Despite my abundance of foretelling 'demon power', as Aunt Vera so suitably named it, I couldn't quite deduce why Monday morning brought with it such a flurry of hushed excitement and stolen corridor glances. Everywhere I looked, people seemed to be either turning to ogle at me or hurrying to whisper in the ears of their friends.
I thought that perhaps I was just being paranoid, but then I came within sight of my locker. There was a throng of people gathered around it. My stomach began to wring itself out like a wet cloth.
I approached with a frown. They were all goggling at something. When someone spotted me, the crowd dispersed as though it were a single all-thinking organism. I picked my way through the mob, felt their eyes press heavily into my skin as I reached my locker.
Everything stopped. My heart, my blood, my brain. Everything.
There was a sheet of paper taped to it, and on that sheet of paper was a horrifyingly familiar photograph. Underneath it, in large bold letters, was the caption "WHO ATE ALL THE SWEETS?"
A torrent of laughter exploded behind me. I turned too fast, the bile rising in my throat. Carmen and her camaraderie marched down the corridor, an unbreakable unit, six girls thick. Carmen, the vicious engine at its centre, flicked her hair at me before vanishing around the corner.
Keep it together, I thought to myself. But it was impossible. At that moment, I didn't want to exist. It wasn't that I wanted to die, in all its finality, but I wanted to vanish. I wanted the sweet release of invisibility, and the blessed burden of its permanence.
Faces shrunk and ballooned around me. Words bounced around my head, sharp-edged and indecipherable. The ground beneath my feet melted away and the air fled from my lungs.
I wasn't keeping it together. I had to get away. I tore away from the locker and set off down the corridor at a near-run. The lockers were covered with paper. How hadn't I noticed them before? They were everywhere.
WHO ATE ALL THE SWEETS?
My own terrified face stared out at me from each and every locker. Wide eyes, the blare of the camera caught in the pupils.
WHO ATE ALL THE SWEETS?
The walls began to turn in grotesque corkscrews. I wasn't panicking; I was panic. I wanted to breath normally again, to feel the cool air flow through my veins, but my dread didn't compromise. It demanded to be met by a complete meltdown.
WHO ATE ALL THE SWEETS?
The tears seared my skin. The sobs choked my throat. I stumbled down the corridor and practically threw myself through the doors to the girls' toilets and walked directly through Mona.
"Whoa, steady there!" she exclaimed, but her smile dropped as she saw the tears running down my cheeks. "Oh, no, you've seen them."
"Seen them?" I shrieked. "Seen them? Everybody has bloody seen them!"
Mona raised her arms. "Saffy, calm down-"
"I can't calm down! Everybody has seen the photograph, don't you understand? Everybody has seen what I look like-"
Mona reached out to grab my wrists, her eyes wide with urgency. I could almost feel her again, a feathery pressure above the cusps of my Atlantic.
"Let's go," Mona said, holding my gaze.
I winced at her. My vision was blurred. "W-what?"
"Let's go," she repeated. "Let's get away from this place, come on."
She made towards the door. "Wait! I can't just leave, Mona. I have classes all day."
"So? Come on, Saffy! Look at how miserable this place is making you! It's not doing anything for you!" Mona put her hands on her hips and pinned me with a fierce glare. "Just once, do what you want to do. Do you really want to stay here?"
I looked around, at the cracked tiles and the rusted sinks. My eyes fell upon one of the mirrors, at the person staring back at me. The dull grey blazer, the dark blue tie, the frumpy hair. The eyes, sunken and miserable. I looked about forty, not seventeen.
"No," I sighed. "I don't want to stay here."
What else was there to say? I looked back to Mona, her face beaming with approval. "But where can we go?"
*
The Ritz was a dilapidated old monument, a cracked and dusty Christmas bauble in the middle of town. It had been a bustling theatre back in the day, but it had been abandoned since before I could remember, and probably for much longer than that. There was an abundance of ivy snaking up the walls, the doors were all boarded up, and the windows to the second-floor plaza had long since been blown in by some storm or other.
The council had threatened to knock it down several times over the years. They were going to build a state of the art entertainment centre. A twelve-lane bowling alley. A six-screen cinema. But it had never happened. Time stood sentinel; time and dust.
I'd never noticed its beauty before. Mona stood beside me, basking in all the glory that had been washed away by decades of wind and rain and neglect.
"Home sweet home," she said, and I gawped at her.
"What do you mean?"
"This is where I spend most of my time. It's the nearest place I have to a home these days."
She stepped forward and made her way across the waterlogged car-park. I glanced around to make sure that there was nobody watching, and eventually mustered up the courage to follow her.
"I don't understand," I said. Mona was taking me around the side of the building. "You live here?"
"Well, obviously I don't live here," she replied. "Technically, I don't live anywhere. Dead people can't have an address or take out a mortgage or anything, you know. But it's where I do most of my haunting, and it's so beautiful inside. So I call it home. It's a sort of headquarters, I guess."
She stopped outside a boarded-up side exit. One of the wooden panels that made up the doorway was missing. The darkness inside looked ominous, but Mona nudged her head at it all the same.
"In you go," she said.
I snorted. "Are you kidding me? I'm not going in there."
"Hey, respect your host," Mona scolded. "Don't worry, there's nothing scary in there. Apart from the rats, I suppose."
"And you," I reminded her.
"I don't know what you're talking about. I'm not scary." Mona batted her eyelids at me in an attempt at what I could only think of as fraudulent innocence, and then gestured towards the doorway once again. "After you."
I gave her one last resentful glare before I dipped down and crawled into the darkness. The air inside smelled of damp and decay, and I was almost certain I could sniff out the residual scent of a smoke-machine. Mona breezed through the door after me, her entire frame beginning to glow as it had done in the park a couple of nights ago.
"Follow me." She set off down the shadowed corridor.
She took me deeper and deeper into the building, past what appeared to be abandoned store-rooms and offices. The walls were all very imposing, with dark mahogany panelling and burgundy paint. Flyers littered the ground, dampened into an unfathomable mush by years of stray rainwater.
Eventually, the corridor opened up into a small fork. To the right was a stairs that climbed upwards into what I guessed was changing rooms; to the left was a set of double-doors that led into an open void, as dark as the depths of the night. It was a fire-exit, I realized, and on the other side of the doors was the auditorium.
Mona noted the look of astonishment that was blatantly plastered across my face and smiled. She drifted through the doors and I followed her. They didn't feel safe on their hinges, as though it was only the dark and the serenity that had kept them intact all these years.
We were standing in the main theatre now, at the foot of the stage. Before me, dappled in the light of Mona's unearthly glow, was the tiered ocean of seats that would once have housed an audience hundreds strong. Above that, held up by twisting pillars, was the balcony, walled in on each side by imperial galleries. There was a second balcony above that, this one much smaller, and above that was the ceiling.
That was what truly took my breath away.
The ceiling was painted with a beautiful mural - of angels and demons, all gathered together in some bizarre saturnalia above the earth. What was even more bizarre was the lack of characteristics that distinguished between the two. There were angels clad in golden robes with soft, full limbs, but their faces were twisted in loathing. And then there were demons, with sharp tails and gnarled horns, only they had serene smiles blooming on the ugly buds of their lips. They met at the centre of the mural, and it was at this galactic nucleus that the mixture occurred.
I didn't know what any of it meant, but at that moment I was glad for Mona and her bewitching glow.
"It's... it's beautiful," I whispered. A few decibels louder, and I was afraid the whole room would crumble.
"I know," she replied, as though she'd built the entire place herself.
Behind us, the main stage loomed. The curtains were moth-eaten beyond repair, the depths of the stage itself still shrouded in darkness, but I could see beams of light filtering in from what I guessed were holes in the rafters above where the sky leaked through.
"Don't you feel better just for being here?"
"Oh, uh, yeah," I replied. I was still in a half-daze. She was right: in the enormity of the theatre, on the immense canvas of the stage, my problems were dwarfed. "It's amazing."
Mona drifted up the side-steps and onto the stage. I followed her. There was no thought involved. I was mindless, floating amidst the beauty of such a strange, forgotten place. Mona was my lighthouse in the dark, banishing the shadows and shedding light on all the various oddities that, until now, had been hidden from view.
The main stage itself looked as though it had been abandoned halfway through a performance. There were cardboard cut-outs jutting out from the wings that were shaped to look like trees, long-since sapped of colour and detail. A Midsummer Night's Dream, perhaps?
Centre-stage was a more diverse arrangement of objects altogether. There were stacked boxes and crates, vomiting props and costumes onto the floor, and along the front of the stage, just before the edge that vanished off into infinity, was a row of items that looked strangely out of place.
The first was a bird cage, its ivory bars trapping nothing but shadows. The second was a china doll, propped up against the former, its eyes staring emptily into space. There were others, too - a small hand-mirror, a single crack defacing its reflection, and a rocking chair. Neither of these, however, compared to the grandeur and perfection of the first two.
My eyes returned to the bird cage, to its elaborate bars and the swing that hung from the inside. There was something tugging inside of me, a familiarity that I just couldn't quite prise free. Why did I feel that I'd seen this object before?
And why, I wondered, was it shaking?
I thought I was imagining it at first. But when I peered closer, the motion was unmistakeable. The bird cage was vibrating. It was trembling on its base, the bars rattling and the air inside seeming to swell and heave as though a little black hole were being conceived in its belly.
I stumbled backwards, my heart vaulting up into my mouth. A scream sliced through the air, one so strained and throttled that it couldn't possibly come from a human throat.
It was screaming, I realised. The bird cage was screaming, as though it were coming to life in front of my eyes.
There was a flutter of movement to my left, and the cage was sent flying through the air. It vanished into the soft cushion of darkness that composed the auditorium, and fell silent. When I looked back up Mona was standing where the bird cage had been, her leg extended as though she'd just delivered a winning kick.
"There," she said, setting her foot down and dusting her hands together. "That's better. Pain in the bee-hind, that thing, I wish I'd never picked it up."
"W-what was that thing?" I exclaimed. There was no concealing the alarm in my voice.
Mona shrugged. "It's a vessel."
"Yeah, I'm gonna need a bit more than that."
"A vessel," Mona explained. "It's a haunted object. Sometimes, when somebody dies, the legacy of their death will tie itself to an object that was important to them. It's like the object remembers, like a part of the soul is still anchored to it. I like to collect vessels, if I can ever get my hands on them."
"Is this something that you liked to do when you were alive?"
Mona threw her head back and laughed. "God, no! I didn't even know about any of this stuff. I was blissfully ignorant. Think of this more as the purgatorial equivalent of stamp collecting."
I eyed the remaining three objects nervously, as though any second they were about to spring up and attack me. "Right."
"Anyway," Mona said, and she drifted into the centre of the stage, "let's talk about something else. We came here to cheer you up, not creep you out."
I followed her, locking my hands in front of me in an uneasy grip. What little light there was filtered down from rain-beaten holes in the ceiling above, and by the time that reached the stage it was mostly faded wisps of yellow.
I felt oddly exposed, vulnerable. The theatre was watching me; a single, lifeless eye.
"I wanted to be an actress once," Mona declared, and instantly my attention was diverted. She'd never given anything up before - nothing personal, at least. Until now, she was just a stranger. A friendly stranger, but a stranger nonetheless. It haunted me that I still knew nothing about her, so I stayed quiet, yearning her to go on.
"That's why I came here," she said. "It was too painful to be around my family, to watch them grieve for me, to scream in their faces and know that they couldn't hear me. I didn't even wait for the funeral. I just left, and this was the first place I came across that felt far away enough.
"Being here, it was the closest thing I felt to familiarity, so I clung to that. You have no idea how amazing it felt to have the whole stage to myself, to act out whole plays by heart and pretend that every eye was on me. That's the funny thing, I guess. There wasn't a single eye on me."
I stared at her. I wasn't quite sure what to say. She wasn't facing me, her gaze tossed out to the vast arena before her. Her grief was contagious, like an airborne disease that latched into my skin.
A thought drifted through the quietude. A question that had been tip-toeing around my mind since the moment we'd first met, and that until now had been met only with denunciation. Now was the time, I decided. "Mona," I said, softly.
"Yes?" She sounded wistful, lost in some distant memory.
"What happened to you? How did you die? If you tell me, perhaps I can help you figure out why you're here and help you move on. Isn't that what you want?"
Mona turned. Her expression was one of pained regret. "Do you really want to know?"
I nodded. "Really. I mean, only if you want to tell me."
Time turned to stone, each second, each minute, a vein set in marble. When she finally spoke, it was with a resoluteness that startled me. "We went into the side of a bus."
My breath caught in my throat. "We?"
"Me and Scott," Mona said, simply. "He was my boyfriend at the time and he had a motorcycle. Sometimes we would go for rides, and one day, just a couple of days before my mum's birthday, we went into the side of a bus. I was seventeen. I died instantly."
There were certain situations that not even my lifelong familiarity with the bizarre could prepare me for. I flicked through my archive of appropriate responses, but came out empty handed. There was nothing in the world I could say that would seem like enough.
Eventually, I settled for: "What about Scott?" When in doubt, I thought, bypass the awkwardness altogether.
"He's still alive," Mona said. I thought I saw a glint of something dark pass across her face, but as soon as it appeared it was gone. "He was in a coma for six weeks, and he lost an arm in the crash, but he survived."
My thoughts scrambled to arrange themselves. My heart ached for her, but I just couldn't make out why she'd been so mysterious about it all. I didn't know what I'd been expecting, but it definitely wasn't a motorcycling accident. Her hesitation surrounding the subject made me think of some twisted murder plot or something.
I started to feel foolish; an unsettling blend of guilt and naivety that churned at the bottom of my stomach.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"It's not exactly something I like to think about, Saffy," she snapped, taking me by surprise. "It was nearly thirty years ago, but it never stops being fresh. I'm like Prometheus, having my liver ripped out each and every day for the rest of eternity."
"Mona, I'm sorry," I said. The words crept off my tongue, as though tentatively feeling for purchase before carrying on. "I didn't mean to be insensitive or anything, I just thought that maybe I could give something back. You know, because you've been helping me so much lately."
"Maybe, one day, you can help me with something," she said, and her lips parted in a thankful smile. "But for now, I'm just glad to have somebody that I can help. I've been on my own for so long."
I wanted to ask her about the markers of death, the absolute lack of any clues whatsoever. The spirit-form was usually map-like in its architecture. They bore, like words on a page, the happenings of their demise. Mona said that she'd died in a motorcycle accident, but her ethereal body didn't bear any of the mortal injuries that it should have.
I opened my mouth to speak. Mona waited for me, expectant, but I faltered.
"Never mind," I muttered.
"Well, it doesn't bear thinking about," Mona said, and she twirled about on the spot. Just like that, all notions of sentiment evaporated. "We have an ambush to plan. Here, sit."
She flapped her hands towards me, ushering me off the stairs and into the first row of empty seats. The fabric released a puff of dust as I sat down. My stomach squirmed at the thought of how many cockroaches I might be sitting on. "Uh, ambush?"
"Correct," Mona said. She began to pace back and forth, her stance meticulous. "Based on today's attack, we need to retaliate accordingly. Bigger and better. Tell me: next week is your field trip to the Cathedral Caves, is it not?"
I nodded, slowly. I already didn't like where this was going.
"And Carmen Vespin will be there, will she not?"
Another nod.
Mona turned to me. The cogs were turning behind those fiery eyes. Something was brewing.
"Let's get to work," she said. Her eyes twinkled and moved to an assortment of abandoned costumes that littered the stage. Her eyes crept over the garments one by one, methodically selecting, and came to a stop on an old clown mask, its teeth sharp and its eyes menacing. "I have a plan."