The Dead Don't Speak | Open Novella Contest 2020 | ✔

Chapter 5: Cataract

When Liz had told me to come talk to her at breakfast, I hadn't had any expectations. I'd assumed we'd be sitting around in the stuffy dinner hall, munching on low-quality crackers, and she'd tell me she didn't actually know what to do. She'd wear a confused look and would announce she'd thought about action plans all night, but concluded she couldn't help me. And who could blame her if that happened? I'd asked her to help me hunt down a bathroom ghost I'd never even seen. A herculean task, too much to put on someone else's plate.

I'd severely underestimated how capable a person Liz Phillips was. How smart and how terrifying. That girl knew things nobody in Lonewood could have known. Should have known. She wasn't strong or abrasive enough to hold her own in a fistfight, but I didn't ever want to be her opponent in a battle of wits.

Not that I didn't already have enough to be terrified about. The sight of my cell's walls covered in blood had seared itself into my brain, my own screaming still resounded in my mind. And Doctor Frankenclaus' ghost girl, silently assaulting the walls of his office with her head, still sent cold shivers down my spine whenever my eyes found her spectral body.

I despised lookout duty more than anything.

"Still can't believe he doesn't lock his door," I muttered. "Doesn't that kind of go against all prison safety rules and regulations ever?"

Liz looked up from the doctor's computer, shifting in the padded desk chair that didn't belong to her, almost drowning in its black cushions. "The man's a boxing champion," she stated, as if she couldn't believe I'd ever considered the words intelligent enough to voice. "He probably keeps his door unlocked because he wants people to know he's always available to help, and if that's what he wants to do, who can stop him? Have you seen those muscles? No one's going to argue with those."

I recalled Doctor Jones' huge form, his hands large enough to crush my head and his glasses too tiny for his face. Though his voice and words had been gentle and softer than expected, I had no trouble believing it could be hard to go against his will. And what kind of idiot inmates would stupidly risk breaking into his office and facing punishment that could be avoided?

I see you looking there. Not one fucking word.

"Doctor Henry's a sweetheart," Liz continued, her eyes drifting to the big screen of the doctor's computer again. "But you do have a point. He really should lock his door. And that security camera, well... he might want to get that looked at, too."

In the dusty upper corner near the door to the doctor's office hung an old white camera, its lens cracked and broken, sticky cobwebs connecting it to the ceiling. If I hadn't known Lonewood existed long before security cameras were even invented, I would've assumed the damaged thing was as old as the prison itself.

Liz knew about the unlocked door and the broken camera. Liz knew about every broken camera. Have you ever taken a good look at this place? she'd asked me during breakfast, tone hushed and conspiratory. It's overcrowded, she'd said, and underfunded and understaffed and stuck in a past century. Lonewood Medium Security Juvenile wasn't much more than a corrupted shithole, as broken as its cameras.

As cherry on top, Liz knew what Doctor Jones did every Thursday after lunch: he went to help the prison's counselors as they worked to provide specialized courses and seminars on drug addiction, anger management, ethics or fucking yoga or whatever other kind of useless thing they wanted us to learn.

And when Jones left, he didn't lock his door.

Naive buffoon.

What Liz didn't know was when Jones would return, which left me stuck on lookout duty while she tried to uncover the bathroom ghost's identity on his computer. While I couldn't tell what exactly she was doing, I did hear her hum every now and then, eyes narrowing when she leaned further towards the screen, as if getting closer to the information somehow let her process it faster.