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“Come on,” Gracie hissed, and Eddie gestured for me to precede him into the darkroom.
Eddie took the canister of film from his pocket. “Let’s do this fast,” he said.
The girls got to work, preparing the equipment and the chemicals. They whispered directions to each other. Eddie and I waited.
Somewhere outside, I heard the snap of a door closing. We all froze.
I put my hand on the doorknob. There was no mechanism to lock the door from inside—probably a measure to prevent teenagers from locking themselves in to fool around. Anyone could open the door and find us.
The four of us looked at one another. “You heard that, right?” Beatrice asked, her voice a whisper again.
Our faces said that we all had. We waited in silence for the sound to come again.
Ice-cold air crept up the back of my neck, like fingers. Somewhere down the hall was a thump, as if something heavy had been dropped.
“Do it,” I hissed at the girls, my voice coming out harsh. “Do it fast. Right now. Go.”
The girls blinked, and then they nodded. Gracie looked at Eddie, who was standing by the light switch. “We’re ready. You can turn out the light.”
My hand tightened on the doorknob. I didn’t know who—or what—was outside this darkroom, but it wasn’t going to open this door. If the door opened, this would all be for nothing.
What did you take pictures of, Shannon?
I looked at Eddie, nodding to him that I was ready.
Eddie turned off the light.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
For a second, the darkness was total, sucking us all down. Then a red light came on. Beatrice had pressed a button next to one of the tanks.
She and Gracie worked quickly. I didn’t watch; I focused on the door I was holding, even though there was nothing to see. The back of my neck was still cold. I strained my ears, listening.
Minutes ticked by. The sisters bickered under their breaths, trying to remember the correct sequence, hissing about canisters and fixing agents. I felt time narrow down to a fine point as I waited, knowing it was coming. And then I heard it.
There was a sound outside the classroom door, as if someone was standing there, waiting, shuffling as they lingered. I heard Gracie’s harsh intake of breath.
“If they come in here, they’ll know we’re in the darkroom,” she whispered. “When the red light goes on, a sign lights up above the door that says darkroom in use.”
In the red light, we all looked bathed in blood. Whoever was outside already knew we were in here. She seemed to always know where we were, wherever we went. But the Snell sisters didn’t know her like we did.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Eddie said, his voice flat. “Just keep working as fast as you can.”
They did, and seconds later I heard a soft creak as the classroom door drifted open, as if by a gentle hand. My palm was slick on the doorknob, and I closed my eyes, listening to her steps outside the door—the touch, maybe, of a rubber sneaker sole against the polished floor. There was the scrape of a chair, or maybe a desk, moving. I pictured her long hair, her eyes. The way she’d screamed at us in the dark that night, grabbed Eddie and tried to drag him from the car.
“What do we do?” Beatrice sounded panicked. I had never heard her sound afraid before.
Eddie’s voice was calm, and in the darkness behind my eyes, I wondered what he looked like. “Keep going,” he said. “As fast as you can.”
She was outside now, only a foot away through the door. I was cold, so cold. I thought she might try the doorknob, but she didn’t. Instead, I felt the gentle brush of something against the door, a scraping sound. One of the girls made a soft whimper in the back of her throat.
“She won’t hurt us,” Eddie said softly. And even though my pulse pounded in my throat, I didn’t think she would, either. If she wanted to, she would have done it already. Could she enter one of us and make them kill the others, like she had done so many times on Atticus Line? Perhaps she could. She could certainly force this door open, whether I held the doorknob or not. And yet she didn’t try.
The scraping continued, and then there was silence. A strange, sinister smell. Something popped, too loud. I wondered what she was doing out there.
The Snell girls were breathing hard as they worked, close to panic. “We have to dry the negatives,” Gracie whispered, her voice shaking. “There’s a—a dryer thing. There’s only four negatives. But the dryer makes noise.”
“Do it,” Eddie said.
