Every girl at St. Monica’s wanted a friend who had been assigned to Vernon Hall, but nobody wanted to live there. A month before the end of each school year, when the new housing assignments came down, the girls were in silent agony as they received their envelopes. They slid their french-tipped fingernails under the seal, they bit their glossy lips, they braced themselves. A few had even been known to pray: it was known that the Director of Student Services listened to no appeals, but perhaps God was different. (Despite its name, St. Monica’s was not, and had never been, a religious school.) For Vernon Hall was the dormitory with St. Monica’s only ghost.
Twenty years ago, every dormitory at St. Monica’s had had a ghost and Vernon Hall had not been special. You would have been hard pressed to find a school, a hotel, a hospital, or even a gym that didn’t have at least one ghost. If you went back forty years before that, you would have found a world in which ghosts were not thought to be real at all. Those who claimed to see them were considered either crazy or attention-seeking. The ghosts had always been there, but most people couldn’t see them.
But then a contractor for the government, while trying to synthesize an ingredient from ultra-violent light that could be used to give enemies of the state cancer, stumbled on what the press and the market termed “Vitamin X.” Vitamin X, which was not actually a vitamin, could preserve and even restore vision if ingested daily. Goodbye glasses; goodbye contacts. So after testing confirmed that it was safe for people to take, it was added, like fluoride, to the water supply. Ghosts, as it was later discovered, hate laboratories and testing facilities of all sorts. Even the ghosts of scientist hate them. (Things must look different from the other side.) And so one particular side effect had not been uncovered during trials. Vitamin X did not simply preserve vision. You could see things you could not see before. Like ghosts.
What were the ghosts? Were they the dead themselves, or mere psychic imprints? No one knew, and the ghosts weren’t saying. Aside from seeking their help in investigating murders, a task at which ghosts were invariably a help, trying to communicate with them was quickly given up. Some ghosts seemed to be free agents: they could go anywhere they liked. Others were stuck in one spot. Particularly in art museums, there were so many ghosts that the effect was one of walking through a hazy, smoke–filled room. The museums did not appreciate these unreal, if devoted, patrons. There might indeed be something romantic about looking at a Holbein through the haze of the countless dead, one of whom might even be—who knew?—St. Thomas More himself. But it was bad for business. “As touching as it is that ghosts love art,” said one director of the Frick Collection, after yet another failed exorcism, this one involving holy water firehoses, “they don’t pay for the privilege.”
To his (no doubt, given the certainty he now possessed of the afterlife, eternal) chagrin, however, the secret to getting rid of ghosts would not be discovered at the Frick, but at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And all because the Met cost less to visit. Because twenty years ago, a young man was looking at the rooms in the American Wing of the Met. He enjoyed looking at fine furniture, but, as a graduate of a program in psychotherapy, he could not find a job and he had little hope of ever buying a nice sofa for himself, let alone a period piece.
In those days, the social and professional consensus was in favor of what was then called mechanized therapy, which consisted of conversations with chat programs which offered solutions that could be employed by anybody. Mechanized therapy was not very helpful, but it was cheap, and, as its proponents liked to point out, talking cures were also not very helpful, but they were expensive. The young man knew his choice to go into psychotherapy was very impractical, but like all young people who enter into impractical professions, he assumed that he would be the exception.
So as the young man wandered into the Verplanck Room, wondering if perhaps he should enter into a more lucrative and stable field, like book publishing, when he saw a weeping lady hovering one inch above the yellow couch. And even though everybody knew that talking to ghosts was a waste of time, the sight of a sad woman adjacent to a couch stirred his professional training, and he asked her, “Why are you crying?”
“Oh,” said the ghost, weeping. “I worked all my life as a maid in the homes of the wealthy, surrounded by their beautiful things. But my own life was so small and dirty. One day, I stole a little china dog. They didn’t really love their beautiful things, and it was so small…. But of course they knew. They never charged me, simply fired me and refused to provide a reference. In the end I pawned the little dog. I never had anything beautiful that was my own except that dog and even that, I couldn’t keep.…”
“That sounds very hard,” said the young man. “Is that why you came here?”
“I suppose it is,” said the lady.
“To have beautiful things of your own?”
“Yes,” said the lady. “But you know, even here, I can’t touch the things. They aren’t really mine. If I think about it, I’m just going through the same pain that made my life so hard, because it’s familiar.” Then her mouth made an “oh!” of recognition, and—
She vanished.
That was the discovery that made the young man very famous and very rich: talk therapy, while only sometimes helpful for living people, was incredibly effective when it came to ghosts. Soon, there were almost no ghosts left. Their lingering issues were located, discussed, resolved. Even living people began to undergo talk therapy again as a preventative measure.
For there to be almost no ghosts, however, there must be a few ghosts.
Such as Emily, of Vernon Hall.
Emily had been at Vernon Hall for such a long time that some people suspected she predated the building. There were no clues on her to give even an estimated year of death, for she always appeared in the St. Monica school uniform. Emily was five feet tall and eternally sixteen; she had fine dark hair and bugged-out eyes. She also had a knife stuck in her back. The knife had been stuck into her so thoroughly that the point jutted out her front. She dripped blood wherever she went. The girls of Vernon Hall could hear Emily howling through the night: it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.
The rest of St. Monica’s posed little trouble. Sinclair Hall’s Berenice, who had poisoned herself for love, moved on when she learned how to locate her self-worth outside of romantic relationships. Jackson Hall’s Katy Anne, who had keeled over from an aneurysm, required only a single session (no one had explained to her that she had died). And though she was sorely missed, for she had been a real character, Jill of Radcliffe Hall, along with the ten other girls she’d murdered after she’d failed her exams, ascended once they’d all had a chance to talk it out. Building by building, St. Monica shed its ghosts.
Only Emily remained. It seemed incredible, but there she was. How hard could it really be (as each therapist hired after the failure of the last privately believed) to sort out one girl’s residual trauma? That no one had yet done it was only a sign that the demand for therapists had lowered standards.
When, one after the other, they came to exorcise Emily, she would cease her crying and listen to them politely. When they explained to her that she had been dead for some time and that she could not expect closure as to her death and that closure was an illusion in any case, Emily would reply that she knew who killed her and felt that justice had been done. She had no unfinished business. One by one, the therapists would seize upon the obvious solution: all Emily had to do to pass over to the other side was to take out the knife. The knife kept her here, pinned to this world, and in some more mysterious way, to Vernon Hall itself.
Emily already knew all that.
“I like the knife,” she said to the therapists.
“No you don’t,” cried therapist after therapist in exasperation. “You float in the shower screaming it hurts while the students are trying to get ready for the day. You can’t possibly like the knife.”
“Well,” said Emily, simplicity itself, “that’s because it does hurt.”
“Okay, okay. You like the knife,” the therapists said, each one thinking the maybe the ones before had not gotten this far. “The knife is what you know. And you don’t know what the other side is like. So you cling to the knife, even though it hurts you, because it’s familiar. But if you let go….”
“I know that,” said Emily. “But why shouldn’t I cling to the knife, if I want to?”
“It’s bad for you,” said the therapists.
“How can it be bad for me?” asked Emily. “I’m dead.”
And so, while, as we said before, nobody really wanted to live in Vernon Hall and deal with the reality of Emily sobbing and howling and bleeding everywhere, with the bad nights when no one could sleep and the worse days of coming back from class to see she’d written “UR NEXT” on your fresh sheets in blood—every girl wanted an excuse to visit. After all, those sealed envelopes always informed a few girls that they were leaving Vernon Hall. Even though they made the obligatory cries of relief, the girls who found themselves moving out did feel, inevitably, a certain loss of distinction and status. A girl who lived in Vernon Hall could, if she played her cards right, be very popular.
Unless you were hopeless, hopeless, hopeless Mildred Burnes.
The name didn’t help.
She was hopeless, that was true. A non-starter, everybody agreed. It wasn’t only that Mildred didn’t know there were cards to play or even that there was a game to win or lose, but that Mildred barely seemed to notice the existence of other people. She certainly was unable to abstract from the individuals she could see to a social world with social rules. She was a scholarship student, but not for anything interesting, like field hockey, or arty, like Latin. Instead, Mildred had a scholarship for biology; she always smelled vaguely of formaldehyde. She aspired to become a forensic investigator, a career which the absence of ghosts had made relevant again.
And it was thanks to a childhood of reading books about crime scenes and practicing stabbing watermelons in her backyard that Mildred, upon moving into her room at Vernon, said something to Emily that nobody had ever said before.
“That knife wound,” said Mildred. “It’s self-inflicted.”
Emily, who had been doing her best “it hurts,” shut up immediately and stared at the new girl.
“I imagine,” said Mildred, in her odd nasal monotone, which was one of many reasons why she would fail, at St. Monica’s, to make a single living friend, “you wedged it up against something, then fell backward?”
“Yes,” said Emily. “Yes, I did.”
“Pretty good job,” said Mildred. “It must have hurt a lot.”
“To be honest,” said Emily, “it hurts more now. The shock meant I didn’t feel that much. Though it took a long time to die. I sort of wished I had taken poison or something beforehand.”
“Why did you do it?” asked Mildred.
“Well,” said Emily, “I wanted to be a ghost.”
“But you must not have known there were ghosts,” said Mildred, “whenever it was that you died. I mean, you’ve been here a long time, haven’t you?”
“It’s true—I didn’t know there were ghosts,” said Emily. “But I had a hunch. It seemed worth it to find out. And there were ghosts, after all.”
In some ways, little changed after this conversation. Emily was still howling up and down the radiator pipes and writing poems in blood on the walls. The other girls in Vernon could still count on Emily to scare them in the shower. Vernon retained its social cachet. But Emily came to the shower and did the rest of her haunting at much more predictable times; if Mildred was busy, Emily was active. Otherwise, she spent her time in Mildred’s room. As long as she didn’t keep Mildred up late, interfere with her studies, or bleed all over her things, Mildred didn’t mind Emily’s presence. They would sit in her room and talk and sometimes they’d play games that didn’t require Emily to touch the pieces. (Cards were a failure.) As Emily’s preference for Mildred became more pronounced, however, others at the school began to suffer its effects. If a girl who had made the mistake of bullying Mildred so much as set foot in Vernon, Emily would make her as miserable as possible. The very ceilings would rain blood on such an unfortunate girl—and that was the only beginning.
Then summer vacation came. Emily was alone. Now she was crying every day with a new and much more primal intensity. The janitor wouldn’t even enter the building.
“It hurts,” said Emily. “It hurts.”
She didn’t mean the knife.
When Mildred came back for her sophomore year—there was no question, that year or any other year, that she’d be assigned to a place that was not Vernon Hall—Emily had put together what she considered to be a foolproof plan.
“You need to kill yourself,” she told Mildred.
“No,” said Mildred, who had expected this.
“But,” said Emily, “I love you. You’re the only person I’ve ever loved. We can be ghosts together.”
“No,” said Mildred. “I don’t want to be a ghost. I want to be a forensic investigator. I can be a ghost later.”
“But why?” said Emily. “Being alive is terrible. The girls here are shallow and mean and when you grow up and graduate that’s what the whole world is going to be full of them. That’s the world. And who knows if forensic investigation will even come back? Your parents made the same bet on ‘Mildred.’”
“That’s all true,” said Mildred. “Being alive is hard. And the girls are mean. And I might never get a job. But it’s like how you love your knife even though it hurts. I want to be alive, even if it hurts, so I can see what happens.”
“But,” wailed Emily, “when you graduate and leave, I’ll be all alone. Also, you didn’t say you loved me too, and that’s a little hurtful.”
“Of course I do,” said Mildred, whose belief that one ought not verbalize what she considered to be obvious facts was another reason she did not make a single living friend at St Monica’s. “Don’t worry. I’ll think of a solution.”
Sophomore year came and went. Junior year came and went. Every summer, Emily felt worse. And then Mildred came back to her room one day in a cap and gown. She had graduated. Emily was curled up in a ball and floating on the ceiling.
“Emily,” said Mildred. “I have a solution.”
Emily uncurled.
“You need to let me take the knife,” said Mildred. “You can only move on if you take out the knife, right? Not if I take out the knife. If I take out the knife, then I’ll take it with me wherever I go. We’ll always be together. I think. In theory.”
“Do you promise?” asked Emily, not coming down from the ceiling.
“No,” said Mildred. “How can I? Nobody’s ever tried this before. Everybody wants to get rid of ghosts, not keep them.”
“You have to promise me something,” said Emily. “One thing. There has to be something you can promise to do.”
Mildred thought carefully about this.
“What I will promise you,” she said, eventually, “is that I’ll never get rid of the knife. No matter what happens, or how weird people think it is. I’ll always keep the knife. I might leave it at home, or put it in a checked bag at the airport, but whenever I can bring it with me places, I will. Even if I never see you again, I will keep the knife. And when I am done with my life, I will come over to you.”
“Okay,” said Emily. She came down. Mildred pulled out the knife and Emily vanished. Mildred wrapped the knife up carefully and put it in her backpack. Then she packed up the rest of her things and left St. Monica’s.
And for the rest of her life, she never did see Emily again.
People did think the knife was weird. More precisely, they thought it was disgusting. After decades or even centuries of being stuck in Emily, the blade had become a nasty color. With her first paycheck, Mildred bought it a leather sheath. Upon being placed in it, the knife sliced the sheath right through.
“Okay,” said Mildred. “But you can’t cut up my things.”
The knife, no matter how it jostled in her bag, did not cut up her things.
Mildred steadily ascended in the profession of forensic investigation. As her reputation for being unfriendly and cold, but hypercompetent, grew, people began to assume that the knife possessed some professional importance to her—a relic from her first crime scene, perhaps. Mildred did not correct them. Aside from catching serial killers for the FBI, she minded her own business. And in a sense, the speculations weren’t wrong. She had a particular genius, everyone acknowledged, for detecting self-inflicted wounds. Had she found Emily out thanks to that talent, or had she developed the talent because she found Emily out? She wasn’t sure and had no one to ask. Or maybe it was Emily’s contribution, not her own.
Years turned into decades. Mildred continued at her chosen profession until the day a tremor in her hands told her she could no longer trust them with sensitive work. She retired. She went to a lawyer and made her will, in which she established a scholarship for scientifically-minded girls at St. Monica’s. Mildred had lived very simply and she had a lot of money to dedicate toward such an effort. After her last meeting with the lawyer, she went to her home. She cleaned it thoroughly, organized her possessions, and methodically began to throw away the perishable food. She wrote out a note.
Then she took the knife out of her bedroom, where she usually kept it, and placed it on her kitchen table.
“Emily,” she said.
There was silence.
“Emily, Emily… I can’t trust my hands.” Mildred looked down at the knife. “Emily—I kept my promise. Help me.”
Silence.
With exasperation, Mildred said: “Emily!”
The knife moved… a little.
“Do I need to say it?” asked Mildred. There was no answer.
So she did.
After all, she’d never really said it, not even back then.
After the body was found, Mildred proved to have left behind a puzzle for her chosen profession. It was plain, from everything she’d done, from the meetings with the lawyer and the note and the way she’d left her home, that Mildred must have methodically planned her own death. Only her fingerprints were on the knife. There were no traces of another person in the apartment. She had to have stabbed herself.
And yet every investigator agreed that the wound could not have been inflicted by Mildred. It could only have come from somebody else. It was physically impossible for her to have stabbed herself.
For years, the case was presented as a puzzle to new students of forensics, in case a fresh young mind noticed something previously overlooked. Every year, young forensics students dreamed of being the genius who put together the clues. And every year, none of them ever found a solution.
None of them ever would.
Can you hear me applauding from my house in Indiana? I love this SOOO much <3
This is full of excellent details in a solid frame, both very funny and poignant. Well done!