THE GIRL WITHOUT A FACE^*

MARIE LU

Out of all twelve bedrooms in the new house, Richard’s was the only one with a closet locked from the inside.

His parents couldn’t figure out how it happened. The closet’s doorknob had no keyhole, for one, and the door didn’t seem rusted shut; when Richard peered through the side of the door, he could see that the bolt was pulled straight across, as if done purposefully. Odd. It didn’t seem like anything was in there. He couldn’t see any shelf or chair legs when he looked through the slit under the door.

Dad joked about it for a while, in the lame, awkward way he had of saying exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. “A trick door!” he said, nudging Richard in the ribs and giving him an exaggerated wink. “I’ll bet the last owner accidentally locked himself in there all the time. Couldn’t you picture that? Probably got himself stuck in there for days on end, hollering . . .”

Dad’s joke trailed off once he saw Richard’s face. They ended up staring at the door together in an uncomfortable silence.

Why did it have to be the closet door that couldn’t open? It was as if the universe wouldn’t leave him alone about closets. And in a giant house this expensive, on a street where doctors and politicians lived, you’d think all the doors would be well-crafted, top-of-the-line. Not made like shit.

Still— “It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll use the dresser,” he said. Hoping his parents would agree and just forget about it.

They didn’t. At first, they tried halfheartedly to open it. Then they tried in earnest. No good. The hinges refused to pivot. They couldn’t even get it to budge. The jokes turned into grumbles about needing to break the whole thing open. They ended up moving Richard to a different bedroom, and that worked for a few days, until the second bedroom’s closet door started jamming up too.

“Sorry, honey,” Richard’s mom said to him. “Must be the cold weather. We’ll get a contractor to look at these. You could switch again, if you—”

“Forget it,” Richard said, waving a hand. He didn’t start a brand-new year in a brand-new house just to dwell on old news again. “No big deal.”

In the rush of moving in, the closet situation was forgotten. A month passed, and January became February.

After a while, Richard started getting the distinct impression that someone was watching him sleep. There was a strange weight in his room, as if the furniture or the walls weren’t aligned quite right, and sometimes he would feel that weight press against his chest like a stone. At first, he would get up in the middle of the night and rearrange his things. Honor roll plaques. Golf trophies. Decathlon ribbons. His Harvard University early action acceptance letter, encased in a thousand-dollar frame. He would move and move until it all seemed right, and then he would go back to bed.

The next night, though, the weight always returned. He tried not to think about it.

Once, in the middle of the night, winter wind slapped tree branches hard enough against his window to wake him up. He scrubbed a hand over his face, then looked around, puzzled. No, there had been some other sound too. A rustling, maybe. He looked around the room. Everything seemed untouched and in place.

Then the rustle came again. It sounded almost like the shuffle of feet.

He tilted his head, listening for the source.

Nothing again.

Finally, he went back to sleep. As he drifted off, he realized that the shuffling sound seemed to come from behind the closet door.

The next night, he had a dream. In the dream, he was walking down an empty street that he didn’t recognize. Fog shrouded the road, blurring the streetlamps. His steps echoed. Up ahead, he saw the faint shape of a girl walking slowly ahead of him. She had long, pale hair, and even though a cold wind blew around him, it didn’t seem to stir a single one of her strands. He could tell he was walking faster than her, but he could never seem to catch up. She stayed ahead, right at the edge, where the fog started to swallow everything whole. She never turned around.

Richard jerked awake. Outside, a weak rain had started. He let himself lie still for a while, listening to the storm, until the sweat on his body had dried. Then he looked over at his locked closet.

The door was open.

He frowned. Then he propped himself up on his elbows and squinted into the darkness for a better look.

The door was wide open, swung all the way out so that the doorknob touched the wall.

Standing in the middle of its entranceway was the girl. She kept her back turned to him, so that all he could see of her was her long hair.

A strange tingle traveled up his neck and over the back of his head. He sat up. Then he swung his feet over the side of the bed, put on his slippers, and got up. Thunder rumbled outside.

“Hello?” he whispered, keeping his eyes on the girl.

She didn’t move.

He took a step forward. Then another. The closet drew closer, and his heart started to pound. He stopped a few feet away from her. He reached a hand out to touch her shoulder.

Before he could, she started to move. She walked into the closet, where it was so black that he couldn’t see any of its inner walls, and then she turned to the right and disappeared abruptly into the darkness.

Richard bolted upright in bed.

He had never woken up from his first dream. His eyes darted over to the closet—he half expected the door to be wide open again, and the girl to be standing in front of it, her back turned to him. The faint light of dawn had already started filtering in through his window.

The closet door was locked, as it had always been. When he walked over to it and tried again to pull it open, it stayed tightly shut.

Just a dream. Richard stared at the closet door for a moment longer, then shook his head and started getting ready for school. A poor night’s sleep meant a long day ahead.

His friends shrugged it off.

“Was she hot, at least?” one of them asked as they ate their lunches on a bench outside school. For a moment, Richard couldn’t even tell who said it—they all looked the same under this slant of winter light, identical in their uniform navy sweaters and scarlet ties and khakis, the crest of their academy embroidered on their right sleeves.

He just smiled with them. His friends were trying to steer the conversation away from the eight-hundred-pound elephant in the yard, and he appreciated that. It did sound kind of stupid in bright daylight, even if the bright daylight was the overcast gray of winter. “Nah,” he replied. “I couldn’t see her face.”

“Maybe she had a butter face,” another friend said, “and your dream’s trying to take pity on you.” The others laughed. Richard went along with it, but the more he did, the colder he felt. A crazy worry entered his mind. What if the girl could hear them?

After a while, the bell rang. His friends started heading inside. Richard followed behind them, half listening to their conversation. He didn’t want to say anything, but the strange weight on his chest had returned, and he felt as if his friends’ chatter was coming from somewhere far away, muffled from behind glass. He grimaced and rubbed his neck. Poor night’s sleep, he thought again. He glanced out across the schoolyard.

Something in the corner of his vision . . . beyond the white fence and across the street. It was the girl. She was just standing there, her back turned to him. Her pale hair untouched by the breeze.

Richard stared. His breath rose in a cloud of condensation. It took him a long moment to glance back at his friends. “Hey,” he called to them. “You guys see that?”

They didn’t hear him. Richard turned back to where the girl— But she was gone already. He blinked. She’d been there. Right there. Yet the sidewalk was empty, swept clean of leaves by the breeze. His eyes scanned the entire street in both directions, following it until it wrapped around the block and disappeared from view. No sign of her.

He swallowed his words. Suddenly he was glad that his friends hadn’t heard him. They would have made fun of him all day for being stupid and seeing things.

He stayed in a fog of thought for most of the afternoon. Each class bled right into the next. It took several hours before the pressure on his chest finally began to lighten. Of course he hadn’t seen anything. Did he really believe that something he’d seen inside his dreams could creep into reality? He almost chuckled out loud in class. Hallucinations: He could definitely use more sleep.

Still, a feeling lingered in the back of his mind. It distracted him enough that he walked home in a daze, crossing streets when he shouldn’t and bumping shoulders against passersby. Cars honked at him at the crosswalks.

There were an awful lot of cars on the streets, actually, when he forced himself to pay attention. He stared at the trail of neon red taillights as he went, letting them blur into a line across his vision. It looked like traffic was being diverted away from his street. He frowned, his mind sharpening again, and then quickened his pace. Unease settled into the pit of his stomach, like he had swallowed something heavy and cold.

When he turned onto the street leading home, he saw the police lights.

The sight sent a familiar ripple of panic through him. There were two cars, both parked outside his parents’ home, and the officers were talking to his mother. Richard noticed that one of the cars was a police car, while the other was an animal control truck. His mother’s shoulders looked hunched as the men asked her questions. She was still in her suit; the cops must’ve asked her to come straight from work.

“Richard!” His mother finally saw him. She waved him over frantically as he approached.

“What’s going on?” he asked. His eyes darted to the police officers. They stared back at him, expressionless. He bristled. Why did cops always look so damn severe? It wasn’t like he did anything.

“Are you Richard Dukaine?” they said.

“Yeah.”

One officer motioned him over to a blue tarp laid out on the road. He pulled it aside.

Richard fought back the urge to gag.

It was a deer. At least, it used to be. Someone had gauged both eyes out and snapped all of its legs. Bone shards protruded out of the hide, exposing tangles of sinew and muscle. Blood stained the cement under and around it. It was as if a car had hit the deer—except too perfectly.

Wonder where the car went. Richard didn’t know why that was his first thought.

The officer pulled the tarp back over the body. Then he turned to Richard. “We’ve had two witnesses tell us that they saw you doing this.”

“What?” Richard almost choked on the word. “I was at school today. All day.” At the pause, he looked from the officers back to his stricken mom. “This is sick. I wasn’t here. This—somebody’s idea of a twisted joke.”

The officer looked at his partner and sighed. “Look, kid,” he said, his voice weary. “If it were me, I wouldn’t blame you. We all know your old man.” He nodded respectfully in Mom’s direction. “And your mother. We don’t want to give you more trouble in your senior year.” He shrugged. “Only wanted to hear your side of the story, see if some kid might’ve been giving you grief, setting you up.”

His mother stepped in before Richard could sputter out an answer. “This is ridiculous,” she snapped. “I had to leave work early for this? My son’s afternoon, disrupted, over this? He’s had a rough enough time. I want to know the names of those witnesses.”

“Now, ma’am, I’m afraid I can’t give out those names—”

“I want them. Do you hear me? I will escalate this to . . .”

Richard’s confidence grew as his mother went on. Of course they had no proof that he did anything—because he didn’t. He lifted his head and looked the closer officer in the eyes. “Tell us who the two witnesses were, and my father will talk to them personally.”

The officer hesitated. “No need,” he finally said, shaking his head as if he wanted to be done with the whole thing. “I don’t want to get everyone all riled up over this. It’s just a deer.”

Richard’s mother narrowed her eyes. “And if you’d stop wasting your time harassing my son, you might find whatever sick child in the neighborhood left this.”

They talked for a few more minutes. But soon the cops left, the animal control people removed the corpse, and the evening settled into silence. Richard thought, as he and his mom went back into the house, that some of their neighbors were watching them through the slits of their window blinds. It brought out a strange rush of rage in him. What did they know?

Before he could step into the house, he saw her again. The girl was walking away on the opposite side of the street, her hands in the pockets of her coat, her back turned, her pale hair limp and dull. He paused on the steps and stared. He didn’t dare blink. His eyes started to water. He had a sudden urge to run over there and shake the girl violently.

But he didn’t. All he could do was stand there and watch until she disappeared into the evening, amid the dark tree trunks and lampposts. He moved only when his mother called him back into the house.

Nothing would come of it. Nothing ever came of anything. Richard knew he was protected; the son of a congresswoman and a lawyer, valedictorian of his old high school, multi-million-dollar trust fund, legacy admission into Harvard. He was a good kid. I’m a good kid.

The police let it go, and they didn’t hear anything more.

Two nights later, Richard was fast asleep when the door of his closet suddenly swung open with a loud bang.

He screamed. His parents came rushing in, and he tried lamely to explain it—but his words sounded slow and dumb. This time, it wasn’t a dream. The closet door stayed open, revealing an empty space inside. His parents listened to him with confused frowns, but Richard could tell that they thought he’d simply had a nightmare, that he’d opened the door himself. Dad even walked over to test it several times, as if to prove to Richard that there was nothing to fear. Embarrassing. An eighteen-year-old guy screaming at monsters in the closet. His parents calmed him down. His father promised to have the door locked back up, if he preferred. As if he were a child.

Richard waved them off. No big deal. Maybe something had kept the door stuck and now the winter air had simply loosened it. After a while, he went back to bed, but instead of sleeping, he kept his eyes locked on the closed closet door until morning finally came.

“God, you look like shit,” his friend whispered to him when he arrived late to class. “What the hell did you drink last night?”

Richard ignored him. He slouched in his chair, tie rumpled and blazer askew, staring blankly at the whiteboard while their teacher droned on. His mind wandered in a murky swamp of thought.

They had moved across town to get away from it all. His parents had gone through great pains to make sure he could still attend a private academy where some of his friends went. It had seemed like a great idea at the time—maybe it was still a great idea, actually. But Richard sat and felt the weight return to his chest, the awful and oppressive heaviness, until it seemed like he could barely breathe. The teacher’s voice faded to a hum, and the world gradually started to look like it was underwater, the walls dark and ugly and rusty green-blue, the light through the windows faded and old, the desks peeling. His classmates continued listening to the lecture, the shadows on their faces cut into sharp angles. The sound of pen against paper grated on his nerves.

Richard’s head nodded. He jerked himself awake. It wasn’t even noon yet—he really had to get more sleep.

The room looked faded now, the sounds and people far away, identical rows of dark uniforms. His eyes went back up to the whiteboard. He just had to get through his senior classes. Then he was free.

The lights flickered overhead. Richard blinked, looked up and then around. No one else even stirred. His friend sitting beside him just kept on writing into his notebook, his eyes obscured by the shadows that fell across his face. Richard turned his attention back to the teacher.

She looked different somehow. Did she always have light hair? Why did Richard remember that she was supposed to be a brunette? He frowned as she continued to write on the whiteboard. She looked shorter now too, her shoulders more delicate, her body nearly lost inside a chunky, bleak-colored sweater. Her hair spilled down to the middle of her back, loose and limp, dull under the green-yellow light. He started to take notes again. He could barely keep up.

Why was she writing so fast?

Slow down, Richard snapped in his mind as he tried to keep up. But the teacher kept scribbling faster and faster, words and sentences that Richard could no longer even understand, lines and lines of jagged symbols from one end of the whiteboard to the other. He paused, bewildered. She was putting all of her weight into it, her shoulders hunched up, her writing arm jerky with motion. The cold, uneasy feeling seeped back into his stomach. He looked around—everyone else still seemed completely unperturbed. Could they even understand what she was writing? Faster and faster she wrote. The room turned darker, until Richard felt like he was the only one still sitting in there. The girl wrote and wrote and wrote, the marker screaming against the board. Richard tried to cover his ears, but it penetrated right through his skin. It was the girl, of course, the girl was his teacher and she couldn’t stop scribbling, scribbling so hard into the whiteboard that she was carving deep grooves into the surface. The nails of her writing hand had started to bleed.

Richard couldn’t take it anymore. “You have to stop,” he called out. No one listened to him. He raised his voice. “Stop. Stop!” He stood up. His chair squealed against the floor. “Stop writing so fast!”

The girl didn’t listen.

Richard spit out a curse and hurried up the empty aisle. Who the hell are you? Why are you following me? He reached her at the whiteboard, grabbed her shoulders, and spun her around.

He couldn’t see her face. Where it should have been, he could only see a heavy film, a blur of skin, like he was staring into a thick sheet of opaque glass framed by pale hair. He shook her as hard as he could. “Stop it,” he hissed through his teeth. His shaking turned violent. The girl without a face began to shriek.

Then hands were on him, and somehow he was being pulled off, pulled away from the grotesque creature. He had the dull sensation of being thrown back to the ground. Somewhere, someone kept screaming.

“Stop!” They were screaming at him. The world suddenly brightened, and when Richard blinked, he was staring up at the ceiling of the room and his classmates were gathered around him in a wary circle. Two of his friends sat next to him, their hands still wrapped tightly around his arms, both breathing heavily. In front of them, a group of students were comforting a shaking girl, who sobbed uncontrollably.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” one of them yelled at him.

Richard stared numbly back at the girl. She sat in front of him in class. Now she trembled and cried in her friends’ arms. Even when the teacher rushed back into the room with security officers at her back, he couldn’t move.

But he hadn’t grabbed his classmate. He had grabbed the girl without a face. He was sure of it.

Another round of police conversations at home, another emergency work-leave for Mom. They all sat together in the living room while the police interrogated Richard, their eyes weary and unfeeling. This time, a psychiatrist sat with them. Richard answered their questions one after the other.

“And you attacked Miss Evans today because you thought she was someone else?” the officer asked.

What in the world was he supposed to say to that? Richard shrugged in frustration. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “I must have had some sort of nightmare in class. I didn’t sleep well last night. I must have fallen asleep.”

He hated the psychiatrist’s penetrating look. She peered at him over her glasses. “Have you had any dreams lately, then?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Do you still find yourself dreaming about Lillian Stephens?”

Richard’s mother straightened, her posture tense. “I’d prefer we not discuss that,” she said. “We’ve gone to great lengths to help Richard forget about—”

“Let him answer the question,” the psychiatrist replied calmly.

Richard tightened his jaw until he thought it might break. If the police weren’t here, he might insult the psychiatrist right to her face—but with the cops sitting next to him, he had to behave himself. “No, ma’am,” he said, keeping his demeanor innocent and confused. “I’ve been doing better since we moved here. We’ve put the whole thing behind us and tried to move forward.”

“He’s graduating in a few months and heading off to Harvard,” his mother interjected. “Top grades in all his classes. Isn’t that right, honey?”

Richard just wanted his mom to be quiet.

The psychiatrist smiled, but somehow, her smile didn’t seem to touch her eyes. “How lovely to hear that you’re doing so well,” she said.

The questions went on for a while longer, until finally the police officer seemed satisfied with his answers. They didn’t leave him alone, though, until he agreed to start seeing the psychiatrist once a week, at least until his graduation. Richard had to play along. So he did.

That night, he lay awake in bed, turned in the direction of his closet, and tried to stop thinking about Lillian Stephens. The whole thing had been so stupid, anyway. It bothered him that the psychiatrist felt the need to bring it up. Did she have any idea how hard it’d been for him to push it all behind him? For him to move on?

Richard grunted and flipped around in bed, turning his back to the closet. Just a weird couple of weeks. He was tired, was all. Screw this. Screw everything.

Slowly, his eyelids started to droop.

A strange noise woke him up. It sounded like a girl, someone crying. He blinked, then sat back up in bed. Was this his house? It took him a long moment to realize that he wasn’t in his room at all, but a stranger’s. No, not a stranger’s. The decorations on the wall had changed, his trophies and plaques replaced with paintings and portraits. Now he remembered; this was his friend’s house, and the only time he’d been in here was during a party at the end of last year. He hesitated, then got out of the bed and made his way across the room. Red party cups littered the floor. He had to get out of here and back to his own home, he thought groggily, before his parents found him gone.

The hallway was dark. He couldn’t seem to turn on the lights. He stumbled down the corridor, kicking red cups out of the way. As he went, he thought he could still hear the sounds of the party going on around him. People dancing. The bass of the music. People were still here, drunk and laughing, beer and vodka spilling out of their cups. He saw a group of people he recognized stumble past him, laughing hard at something he couldn’t understand. The light was green and blue, cutting sharp angles on their faces, turning them into hideous creatures. A lightbulb somewhere kept flickering like it was about to go out. Everything wavered in and out of focus. Maybe all the booze was what made it so hard to see straight. He looked away. Better go downstairs.

Before he could, though, he caught sight of someone he recognized. It was himself, junior year, laughing with a bunch of his friends. A girl was with him. As he looked on, his younger self filled up the girl’s cup with another round of vodka, and she nearly dropped the whole cup as she leaned against the wall. Lillian Stephens. The memory looked different from this distant angle. He saw himself grab her arm when she tried to leave. He shouted something in her face while his friends jeered. Then he started dragging her toward a nearby closet. She laughed with a wild, unsteady lilt, and she tried to pull her hand away. She was so drunk. She couldn’t even walk well enough in the opposite direction. Just shut up, he remembered thinking that night. Then he opened the closet door, shoved her in, and locked them both inside the darkness.

Richard tried to recall exactly what happened afterward, but the memory was too hazy. There was her nervous laughter, and then some shouting. Someone clawing weakly at him. Wet streaks on her cheeks. His sudden, searing irritation with her. They were just having some fun. Oh, come on, he said. Then you can go. Promise. He remembered her fists pounding on the door. Her crying. He could barely hear her through the bass of the music.

Afterward, he staggered out and left her huddled in the corner of the closet. She looked like she wanted to sleep anyway.

He managed to make his way out of the house somehow, into the blur of his car, and onto the road. He shouted at the world to stop spinning so much. He’d almost made it home too, before he’d hit that damn deer and run himself straight into the lake. Shatter. Shards. A terrible screech. Then that green and blue light again, everywhere, and him struggling through the murky water to the police sirens above. Except, this time, he couldn’t seem to reach the surface—

A loud clap of thunder jolted Richard out of the nightmare. He sucked in a terrible gasp of air. Sweat beaded his body. Outside, the wind was slapping the branches against his window again. Richard looked wildly around until he knew for sure he was back in his own room. Then he flopped his head back down on his pillow and let his breath out.

That stupid psychiatrist, planting memories back in his brain.

A faint tapping sound made him turn in bed. His eyes settled on the closet.

The door was wide open again, the doorknob tapping gently against the wall. Inside, it was blackness. The hairs rose on Richard’s arms and neck. Suddenly the room seemed colder, the weight pressing again on his chest, the terrible feeling that something in here did not belong. On a strange compulsion, he rose from his bed and took a step toward the closet. Then another. Step by step, he made his way over to the closet until he stood right at the edge where the blackness began.

Inside the closet crouched the pale-haired girl without a face, her wrists and arms slashed with dozens of lines, blood smearing the wall behind her. She reached her scarlet hands out to him. He opened his mouth to scream.

Morning came.

Bright sunlight streamed into his room. Someone was pounding on his bedroom door. Richard went to the windows and pulled down all the blinds. He curled up in defense, then pushed himself into the corner of the bed. His bloodshot eyes stayed on the closet door. He couldn’t remember when it had closed again, or whether or not it’d been closed the entire time, but he couldn’t take his eyes off of it, and he couldn’t stop trembling. His body felt sticky with sweat, and he was afraid to look down in case he saw blood smeared across his skin.

“Honey?” The pounding again. It sounded like Mom, but he couldn’t be sure. “Are you all right?”

He didn’t want to answer. Go away. What if it was the girl, trying to tempt him out of bed?

“Honey.” The voice sounded more urgent now. “Honey, the police called again. They said the neighbors saw you wandering around the middle of the street last night.” She sounded frantic. “Richard? Did you hear me?”

I don’t know. It wasn’t me. Richard started shaking his head to himself. He looked down at his bed. Mud and grass stained the sheets, and his feet were dirty.

Ridiculous. He couldn’t have gone anywhere last night—all he did was wander around in his nightmares, that damn party that just refused to go away. When he heard his father’s voice join his mother’s outside the door, he finally lifted his head. “Go away!” he yelled. “I’ll come out. Just please go away.”

His mother gave some muffled reply through the door, how they were here to support him through whatever trouble he might be experiencing, that they were going to wait downstairs for him.

He didn’t move until the sun had shifted into late afternoon. By then, his parents’ voices had turned sweet and coaxing. Sweetie, please come down. You should eat something.

“I’ll be there, goddamn it,” he finally spat at the door. He stumbled out of bed and forced himself to the bathroom.

There, he let out a choked gasp.

He looked horrible. Worse than horrible. His eyes were so bloodshot that it looked like his irises swam in a red sea. Were his eyes bleeding? The veins on his hands and wrists stood out, swollen as if ready to pop. His skin looked ashen, a corpse-like gray.

Richard splashed water on his face, scrubbed it hard, and looked again. Then he started to cry. What was wrong with him? Why was he being punished like this? It wasn’t his fault Lillian had taken it all so badly. After the night of that party, after the rumors had already spread like wildfire through school—Lillian, that slut, she gave herself away in a closet at a house party, she wanted it, that slut—the girl just shut down like a broken toy. Richard didn’t see what the big deal was. How could she be so depressed over nothing? She’d been drinking as much as he had, maybe more. Besides, he was the one who got slapped with a DUI and destruction of property after the deer and the lake. His dad had to make a personal call to Harvard to explain that one.

They were all just fooling around.

Richard hadn’t expected to go to school one day to hear that Lillian had been found dead in her closet, her wrists and arms slashed apart by a razor.

Then came the accusations against him from her parents, and the trial. A whirlwind, a nightmare. Sure, his parents had plenty of money and influence to fight it, and the charges were dropped—lack of evidence, and all—but the damage to him was done. His parents had to move across town and switch him into a new private academy. He’d fought to put the whole thing behind him.

Richard had a sudden urge to smash his mirror into pieces. I don’t deserve to be punished like this. He stared at his reflection. His thoughts echoed back at him, filling his mind until it sounded like a different voice said the words.

The sun shifted again. Afternoon turned into sunset, and his room bled with red light. Darkness crept forward. His mom started calling for him again.

What would she say, once she saw how terrible he looked? Richard sighed and raked a hand through his hair. Finally, he went to his dresser and started pulling out some clothes. His movements turned feverish as he went. He pulled out more and more, until a pile of clothes lay on the floor. That was what he had to do. He had to get out of here, before the girl found him again.

A faint movement at his window distracted him. He paused in what he was doing and turned to look out at the street.

Except it wasn’t his street any longer. Instead he saw a long, dark hallway stretching away from him, a hall covered in portraits, its walls faded and charred as if burned by fire. It looked like a shadow of the home where the party had happened, its details eerie and inaccurate. The portraits’ eyes were all closed, their brows all furrowed. The wallpaper, once cheery and yellow, was singed with dark streaks.

And standing in the middle of the hallway, framed by his window, was the girl. She had her back turned to him, and all he could see of her was her torn sweater and her long, pale hair. She turned her head slightly, so that he could see the outline of her cheek, and then slowly, excruciatingly, she turned all the way around. The deep, jagged lines carved into both of her arms were sharply visible, blood dripping in long streaks down her fingers and dotting the floorboards of his bedroom. Now he could make out the curve of her lip, the dark circles under her eyes. He ran over to the window, dragged his dresser away from his bed, and shoved it in front of the windowsill with a loud crash, blocking the opening halfway. Outside his bedroom door came the alarmed sound of his mother’s voice, but she seemed so far away that he couldn’t tell if she was there at all. Richard yanked the blankets off of his bed and piled them up on top of the fallen dresser, then dragged an armchair over to add to the barricade. He pulled his bed over. He picked up the floor-length mirror in the corner and stood it in front of the armchair. His breath came in short gasps.

Maybe that will keep her out.

His mother’s fist continued pounding weakly on the door, but he was no longer listening.

Beyond the barricaded window, a thick darkness began seeping into the room. It crawled in along the edges of the walls, shutting out the light until a yawning black fog stretched across half the room, reaching for him. He stumbled backward with a cry. His bedroom door’s knob jiggled. Richard’s back hit the wall. When he stared at his reflection in the floor-length mirror, he saw that the whites of his eyes had turned completely red.

Then his reflection vanished, replaced by hers. Blood stained her arms.

Richard suddenly felt the grooves of the closet door behind him. He yanked on the door—it swung open without a sound. He scrambled into the safety of its small, enclosed space, and then he shut the door and locked himself in. Go away, he whispered into the darkness. Tears ran down his cheeks. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry. Just go away and leave me alone, please leave me alone, please.

Go away, Lillian.

For a moment, it seemed as if the world stilled. As if it listened to him. Richard’s sobbing quieted—he straightened, listening for the sound of footsteps or a girl’s voice, waiting for the weight to press down on his chest. Nothing. He kept waiting, until his legs grew cramped and the closet had started to feel stuffy. In his haste, he realized that he still had his shaving razor clenched tightly in one hand. Through the slit below the door, he could see a thin sliver of light. The world had gone quiet. Maybe she’d gone away. He’d imagined this whole insane scene in his head and now that he had shut himself away, he’d cleared his mind, and when he opened the door he would see his room all put back together. The girl would be gone.

Long minutes dragged by. Finally, he reached out and pushed the closet door.

It wouldn’t open.

He pushed harder, then searched for a lock that didn’t exist. His breathing grew labored; he jiggled the doorknob again, and when that didn’t work, he shoved himself to his feet and slammed all his weight against the door, again and again. The door stayed as unmoving as a brick wall.

Maybe someone had accidentally locked himself in there, Dad had joked.

Richard started screaming for help. His fists pounded on the door. Somewhere, far away, he thought he could hear the frantic shouts of his mother. He pounded until his fists were bruised and raw.

His breath started to rise in clouds. When he paused long enough to look around the dark closet, he realized that he was not alone. The girl without a face was crouched in one corner of the closet. Richard scrambled away from the door and huddled into the closet’s other corner. She kept staring with sightless eyes. With a whimper, Richard brought his hands up to block her from view.

“What do you want?” he whispered into the darkness. His voice trembled. “I’ll do anything. Please.”

When he opened his eyes again, the girl had crawled halfway to him, leaving red stains on the floor as she went. He curled tighter as she drew near. She lifted her bloody hands, then reached for him. Her hands touched his cheeks. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out.

I want you to see me.

For a split second, the girl’s face came into clear focus. It was a familiar face, one he’d seen in a closet and one he had worked for a long time to blur out. Small, thin lips still shiny with gloss. Skin so pale that little blue veins appeared along her temples and eyelids. Smudged black mascara that cut a sharp line across the top of her left cheek. Irises of piercing gray that surrounded dilated pupils, bloodshot eyes.

She looked down at the razor in his hand. She touched it—and at her touch, the razor crumbled into pieces, leaving behind only the blades. She held one of them up to his face, then brushed it across his arm.

Then you can go, she said.

Outside the closet, Richard’s parents finally broke down the door to his bedroom. Two police officers followed behind them. They shouted frantically for their son, but no one answered. The room was dark, the dresser and mirror and blankets all piled haphazardly in front of his window. They turned on the light. The police searched the entire room. Finally, Richard’s father yanked open the closet door.

Richard sat huddled against the closet wall. His face stayed turned down in concentration. Blood covered his arms. In his hand was a blade from his razor, and he was busy sawing deep, jagged lines into the flesh of his arms.

His mother screamed at the sight. His father lunged to snatch the razor out of his son’s hand, but Richard shrieked at him to get away. It took his father and a police officer to drag Richard out of the closet and into the light, but even then, they could not pry the razor out of his hands.

“No,” Richard gasped as they tried to restrict his arms. “You don’t understand. She said I could go, if I did this. She promised I could go.”

× × ×

Spring changed to summer, then to fall. The semester began at Harvard, and a new flock of freshmen filled its halls. Absent among them was Richard. In a hospital several miles from home, he sat against the soft wall of his room, struggling, as always, to free his hands from their bonds. In the corner, the girl without a face watched.

How frustrating, he thought, that no one would give him what he kept asking for. All he wanted was a blade. But it never came, so he struggled alone, trying, failing, to act on her words.

Finish. Then you can go.