The Haunted

by Danielle Vega

  Hendricks’s hand twitched, horror growing inside of her. She took a ragged breath in, pushed the plastic curtain back, and started upstairs. She noticed she was trailing blood onto the stairs, the color garish and red against the raw wood. But when she stopped walking and examined the prints a little closer, she saw that it was only peanut butter ice cream.

  A voice echoed from just above her: “You crazy . . . you, you assholes. You think you’re so cool, that the world revolves around you, but you’re nothing. I’ll show you.”

  It was a high rasp of a voice that seemed to grow higher and thinner as Hendricks listened. She stood, frozen, on the staircase. That voice didn’t sound human at all. It didn’t sound like anything she’d ever heard before.

  Sweat broke out on her palms. She was crying again, her breath hitching in her throat, her eyes clouded with tears. She didn’t want to go up there, didn’t want to see what was waiting for her in Brady’s room, but her legs seemed to move on their own, carrying her up to the second floor and around the corner. The voice had stopped talking, but that didn’t ease her fear.

  Hendricks reached for the doorknob of her little brother’s room. Holding her breath, she pushed the door open . . .

  Brady’s baby doll sat on the windowsill, its glass eyes seeming to glow in the dark, jabbering away.

  “A . . . B . . . C . . . D . . . come sing with me!”

  Hendricks peered around the room, her heartbeat hammering. There was nothing there, nothing but that damn doll. She wiped a hand across her mouth, trying to catch her breath. Her skin felt cold and clammy to the touch, still damp with tears. She closed her eyes, and then opened them again, expecting the room to change. But it didn’t.

  “Sing with me!” the baby doll sang.

  Hendricks hurried across the room, grasping the toy with shaking hands. She turned it over, intending to switch it off, but her hands were thick and clumsy and it smashed to the floor instead.

  She blinked down at the ruined toy and felt her heartbeat slow as its low, gravelly voice petered out. Then she turned around and saw the boy lying in the doorway.

  Hendricks’s hands flew to her mouth. The boy was on his side, his arms and legs tied. His lips had been stapled shut, and blood ran down his chin in thick rivulets, pooling on the ground below his cheek. He writhed around on the ground, struggling to get free.

  Hendricks stared in horror, too shocked to scream. She took a quick step backward—

  And her foot banged into something.

  Something that wriggled.

  She felt her whole body constrict. No, she thought, but she was already turning, a hand balled at her mouth.

  A second boy was lying on the floor behind her, his arms and legs tied just like the first boy’s had been. His mouth had been duct taped shut, instead of stapled. Someone had carved the word loser into his chest, the lines thick and deep. Thin strips of skin peeled away from the wound, and the blood had crusted up around it, brown and scabbed. Fresh droplets still oozed out from where it had dried, tracing thick, red lines down the boy’s front.

  Hendricks felt her stomach lurch and pressed her hand tighter over her mouth. She felt like she was going to be sick. She turned and—

  Oh God.

  There, just a few feet away from where she was standing, was a third boy. This boy had been tied, too, and his mouth duct taped, but no one had mutilated him. His eyes were bugged and red. He moaned against the duct tape covering his mouth and, though Hendricks couldn’t hear what he was saying, his meaning was clear.

  Don’t hurt me.

  Hendricks took a step toward the bound and frightened boy, and said, “I didn’t do this to you, I swear!” She dropped to her knees and began fumbling with the bindings around the boy’s wrists.

  When she raised her hand, she saw that she was holding a stapler.

  CHAPTER

  24

  Hendricks’s hands sprang open, but the stapler vanished before it hit the floor.

  She spun in place, eyes moving anxiously over Brady’s stuffed animals, and the baby-animal pictures hanging on his wall. The boys had vanished. Brady’s room looked just like it always did, except that his crib was still overturned from his accident the other night. Hendricks stared at the blankets spilling onto the floor for a long moment, waiting for her heartbeat to steady.

  It was good that the crib was messed up. It made it easier to believe that everything she’d seen had really been there.

  She turned back to the door, her eyes drawn to the place on the floor where Brady’s nursery met the hall. While the hall floors had been replaced, Brady’s were still the original wood, and it always looked a little funny where the old, creaky floorboards met the fresh, raw wood of the hall. But now, looking closer, Hendricks noticed that there was a spot that looked a little darker than the rest. Stained.

  It was blood, she realized. That’s where the ghost boy with his lips stapled shut had been lying. Hendricks pictured how the blood had dripped from his mouth, pooling between his cheek and the floor.

  What she’d just seen had really happened.

  She pressed her trembling fingers to her lips and took a few horrified steps away from the door. There was a part of her that expected the ghost boys to blip back into existence again. But the door stayed empty. Sucking down a deep, uneven breath, she bolted. She didn’t slow until she was down the stairs and out the front door, cutting around the side of her house and through the yard.

  She nearly collided with Eddie’s back door. “Help!” she screamed, fists pounding on the wood. “He’s back, they’re back!”

  Eddie yanked the door open and pulled her inside. He locked the door behind her, checking the window like he thought the ghosts had chased her across the yard.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  Hendricks started to nod, struggling to catch her breath. She could still feel the strange weight of the stapler between her fingers. There, and then gone.

  She stopped mid-nod and started shaking her head instead.

  She was not okay. She didn’t see how she could ever be okay again.

  “Oh my God,” she spluttered, raking her hands through her hair. “I feel like I’m going crazy.”

  Eddie took her by the arm. For a second, it looked like he might hug her, and then he froze, shifting his eyes away. He was still holding on to her arm, but now he repositioned his hand, like he was trying to lead her out of the room. “Come on, let’s go upstairs,” he said.

  Hendricks’s skin was warm where he was touching her. Her voice felt lodged in her throat, so she just nodded.

  It was too dark for her to see much of the room around her, but she could tell that the layout was different from her house. Eddie’s back door seemed to open into a sort of basement bedroom. She saw a mattress on the floor, piled with sheets and clothes, and then Eddie was leading her up a narrow staircase with tacky, wood-paneled walls and orange carpet. The staircase opened up into the kitchen.

  Hendricks had been preparing herself. She didn’t know what Eddie’s family situation was, but, between what had happened to his sister and what went on with his older brother, she couldn’t imagine it was great. She didn’t want to come across as a total snob if things were a bit hectic.

  Still, when Eddie flicked on the kitchen light, she stood frozen in the doorway, shocked by what she saw.

  The kitchen was clean. Not tidy, like her kitchen back home, but clean. Like someone had gotten down on their knees and scrubbed the floors by hand. The linoleum floor was old and peeling, but spotless. The stainless steel sink gleamed.

  And that smell . . . Hendricks’s nose wrinkled. Bleach, she realized after a moment, mixed with some sort of lemon-scented cleaner. The entire room reeked of it.

  Eddie motioned for her to sit. There was only one chair at the card table set up in the middle of the room. Hendricks had the feeling th
at this wasn’t the sort of home where the family ate together.

  “Tell me what happened,” Eddie said, getting a glass from a cupboard above the sink. Hendricks noticed that the array of cheap-looking coffee mugs had been arranged according to color, but Eddie closed the door quickly, before she could see anything else.

  He filled a chipped blue mug with water from the faucet, and handed it to her.

  “Thanks,” Hendricks murmured. And then, haltingly, she told him everything she could remember about what had just happened. “It—it felt like they were re-creating something. And then, the ghosts just . . . vanished.”

  Eddie leaned back against the sink. “That’s messed up.”

  Hendricks took a sip of water. “The night Brady got hurt was the same. It felt like something that had happened before.” She shuddered, remembering.

  Eddie stared off into space. After a long moment, he said, “Okay, so I read somewhere that this can happen. A ghost will re-create the events leading up to its death. Can you put all the . . . scenes, or whatever they are, together?”

  Hendricks closed her eyes and pressed a finger to the skin between her eyebrows. The things she’d seen seemed to morph together until all she could remember was that awful laughter. That voice whispering to her: You’ll pay for what you did!

  And then a pair of yellow eyes popped into her head.

  “Okay, this might be something,” she said, sitting up straighter. “There was this cat in the basement, right? And then the night Brady got hurt, the first ghost boy was holding him, but not like you’d hold a baby. He was holding him like this.”

  Hendricks curled her arms in front of her chest, showing Eddie.

  Eddie’s brow furrowed. “So he was holding Brady like he was a cat.”

  “Yeah, and kind of stroking his head, like this,” Hendricks said, demonstrating.

  “And then what?” Eddie motioned for her to continue.

  “And then he—” Hendricks’s voice got caught in her throat. She swallowed and tried again. “He threw Brady against the wall. That’s how he got hurt.”

  Eddie was staring at her, a look of sympathy in his eyes. “Hendricks, I’m so sorry.”

  But Hendricks just shook her head. She couldn’t think about that right now. “And then, tonight, the cat led me upstairs.” She frowned. “I didn’t see him after that, though. He wasn’t in the same room as the boys.”

  Eddie ran a hand through his hair, ruffling it. “Look, I’m really hungry. Are you hungry?”

  Hendricks nodded. She was about to reach into her pocket for the money her parents left for pizza, but Eddie was already opening up his fridge and rummaging around inside. He pulled out a frozen pizza.

  “Pepperoni?” he asked, holding it up.

  Hendricks was relieved that he hadn’t said bacon mushroom. “Perfect.”

  Eddie popped the frozen pizza into the oven.

  “Here’s the thing. I’ve never been big on the supernatural.” He fumbled with an egg timer that had been on the fridge. “Most of what I know comes from Reddit or old movies.”

  “Which clearly isn’t enough.” Hendricks sighed heavily. “I really thought that ritual was going to work.”

  “So maybe that’s what we need.” Eddie paused. “An expert.”

  “You know a lot of ghost experts?”

  “Just one,” Eddie said. Hendricks cocked an eyebrow and he continued, “Remember when we were at the occult shop? That woman at the counter knew about our ritual just from the stuff we bought.” A shrug. “So let’s go talk to her.”

  “I’m not telling some random weird chick about my ghosts.”

  “Why not? What have we got to lose?” He placed the egg timer on the table between them, and for a moment, the only sound in the kitchen was its steady ticking. Hendricks stared at it for a long moment, trying not to think of it as a metaphor. They were running out of time.

  “Fine,” she said, her eyes flicking back up to Eddie’s. “I guess I’m desperate enough to give it a shot.”

  “Tomorrow, then?”

  Hendricks nodded. “Tomorrow.”

  As they were eating, the kitchen door swung open with a creak, and a small, rail-thin woman poked her head into the room. She was wearing yellow cleaning gloves that gaped around her skinny wrists, a red bandana holding her thick, dark hair away. She smelled strongly of lemon-scented floor cleaner.

  For a moment, she stared at Hendricks without seeming to see her.

  “Uh, Mom, this is Hendricks, she’s a”—Eddie glanced at her—“uh.”

  “I’m a friend of Eddie’s from school,” Hendricks finished. She shot him a look, daring him to contradict her.

  He shifted his eyes to the table and added, “Her family just moved into Steele House.”

  Eddie’s mom’s eyes flickered to the kitchen window, as though trying to catch sight of the house through the trees that separated the two yards. Some emotion that Hendricks couldn’t place passed over her face, but then she shook her head, and the look was gone.

  “Margaret,” she said, by way of introduction. She adjusted her gloves. “Nice to meet you, Hendricks.”

  And then she ducked back into the living room. A moment later, Hendricks heard a sound like a vacuum cleaner turning on.

  Eddie cleared his throat. “Look, you can stay here tonight, if you want.”

  “Thank you,” Hendricks said, and Eddie stood, clearing their plates and loading their things in the dishwasher before heading back to the basement door.

  Hendricks pushed her chair back and followed him. But she paused at the living room and peered in.

  Margaret Ruiz was running the vacuum cleaner over a spot on the carpet, back and forth, again and again. She didn’t seem to notice Hendricks standing there, watching.

  * * *

  • • •

  Eddie offered his bed, but Hendricks insisted on taking the floor.

  “I’m not kicking you out of your bed,” she said. “It’s enough that you’re letting me stay here at all.”

  Eddie rubbed his neck, mussing the back of his hair. “My dad would kick my ass if he knew I let a girl sleep on the floor.”

  “Well, tell your dad it’s not the 1950s anymore.”

  Eddie raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  “Girls are tough enough to spend a night on the floor.” Hendricks thought of all the nights she’d spent in her closet back in Philadelphia, crouched behind coats and shoes, because she was too scared to sleep in her actual bed. “Besides, I’ve had worse.”

  Eddie frowned at her, and then shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, then grabbed some pillows and blankets from his closet.

  “Thanks,” Hendricks said, and she settled herself on the floor as Eddie flicked off the lights and crawled into bed. She pulled the blanket up to her chin and, even though the room was dark and Eddie had his back to her, she wiggled out of her jeans below the blanket and placed them on the floor beside her.

  “Good night,” she murmured.

  “Good night,” Eddie said. His voice sounded very close.

  Hendricks peered into the darkness, listening to his ragged breathing. The taste of peanut butter ice cream was still on her mind. Every time she swallowed, she remembered the footprints she’d trailed upstairs, how they’d looked so much like blood . . .

  She shivered, hard, and pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders. Goose bumps popped up along her legs. For a moment, she considered pulling her jeans back on, but then decided against it. She just needed to close her eyes and go to sleep. Everything would be easier in the morning.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to steady her breathing.

  A minute passed. And then another. This wasn’t working.

  She opened her eyes again and stared up at the ceiling. A crack ran through the plaster, and if Hendricks
looked at it for long enough, it began to take shape. Two ears, and two eyes, and a long, twitching tail . . .

  Meow.

  She sat bolt upright, breathing hard.

  It wasn’t real.

  A sob hitched in her throat and she pressed her lips together, desperate not to cry.

  There was a creak of mattress springs, and then Eddie’s voice, closer than before: “Hey.”

  Hendricks swallowed, not quite trusting herself to speak. “Hey,” she croaked.

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You don’t sound too sure about that.”

  “I—I’m not, really,” Hendricks admitted. She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. Don’t cry, don’t cry. “This is just a lot. I feel like I’m going crazy.”

  There was a beat of silence, and then Eddie said, “This is a queen-sized bed, you know.”

  Hendricks thought she knew what he was trying to say, but she didn’t want to assume, in case she was wrong. She lowered her hands, sniffing. “So?”

  “So, it’s plenty big enough for both of us.”

  Hendricks didn’t say another word. She scrambled into bed beside him, huddling down in the blankets. The bed was big enough that she wouldn’t have known Eddie was in it with her, except that the mattress shifted when he rolled over.

  She lay very still for a long moment, imagining his body in the darkness. Was he facing her? Looking at her? She wanted to reach out to him, touch his arm or his shoulder, just so she knew how he was positioned beside her.

  This was the second time they’d slept together, she realized, and, without meaning to, she remembered how it’d felt to curl up against his side, his arm wrapped around her shoulder, his chest rising and falling beneath her cheek.

  Her skin flushed with heat. She was suddenly glad for the darkness, glad that Eddie wouldn’t be able to see how badly she was blushing. She shouldn’t be thinking like this, anyway. She had a boyfriend.