Invisible Traces · A Horror Story No. 27
The Third Time
Alex Moonn
The legend taught you how to call the girl in the bathroom, but nobody taught you what to do when she called back.
Grupo Escolar Presidente Vargas sits with its back to the river, and every September the water leaves a brown line on the gymnasium wall. In the girls' bathroom on the second floor, the last stall stays pulled to, never locked, never all the way open. At thirteen, the narrator learns the whole legend from her friend Sabrina: stand facing the mirror, call Marlene three times, and on the third, pull the flush.
English edition, available on Amazon.
Read an excerpt
The last one. The one at the far end. Its door stayed pulled to — never locked, never all the way open. The cleaning ladies scrubbed the other three and wiped a rag across the outside of that one, quick, without going in. Once I asked Dona Neusa why she never opened it. She wrung her rag out over the bucket, slow, waited for the water to stop running between her fingers, and answered without looking at me:
"Because in there, it's clean."
I waited for the rest of the sentence. It never came. She picked up her bucket and walked out to the hallway, and left me alone in front of the dark gap, two fingers wide, between the door and the frame, a gap that never grew and never shrank.
English edition, available on Amazon.
