The Last Place Anyone Looks MP3
Read by Lin Sagovsky
“She was never… seen… again!”
The underside of Dot’s face was cast in a harsh yellow glow from the electric torch wedged between her knees. Some stories have no business being told with the lights on.
“They say she’s still there, all these years later,” Dot’s voice rasped, her eyes darting between the other three girls sitting in the circle. “And if anyone’s brave enough to play on the third floor of the east wing, they’ll hear little Harriet’s voice, taunting them: you’ll never find me .”
Dot drew a long, hissing breath, which blended seamlessly into absolute silence. All four girls cast skittish glances at one another as the silence began to overstay its welcome.
“Don’t be such a wet blanket, ‘Belle.” Dot had abandoned her eldritch storytelling voice (for the plummy elocution of Buckinghamshire). “My sister said she spoke to a girl who tried it. On the third floor, I mean. Looking for her.”
“Playing hide and seek with a ghost?” Vi piped up. “That’s not even fair! They can walk through walls and fly and—”
“Ghosts can’t do anything,” said Annabelle through gritted teeth, “because they’re not real.”
“She means looking for her body, Vi,” said Maisie, the last girl to speak. Her soft Scottish brogue was little more than a whisper as she clutched Vi’s hand. “Her body’s still hidden somewhere, with people walking past it for years and years with no—”
“There’s no body,” insisted Annabelle, “because there was no girl, and there’s no ghost because there are no ghosts!”
The finality of this statement hung in the air, until Dot decided to swat it down.
“Well there is one way we could find out.”
*
“Seventy-five…” Vi called out through her forearms, pressed against the stone of the staircase’s central pillar. “Seventy-six…”
The late morning sun cut through the far window of the east wing. In the bleached path of light that ploughed through the corridor, dust swirled around a pair of feet yet to find a hiding place.
“Eighty-three... eighty-four…” In between Vi’s counting, the rowdy buzz had subsided, replaced by the occasional giggle echoing about the woodwork. An abundance of right-angles and oak panelling gave the space an atmosphere of austere precision, and acoustics to drive a musician to distraction.
“Ninety-seven…” Each number carried a weight its predecessor did not. “Ninety-eight... ninety-nine... one hundred!” No-one was present to witness Vi’s dramatic flourish as she turned on her heels to face the empty corridor. "Coming, ready or not!"
Her left foot almost tripped over her right as excitement collided with caution. The corridor was flanked by six rooms, three to each side, with a seventh at the far end. Taking a few quiet steps towards the first door on her left, it opened with a gentle push, and as she crossed the threshold, another giggle echoed somewhere along the corridor.
Stacks of chairs and desks lined the walls of the deserted classroom. The leather of Vi’s shoes creaked against the varnish of the floorboards as she crept across the empty space. Beneath the dirty grey blackboard, the teacher’s desk lay obscured by a large, cream-coloured sheet. She stood beside it, squinting into its folds. Reaching out, her fingers curled around the slack fabric, and with a swift, theatrical gesture, she pulled.
“Boo!”
“Oh, hell’s teeth, Vi.” Maisie clambered up from beneath the desk. “I thought this was a good one.”
“Well there’s no chance of you going missing for seventy years.” Vi offered Maisie a hand, helping her to her feet. The two girls made short work of the next room, rapping on the ceiling-high cupboards before flinging open the doors, exposing the empty insides to the first sunlight they’d seen in years.
“We’re coming for you, Harriet!” called Vi, as they stormed over the corridor to the room opposite. “Or Hazel.”
The room they found themselves in held the same set of tall cupboards, but Vi made a beeline towards the curtains, beneath which a pair of black shoes were peeking out.
“You’re not a ghost, are you?” Vi quizzed the apparition above the shoes.
“Oh, shut up,” came Annabelle’s voice, as her sour face snaked out from behind the fabric.
“Because if you are,” Vi continued, “you’re looking very—”
From somewhere, perhaps the corridor, a mischievous giggle wound its way into the room. All eyes turned to the door.
“You’ll never find me …” came a high, young voice from nowhere in particular, followed by the same skittish laughter.
“Dot, is that you?”
Behind them, the cupboard burst open, and out Dot tumbled in a haze of dust. Sprawled on the floor, she looked up at the other girls with a tight, pale face.
“It’s not me.” The words were a tense croak as Dot struggled to stand up. “I’ve been in there trying to keep quiet since you walked in.”
Once again, the teasing giggle rang out through the room, as the eyes of each girl darted in a different direction.
*
“You remember how I was saying,” said Maisie, “in 1889 there was a Harriet Pendleton who played on the hockey team?”
The pages of the notebook blurred into a torrent of words and pictures. Vi sat on the edge of her bed in the otherwise-empty dormitory, flicking through Maisie’s sharp, inky scrawl. Lists of names bled into dates and timelines. A hand-drawn floor-plan popped up as a double-page feature, before sinking back down into the reservoir of words. Less than two weeks ago, the notebook had been new.
Vi paused to take in a particularly arresting one-point-perspective sketch of the corridor. Sat on her left, the artist held forth in her Caledonian lilt.
“At first I thought she was a good bet, but then I found her in a 1932 copy of Who’s Who in the library, so it couldn’t have been her. So either I’ve missed a Harriet or a Hazel, or—”
“I never knew you could draw so well.” Vi’s interruption ploughed into Maisie’s monologue, squashing it flat. “In pen and everything.” The compliment was met with sullen silence, followed by a long, woebegone sigh. Vi looked down to see Maisie staring resolutely at the wall.
“You could at least pretend to care, you know.” Maisie’s chin was held high. “You said you’d help me.”
“I’m... I’m sorry.” Vi reached out a tentative hand to rest upturned on Maisie’s shoulder, curled fingers stroking her hair. “I just don’t know how you find it so easy to think about something so… so...” Vi wriggled her shoulders.
Maisie gave another long sigh, her head sinking back against Vi’s shoulder as she relaxed. “I can’t think about anything else.” She wiped the back of her hand across her cheek as Vi continued to comfort her. “Just imagine it. Being trapped like that, nobody knowing where you are, for years and years. Being turned into a… a story so girls can scare one another. It’s just horrible.”
The two girls sat, holding one another, rocking gently back and forth.
“I wasn’t kidding about the drawing, you know.” Vi tilted her head towards the notebook. From somewhere inside the hug, Maisie shrugged.
“Nothing special. I didn’t even manage to finish it. It doesn’t have—”
The rocking stopped. In the hush, Vi leaned in towards Maisie’s ear.
“What’s the matter?” she whispered, as Maisie stared into an imaginary middle distance.
“Oh, it can’t be that simple!” Throwing off the hug and jumping to her feet, Maisie scooped up the notebook in one hand and grabbed Vi’s wrist with the other. “Come on.” A moment later, she had pulled both of them out through the dormitory door without so much as a by-your-leave.
*
“Slow down!” Vi called out as Maisie pulled her up the last few steps. She snatched her wrist from the smaller girl’s grasp, but Maisie’s attention was already lost down the length of the corridor. “Can you just explain to me what’s going on?”
“I think I know where she is, Vi.” With a trembling excitement, Maisie folded back one half of her notebook and held up a spidery sketch at arm’s length. For all of Maisie’s haste, her focus was pulled away to some invisible, far-off point.
“Well?”
“I don’t … oh, it’s not half difficult to explain, but I know where she hid.” She turned to face Vi, gripping her hand with an urgency that belied its gentleness. “We need to start another game.”
“Another … Hide and seek? Now?”
“I promise it’ll all make sense in five minutes.” Maisie’s grip tightened. “We need to start playing. Just face the wall and start counting. That should do it.”
The soles of Maisie’s shoes squeaked gently as she shifted from one foot to the other. Her breathing slowed, but not by much.
“Fine,” said Vi, pulling free from Maisie’s hand. With a shake of her head she took a breath, closing her eyes and turning to face the pillar. “One…” she began. “Two…” The sounds of Maisie’s footsteps were already vanishing along the length of the corridor. “Three…”
She had only reached twenty-eight when the screams began.
Vi almost fell over herself as urgency collided with confusion. It was impossible to tell where the screams were coming from. Bouncing from floor to ceiling, in and out of every half-open door, they paused, replaced with a desperate gasp for air, before renewing with the same maddening omnipresence.
“Maisie!” Vi called, twitching in all directions as she passed the first pair of doors. “Where are you? Maisie!” She stumbled further down the corridor towards nowhere in particular. The screams subsided once again, this time followed by rapid, shallow breaths.
“Vi?” came Maisie’s voice. It was hushed and frantic, and could have been coming from anywhere. “Vi, can you hear me?”
“Where are you?” Vi shouted up into the ceiling, only to cast a doubtful eye down towards the wainscot before turning back towards the stairs.
“I think … I think I’m stuck, Vi ...” The sound of her breath shivered along the wooden panelling. “Vi, she’s here.”
“Maisie, for God’s sake, where are you?”
“I’ve found her, Vi. I’ve—”
The last echo of her voice died away, leaving Vi in the quiet, empty corridor.
“Maisie!” She cried out for the girl whose voice she could no longer hear. Her own voice, and the sound of her running feet pounding on the floor, reflected back at her from every surface. “Maisie!”
It would be a long time before she would stop calling out that name.
*
“Ninety-eight …” called out Tamsin, between the smacking sound of her chewing gum. “Ninety-nine … one hundred.” With scant enthusiasm and a roll of her eyes, she turned to face the length of the corridor. “Coming, ready or not.”
Just half a dozen steps into her misadventure, she slowed her pace, cocking her head to one side. A long, woebegone sigh had begun to tumble from nowhere in particular, weaving around the door frames and winding its way up from the floor.
“Manisha?” Tamsin called out, turning to face the way she’d just come. “Is that you?” She began to walk backwards, slowly, along the length of the corridor. A second sorrowful sigh followed the first. Tamsin turned again, eyeing the door at the far end. “I swear, if this is you pissing about …”
“You’ll never find me…” lamented the soft Scottish burr. “You’ll never find me …”
(c) Rikk Hill, 2020
Rikk Hill didn't grow up in a dilapidated Victorian house next to a mysterious forest. To this day, ravens refuse to do his bidding, no matter how nicely he asks them. He builds artificially intelligent machines for a living, but nobody would want to read stories about that.
Lin Sagovsky is currently playing William Shakespeare in a solo show, Bard in the Yard, a kind of Deliveroo theatre for gardens all over London. Apart from her voicework and acting in various media, she also helps non-actors become better communicators - especially, these days, on Zoom and Teams.
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