpses, to see them, to see what they might have looked like…

Now, stopping before the closed broom closet door, Kelly could recall the expression of intensity so prominent on Mouse’s face. What had Mouse expected to find in the closet, anyway? Perhaps she’d wanted to see it the way young boys will want to explore haunted houses—not necessarily because they believe in ghosts, but because they wanted to believe in ghosts.

Ghosts, she thought now.

That had been the first time. They’d gone up to the third floor a second time too—almost a full year later. Only that time Mouse hadn’t been so excited. By then, Mouse had started retreating into the back of her mind, and by then she had become frightened too. Frightened and confused. And it had been Kelly’s idea to come back up to the third floor, not Mouse’s. Kelly’s idea…because she needed to tell Mouse something, needed to show her something…

Standing before the closet door now, Kelly almost recalled what it was. And with that near-recollection, she could feel the threads of other memories—memories from home—being pulled along behind it. It was a train; everything was connected.

This is the only way I can explain it to you, Kelly had said.

Tell me, said Mouse.

I can’t. I have to show you. And I don’t want to talk about it down here, not with everyone else around. Let’s go upstairs, to the third floor. Let’s go to the closet again.

And what exactly had she told Mouse? What had been so important to tell her friend…to bring her back up to the third floor one year later? Kelly had become more and more depressed with the passage of time. It had been Mouse who’d forced her to talk, prevented her from falling too deep inside herself. And it had been Mouse who’d finally asked what had happened, and why Kelly had been sent to the institution in the first place. Mouse’s story was not a secret: though Mouse’s parents claimed they were concerned about their daughter’s well-being, it was clear that the Sotes really feared for their own lives. Mouse had been a confused and bizarre child who had often succumbed to impromptu bursts of violence. But Kelly…she’d never given up her secret, never told what had happened, never wanted to discuss it. It was just best to forget, she’d managed to convince herself. Some nights, she almost managed to make herself forget, and that would have been just perfect. There was nothing she wanted to remember, nothing she wanted to keep inside her for the rest of her life.

We can forget, she thought now, but it never truly leaves us. It just stays inside, sits dormant, until it’s ready to attack us again.

“What did I take you up here to tell you?” she mumbled to herself. And she didn’t just tell her story—she showed Mouse, convinced her…

How?

Reaching out, she gripped the pitted brass knob of the closet door, turned it. She heard the tumblers in the lock roll over. In one great swoosh, she yanked the closet door open and stood there, staring inside.

Her heart nearly stopped. Her hand fell away from the doorknob. The world around her pulled back and vanished as she stood there, staring inside the closet, staring at the two writhing, huddled shapes in the blackness…

The two dead girls were there, propped crookedly against each other, their clothes hanging off their bodies, their skin a pale white-blue. Patches of scalp showed through their hair. Their eyes, large and fishlike in their heads, rolled with a wet, sucking sound to face Kelly. Their lips parted simultaneously, exposing black, rotted gums and teeth like twisted, rusting metal.