by Val Crowe
I was lying on my back in the room where Heather Olsen had fallen, and the sun was coming in through the window onto my face.
I felt sticky.
I looked down at my body, and everything seemed intact, but I felt strange. Drained.
Mads was standing in the doorway.
I blinked at her.
She faded out and then back in. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear what she said.
My head was pounding. I struggled to get to my feet.
I couldn’t. I fell down, dizzy. I stayed there for several moments, on my hands and knees, my head hanging down. I felt like I might vomit.
Finally, I managed to push myself into an upright position. The room spun and turned and I staggered and stumbled to the doorway. I clutched the wall for balance, gasping.
“Out,” came Mads voice at my ear. “Get out of here, Deacon.”
Yes, I thought she might be right. I half walked, half crawled down the steps and then managed to get myself out of the door and over the porch and down the front steps. The morning sun made my head hurt even more.
I sat there on the sidewalk, hugging my knees to my chest, retching.
Mads stood over me in the brilliance, the sun shining through her as if she was made of stained glass. “They were feeding on you, Deacon. You can’t go back in there. You’re waking them up.”
I looked back at the house. “But… but Wade.”
“They took him to try to keep you,” she said. “They want to suck you dry.”
My head felt as if someone was pounding a hammer behind my eyebrows. I chuckled softly. “Suck me dry, huh?” Yeah, okay, it had been like that. God, it had been so strange. I had lost control of myself. Whatever was in that house, it had drawn me to it, and it had taken charge of me.
“You can’t go back in there,” said Mads. “If you do, you might not fully recover, and the power it will have might make it too strong.”
“I have to get Wade back,” I said.
She shook her head. “You have to find another way.”
* * *
I made it back to Wade’s place, but I didn’t have the energy to drive all the way back to the Airstream. When I got to Wade’s, I told myself that I would take a little time to get myself together and that then I would call Rylan and make a plan. I knew she didn’t want to go back into the dorm, but she was the only other person who I knew to talk to. I would tell her that the only reason it hadn’t been safe last night was because I was with her. I had powered up the dorm like a big battery or something. If I wasn’t in there, the place couldn’t hurt her.
At least I hoped it couldn’t. I didn’t know what the place had done with all the energy it had gotten from me. Maybe it was stronger now.
I fell asleep on Wade’s couch, though, and I didn’t wake up until noon, when Rylan showed up with coffee. She was coming from her shift at the coffee shop, and she was glad to see that I was there and not dead.
She had brought three coffees with her, hoping that I would have found Wade and brought him back. But now, she could see that I hadn’t, and she was worried.
I told her everything that had happened and what I thought was going on with the place. How it was using me to power up.
“How do you know this?” she said. “Just a guess?”
“Uh… well, I mean it’s what makes sense,” I said. Explaining Mads was a little confusing. I have a guardian ghost? She’s a really hot chick? Yeah, whatever. Likewise, I didn’t tell her that the house had made me all hot and bothered to get me into the room last night. I guessed the weird, disturbing sexual energy correlated to the barnacles, which were sexually transmittable. All of it made me feel… ooky. I disliked it entirely.
“I guess this kind of thing has happened to you before,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. And it had, sort of. I had noticed that my presence seemed to strengthen the ghosts.
“Okay,” she said. “Well, I spent the morning looking into Heather Olsen. Just in case there was anything there that might be able to help us.”
“How would it help us?”
“I don’t know. Usually, with ghosts, their history is really important. Like, have you every seen Amityville?”
“That’s the one with the house that has window eyes?”
“Exactly.”
“I think I saw the remake.”
“Blasphemy,” she said, shaking her head. “Anyway, you should really read the book. It’s based on a true story, you know.”
I just shrugged.
She kept going. “In The Amityville Horror, a family buys a house where a mass murder took place. The remake tried to make it out like the murder was caused by the haunting, but I really think it was the other way around, you know? The murder caused the haunting. Anyway, if we know why Heather Olsen died, maybe it can help us in some way. These things that are attached to us, they’re related to her somehow, right? Gotta be. They came from that room.”
“I don’t know if it’s as simple as the ghost of Heather, though,” I said. “Besides, there seems to be some kind of… impression of her stuck in the house.”
“Oh?” She raised an eyebrow.
I sighed. “Uh, you know when we lost Wade, when I was convulsing or whatever?”
“Sure.”
“I maybe had a kind of vision,” I said.
“Of Heather Olsen?”
“Yeah, she said her name was Heather.”
“And what was she doing?”
I blushed. “Uh… she was… she seemed drunk.”
“Probably would have had to be to do what she did,” said Rylan.
“What did she do?” I said.
“Look, when I first did my research before I went into the house to film the youtube video, I thought I had found everything, but I did some more digging this morning, and I found out some pretty disturbing stuff. I’m guessing that her family didn’t want this to get out, and that’s why they suppressed it. But I found something from about ten years ago at some benefit dinner held in her honor by one of the guys who was in the building when she fell. He told the story at the dinner and then they raised money for Take Back the Night.”
“What?” I said. “She was raped? Because, um, she seemed willing to me. I mean, if she was drunk, maybe she wasn’t in her right mind—”
“Ridinger Hall used to be a frat house,” said Rylan. “Back when Malbrooke still allowed them on campus. And back in the day, the frat that lived there were known for being the craziest partyers. I guess the party never stopped at Ridinger Hall. And one of the things that a few of the senior guys were doing was, like, sharing Heather Olsen.”
“You mean… they were all having sex with her.”
Rylan nodded. “Yeah, and no one really knows how she fell. The two guys that were up there were too drunk to remember and both of them were brought up on charges of involuntary manslaughter. But they weren’t the only guys who had been with Heather. There were at least six of them in on it. It wasn’t the first time, either. She was apparently over there with them all the time. That night something went wrong.” She raised her eyebrows at me. “What did you see?”
I shook my head. “Nothing like that. Nothing was, uh, going wrong in the vision I had.”
She considered that for a moment. Then she opened her mouth as if she was going to ask me a question. But she seemed to think better of it and closed her mouth. “Well, okay. So, I’m thinking that maybe what happened is that those two guys got jealous. Maybe they started fighting each other over Heather and she got caught in the middle. In the scuffle, she went out the window.”
“Could be,” I said.
“I mean, guys fight over girls. Witness you and Wade.”
“Wade and I did not fight over a girl.”
“Yeah, he walked into a door and got that shiner.”
I cleared my throat. “It wasn’t a fight, not exactly. It was… a conversation.”
“That involved punching.”
“Only o
ne punch,” I said. “He told me to do it.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Well… anyway. I guess it makes sense, the barnacle being passed along sexually. If Heather was casually passed around in life, maybe she’s latched onto that in death as her revenge.”
“Yeah, I guess that makes sense,” I said. “Does that help us?”
She raised her shoulders. “I don’t know, but I thought I should share.”
“I think we can’t worry about anything until we get Wade back,” I said.
“Right,” she said.
I licked my lips. “I don’t think I can go back in there. Whatever it is that I do to the house, it’s bad. But you—”
“No,” she said. “I’m not going in there. Especially not alone.”
“Please? I’ll stand outside, and we can stay on the phone the whole time.”
“No freaking way am I going back in that place,” she said.
I rubbed my forehead. Damn it.
* * *
I spent the day trying to figure out what to do about Wade.
More than once, I almost went back into the house. I paced in front of the sidewalk, thinking that I had to do something for my friend. Mads said he was still in there. I had to get to him.
But Mads talked me out of it. She told me it was stupid to go back in. My presence in the place would only make things worse.
“So, what am I supposed to do?” I said. “I can’t leave him in there.”
“When the house realizes that it’s not enticing you back in with Wade, it’ll spit him out,” Mads said.
I stopped pacing, staring up at the place, its dark windows taunting me. “You sure about that?”
Mads didn’t say anything.
Damn it.
I went up to the sidewalk and started offering to pay people on the street to go inside and look for Wade. Most of them didn’t even stop, giving me wary looks before crossing to the other side of the road to get away from me. The few that did stop wanted to know how much money I’d give them.
One guy laughed me off and kept walking. I yelled larger and larger amounts after him, desperate, but he never stopped.
Another guy took me up on it.
He went in, but he was only in the house for maybe five minutes before he ran back out, his eyes wide and a wet stain on the front of his shorts. He didn’t even take my money. He tore up the sidewalk out of there. Didn’t even say a word to me.
Eventually, I gave up on that.
The day wore on. I was hungry. I went to pick up some fast food and ate in my truck.
I thought about calling Wade’s mother and trying to explain this situation to her. What if I never found my best friend?
* * *
“Wade?” said a trembling female voice when I opened the door to Wade’s apartment.
“Uh, no,” I called. “It’s Deacon, Wade’s friend? Who’s that?”
Charlotte appeared from Wade’s bedroom. She was hugging herself. The barnacle slithered in the air above her head. “Oh, okay, I remember you. You were here the other day.”
“Is Wade here?” I said, hope rising in my chest.
“No.” She shook her head. “I’ve been waiting for him. But he’s still not back. You don’t know where he is either?”
I didn’t answer. I did know where he was, but I couldn’t put it into words for her.
She let out a strange noise, almost like a sob. “All that crazy stuff he was telling me the other night, it’s all true.”
“The crazy stuff about the barnacle?” I said. “Yeah, it is true.”
“My roommate found me at the window in her bedroom last night,” said Charlotte. “She lives upstairs, and I have the bedroom downstairs. She said that she had to fight me to try to keep me from throwing myself out of the window.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s kind of what the thing does.”
“The thing is, I don’t remember any of it,” said Charlotte. “I don’t remember going upstairs to her room, or opening the window, or fighting with her, none of it. But I scratched her face all up to hell. She was on the verge of giving up and letting me fall when somehow, I started to respond to my name, or at least that’s what she says. I didn’t know what to make of it all day. And then I remembered everything that Wade told me about Olivia, and about the thing he said he’d somehow passed to me, and I knew that he wasn’t lying to me. So, I came here.” She hugged herself tighter. “But he’s not here. Do you know when he’s coming back?”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I… I’m looking for him too.”
“Oh, God, what if it got him? The barnacle?”
“No, it doesn’t work like that. He doesn’t have it. You do.”
“So, he’s okay? You know, all he wanted to do was take this thing back from me, and I didn’t let him, and now I don’t want to be alone. What if I try to jump out another window? Why does Wade have to live on the fourth floor of this house, anyway? I’ve been so freaked out.”
“You’re going to be fine,” I said. I took a deep breath, making a decision. “You stick with me. I’ll make sure you stay alive.”
“You will?”
“Yes,” I said. But now I didn’t know what to do. Should I send her back into Ridinger Hall? Would she be able to find Wade?
Considering how freaked out she already was, I didn’t know if that was a good idea.
She sat down on the couch. “Did Wade ever tell you how we met?”
“No,” I said. I looked around the apartment, and then I sat down on the opposite side of the couch. I guessed she wanted to talk. Maybe that would help her calm down.
“I’d known of him, of course, because he’s like a fixture around here. He’s the guy who’s always at the bar, who always buys you a drink on your twenty-first birthday.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard this,” I said.
“Right, well, I thought he was creepy and old and I wasn’t interested,” she said. “But then, one night, and this was last semester, back when I lived on the other side of town, and I had to drive to get home?”
“Uh huh,” I said, more because she was expecting it than because I was particularly interested in this story.
“Well, I had too much to drink, and I couldn’t drive. He said that I could stay at his place, and I didn’t want to, because I thought he was a creeper. But he was a perfect gentleman. Didn’t even attempt to make a move on me. So, then I knew that I could trust him. And if I had to sleep in town, I started coming to his place and knocking on the door. Eventually, we did end up doing it, though.”
Way to get rewarded for being the gentleman, Wade, I thought, smirking inwardly.
“I mean, I just liked that he was older and more experienced and that he knew what he was doing,” said Charlotte. “And I’m not interested in anything serious. I’m young. I don’t want to be tied down. I just want, like, someone to blow off steam with. That’s what Wade is to me. He’s good for that. I never thought that if I had sex with him, I’d contract a barnacle or whatever you’re calling it. I never thought that being with Wade would kill me.”
“It’s not Wade’s fault,” I said, feeling the need to defend him. “He didn’t know the thing would get attached to him when he went into Ridinger Hall.”
“Well, that place is haunted,” she said. “What did he expect?”
“Easy to say with hindsight,” I said. “Anyway, he’s been adamant that he wants to take the barnacle back from you.”
“That’s what I want too,” she said. “I just want this nightmare over.”
* * *
I hung out with Charlotte for another forty minutes, getting antsier the longer I wasn’t doing anything for Wade. I was thinking that she and I were going to have to leave and go somewhere else, but I didn’t know where, and until I knew that, I didn’t want to bring it up and upset her.
Charlotte excused herself to go to the bathroom, and she was gone a long time.
I knocked on the door after a while. There was a window in
there.
The door opened right away and Charlotte threw herself at me, sobbing. “Oh, my God. I’ve been standing in there for fifteen minutes, just staring at the window. I couldn’t make myself move away from it!”
I hugged her awkwardly, gingerly patting her back. “Just calm down. You’re going to be okay.”
“I’m going to die,” she said, pulling away from me. “It already happened to Olivia. Now, it’s going to happen to me.”
I winced, hearing Olivia’s name. “That doesn’t have to happen. If you can get someone to watch out for you, keep you away from windows, you should be fine until Wade is back.” Because he was going to be back. I was going to make sure of it.
“And when is that going to be?” She threaded shaking hands through her hair. “I can’t wait that long. I have to get rid of this thing. If I have sex with someone, I’ll pass it to them, right?”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “But that’s not very responsible, is it, knowingly passing this to someone else?”
“Screw being responsible. It wasn’t responsible for Wade to give it to me.”
“But he didn’t know that he had it. If he’d known, he never would have slept with you. Besides, if you pass it on to someone else, and that person dies, then it’ll just come back to you, like it did to Wade.”
“Oh, hell,” she said. “So, then I have to explain to some dude to stay away from windows, and he’s going to think I’m nuts, and then he’s not going to have sex with me anyway.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I don’t have anyone to watch out for me,” she said. “My roommate isn’t going to do it, not after I practically scratched her face off. She’s annoyed with me. I tried to explain it to her, and she looked at me like I had lost my mind.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Uh… sit back down on the couch. We can figure this out.”
“How? I’m going to kill myself.” She started to cry softly.
“Hey, don’t,” I said. I felt awkward. I didn’t know Charlotte very well, and I wasn’t sure how to comfort her. I reached over and tentatively patted her shoulder. “It’ll work out.”
“How?” she repeated, sobbing in earnest now. “I have to sleep with someone, but unless I’m a total bitch and don’t tell them until it’s over, they’ll never agree to it. So, my options are to be a bitch and live or to be nice and die.”
