The Haunted

by Danielle Vega

Hendricks straightened. “Hi,” she said, and her voice sounded so breathy that she grimaced, hating herself a little. She cleared her throat and tried again.

  Eddie kept his eyes fixed on her, but they were no longer guarded. He looked . . . hopeful.

  Something inside of her thrummed. “What are you doing here?”

  That came out sounding accusatory. But at least it was better than seeming like some lovestruck schoolgirl.

  “Sorry.” He shook his head, the hopeful look instantly gone. “I didn’t mean to crash your party.”

  “That’s okay,” Hendricks said quickly.

  “I’m looking for my lighter,” he explained, cupping a hand around the back of his neck. “You know that silver one? It used to be Kyle’s, and I haven’t seen it since I was here, so I figured it might be up in Brady’s room. Is it cool if I go look for it?”

  “Of course,” Hendricks said. And then, before she could lose her nerve, she rushed to add, “You’re welcome to stay, you know. If you want to.”

  “I don’t—” Eddie started, and then stopped. Something in his face changed, though Hendricks couldn’t say what it was. He took a breath and said, carefully, “I think I’ll just find my lighter and go.”

  He gave her a tight smile, and then he turned and hurried up the stairs to the second floor without another word.

  Wanting to avoid another awkward interaction, Hendricks made her way out to the yard, where her friends were hanging out around the empty pool. She’d barely seen Eddie at all over the past two weeks. They passed in the hall at school sometimes, and they’d smile or nod at each other, but they didn’t talk or hang out anymore. Every time Hendricks saw him she felt strangely empty. Like she’d lost something she hadn’t realized she’d wanted.

  “Portia and Vi look like they’re having fun,” she said, doing her best to push Eddie from her mind as she dropped into a lawn chair next to Connor and Raven.

  Raven had been staring up at the night sky, but now her gaze swung around to the side of the pool, where Portia and Vi were dancing. Her eyebrows knit together.

  “Just pray that Vi calls her after this,” she said. “I don’t think I can take another two hours on the phone with Portia dissecting her every facial expression.”

  Connor leaned back in his chair, blinking up at the stars. “Hey, I think I can see the bigger dipper,” he murmured.

  “You mean the Big Dipper,” Hendricks said.

  “No, like that one but bigger.” Connor squinted, and pointed up at the sky. “See? It’s right there.”

  Hendricks leaned over to see what he was pointing at. “There’s no such thing as the bigger . . .” She trailed off, her eyes landing on a slim red book that was leaning against Portia’s chair. She cocked her head. “What’s that?”

  Connor blinked, blearily. “The yearbook? Portia brought it to show Raven earlier.”

  “It was her mom’s,” Raven explained. “Remember how I didn’t believe that story about those guys who disappeared when her parents were in high school? Well, Miss ‘I can’t stand to be wrong about anything’ just had to bring the yearbook to your party so she could prove to me that it’d really happened.”

  Hendricks felt her breath go still.

  Guys who disappeared?

  All at once, she remembered the story Portia had mentioned during her first days at Drearford High. My mom told me that her freshman year, three of the coolest boys in school just vanished, and no one ever heard from them again. They were gone, just like that.

  Her heart thumping, Hendricks grabbed the yearbook and began flipping through the pages. Raven said something, but Hendricks didn’t hear what it was. A strange, buzzing sound had filled her ears.

  Where is it . . .

  It was on the very last page. At first glance, it just looked like a collage of photographs. But when Hendricks looked closer, she saw snippets from poems about loss, well wishes, and sad messages from parents.

  It was a memorial page.

  The inscription at the top read:

  For Jason Hart, Eric Hughes, and Chris Adams. We hope you found peace, wherever you are. Lots of love, Drearford High Class of ’99.

  Hendricks lifted a hand to her mouth, her eyes scanning the three faces shown in the photo collage below. Cold sweat gathered on the back of her neck. She recognized those faces.

  “Oh my God,” she said out loud. “I—I know what happened to these guys.”

  Raven snorted. “Um, how would you know anything about three teenage boys who disappeared, like, twenty years ago?”

  But Hendricks wasn’t listening. If the boys who were haunting her house were in this yearbook, then it probably meant the girl who’d killed them would be in here, too.

  Her stomach warped as she flipped through the book again, more slowly this time, carefully scanning the lists of names next to the blocks of photographs.

  Kevin Brooks, Kelly Bishop, Amanda Bell . . .

  Margaret Bailey.

  Hendricks felt her body temperature drop. Maggie was short for Margaret. She followed the name to the corresponding photograph, and a new horror settled over her as she realized that she recognized Margaret Bailey’s bugged eyes and lanky brown hair. She lifted a trembling hand to her mouth.

  She’d met Saggy Maggie.

  Only now, her name was Margaret Ruiz.

  Hendricks jerked her hand backward, her chest hitching. She looked up, staring into the darkened windows of Steele House. If she concentrated, she could feel something pulsing. An angry, insistent energy. Like swarming bees.

  All this time, she’d thought the ghosts were after her. She’d been so sure that they’d sensed something in her, something that Grayson had broken.

  But she’d been wrong. They’d wanted Eddie. They’d already punished Maggie by murdering two of her children, and now they needed the third.

  Three sacrifices, for their three lives, just like Ileana had said.

  Hendricks pushed herself to her feet, her legs trembling beneath her. She saw movement behind the window of Brady’s nursery and remembered, suddenly horrified, that Eddie had gone upstairs to look for his lighter. She was pretty sure the rest of the party was outside by now, which meant he was alone in Steele House. Alone with the ghosts of the boys his mother had murdered.

  No, she thought, digging her fingernails into her palms. No . . .

  There was a sudden crash of thunder and, a second later, lightning lit up the sky. A breeze tore through the trees with a sound like rattling bones, and Hendricks flinched, feeling rain prick the top of her head, her shoulders, her cheeks.

  The rain came faster now, creating rivers in Hendricks’s backyard. The party devolved into chaos. People were leaping to their feet, laughing and shouting as they rushed for the house One kid finally reached the back door and frantically tried to pull it open, but it was locked.

  Connor and Raven and Portia had been dragged along with the crowd, but Connor stopped when he saw that Hendricks wasn’t following them.

  “Hendricks!” he shouted, squinting to find her in the confusion. “Come on!”

  She shook herself from her stupor, stumbled after him, and almost fell. There was a crunch beneath her sneakers. She looked down to see that the earth beneath her feet had begun to shift.

  Like something was trying to crawl up from the ground beneath her.

  She hurried faster, but it was too late. The ground writhed and moved. And then something poked up through the earth, wriggling like white worms. Hendricks stared for a long moment before she realized, with horror, what she was seeing.

  Fingers. Not the fingers of a living hand but the bony, decayed fingers of a long-buried skeleton. They were reaching up from the ground below her feet, grasping.

  And then they were whole hands, six of them, opening and closing like claws. One of the hands curled around Portia’s an
kle, dragging her, screaming, to the ground. Tears streamed down her face as she tried in vain to kick the hand away.

  Arms appeared next, and the tops of skulls. Then full skeletons were dragging themselves up from the mud. Their bones were glowing an eerie white in the erratic flashes of lightning. Bits of old clothes and half-rotted skin still clung to their skeletons. Maggots wriggled through their empty eye sockets. Their smiles were wide and gruesome.

  There were three of them.

  Hendricks’s heart dropped as a voice filled the night, seeming to leak out of the wind and creep up from the ground below her.

  ONE MORE.

  CHAPTER

  30

  Hendricks stood without moving as the decaying bodies crawled out of the ground around her.

  Eddie’s mother tortured and killed these boys, she realized with growing horror. All this time they’d been right here. Buried in her backyard.

  How many times had she walked over their bones without ever knowing they were there?

  Her mouth filled with the taste of something sour. Goose bumps climbed her arms.

  The three skeletons circled Hendricks, Portia, Connor, and Raven, forcing them into a tight huddle at the center of the yard. Portia was crying. Raven’s face was pale and pinched.

  “Holy shit,” Connor kept saying. “Holy shit.”

  The skeletons didn’t speak. But their yellow jaws snapped open and closed, gnashing broken teeth. They raised their bony arms in front of them, fingers twitching.

  One of the skeletons leapt for them. Raven screamed and stumbled back as Connor threw himself into the skeleton’s path. Hendricks felt a lift of hope as Connor began to wrestle the skeleton away from them. But it only bared a gruesome smile. It caught Connor by the shoulder and wrist, and then Hendricks heard a sickening snap as it wrenched his arm out of its socket.

  Connor dropped to his knees, the color draining from his skin. The skeleton didn’t let go of his arm—

  Another skeleton had grabbed Portia from behind, pinning her arms to her sides. She tried to scream, but it covered her mouth with its dead, decaying fingers. The sound came out muffled and hoarse. As Hendricks watched, frozen with fear, the skeleton sunk its broken teeth into Portia’s shoulder—

  And the third was dragging Raven to the ground, its fingers curled in her hair—

  Hendricks shrank back, her breath coming in harsh little gasps. Her instincts told her to run. But if she didn’t do something, and soon, all of her friends would die.

  The lights inside Steele House began to flicker. On and off. On and off.

  Through the windows, Hendricks could see the shapes of three ghosts moving through her living room. Her kitchen. Up the stairs to the second floor of her house. The smell of cologne was suddenly so strong that it burned the insides of her nostrils.

  Something came to her with a sudden, dawning clarity:

  All of this would be over once Steele House had its final sacrifice.

  Eddie, she thought. She couldn’t let Eddie die.

  She needed to give the house something else.

  Feeling like she was in a dream, Hendricks tore past the skeletons, her legs trembling beneath her. She crossed the yard and pulled the back door open with a screech of hinges that sent a shiver straight down her spine.

  You can’t save him.

  The buzzing she’d heard earlier was louder now. It rattled her bones and made her skin creep.

  Hendricks stepped inside, and the door moved on its own, whizzing out of her hand and slamming shut behind her. The walls trembled.

  She felt a scream rise in her throat. She swallowed it down, worried that the house would hear her, and hurriedly tried to open the door again. She couldn’t. It was locked.

  The kitchen flickered in and out of focus. It reminded Hendricks of a faulty light bulb, except the house itself changed. The familiar walls and furniture of her family home blinked out and, underneath, Hendricks saw a different house. An older house.

  It was empty, and rotten, with moldy floorboards. Words had been scrawled across the walls in something that looked an awful lot like blood. SLUT. LOSER. WHORE. Hendricks shivered, reading them.

  Somewhere in the dark, someone began to laugh, the sound causing fear to drop through her like a stone. She felt a tickle at her ankles and screamed, jerking backward.

  A cat wove between her legs, mewing.

  “Poor Saggy Maggie . . . What are you going to do about it . . . ? You going to cry?”

  The voice was like a radio signal fading in and out. Hendricks felt weak with terror.

  The lights flickered back on, and the kitchen looked normal again. Gone were the moldy floorboards, the mewing cat, the words painted across the walls in blood. In its place was the house Hendricks knew. Boxes stacked in the corner and freshly painted drywall and the gently rustling plastic curtain. The buzzing sound had stopped, too, and in the sudden quiet Hendricks could make out the sound of Eddie’s strained, strangled voice echoing down the stairs.

  “Please, no, please don’t! Oh God!”

  Hendricks drew a long, sobbing breath. She raced for the stairs. But each step she took forward made her more aware of the friends she was leaving behind.

  I’m doing this for them, she told herself. Once she gave the house its sacrifice, the ghosts would leave for good.

  She pushed the curtain back—

  YOU CAN’T SAVE HIM.

  With a sudden bang! every single window in Steele House shattered. Glass filled the air, twinkling like diamonds.

  And then it began to fall, cutting into Hendricks’s face, slicing her arms. With a shriek, she threw her hands over her head, trying to protect herself.

  Rain rushed into the house in a torrential flood. It poured in from the second-story windows and cascaded down the stairs, sweeping Hendricks’s feet out from beneath her. She fell to her knees, one hand grasping for the bannister. She knew that if she let go, the rain would sweep her away.

  The house didn’t want her to reach Eddie. It would do everything it could to keep her from getting to him.

  As soon as the thought entered her head, the walls around her burst into flame. The paint bubbled and caught, and fire raced up the stairs and leapt to the second floor, where it quickly consumed the plastic curtains, the drywall, the bare wooden beams of the walls. The hall and staircase filled with smoke.

  Coughing, Hendricks dragged herself back to her feet. The flames were still low enough that the heat wasn’t burning her, but she knew how fast fire spread. She needed to get Eddie out of there now, before the whole house came down.

  Ash and blood rained down around her in equal measure, making it impossible to see more than a few feet in front of her. The blood was past her knees now and growing higher with every second. Glass floated on the surface, reflecting the firelight dancing over the stairwell’s walls.

  Hendricks kept moving. It took all of her energy to force her feet up the stairs, to keep moving.

  The smoke made her dizzy and left her eyes clouded and itchy. She grew light-headed and fuzzy. Her knees knocked together, and then gave out entirely. As Hendricks’s breath stopped, pure panic took over.

  This is it, she thought, the last of the energy leaving her body. This is how I die.

  The flames around her danced higher, but Hendricks’s eyesight grew darker, darker, darker.

  And then everything went black.

  * * *

  • • •

  When Hendricks awoke she was lying on her stomach in Brady’s nursery. The floor was warm beneath her cheek and her head pounded, like someone had struck her with something heavy. The fire hadn’t reached this floor yet, but the air was thick with smoke.

  She choked, and tried to roll over, but there was a pressure on her back, like knees driving into her spine. Her arms had been wrenched behind her, and sh
e felt fingers moving, twisting thick, coarse rope around her wrists.

  “Don’t move,” said a deep voice. Hendricks lifted her head, and whoever—or whatever—was on her back gave her wrists a violent jerk, sending pain flaring up her arms and through her shoulders. “I said don’t move.”

  Hendricks tried to say okay, but there was something covering her mouth. She worked her lips up and down, recognizing the stickiness and the strange, almost vinyl texture. Duct tape.

  The pressure released from her back. She tried to inhale, but the smoke was too thick. It coated her nostrils, making her feel sick. She turned her head.

  Through the smoke, she could just make out Eddie lying a few feet away, curled on his side. His eyes were wide and horrified over the duct tape covering his mouth.

  Two of the boys stood over him. They were so good-looking, Hendricks realized. Just like their photographs in the yearbook. Their skin was clear and unblemished. Their hair was tangled, but still thick and shiny, one of them a brunette, the other blond. Hendricks could easily picture them being friends with Grayson and the other soccer guys back at her old school. Except for the fact that they were dead.

  She couldn’t say for certain how she knew they were dead. They looked alive, at least at first glance. But if she studied them a little closer she thought she could see something pulsing in their eyes, something writhing and wriggling beneath their skin. Something that hinted at decay.

  In fact, the longer she stared, the more clearly she could picture maggots pushing through their cheeks, mold growing up over their hair, teeth and nails yellowing, curling, rotting away . . .

  As Hendricks watched, the third boy crossed the room, joining them. He didn’t look as alive as the other two. His face was hollow-eyed, his black teeth bared in a gruesome smile, his lips thin and bleeding. There was a pair of scissors in his hands.

  “You can’t save him,” he said, his voice a deep rasp.

  And then he knelt beside Eddie, yanking his head off the ground. Hendricks struggled to scream, but the duct tape kept her from uttering a sound.