The Unleashed

by Danielle Vega

She scooted her body down the length of the tub, bending her knees until she could lay her head and shoulders down on the bottom. Hot water rushed up over her cheeks. She released a sigh that sent a trail of tiny bubbles up toward the surface. Better.

  She’d gotten good at holding her breath over the years. There was something so peaceful about being underwater. The water acted as a strange lens, distorting everything in the bathroom. Some things seemed strangely close, others far away. Hendricks blinked, staring up at the ceiling above her. The only thing she could hear was her own heart beating in her ears.

  And then, out of nowhere, Ileana’s advice about the séance drifted through her head.

  A conduit is someone who exists on both planes.

  Hendricks blinked. She was starting to feel a little light-headed. She’d have to come up for air soon.

  But . . . what did Ileana mean by that? Anyone on both planes?

  She’d said they could use Raven because she was in a coma. But she’d also said that someone practiced in lucid dreaming or transcendental meditation could be the conduit as well.

  Hendricks could feel her eyesight growing dim. Her head felt hot and full of air, a balloon about to burst. She reached out from under the water and gripped the side of the tub. But she didn’t pull herself out.

  How close would she have to come to death to act as a conduit? she wondered. Would she have to pass out?

  Or would it be enough if she just got a little dizzy?

  Hendricks dug her fingers into the plastic. Her toes curled into the bottom of the tub. Her chest was tight, her lungs raw, but still she didn’t come up for air.

  Talk to me, Eddie.

  The muscles in her arms clenched tight. It took all the strength she had to hold herself under water as the oxygen drained from her brain. Her body began to shake.

  Come on. Talk to me.

  She became vaguely aware that her vision was narrowing. The edges of her eyesight had dimmed to black, and all she could see was the slow rise and fall of the surface of water directly above her. The rest of the world had faded away. It was like it didn’t exist.

  Her grip on the side of the tub began to weaken. She was losing strength.

  Was it possible to drown in a bathtub? Hendricks had a sudden vision of how it would happen, almost like she’d floated out of her body and was watching from the ceiling.

  She imagined how her eyes would lose focus, like Eddie’s eyes had. How they would glaze over, and then go still as the last of the life drained from her body. Her fingers—still grasping the sides of the tub so tightly—would relax, her arms slithering back into the tub to come to rest at her sides—

  Distantly, Hendricks thought she heard a snatch of music, some old eighties song.

  Maybe I’m just too . . . maybe I’m . . .

  It was man’s voice, deep and urgent, the fast beat making her heart speed up.

  The light hanging from the bathroom ceiling above flicked twice.

  Off.

  On.

  The water in the tub seemed to chill and Hendricks saw a thin film of ice crawl across the surface. She caught movement at the corner of her eye, a flicker of white, and had the sudden sensation that she was no longer alone in the bathroom. There was someone standing in the opposite corner, behind her. Watching her. She felt like they—or it—was coming closer. Closer. Hendricks jerked underwater. She felt paralyzed, like when caught between a dream and waking.

  A far-off scream ripped through the night, and Hendricks felt her paralysis release. She sat up, gasping for breath. She saw something twitch on the other side of the room and whipped her head around, her heart leaping into her throat. But it was just the mirror on the back of the bathroom door, reflecting her own movements back to her.

  A relieved breath escaped her lips. She was alone.

  The water in the tub was cold now, and Hendricks was trembling. She pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, trying to catch her breath. Her lungs felt rubbed raw, and tears had sprung to her eyes. Every breath was fire. Her heartbeat was so loud in her ears that she could barely hear anything past it.

  And then, Hendricks heard it again. That terrible scream.

  She stood, dripping, just as the screaming stopped. Her nerves twitched. It sounded like it had come from next door.

  Portia lived next door.

  She grabbed her bathrobe, pulled it on, and yanked the bathroom door open. Water trailed down her legs as she raced down the hall. Her feet left wet footprints behind her.

  “Hendricks, honey, what’s wrong?” her mother called as Hendricks darted past her and out the front door.

  It was cold outside, and windy. Hendricks had to grip her robe tightly around herself to keep it from flapping open. Goose bumps shot up her legs. She raced down the stone steps, fighting back a shiver when her foot hit cool, damp dirt. But she didn’t slow down.

  Portia started screaming, again.

  “Portia!” Hendricks raced up the steps to Portia’s house and banged on the front door. When no one answered, she tried the door—Portia often joked about how no one locked their doors around here—and it turned easily beneath her fingers. Thank God. She raced down the hall to Portia’s bedroom.

  Portia was sitting upright in bed, her eyes wide and rimmed with red. She was shaking.

  “Portia?” Hendricks climbed onto Portia’s bed and grabbed her by the shoulders. Portia turned to look at Hendricks full on, her eyes focusing on her face.

  Hendricks froze. A bruise was already starting to blossom along one side of Portia’s face. It was massive, an ugly purplish yellow spreading across her cheekbone and down toward her chin. And cutting straight through the bruise was what looked like a knife slash. A two-inch-long gash, the edges starting to pucker, bleeding so badly that there was already blood crusted in Portia’s hair and along the bottom of her jaw.

  Hendricks felt a sudden dip in her gut. “Portia . . . Oh my God, what happened?”

  Portia blinked, only just seeming to notice that Hendricks was there. She lifted a hand to her face, cringing. “It was Eddie. I—I felt him. He . . . he cut me.”

  Throat dry, Hendricks asked, “Eddie?”

  “He was here,” Portia said, her lower lip trembling. “Hendricks . . . he tried to kill me.”

  CHAPTER

  9

  Portia refused to sleep in her own room that night. She snuck out her window and curled up on Hendricks’s floor, answering her questions with numb, one-word answers until the two of them finally fell asleep.

  He was here. He tried to kill me.

  Those words echoed through Hendricks’s head all night, and all through school the next day, distracting her from the equations she was supposed to be memorizing in algebra, the lecture on African countries in geography, and the inedible lasagna they were serving at lunch. Hendricks knew what those words meant obviously, but she couldn’t get them to come together in a logical way. Why would Eddie visit Portia?

  If he’d really come back, wouldn’t he visit her?

  Eventually, she found herself back in the gym with the rest of the prom committee, balanced on top of an old wooden ladder, covered in glitter. She and Portia were constructing a selfie wall out of netting, streamers, and cardboard fish, and Hendricks’s fingers were already a mess of paper cuts. Usually she wouldn’t mind. She’d always enjoyed working with her hands, and there was something satisfying about seeing the results of her labor pay off immediately. Paper cuts plus sore arm muscles equaled awesome selfie wall.

  Or, at least, the work would have been satisfying if she’d been able to focus on what she was doing.

  “I still don’t understand,” Hendricks said finally, giving up on a streamer she’d been trying to untangle. “How do you know Eddie was the one who cut you? It sounds like you didn’t actually see him.”

  “Hav
en’t we been over this, like, twenty-five times?” Portia grumbled. “I didn’t see anything but I felt, like, a presence. And then the room got really cold.” She lifted her hand, absently fumbling with the Hello Kitty bandages she’d plastered across her face. She’d managed to cover the knife wound, but the bruise was still visible around the edges, deep purple and angry. “I could feel something on the edge of my bed, and then I heard a noise, and I woke up and that’s when I felt it. Him.” Portia gave a sudden, hard shudder. “It was awful.”

  Hendricks thought of the shadow she’d seen climb out of the foundation of Steele House. It didn’t have any defining features. It was just a shape, a darkness. It could’ve been anyone. “I still don’t get how you know it was Eddie?”

  Portia turned to her, blinking. “What do you mean, you don’t get how I know it was him? We just did a séance to raise him from the dead. Who else would it be?”

  Hendricks didn’t know how to answer this, so she shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it was a dream?”

  Portia shot Hendricks a deeply annoyed look. “How could a dream do this?” she asked, gesturing to the bandage on her face. “Besides, do you really think I would’ve screamed like that over a dream?” She sniffed, muttering, “Give me a little credit.”

  “I’m sorry, it’s just that . . . this doesn’t make any sense. Why would Eddie come to you?” Hendricks’s voice cracked on the word you. She wouldn’t have admitted it out loud, but this was the part she was having the most trouble understanding. Her cheeks blazed. She added, “I mean, you barely even spoke to him when he was alive, right?”

  Portia nodded, but she was looking past Hendricks now, staring into space. A laugh erupted from the other side of the gym, where two dozen kids were painstakingly constructing a twelve-foot-tall cruise ship out of papier-mâché and glitter.

  When Portia spoke again, her voice sounded small. “I, like, made fun of him and stuff,” she said. Guilt flickered in her eyes. “You remember, right? That night at the pizza place?”

  Hendricks nodded. She remembered. One of the first times she’d ever hung out with Raven and Portia and Connor was at this pizza place on Main Street, Tony’s. Eddie had come in to pick up some food to go. Raven and Portia had been pretty vicious.

  Hendricks swallowed. Whenever she thought of that night, she felt a fresh rush of shame. She hadn’t stuck up for him. She’d been too embarrassed, desperate to get her new friends to like her. She wished there was a way she could go back and rewrite what had happened. She would’ve done things so differently.

  “That wasn’t the only time something like that happened,” Portia admitted. “Eddie knew we didn’t like him. Maybe . . . maybe he’s trying to get revenge.”

  “Eddie wasn’t like that,” Hendricks said.

  “How do you know?”

  “What do you mean, how do I know? I knew him.”

  Portia didn’t look so convinced. “Look, I get that you guys were . . . involved or whatever, but Hendricks, you only knew him for, what? A month? I’ve known him my whole life.”

  Hendricks opened her mouth and then closed it, again. She didn’t know what to say. The idea that she might not know Eddie as well as she’d thought she did upset her more than she’d liked to admit. She thought of telling Portia about how Eddie had told her about Valentina, the little sister he’d never had, or how much he hated this town, or how his mother used to tell him he should make wishes on tears instead of eyelashes. They were such small things, but they all added up to a person who was so different than the Eddie that Portia had known.

  “I knew him,” Hendricks said again. “I might not have known him my whole life, like you did, but I can tell you for sure that Eddie wouldn’t try to hurt you just because you made some stupid jokes. He wasn’t that kind of person.”

  “Except that he’s not a person anymore, is he?” Portia reminded her. She had the streamers balled up in both hands, and now she was twisting them anxiously. “Ileana said he could come back . . . different, remember? Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe dying, like, made him turn evil?”

  Hendricks chewed on her lip. She’d had this same thought, of course. Ileana’s warning had been tumbling through her head all last night, all day today. And whenever Hendricks closed her eyes, she saw that strange shadow crawl up from the Steele House foundation, she felt the drone of wasps surround her, and she wondered: What, exactly, had they brought back?

  Anger knotted up her chest, but she wasn’t sure who, or what she was angry with.

  “I need to pee,” she said. If she didn’t take a second to catch her breath, she worried she might lash out.

  “Take your time,” Portia muttered.

  Hendricks blinked at her. “Are you mad at me?” She sounded pissed.

  Portia sighed. “No. I don’t know. You just keep asking me what happened, but when I tell you, you don’t believe me.” She touched her bandage, cringing. “I’d rather not relive this whole thing again and again because you think I was having a bad dream.”

  “I’m just trying to figure this thing out,” she said.

  “No, you don’t want to believe Eddie was behind it,” Portia shot back.

  Hendricks stared. She knew Portia was pretty freaked and that was why she was lashing out, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to make nice. Portia hadn’t even seen the ghost. The only reason she was insisting it was Eddie was because she hadn’t liked him. Hendricks didn’t think it was too much to expect a little proof.

  She sucked a breath in through her teeth and tried one last time to keep the peace. “I feel like you’re not listening to me,” she said, once again using the “I feel” language they’d been taught at CTE.

  Portia didn’t look up from the streamers she was detangling. “And I feel like you should just head home,” she said stiffly. “We don’t really need your help here anymore.”

  “I don’t want to fight.” Hendricks dropped the streamers she’d been knotting together. “But if you want me gone, I’m gone.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The clock in the school hall was broken, the hour hand pointing at the nine, the minute hand twitching between the four and the five.

  Hendricks glanced at it as she rounded the corner to the bathroom, a frown touching her lips, but before her brain could process why she thought it was odd, her eyes settled on a group of girls huddled beside the bathroom door.

  A rush of relief. It embarrassed her how grateful she was to see them there, but ever since the morning all the lights went out, she’d been nervous about being in the school halls alone. The muscles in her shoulders relaxed slightly as she walked past them.

  She recognized them, she realized. They were the girls from prom committee, the rude ones who’d huddled on the bleachers, ignoring Portia. Hendricks’s relief turned to annoyance. Why weren’t they in the gym now?

  “We could use some help with the selfie wall,” Hendricks muttered, as she reached for the bathroom door.

  The head of the group seemed to be a girl in an oversize, pale pink jean jacket. She was facing away from Hendricks, but something about her reminded Hendricks of Portia, how Portia seemed to command whatever group she was in. The girl twitched at the sound of Hendricks’s voice, but she didn’t turn around.

  Whatever, Hendricks thought, rolling her eyes. She pulled the bathroom door open—

  She barely had time to register the sudden rush of footsteps and the blur of a boy running past before something flew through the air and bit into her arms. The girls around her shrieked and scattered.

  Hendricks flinched, reacting seconds too late. The boy must’ve thrown something at them. She heard the rattling sound of dozens of tiny objects, like pebbles, scattering across the floor.

  “Oh my God,” said one of the girls, horrified. “They’re . . . they’re teeth.”

  Teeth? Hendricks opened
her mouth soundlessly as her eyes landed on a tiny object lying on the ground near her shoe. It was yellowish and crescent-shaped and viciously pointed. One edge was rimmed in blood, and something thick and pink that might have been flesh. It looked like it had only just been pulled from a mouth.

  Hendricks covered her mouth with one hand. Her stomach flipped over.

  It was a tooth, she realized, but not a human one.

  It looked like it belonged to a rat.

  Hendricks looked back at the girls, but they didn’t move. Their faces were pale with fear and frozen. Were they just going to let that creep get away with this?

  “Hey!” Hendricks ran, darting down the hall and around the corner, after the boy. “Hey, what the—”

  She slammed right into Connor, who stumbled back a few steps. “Whoa, hey what the hell?”

  “Sorry.” Hendricks recovered quickly and rose to her toes, trying to see past him. “What happened to that guy who just ran down here?”

  “What guy?” Connor said, frowning.

  Hendricks blinked at him. Something cold moved through her. She took a few steps back and checked around the corner. The girls were gone, the floors where they’d been standing clean.

  No rat teeth, no blood.

  The floor tilted below her. Had the girls been there at all? Had any of that—the boy, the teeth, the screaming—actually happened?

  Her eyes flicked up. Now the clock above the bathroom read 4:10. Just like it was supposed to.

  Behind her, Connor cleared his throat. “Hendricks? You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Hendricks said absently. She felt like her brain was moving slower than it was supposed to, struggling to catch up with what was actually happening. She lifted a hand to her head. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “I was actually about to come find you,” Connor said. “I heard from Mr. Jenson that they’re starting to do sign-ups for the fall musical. Not just cast, but crew and construction and stuff, if you’re still interested in that. We usually start building the set over the summer.”