The night they died was a horrible, panicked blur of fear and misery in Harriet’s memory. Her parents had eaten contaminated meat that had given them food poisoning. At first they’d just been sick, but after a few hours neither of them could breathe properly. Harriet had called an ambulance while her gran panicked and dithered, but her mum and dad had both died before the paramedics arrived.
Her whole life had been taken away from her in one moment. They’d been about to move to America for Harriet’s mum’s new job; they’d sold their house and were only supposed to be staying with her gran until their visas came through. Before the documents ever arrived, they were both gone. Everything Harriet had loved was lost, just like that – her family, her home, her life. Harriet was left with nothing except her grandmother.
The ache in her heart for her parents had never disappeared. Their deaths had been a terrible mistake. But now, more time with them was tantalizingly out of reach. Just.
Harriet and Kasper crossed the hallway, stopping once or twice to let a vacuous shell of a ghost drift past, blown wherever the wind took them. Finally, they reached the place where Harriet had tripped and fallen.
Peering over the edge of the floor, Harriet could see rust-coloured splatters of blood staining a steel beam that jutted out from the floor below. She must have hit her head on the way down.
Harriet realized she was rubbing at the hole in the back of her head and forced her hand down by her side. The quicker they found her phone and got away from here, the better.
“How big’s your pager?” Kasper asked, crouching down and searching the floor for any sign of it.
“Pager? What is this, Seinfeld? It’s a mobile.”
Kasper looked confused, so Harriet said, exasperated, “A mobile phone?”
“A car phone? One of those big bricks?” He looked embarrassed. “Sorry. I was never really that bothered about technology when I was alive.”
“No, it’s like –” she gestured the size of a small rectangle. “It’s silver.” It blew her mind that he didn’t know what an iPhone was. She kept forgetting that although the other ghosts looked like they were eighteen, too, they were a lot older. There was a whole vacuum between their life experiences.
She started searching too. There were bright yellow hazard signs leaning up against the wall, warning that there was a dangerous, unstable edge. Why hadn’t she noticed them before? No wonder she’d had an accident, if they were hidden out of sight like that.
Harriet caught sight of a flash of metal hidden behind a fern. “Oh, there it is!”
When she attempted to pick it up, her hand went straight through the phone. Of course. Disappointed, she said, “Well, I should be able to make a call using voice control.”
“How does it work?” Kasper asked. His eyes were bright with excitement. At least someone was happy. “Where are the buttons?”
“You just touch the screen,” Harriet said, already dreading having to give a tutorial in twenty-first-century technology.
“How does touching it do anything?” He leant in for a closer look, his hair brushing against hers.
Harriet had no idea how it worked, but she wasn’t going to admit to that.
“We don’t have time for me to explain. Computer stuff is very complicated. Unlock,” she said to the phone, before he could ask any more questions.
Something in her chest loosened when the phone registered her voice. She could call her gran before she started worrying. The battery was still on ninety per cent, too.
Kasper gasped. “There’s writing on the screen!”
A search result was still open in her browser. She had been looking up information about the building just before she’d entered, but hadn’t paid much attention at the time. Now, she paused and read the first link.
SEARCH RESULTS FOR ‘MULCTURE HALL’
22 OF THE WEIRDEST UNEXPLAINED MYSTERIES
17. The 23 students who died overnight in a UK university dorm.
Back in 1994, twenty-three students died during a single night at Mulcture Hall, on the University of Warwick campus outside Coventry. The alarm was raised early one morning when a student from another hall found their friend dead in their bed. Police arrived at the scene and discovered that every student who had been in the building that night had died some time after midnight.
It was initially declared that the deaths were due to a gas leak within the building, and a press release was issued by the university to that effect, including promises to run immediate health-and-safety checks on all of the halls of residence on the campus.
However, the mystery deepened when autopsies found none of the signs usually associated with carbon monoxide poisoning or oxygen starvation due to a gas leak. To this day, the case remains open with the West Midlands Police, who declared the deaths suspicious after a long investigation.
The case has been discussed online ever since, and possible explanations have varied from a simple blood-sampling error at the post-mortem, to wilder theories such as alien abduction. However, it seems unlikely the true explanation will ever be found.
The deceased were mainly first-year students aged eighteen or nineteen, as well as four international post-graduate students in their mid-twenties.
Harriet frowned. That was weird. What could have killed them all, then? Had the police seriously never found anything in all this time?
Before Kasper could read it and get distracted, she said, “Call ‘Home’.”
When the phone started ringing, Harriet found that for some reason she couldn’t breathe. Finally, the line clicked on.
“Hello?”
Harriet exhaled in a gust and said, “Gran. Hey.”
She spoke over her. “Have you been studying in the library all night again? You should come home, it’s not good for you.”
“I’ve had an accident, Gran,” she said, a lump in her throat. Her gran always assumed the best of her. As if she’d ever been really studying, all those nights she’d stayed out late. She’d been messing around with mascara and eyeshadow in the empty stacks of the library’s Economics section.
“Hello?” her gran repeated. “Harriet? I can’t hear you. I’m going to call you back. I think the line’s bad.”
“I’m here, Gran!”
Her gran hung up. Harriet looked at Kasper, who was watching her with a soft, gentle frown. There was a tickling suspicion making itself known in the back of her brain.
The phone rang again.
“Harriet, hello?” Her gran’s voice sent ice-cold shards running through Harriet.
“Hey, Gran. I’m here, Gran. I’m so – I love you. I love you so much.”
“I think you pocket-dialled me. Come home, will you? I need you to turn the heating on. I can’t reach with my ankle.” With that, she hung up again.
Harriet really, really wished that she was the kind of person who cried. Her mum and dad felt further away than ever. “She doesn’t even know that I’m missing. If I had to die, why couldn’t it be where my parents are?”
Kasper didn’t reply. She wanted to shake him – and shake all those ghosts downstairs who’d been watching her every move. This was her life. Not a TV show.
Furious, she abandoned the phone and marched down the stairs. The Shells let out a collective, mournful sigh as she left. Kasper didn’t follow.