The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [146]
You don’t have to do this, Grace. The shadow pulsed around her, thick and hungry. You don’t have to live through this, not again. Just let the flames come. That’s the way it ends. You’ve got to let them burn.
But there was something important here—something she needed to remember. Grace surrendered to the dark. Somewhere owls wept. She was thirteen again.
Floorboards creaked above her: old pine sagging under a ponderous mass. That would be Mrs. Fulch, going to the bathroom after her bedtime glass of tea and gin. Her room was on the third floor, although Grace never understood why. It took Fulch ten minutes just to get up the stairs.
Then again, all of the faculty had rooms up there—the wardens, the nurse, the housekeeper, the groundsman, Fulch the cook, and Mr. Holiday, the director of the orphanage. Maybe that made it easier to keep the children out. The third floor was strictly against the Rules. Once, when she was eight, Fulch had caught Grace with her shoe on the first step of that staircase and had dragged her to the kitchen to spank her with one of the big wooden spoons she used to stir the soup kettles. Grace had never tried to climb to the third floor again.
Somewhere above her, a door shut. Seconds later came a grunting sound, followed by a labored whuffling. It made Grace think of a National Geographic special they had let her watch once on the orphanage’s flickering black-and-white television. She liked National Geographic, even though Mr. Holiday said scientists were all godless sinners. The show had been about animals in Africa. A water buffalo wallowing in a mudhole had made the same exact whuffling. It seemed Fulch’s own cooking had disagreed with her. Again. That meant three or four more times that night the sound of her waddling to the bathroom would wake Grace up. That was, if Grace had somehow fallen asleep.
“Grace …”
The whisper was barely audible, drifting on the air of the dormitory.
“Oh, Gracie …”
Giggles.
Grace went stiff. Talking after lights out was against the Rules. So was getting out of bed, no matter how much listening to Fulch made you have to pee.
Bed-wetting itself wasn’t against the Rules—and there was lots of it there. Some days the yellow-spotted sheets flew on the clothesline behind the orphanage like flags. All the same, messing your bed was good for a swat or two from Mrs. Murtaugh, the housekeeper, or maybe from her husband, the groundsman, if she was too busy to do it herself—and Mr. Murtaugh’s big hands were rough and hard from work. Grace had learned not to drink too much before bed.
“We’re coming for you, Gracie.” More giggles, quickly stifled. Another whisper, falsely shrill. “It’s me, Mrs. Fulch, and here’s Mr. Holiday.” Slurping, kissing noises. “We want to make you our most special girl, Gracie.” Hands reached from the dark, groping for her nightgown.
Grace sat up. “Leave me alone.”
She did not whisper the words, even though Mrs. Broud, the second-floor warder, would be sitting in a chair just outside the door.
The hands recoiled.
“You little—” A word Grace didn’t understand. “—you’d better shut up.”
That was Mattie Winter. She liked to use words she learned by lurking within earshot of Mr. Murtaugh. The groundsman had a habit of uttering a constant stream of curses as he worked; he never seemed to notice it.
“Did she hear us?” came a thin and piteous whisper. Lisbeth Carter. She could only speak in whines; it had something to do with her nose being too narrow inside to breathe right. These days she was Mattie’s shadow.
Grace could just make out their outlines in the gloom: one tall and thick, the other a knobby rail. When she came to the orphanage two years ago, Mattie had crowned herself the queen of the girls’ second-floor dormitory, and none of the other girls had ever disagreed—at least not without getting Mattie’s fist in the stomach as reward. Grace avoided Mattie when she could, but a few months ago the other girl had seemed to tire of Grace’s silence. Since then, she had worked nonstop to get a rise out of Grace. She hadn’t succeeded yet.
“I said