“Don’t!” Daphne shouted.
“Let me go, you bitch!” Anne screamed.
She kicked her legs and thrashed her arms, but her struggle was futile. The dark mist had her bound; then it gagged her mouth. Only her eyes moved, looking desperate in her capture.
“Oh, Anne,” Daphne whispered, hopelessly.
Then the cloud moved away, taking Anne with it. Across the great room. To the stairs. Up and up, until the only disturbance came from the storm wailing above the orphanage.
The girls fell silent.
Shirley, wearing her pink flannel gown, descended from the ceiling, walking like a crab down the flaking walls. She paused for a moment, searching the great room for the Headmistress, but all she saw was Daphne by the sofa, one hand covering her eyes, and Mary sitting on the floor, playing with the edge of her nightgown.
“Where is she?” Shirley whispered, too frightened to leave her place on the wall.
“She has departed,” Mary said. “Like the unforgiving tide, she has crashed to the shore, taken her due, and withdrawn.”
“Where’s Anne?”
Mary opened her mouth to answer, but Daphne spoke first. “She went back upstairs. Just for a while.” She knew the truth would upset Shirley, probably make her disappear again.
But Shirley already knew the truth.
“She’s being punished, isn’t she?” Shirley said, scurrying two feet up the wall. “Oh no, we’re all going to be punished, aren’t we? We shouldn’t have come down here. We shouldn’t have. It’s against the rules. Oh, why did I let you talk me into this?”
“Calm down, kid,” Daphne said, fully aware that it was just such an outburst from Shirley that had called the Headmistress in the first place. “Losing your head isn’t going to help Anne now. It isn’t going to help anything.”
“But what are we going to do?” Shirley wondered aloud.
“We’re going to keep cool heads,” Daphne replied. “Now, come join us.”
“We’re not supposed to be down here.”
“Fine,” Daphne said, exasperated and in no mood for another argument. “You go on back up, and we’ll meet you in the classroom.”
Shirley looked around the room, seeming unsure. Then she raced back up the wall, disappearing into the ceiling as she had before the Headmistress’s arrival.
Daphne crossed to where Mary sat on the floor. She looked down, perturbed at her friend. Through the whole ordeal with the Headmistress, Mary had done nothing. She’d just sat there. Such cowardice wasn’t like Mary, and Daphne was greatly disappointed with her.
“Do you mind telling me why you were acting like a bump on a log while the forest was burning down around us?”
“I had to,” Mary said quietly. She shifted slightly on the floor, getting her legs under her. She stood, brushing at the back of her nightgown. When she stepped to the side, Daphne saw Mary’s excuse for keeping still.
On the floor, in the place where Mary’s nightgown had pooled, sat a vermillion bag, the Clutch, and five small bones, still splayed out from their game. The tiny skull resting at the center lay on its side, one eye socket looking upward. It reminded Daphne of a wink.
She lunged forward and wrapped her arms around Mary. “Quick thinking. I’m sorry I questioned you.”
“The Headmistress just appeared so fast. I didn’t know what to do. The bones were all over the place, and the Clutch, and there just wasn’t time to pick it all up. So I covered them, like a hen protecting her chicks.”
“You’re wonderful,” Daphne said with a relieved chuckle. “Let’s gather up those chicks and go find ourselves a chicken.”
They found Shirley in the second-floor classroom. She sat in a shadowy back corner, her hands clutching the desk before her.
The room was even more dismal and depressing than the dilapidated great room below. Down there was dust and rot and general disarray, but up here…
Twenty weathered desk chairs sat in the gloomy space, four across and five back. A large oak desk faced the chairs from the front of the room. Against the wall on the left, a broad map hung from ancient pins. The window across the room was broken, webbed with cracks; a fist-sized hole was punched through it, low and to the right. Wind rushed through. Everything here was filthy, but it was not otherwise different from the way it had been, unlike downstairs where vandals had overturned and damaged the furniture. It was the basically untouched appearance that gave the room its particularly horrific quality.
Once, children sat at these desks. They dreamed in these seats, looking through the window at the great world from which they were delivered. Now, the arched-back chairs were empty and frosted with dust. Gray like granite. They reminded Daphne of tombstones, marking the passing of countless young lives.
And did I once occupy one of these desks? Daphne wondered. Did I learn here? Did I dream? Why can’t I remember? Why can’t any of us remember?
“There’s our delicate child,” Mary said, pointing to where Shirley sat at the back of the class.
“What happened to Anne?” Shirley whispered. “What did the Headmistress do to her?”
“The Red Room,” Daphne said. There was no point in lying about it. Shirley would pitch a fit, but it couldn’t be helped. None of them was more terrified of the Red Room than Shirley, even though she was the only one never to have spent time there.
“Oh,” Shirley yelped, clutching herself in fear. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to wait for Anne,” Mary said. “She’ll need us when she emerges from that horrible place.”
“What if the Headmistress comes back?”
“You know she has to guard the door,” Daphne said. “She can’t leave until she’s finished with Anne. We have a few hours.”
Shirley clamped her thumbnail between her teeth and looked around the room, as if expecting a monster to break through the walls. She gnawed on the nail and clutched her chest with the other arm.
“Should we play?” Mary whispered sheepishly.
“You mean the bones?” asked Daphne. “It is the perfect time, with the Headmistress occupied.”
A gust of wind blew through the broken window. The paper map clicked against the wall.
“We can’t,” Shirley said quickly. “Anne isn’t here.”
“True enough,” Daphne agreed. “But she just won the game. She’s already told a story, and it’s unlikely she’d get another chance so soon. It couldn’t hurt anything to play once more.”
“I don’t think it’s fair to her,” Shirley said, her voice barely a whisper.
“Well, what would you like to do?” Mary asked. “Should we count raindrops or motes of dust?”
“Aren’t there other games we could play? The stories we tell are just so awful. Why can’t we play a game that isn’t so awful?”
“You know this game has a purpose,” Daphne said, “and a real reward should we truly win.”
“But how do you know?” Shirley asked, her voice very near tears. Her sullen face lowered. She removed her thumb from her teeth and set her hands on the desk. “How do you know we won’t be here forever?”
Daphne stepped forward and leaned down to put her arm over the seated girl’s shoulders. “You saw what happened to Sylvia. She was with us for a very long time until the night she told that story—her story. Don’t you remember what she said? ‘It’s me. My god, this story is about me.’”
Mary came forward to stand next to them. Thinking of Sylvia, she recalled bits of a poem by Byron, a poem of beauty, of light and of music. Under less somber circumstances she might have quoted from it. Instead, she put her lips very near Shirley’s ear and said softly, “Don’t you remember how beautiful it was? Don’t you remember how she smiled so, so brightly? And then, her body turned to specks of shining white light, and she was gone.”