The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall Read Online Free PDF Page B

try to leave now, and deal with the potentially nuclear-level fallout, or leave later, when they weren’t looking. Once they noticed I was missing, they might call the police to pick me up, but that was fine. I’d much rather spend the night in jail than in this house.
    Time to re-strategize.
    So I shrugged and attempted to act resigned. “Whatever.”
    “First thing tomorrow,” Mom promised, her shoulders rounding with relief.
    Dad nodded sharply, forced to play nice but obviously furious that I had the nerve to defy them.
    I turned away, nursing more than a little fury of my own.
    In the sticky silence that followed, we realized that Janie had taken my father’s instructions seriously and left the apartment altogether. Dad talked Mom out of going to look for her, but I was on edge, picturing the words on the floor, the light dancing on the walls, and my oblivious little sister in the middle of it all.
    A few minutes later, she showed up, dusty but unharmed. The keys clanked as she dropped them on the table. On her face was a wide-eyed expression I couldn’t decipher. She’d always been delicate, like a ballerina. Now I had the urge to stand in front of her like some sort of bodyguard.
    I went over to her. “Did anything happen?”
    “Yeah,” she said, her voice hushed.
    “What?” I asked.
    She glanced around. “Come closer,” she said. “I’ll whisper it.”
    I leaned toward her, my heart pounding, as she stood on her tiptoes and raised her mouth to my ear.
    “It was …” Her voice trailed off.
    “It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t be afraid to tell me.”
    “It was … BOO! ” she shouted directly into my eardrum, deafening me. Then she (wisely) rushed away as I stood frozen with rage. Her gleeful laughter bounced off the walls.
    I couldn’t believe I’d been worried about her.
    “You are such a jerk,” I hissed.
    “At least I’m not a scaredy-cat!” She danced farther away. “You’re just mad because I’m braver than you.”
    Then she (very wisely) ducked out of my reach and ran for the kitchen, just as Mom stuck her head out and said, “Time to eat. Has anyone seen that tray that was in here before?”
    After our tense dinner of gas-station gourmet, I stood up. “So where are we sleeping?”
    “We can put the air mattresses over in the corner by the TV, I guess,” Mom said.
    “No, not there!” Janie said. “I found someplace better!”
    She was wiggling like a delighted puppy.
    “Upstairs,” she said. “I found a place called Ward. It has bedrooms. And real beds!”
    I thought of the door in the day room marked WARD —the one I’d been too afraid to go through. Maybe Janie was actually braver than me (but that didn’t make her any less of a jerk).
    “If there are beds up there, they’re a hundred years old,” I said. “They’re probably full of maggots and bedbugs.”
    “No,” she protested. “I sat on one. It was nice.”
    Mom and Dad exchanged a dubious look.
    “You can’t seriously be thinking of letting her sleep up there,” I said.
    “Oh, Janie, I don’t know,” Mom said to my sister. “If Delia would go, then maybe … but the rooms must be so … old . And dusty.”
    Not Delia doesn’t like it up there . Just a general distaste for dust and oldness.
    “We brought clean sheets,” Janie said. Then her eyes cut over to me, and in them I saw expectant curiosity, like she was waiting for my reaction.
    Thirty minutes earlier she’d been scared enough to want to run away with me. Now she wanted to spend the night in some weird part of the house. This was just a bratty dare, designed to get a rise out of me, and I refused to give her the satisfaction. What difference did it make? I wasn’t planning to sleep there, anyway.
    So I shrugged. “I’m beyond caring at this point.”
    Maybe we’d get lucky and the ghost would eat my sister.
    *  *  *
    The ward hall, which I’d expected to be starkly institutional, with concrete and metal and straitjackets,