The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall by Katie Alender Read Free Book Online Page B

in them.
    I know that person, I thought.
    But from where? The answer was buried in my head somewhere, like the lyrics to a song you haven’t heard in years. I just had to catch the answer, the way you catch one word in your memory and then the whole song comes flooding back.
    I know that sweater.
    Burgundy. Baggy. It was my father’s sweater. I remembered a Christmas card photo of him wearing it.
    My thoughts slid together in a confused mush. I knew I should know who that was down there, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I rubbed my face with my hands, feeling dizzy.
    Janie? Oh God. Could that be my sister? Could it—
    No. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to remember.
    Dad handing me a folded burgundy bundle after I borrowed it for the bazillionth time. Telling me to wear it with pride and restore it to its former coolness. Mom laughing and saying it was never cool, but it might have a chance now …
    Now that Delia will be wearing it.
    So … wait. That was my sweater? And was that my face ? But why was my face down there?
    Why was my face attached to a dead body?
    It hit me with a pop! —the instant, horrible, irrefutable truth:
    That wasn’t some random dead body.
    That was my dead body.

I stared down at my dead self.
    From behind me came the sound of bells, more clearly than I’d ever heard it before.
    I turned around. A girl about my age stood a few feet away, wearing a pair of long, silky ivory pants and a matching tunic top. Her black hair was cut in a sleek bob that barely grazed her chin. She had a striking look—a thin uniformity to her eyebrows, a distinctive pink glow on the apples of her cheeks.
    Around each of her wrists was a thin leather strap with a pair of jingle bells attached to it.
    She folded her arms, sending a fresh peal of ringing through the air while she grimly surveyed the room. Then she stepped closer to the window and peeked out. Seeing the body below, she bit her lower lip and glanced at me.
    “I see we both died in our pajamas.” Her voice was crisp, with a lilting British accent. Her large brown eyes were keenly intelligent as they flicked from my booted feet to my face. “I tried to get you to leave. Guess I didn’t try hard enough.”
    I didn’t answer. I was mesmerized by the light coming off her alabaster skin, and the way her body seemed to flicker slightly … as if she was constantly having to catch herself to stop from fading away.
    “Eliza Duncombe,” she said, stepping toward me with her hand extended. “Welcome to Hysteria Hall.”
    When I didn’t reach out and shake her hand, she smoothly drew it back and gave me a cool smile. “Just a little joke we have among ourselves here. Obviously, it’s quite a rude nickname for the place. What year is it now? Is it the nineteen eighties yet? The last time I asked someone, it was nineteen forty-three. It could be the eighties by now, right? I died in twenty-two. Very difficult to keep it all straight, you know. Well, you wouldn’t know, would you?”
    I took a step back.
    Now she considered me as if I might be a little slow. “Aren’t you going to talk to me?”
    No. I was not, in fact, going to talk to her.
    What I was going to do was scream.
    I screamed until Eliza Duncombe turned away and vanished into thin air. I screamed until the body on the ground became a blur. I screamed until I collapsed in on myself.
    Until the whole universe collapsed around me.
    *  *  *
    At some point, I stopped screaming and fell to vacantly staring around the room. The ceiling looked like a normal ceiling. The walls looked like normal walls.
    I can’t be dead. This is only a dream.
    But there was nothing dreamlike about the flurry of activity that soon took over my room. Police officers and paramedics crawled all over the place. My mother’s sobs carried in from the hallway. A woman in a suit stood at the open window, taking pictures of the body.
    Yes, the body. It was no longer me— my body—but just a thing, separate from