Page 30 of Hollow
“Tell me more,” I say quickly before he has a chance to change his mind.
He thinks that over and then nods at the buildings. “I will, but only if I can walk you back inside. I’m afraid it’s getting a little chilly out, and you don’t have a coat.”
I want to tell him that I’m always hot since I’m always wearing so many layers, but I just nod, and we walk away from the shore.
“Not to mention that lake makes me feel uncomfortable sometimes,” he adds. I glance at it over my shoulder, at the darkness. I have to agree with him. “The energy is palpable.”
“Strange energy,” I say, nodding.
“Too fitting for a ghost story,” he says.
“So what happened?” I prod, our feet on the gravel path again. “You saw the body. Was it a woman? A man?”
“A woman in a nightgown. Always crawling around the corner.” He makes a face at that, and I suppress another shudder. “And yet I could never catch up with her. Finally, I saw her go inside my room, but when I went in after her, she was gone. And the blood, which had been very real on the floor, was all gone. The only tangible thing that was left behind was a row of lit candles on my windowsill and a dead snake on my desk, stabbed with sewing needles. Someone had written Welcome to Sleepy Hollow. May you never leave in blood.”
“My goodness,” I say through a gasp. “That’s…that’s…”
“Cruel? Horrifying? Diabolical?” he provides. “I thought so too. But when I brought it up with Sister Sophie, she passed it off as a prank. Some students are illusionists, especially second years, and it’s not uncommon to haze the new teachers.”
“But the woman in the hallway,” I point out. “The blood.”
“The blood disappeared,” he says, “so that points to illusion.”
“But you don’t believe that.”
He gives me a curious look. “No. You’re right. I don’t believe that. Especially as it happened again last night. I woke up to hear Marie’s voice, her…laugh,” a dark look comes over his eyes, “then I heard the…body. As it went down the hall. But this time, I didn’t want to invite trouble. I stayed in my room with the door locked and waited for the sound to disappear. It took a while, sounded like it was going up and down the hallway for hours, but I refused to open the door. Still barely slept after that.”
We stop in front of the building where his class is. “I’m afraid this is where we’ll be parting ways today,” he says with a slight bow.
“You can’t leave me now,” I protest. I reach out and grab the collar of his coat. “I want to know more.”
“And I have papers to grade,” he says, eying my hand until I let go of him. “But I promise if it happens again, I’ll let you know.” He swallows and looks around the grounds. “I have to admit it’s nice to be able to tell this to someone who doesn’t dismiss the whole thing.” His gaze comes back to me, this time with intensity. “You’re nothing like the rest of your family, are you?”
“I hope not,” I find myself admitting.
He gives me a knowing smile. “Take care, Kat.”
Then he turns and walks off, and I know there is so much more he’s not telling me.
Chapter 11
Crane
I’m not sure if it was the talk I had with Kat that helped, someone to listen to what I was saying and not dismiss me as Sister Sophie did, but I finally had a good sleep last night.
Or should I say, I at least managed to ignore the sounds. Marie’s accusatory cry and her insults, followed by the thump of the thing in the hallway. But I just put the pillow over my head and counted backward from one hundred, and then, by some miracle, I was out.
Suffice to say, I wake in the morning feeling in good spirits. Part of me wants to leave the ghosts as practical jokes and move on, while the other has the energy to investigate into Vivienne Henry further. I don’t know why the teacher I replaced is of such interest to me. It sounds like she had a nervous breakdown and killed herself. That happens. The isolation probably got to her. The stress. She had been here for far too long. Yet because I know that ghosts exist and that she did die on the school grounds—in the lake—and I did replace her in a technical sense, I wouldn’t be surprised if the ghost outside my door is Vivienne.
Unfortunately, if that’s true, it probably means she’s out for revenge. A lot of ghosts seek those with magic because our energy is such a draw for them, like moths to a flame. Only on rare occasions are those ghosts actually able to cause harm. If the ghost was also magically inclined before they died, well, that’s something I don’t want to find out.
Nonetheless, I bathe and get dressed for the day, and before I head out to the dining hall for food, I decide to pull a card from one of my decks.
I pull the Ten of Swords.
To those who dabble casually in the arcane, the Ten of Swords doesn’t always mean calamity. A man on the ground with ten swords on his back might mean you’re starting over at rock bottom, not certain doom.
But when I pull the card, I see myself on the ground, mimicking the knight drawn on the card deck, my face caked in dirt while I scream for mercy. There is something dark above me, monstrously tall and large, a big black figure that seems to stretch into an endless night sky, the sound of a horse whinnying and galloping hooves. The echo of a blade being drawn.