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She had informed Dagmar and Aracelia very politely that the lights in the west stairway, the ones between the second and third floor, were dying. It was late now, after leaving her History teacher alone to do her homework; instead of the easy trip downstairs she'd anticipated, she found herself staring down the challenge of the eerily flickering lights - the stairs flashing into her vision, then fading back into darkness. The wall-mounted lights shone dimly, every shadow cast in eerie orange.

Now, normally Elke would have resigned herself to temporary over-shoulder glancing and hurried down the stairs. One flight, a landing, another flight, through the door and to her own room. Not much could happen in that short span. Only there had been a monster on school grounds just yesterday. She hadn't seen it, but she'd heard it, she knew it was there, it could still be outside. It probably was still outside.

Or it could be inside.

But it wasn't, she assured herself, it would have left a trail of blood, guts, and gore! And from what she could see, there were no guts or gore or even a little sprinkling of blood in the stairway. (This was good. Elke tended to faint or throw up when faced with blood.)

Still, even with all these good thoughts, she couldn't. Quite. Make herself take that first step into the dimly lit stairway. She stood there, toes just barely inside the doorframe, staring into possibly monster-filled oblivion.

The sudden appearance of Frankie and her odd fashion of traveling upstairs surprised a squeak out of Elke, but she'd seen the other girl come up the stairs like this enough that she recognized it halfway through the escalation to a scream. She smiled weakly at the pink-haired girl, then almost told her of the monsterkitten and the student hanging outside Giselle's window.

Of course, when she had told Giselle of the first monster, the second had appeared, so she thought the better of it. Instead, with the patented 'Elke is lying' look that everyone seemed to recognize if they'd been at Barren Pines for more than a week, she said, "Um... no?"

"Hi, Frankie," said Elke after a moment.

Worse, for poor Elke, is the fact that someone, no, something had also been listening in to Frankie's demands and had decided to answer her heated calling.

The first thing the two girls heard was a slow scuffle, as if something was dragging itself up the stairs from the two floors below. It was slow, but it remained steady, the echo of the sound making its way up to the third floor where the girls were.

Soon enough, the owner of the scuffle appeared, a forlorn looking woman (at least, from what either student could tell) latching on to the handrail as her feet drug themselves up the stairs, one step at a time. As she turned the corner on the stairs, approaching their level, they could finally view her front. Or at least, the parts that weren't covered by the strands of long dark hair. Her face was entirely covered by the tangled hair, but Elke and Frankie could both tell from the way she carried herself that something was terribly, horribly wrong with the woman.

A hiss came out from beneath the hair, distorted words that made no sense. Was her leg broken? Why was her arm being held at a funny angle? Was that... was that a voice trying to talk to them? What was she trying to say?