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3 October 1942
The telephone had been a gift from her aunt, meant to tether them to each other after she'd moved out on her own.
"You'll call me all the time, won't you, Jennifer?" Her aunt had asked, sounding worried, and of course, Jennifer had reassured her that the phone would ring day and night, until the poor thing melted down from overuse. She had done so fully intending to follow through on her promises, so she hadn't been lying at the time, had even been quite good about fulfilling it for the first few weeks... but after the initial blitz of communication, Jennifer had grown accustomed to the quiet of her new flat, had grown to enjoy her solitude and independence, and had become less reliant on the sound of her aunt's voice on the other end of the line.
So the phone had sat, silent and dusty and largely forgotten, until one day it rang just as Jennifer had come bustling in from outside, shivering from the rain and dripping on the floorboards.
"Oh, dear," she muttered, closing her umbrella and tucking it neatly into the stand beside the door. The phone emitted another shrill bleat, and she was sorely tempted to ignore it; she could always call her aunt back later, simply pretend she was calling merely to say hello, and oh, heavens, had she really missed her earlier call...?
Certainly that would work. She'd done it before... and then felt terribly guilty afterwards, worrying that something had been wrong, some kind of emergency, and she'd ended up calling her aunt back immediately, sputtering some feeble excuse about not getting to the phone in time.
"Hello?" She said, pressing the cold plastic handset of the Bakerlite to her ear. "I'm so sorry I haven't called, Aunt Hazel! I've been --"
" Jennifer. "
The hurried litany of apologies tumbled soundlessly across her teeth, her pale lips still moving wordlessly as the sound of her own name filled her ear.
"You know you've been a bad, bad girl. And bad girls have to be punished, don't they?"
"Who is this?" She finally managed, the handset shaking in her grip. "How did you get this number?"
" You don't remember me, dear Jennifer? " The voice on the other end of the phone sneered. " No, of course you do. Oh, Jennifer." The voice laughed, a deep, mirthless chuckle. "A bad girl is bad enough, but you're a liar, too! But then again, you always have been, haven't you, Jennifer? "
"Th -- this is sick," Jennifer cried. "You've got no right to do this to me! I -- I'll call the police!"
" Oh, will you? " The voice asked, suddenly coy and curious. " What will you tell them, I wonder? Certainly not the truth. "
I'll tell them I'm being harassed , she thought, frantically, unable to articulate this threat to the voice. I'll tell them I'm being targeted by another sick individual obsessed with the massacre...
Except those callers, twisted and malicious as they had been, hadn't known about Wendy's taunts when they'd played airship.
They hadn't known about "Joshua."
They hadn't known how the other children, on the night that Stray -- Gregory Wilson, rather -- had come for them, how her tormentors had held out their hands to her, their filthy and beloathed Princess Jennifer , and asked for her forgiveness.
"It's not possible..." she whispered. "They all died."
"Yes," said the voice on the other end of the phone. Wendy. Joshua. Wendy. A parody. A phantom. A ghost within a ghost.
An enemy.
" Yes, they all died. Not that anyone cared... you were their tragic little starlet -- first the airship accident that orphaned you in the first place, and then a bloody, vicious massacre and that idiot Dolittle carrying you out like a little doll... what a picture you two made! " The voice laughed, harsh and angry. " You know I still have it. I clipped it out and hung it on my wall. I look at it all the time. In fact, I'm looking at it now, Princess. You were lovely, Jennifer, even with your short hair and your clothes splattered with mud. Are you still pretty?" The voice paused, perhaps anticipating an answer, but when Jennifer remained silent, it continued. "I bet you've got a whole family by now. A daughter of your own, perhaps? Do you play games with her, Jennifer? Do you give her crayons and dogs and gingerbread? Mermaids and roses and promises? "
"Wendy?" The name was sandpaper in her mouth. "How did you...?"
The voice laughed, again. " Heavens no. Wendy is dead. I finished her off myself. It wasn't difficult, Jennifer, she was already so broken... more red foam than skin and bone at that point, but still there, still trapped there in her own mangled flesh. You should have seen the way she looked at me. Such disbelief, and sadness... she begged me to make it stop hurting, and I did... eventually. Would you like to hear more? I haven't forgotten anything... so many ugly little details... "
"No," Jennifer said, frightened and horrified by the confession. "I don't want to hear anything more you have to say. I'm hanging up and calling the police. You need help, whoever you are. Leave me alone!"
The voice was still laughing when she slammed the phone back down into the cradle, and continued long into the night, echoing throughout her head as she laid awake until the first light of the morning began to dribble in through the curtains.
10 October 1942
A week passed.
The phone rang and rang and rang.
It shrieked and it howled.
It laughed and it laughed and it laughed.
Jennifer entertained fantasies about unplugging it, or smashing it, or ripping it from the little table in the hall and hurling it into the street... but in the end she only sat with her hands over her ears and tried not to scream.
21 October 1942
" Jennifaaah... "
"Why are you doing this?"
She was sitting on the floor beside the table, hair and clothes unwashed, clutching the handset with such force that she feared her fingers might deform the plastic.
" Because I miss you, Jennifer," the voice said, sounding hurt that she hadn't already guessed as much. "I'm all alone here. It's quiet and it's dark, and there's a peculiar smell coming from the basement... I wonder what it could be? "
Jennifer closed her eyes and shuddered.
The little boy who's clothes she'd worn... who's father had fed her candy and soup.
" Joshua, " he'd said, meaning her, as if though the buzzing lump beneath the sheet on the bed hadn't been there at all. " Joshua, you must eat, my boy. You've been so sick recently, Joshua. Please eat. Please. Please. Pretty please. Please don't make me feed you. It's always so hard to clean you up afterward. Please. Pretty peas. I need you to eat . "
How he had frightened her when he spoke like that...
" He's still here, you know. "
"No," Jennifer whispered, trying to shrink herself down to nothing. "The police took him. I... I've visited his grave."
" Oh, his bones. What a silly thing to do. He doesn't need them, anyway. He has me now, after all. "
Frightened, and exhausted, Jennifer began to cry.
2 November 1942
"I have to go back."
Clara froze, the steam rising like smoke from her teacup. "To the orphanage?"
"No," Jennifer said, her own cup sitting untouched and forgotten on the table before her. She wished she hadn't accepted Clara's offer, and would feel guilty for wasting it when she thought about it later. "The Gingerbread House."
"The... what?"
"Gregory's house," she corrected herself, feeling a touch self-conscious; she'd never told anyone but Wendy about giving that cavernous old farmhouse such a quaint moniker. "Where he kept me after the airship crashed."
Clara's face -- still soft and forgiving, even after everything she'd endured -- scrunched up in distaste.
"What on earth for? I mean, why would you ever want to go back there? Af -- after all this time?"
Jennifer took a deep breath, inhaling the warm, milky scent of tea.
"Someone's been calling me. Someone who knows about... my past."
"I don't mean to be unkind," Clara said, delicately, placing her teacup, untouched, back into the saucer. "But your past is hardly a well-kept secret, and this -- this is hardly the first creep to call and harass you about it, either." She blushed slightly, obviously worried about having offended her friend. "I'm sorry. It's not my place, is it?"
"No, it's... I don't mind, Clara, honestly. I was halfway hoping you'd talk me out of it, anyway. But I realized as soon as I sat down that I had already made up my mind." Jennifer shook her head. "Whatever's left of it, I suppose."
"But why this time?" Clara gently persisted. Her concern for her oldest friend was unmistakable. "There's been so many others... what makes this one... er, special?"
"This voice -- this person, whoever they are... they know things they shouldn't. Things I only shared with Wendy."
"You don't think..."
"I don't know what I think," Jennifer admitted. She told Clara about the voice's denial, and its confession when she'd asked about Wendy. She saw her own expression of horror mirrored in Clara's blue eyes, on the (something something) of her mouth.
For one flickering moment, she was the sixteen-year-old from the orphanage again, and Jennifer felt a rush of sorrow and longing wash over her.
"Good heavens," she breathed, and she was Clara again; tiny wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, and her light, mousy hair long, curled and coiffed; a style she never could have managed in the confines of the orphanage where merely finding a hairbrush with most of the bristles still intact would have been a miraculous event. "What a monstrous thing to say."
A moment passed.
A long, unhappy one.
Then, finally, Clara asked the one question Jennifer had hoped she wouldn't.
"You don't think... oh, Jennifer, you don't think it's Diana, do you?" She bit her lip, her eyes pleading behind the watery sheen that had built along her lower lashes. "It can't be, can it?" Her voice fell to a whisper as she stared down into her teacup. "Not her... please, not her..."
"I don't know what to think, Clara," she said, and it at least sounded believable, even if neither of them believed it. "It -- the voice -- was definitely trying to sound like... like Wendy, when she was pretending to be Joshua. But it wasn't quite right, like the person doing it wasn't a child... anymore."
"But the phone calls, and that confession... the cruelty of it." Clara looked miserable. "And they couldn't tell, could they? The b... the bodies, they were all so... that man had... they just assumed because of the clothes. We all did. But what if..."
Jennifer nodded, numbly. "What if I wasn't the only survivor that night?"
6 November 1942
The phone rings, as it does.
At 2 o'clock in the morning, as it must.
"Hello?" She doesn't recognize her own voice, it's so choked and ragged with exhaustion and tears, both spent and unshed.
"Jennifer?"
" Clara? "
"I'm sorry, Jennifer, I couldn't sleep. I had to call you before it was too late."
She sits up in her bed, wide awake in spite of the weariness that had settled cancerous into her bones.
"Too late?"
"Before you left, I mean. To go back to the Gingerbread House."
"Clara," she said, her shoulders slumping. "Please don't try to talk me out of it, again. I have to go. The calls aren't stopping. They -- they're getting worse. I'm afraid if I don't go, they never will."
"I'm not calling to stop you," Clara said, when Jennifer finally allowed her a moment. "I'm calling to say that I want to go with you."
Jennifer's eyes widened, imp-like in the dark.
"Whatever for?"
"Because I'm worried about you," the woman they'd once crowned the Frightened Princess said, sounding more determined than Jennifer had ever thought her capable of. "And because... if it is Diana... if there's even the smallest possible chance... I need to be there, too. I need a chance to fix it, and be there this time, like I wasn't last time."
Jennifer thought about arguing with Clara, or at least trying to convince her that whatever she believed herself responsible for could not possibly be any of her fault, but she knew all too well what Clara was feeling.
"Yes," she said, after a moment. "I think that would be a good idea."
15 November 1942
The bus door opened with a threatening hiss.
"Are you sure?" Clara whispered, clutching her little brown suitcase in front of her knees. Jennifer was alarmed by how pale and fragile she looked, but selfishly, she could not bring herself to offer Clara a reprieve; now that the day of the journey was upon her, she found that she was utterly terrified of having to go at all, let alone by herself.
"Yes," she said, grimly, clutching her own small luggage.