Carver Pike - Scalp

Even the living would roam these grounds. Terror lived on forever, and all the sorority girls who’d screamed for help would manifest into something horrible. Nitsy imagined pale white women roaming the halls, barefoot, in ripped nightgowns, and if you got to close to them, they’d open their mouths and scream the way they did that night when the boys played too rough and their virgin innocence was ripped from them.

Silence. Total silence. It was almost as loud as the MRI machine’s hammering.

A door popped open behind her and Nitsy nearly screamed.

Eggo stepped out of the classroom and locked the door behind him. She’d forgotten he was still in there. Everyone else had left, but Eggo stayed behind, playing on his phone, waiting for them to flee back to their rooms.

Nitsy paused with her hand at her chest, choking back the scream that almost belted forth from her gut. Eggo seemed almost as frightened by her presence. The keys rattled in his hand.

“Jesus,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“I… I was reading the flyers on the board,” she said.

“You scared me, man,” he admitted.

“Got me too.”

They both laughed.

“Now, go to bed,” Eggo ordered. “At 4:45 you better be ready to wake up the world. Nobody else even knows what’s coming. You guys will be the most hated crew here.”

“Great,” she replied, “and right on time to be hit with questions.”

He shrugged. “Gotta laugh in the face of your enemies, Nitsy. Get some rest,” he lowered his voice and added, “so you can scare the shit out of everyone in the morning.”

“It’s on,” she assured him, with a confident nod of her head.

“It’s on,” he replied.

Eggo turned and walked in the opposite direction of Nitsy’s room, leaving her once again to face the darkness alone.

Nothing’s here with you. Walk to your room. That’s all you have to do. Walk.

With the workshop room on the second floor, the same floor where her room was located, she only needed to continue down the hall to get where she was going. So she did. She took one step at a time and made her way past the next classroom. The lights were off, the room was dark, and so was the hallway—

POP. The light above her flashed on and even though she was expecting it to, the way it cut through the black space so quickly and so harshly caused her to flinch and tighten her fists.

Somewhere in the distance, she heard giggling and feet slapping the tile floor, but it wasn’t scary. It wasn’t the playfulness of ghostly children in the halls. It was one of the other teams wrapping up their project session and headed back to their rooms.

The next light popped on as she moved under it. There was still so much hallway ahead of her.

She quietly made her way down the dark corridor and tried her best to force hideous images from her imagination. It was of no use. Ahead of her, in the next classroom window, she thought she saw a pale face, and she knew it would be grinning at her as she passed, daring her to turn the knob and join it in there.

Don’t look. Keep walking.

Her eyes were on her shoes as she stepped past the window. The light turned on and she still refused to glance up. It would be there. She knew it. Smiling a jagged-toothed grin. It might even call out to her in a gravely, throaty voice. “Come in and play.”

Keep walking, keep walking, keep walking.

Nitsy picked up her pace and finally lifted her gaze to see how much further she needed to walk. Around the next bend would be the hall full of dorm rooms. Hers was the fifth down on the left. She was almost there.

Why didn’t Phyllis wait for you? You’re going to give her so much hell when you get to your room.

Nitsy froze.

Behind her came the chittering of what sounded like crickets. Inside the building. Too terrified to look back, but too nervous not to, Nitsy stood in the space between one light and the next and thought about it. The light behind her turned off. The one in front of her hadn’t yet illuminated.

Total darkness.

Crickets.

No, not crickets. Like hissing cockroaches.

And it wasn’t coming from behind her now. It was somewhere ahead of her.

She couldn’t wait any longer, she marched forward, her legs moving on their own now, too afraid to allow her mental images to slow them down. The sound was far enough ahead of her that she could detect it before getting too close.

Before she knew it, she was rounding the corner and on the last leg of the walk to her room. She had only five doors to go. The lights came on as she walked, and she was moving so quickly more than one light was on at a time. She felt better, more secure until she saw the figure at the end of the hallway.

Nitsy halted again and peered into the darkness at the end of the hall. The hissing of the roaches was there in the darkness, and she thought she saw a man standing with his legs slightly apart, his right arm stretched out, his fingertips touching the wall while his other arm hung loosely at his side. The man looked like he was struggling to hold himself up, like a drunkard walking home from a bar.

There is a man.

She couldn’t make out his features. He was too far away. Nitsy crept forward quietly. She was at the third door now and only needed to go a little further. She was almost there.

Is he watching you?

The closer she grew, the less sure she was that it was a man at all. He stood so still that he could have been a mannequin propped up at the end of the hall. She didn’t remember seeing one there during the daytime and she couldn’t imagine why there would be one there at all.

The clicking and hissing grew louder as if some thing sensed her proximity. Whatever was making that noise wanted to pounce on her. She could feel it.

It’s your imagination again. You’re not in a damn MRI machine, Nitsy. You’re at Stonewall Forge Leadership Conference and you’re safe.

But was she? The park ranger had said his friend was missing. And the caretaker and his wife hadn’t shown up for work.

It’s only a coincidence.

Nitsy was only a few feet away from her door when the figure at the end of the hallway moved. The hand touching the wall scraped against it, digging its fingernails in. The free hand reached out to her. And the clicking and hissing practically screamed at her.

She turned the knob, yanked open her door, and closed it behind her. She didn’t slam it out of fear it would only make the figure come to her door. She hoped that by being quiet maybe it wouldn’t follow her.

“Hey!” Phyllis called out from behind her. “I was wondering where you were.”

Nitsy looked at her new friend in her flowered pink pajamas and fought back the urge to scream at her. Finally, she got control of her breathing. “You left me.”

“Left you where?”

Their other roommate, Megan, who’d been assigned the role of Data Collection Specialist because she was always on her phone “researching,” stared down at them both from her bed on the top bunk and said, “We only came back to the room.”

“Something’s out there,” Nitsy whispered. “Keep your voices down.”

“You’re just trying to scare us,” Phyllis insisted. “Like earlier when you were talking about ghosts and stuff. Now’s not the time. We need to sleep so we can do well on our project in the morning.”

Nitsy shook her head. “I’m telling you, there’s something out there.”

Phyllis put her hands on her hips. “Are you trying to get me to look out there?”

Nitsy shook her head again.

“Good,” Phyllis said, “Because I don’t want to. I want to go to bed. And you want to know why I left you?” When Nitsy didn’t reply, Phyllis continued, “I left you because Bradley walked me back to the room. I think I kinda like him.”