A Summer Alone in the Dorm

The‍‌‍‍‌‍‌‍‍‌ summer break was just a few days away. Trains were already full to the brim, buses tickets were sold out at a fast rate and the campus looked as if it was going down with the ship since it was getting emptied very quickly. Everyone was in a hurry to get home.

Clara, a second-year literature student at St. Agnes College in northern England, didn’t feel like going with the crowd. She was suffocating with her coursework and the silence of the nearly empty campus was like a lifeline to her. She made a decision to stay.

When the last suitcase was taken out, only two girls were left on the whole third floor of Willow Hall: Clara and a girl from the room next door whom Clara had talked to a couple of times. Her name was Sarah.

Sarah had a nice smile and a bit of a limp that she never told the cause of. Since both of them were staying back, Clara proposed that they become each other’s company.

“If you want you can come and live with me,” she said. “It’ll be less lonely.”

Sarah’s face was covered with light. “I would really like that,” she answered. “I can’t stand being alone.”

At 2:47 a.m. that night, Clara was wakened by an urgent need to go to the bathroom. There was absolute silence in the corridor except for the low humming of the vending machine at the far end. Sarah was sleeping on the spare bed and her breathing was even.

Without turning the light Clara went out.

The bathroom was located at the very end of the corridor, after a series of closed doors. She pushed it open—and stood there motionless.

The whole floor was very slippery with blood. It was not that the blood was splattered. It was poured. As if someone had take overturned the whole buckets of it. The disgusting smell of blood hit her like a fist.

She lifted her eyes.

Suspended from the ceiling was a severed leg, the point of the cut was immediately above the knee. The skin looked very pale, almost see-through, and a thin silver anklet shone in the dim emergency light.

Clara could not scream. She was completely unable to do so. She took a step back, the door hit the wall with a loud bang, and she ran off.

She came running to the room and was trembling all over.

“Sarah… Sarah, wake up!”

Sarah immediately sat up, very composed and collected.

“What is the matter?”

“There’s… there’s a leg in the bathroom. A real one. Hanging from the ceiling.”

Sarah neither laughed nor panicked. She simply reached for the glass of water on the nightstand and gave it to her.

“Drink. Then tell me exactly what you saw.”

Clara drank the water very quickly, her whole body was shaking.

“It was… pale. And it had this little silver anklet.”

Sarah didn’t say a word for a moment. Then, very slowly, she uncovered her legs with the blanket.

The right one was amputated just above the knee.

It was the place where the cut had been, precisely.

Clara’s eyesight got very narrow. The glass of water that she had just taken from her hand fell to the floor and broke into pieces. The last thing that she could remember was Sarah’s gentle, almost pitying smile.

Cold water was very effective in waking her up.

She was laying on the carpet. Mrs. Dawson, the cleaner during the night shift, was kneeling next to her, and there was a look of concern on her face.

“Clara? Are you able to hear me?”

Clara wanted to sit up with her own strength. “The leg… Sarah… she...”

Mrs. Dawson’s face changed. She looked around the empty room and then changed her expression.

“Sarah, who?”

“The girl next door. She was with me.”

Mrs. Dawson spoke in a lower tone of voice.

“Just listen to what I am telling you. No student has lived in 3B for three years. Not since the accident.”

Her blood turned very cold.

“Three years ago,” Mrs. Dawson explained, “a girl named Sarah Kelly fell from the fire escape. Her body was found on the concrete below… but her right leg was missing. It was the railings that cut it off cleanly. Some say that she walks the corridor at night, looking for it.”

Clara looked at the empty bed in the spare room. The bedclothes were untouched. There was no indentation. No warmth.

Mrs. Dawson told her to get ready and leave the next morning with her first train.

“Some doors are better kept closed during summer break.”

Clara decided not to spend any more nights at Willow Hall.

When she came back in September, she asked the maintenance people to take off the silver anklet that, for some reason, was still hanging from the ceiling of the bathroom.

They said that nothing had been there.

Sometimes, on very quiet nights, students from the third floor can still hear one foot dragging softly along the corridor… and then a faint, almost apologetic whisper:

“Have you seen my ‍‌‍‍‌‍‌‍‍‌leg?”