***

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” it said.

Winky nearly strangled me with her grip so high on my shoulders. I shook her off impatiently, still unable to see the source of the voice, but feeling the need to be ready to kick some serious ass. All I knew at this point was that it was a girl in there, which meant I had maybe a slightly better chance of fighting her off. I pulled my foot back and set it down outside the threshold.

“Who are you?” I said into the dark space. The drapes were drawn back, but the light coming from outside wasn’t strong enough to completely light up the room.

“A better question might be to ask who you think you are.”

The sound of a match being struck reached my ears and the faint glow of candlelight trickled past the door.

“This is my home. My place. You have no business here. Go away.”

My mouth opened to say something in response, but my brain was short-circuiting. Who would live in a morgue like this? Who but a deranged, canner-murderer? I inched my feet apart, ready for her to make her move from behind the door.

My only gauge for her location was the candlelight that was moving ever closer to where we were standing, making flickering and jumping shadows appear on the wall that looked like angry spirits dancing around.

Winky was obviously in better control of her body than I was. Her voice sounded strong, coming from over my shoulder.

“We’re looking for someone. We don’t mean any harm, and we’re not here to cause you any trouble at all. We’re peaceful.”

A bitter laugh echoed in the room. “Peaceful. Yeah, right. I saw you on your bikes. I know who you are. You’re the ones who blew up my house.” The voice was just on the other side of the door now.

She kept calling this place her house. It sounded too personal to mean anything but the most awful thing I could imagine.

“When you say your house, do you mean this was your house before … like … when your parents were here?”

At first there was no response. No sound at all. And then I heard a sniff.

“Yes. This has been my home for eleven years, five months, two weeks, and one day.”

I risked turning my head to look at Winky. She was staring at me, her eyes telling me she was getting the same impression I was. This girl has lost it. We were dealing with, at the very least, a girl who’d gone insane.

Winky spoke again. “Please don’t shoot us. We’re just looking for someone. His name is Bodo.”

I took over. “He’s tall, blue eyes, German accent … he’s funny and cute …” I knew I sounded lame, but this girl was giving me hope. She had lived here either as a canner or at least with them. Maybe she’d even seen things that had gone on, through her window.

“You love him,” she said. It was simple and unembellished, save for one emotion: curiosity. As if it were something to be examined, this situation of a girl loving a boy in the middle of all this carnage.

“Yes,” I said softly, the vulnerability I had with regard to Bodo coming through in my tone. I couldn’t have stopped it if I’d wanted to, but I didn’t care what this girl thought of me. Maybe if she knew how important he was to me, a stranger but someone who meant her no harm, she might be able or willing to help.

We stood there, waiting for her response. The seconds ticked by and a slight breeze caused the candlelight to flicker. I grew impatient, and the not knowing who she was or what she had going on behind the door was eating away at my nerves.

“Hello? Are you there?”

No answer came.

“Hello?!” said Winky in a much louder voice.

I cringed, concerned we’d offended this person, whoever she was, and were causing her to go over the edge even further.

But I needn’t have worried. She neither responded nor retaliated in any way. She remained silent.

“What the hell?” whispered Winky softly in my ear.

I motioned for her to follow me, crouching down and pushing the door open slowly … slowly … praying there wouldn’t be a loaded gun on the other side.

***

I almost expected to see a ghost on the other side of the door. Or a crazed lunatic, bent on my destruction. I was not prepared for what I did see.

Nothing. There was no one there. A candle flickered on a dresser in an old fashioned holder, steps away from the bed and across the room from where we stood at the entrance. But there was no girl, no person, no living thing that we could see in the dim candlelight.

“Where is she?” whispered Winky.

I listened carefully for any signs of her, but all I heard was the ticking of a windup clock that sat on the night table next to the bed. A pleated linen lampshade covered a glass bulb-shaped base, the cord running over the back of the table. The white bed had decorative pillows with ruffled edges carefully placed at its head. The one in front was one of those neck rolls to use for lying in bed and reading with a book towards the ceiling. I flashed back to days in my bedroom, hours spent reading about fantasy worlds and romance that never happened for me in reality.

I shook my head out of the past and back to the present. There was a girl in here, the original owner of the mansion, and we needed to find her before her bullet found one of our heads. I signaled for Winky to follow me deeper into the room.

Our footsteps made no sound on the thickly-carpeted floor. We stopped in front of a huge walk-in closet. I could already see that the interior was bigger than my bedroom at home had been. A large marble bathroom was off to the right.

“Do you see her?” asked Winky.

I shook my head. If it were me, I would have chosen to hide in the closet, so that was the direction I went. Winky went the other.

I got to the entrance and peeked around the corner, revealing as little of my head as possible, just in case she was waiting beyond to blow me away.

The room was divided in two parts. The first, where I was standing, was a dressing room. The nearby candle made it possible to see the details of the room. The center contained a cabinet with a marble top. The wood of the cabinet was dark and rich-looking, with golden knobs marking the placement of thin drawers. I walked over and carefully opened the nearest one.

Rows of gleaming, very expensive-looking watches winked up from within, each pushed into a cushioned slot. Even in the near darkness, I could see some of them contained diamonds.

I closed the drawer, looking around for the hiding place of our mystery girl. All I saw were shoes of all types and colors, shelved from floor to ceiling, sweaters folded like they were on display in a department store and color-coded by shade, leather purses and other totes lined up like soldiers on a top shelf, and possibly hundreds of men’s suits and women’s dresses and other clothes in the closet area beyond. Whoever had lived here had spent probably millions of dollars on this closet’s contents alone. I shook my head at the waste. It all meant less than zero now. If this money had been channeled into food, water, protection, and other things, this girl might not have gone bananas. So, so sad.

I walked into the closet and pushed the clothes from side to side, looking for a girl hiding in their midst; but she was nowhere to be found. I looked up at the ceiling and saw no attic or evidence of a secret door. I got bold and kicked the walls behind the suits and dresses, listening for the sound of a hollow space. But there was nothing there. She either just disappeared into thin air or she’s in the bathroom, because she couldn’t have jumped out the window, and there is no hidey hole in here.

I panicked a little at the idea of Winky being alone with her, so I hurried out of the closet to join her. We met as she emerged from the marbled room, shaking her head. “She’s not in there,” she said, no longer whispering. “I even looked in the cabinets.”

“She’s not in the closet, either.”

Winky put her hands on her hips, frowning. “That’s just too weird, right? I mean, nobody just disappears into thin air like that.”

“Unless she’s a ghost,” I said, only half joking.

“Please, Bryn. Don’t even think about going there. That girl was as real as you and me. She’s hiding here somewhere.”

“Did you check under the bed?” I asked.

Winky walked over and swept up the dust ruffle, getting down on her knees to check. “Nope. No ghosts under here.”

“Well, we’re just missing something, that’s all. Come on. Let’s look in the closet again.” I moved to walk past Winky, but she grabbed my arm.

“Maybe we should just leave her alone. I mean, she survived living in this house with canners. She’s either one of them or has some serious firepower in here that kept her protected. Do we really want to mess with that?”

Winky was right, but I couldn’t get the ghost-girl’s response about Bodo out of my mind. I was banking on the fact that she respected the idea of love. Hopefully, she wasn’t so cynical at this point, that the idea of me being in love wasn’t going to make her want to murder me in cold blood.

“You go,” I said. “I’m going to try and talk to her. She’s here somewhere. Maybe I can convince her to talk to me or something.”

Winky shook her head slowly. “You must be totally crazy over Bodo to go through all this for him. If it were me, no offense, I’d give it up. Nobody’s worth dying for.”

“Bodo is,” I said, before walking back into the closet.

***

I stood near the cabinet with the watches inside and talked out into the air around us. “Hello! Lost girl! We’re not here to hurt you or eat you or any of that crazy stuff. We just want to ask you about a friend of ours. He was here the night we came and took those kids out of here. He got left behind.”

I waited for a response and got none, so I continued.

“His body’s not downstairs, so I think he might have survived. The last time we saw him he was fighting on the front lawn or in the front of your house.”

Still no answer.

“Did you see him? Do you know where he is? I really need to know!”

I was getting frustrated with her lack of response. I just knew she could hear me, and the longer I sat there listening to the silence, the more convinced I became that she knew something. Wouldn’t she just tell us she knew nothing and to go away if she didn’t?

“I know you can hear me. And I’m sorry those canners … the cannibal kids, took your house from you and ruined it. I’m sorry there are monsters out here who are doing terrible things. But we’re not with them. We’re just like you. We’re just trying to survive, but we’re not doing it by killing other kids.”

Winky said softly. “Well, technically we did kill those canners.”

I nudged her to tell her to shut up.

“Okay, so we did kill some canner kids,” I continued. “But that was only to rescue the kids they were hurting. That’s okay, right? To kill kids who are killing and eating others?”

I wasn’t sure if I were asking her or myself at that point. This one-woman monologue felt like a confession in a way. I decided to just roll with it. If nothing else, it would help me get some things off my chest.

“Sometimes we have to make hard choices. Choices we shouldn’t have to make, because we’re just kids, and it’s not fair that we got left here without our parents.” My eye ran across all the shoes and handbags in the room around me. “Even if our parents were jerks, at least they kept the monsters away.”

The cabinet in the room popped.

I jumped back, crashing into Winky.

We stumbled away from the center of the room, towards the entrance, both of us staring at the marble top of the cabinet that was slowly rising up and tilting backwards.

“My parents weren’t jerks,” came the voice of the Lost Girl. Her head appeared out of the floor, coming up on a staircase that was located beneath the dressing room.