The Haunting

by Alex Bell

  The only light in the room came from the glow of Jay’s mobile phone, still on the table between us. I looked at it and saw the planchette fly over to number nine and then start counting down through the numbers. When it got to zero, someone in the café screamed, a high, piercing screech that went on and on.

  Cold clammy fingers curled around mine as Jay took my hand in the darkness and squeezed it tight. I could hear chairs scraping on the floor as people stood up, demanding to know what was happening. More children started to cry, and I could hear glasses and things breaking as people tried to move around in the dark and ended up bumping into tables. And above it all was the piercing sound of a woman crying hysterically, as if something really awful was happening to her.

  I let go of Jay’s hand and twisted round in my seat, straining my eyes into the darkness, desperately trying to make sense of what was happening. Now that my eyes had adjusted, I could just make out the silhouettes of some of the other people in the café with us – plain black shapes, like shadow puppets dancing on a wall.

  But one of them was taller than all the others, impossibly tall, and I realized that whoever it was must be standing on one of the tables. They weren’t moving, not at all. Everyone else in the café was moving, even if only turning their heads this way and that, but this person stood completely stock-still. I couldn’t even tell if I was looking at their back or their front – they were just staring straight ahead, arms by their sides.

  “Do you see that?” I said, but my voice got lost amongst all the others. I stood up and took half a step forwards, staring through the shadows. I could just make out the outline of long hair and a skirt. It was a girl standing on the table in the middle of all this chaos. No one else seemed to have noticed her.

  “Jay—” I began, turning back towards him at the exact moment his mobile phone died. The screen light flickered and then went off. At the same time, the café lights came back on. I spun back round to look at the table where the girl had been standing, but there was no one there. The table was empty.

  “Did you see her?” I asked Jay.

  “See who?”

  I stared around for the girl in a skirt, but there was no sign of her.

  Anyone would think there’d been an earthquake or something. There was broken china and glass all over the floor of the café, many of the chairs had fallen over and a couple of tables had overturned.

  “Who was that screaming?” people were saying.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Is someone hurt?”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “Oh my God, someone’s been burnt!”

  Bill, the owner, had led one of the waitresses out from the kitchen. She must have been the one who’d screamed in the dark. She was still sobbing and it was obvious why – all the way up her right side she was covered in burns. Her hand, arm, shoulder and the right side of her face were completely covered in a mess of red and black bleeding flesh, so charred that it was hard to believe it had once been normal skin. Her hair was still smoking and the smell made me want to gag.

  I heard someone on their phone calling an ambulance as other people moved forward, asking what had happened.

  “I don’t know,” Bill said. He’d gone completely white. “I don’t know how it happened. When the lights went out, she must have tripped or something. I think… I think she must have fallen against the deep-fat fryer…”

  I could feel the blood pounding in my ears and turned back round to Jay. Wordlessly, he held up his mobile phone for me to see. From the top of the screen to the bottom there was a huge crack running all the way down the glass.

  “Did you… Did you drop it?” I asked.

  But Jay just shook his head.

  The ambulance arrived soon after that and took the weeping girl away.

  “In all the years this place has been open we’ve never had an accident like this,” I heard Bill say. “Never.”

  Bill went to the hospital with the girl and the café closed early. Everyone filed away, going out to their cars and driving off. Soon, Jay and I were the only ones left. Normally, he would have cycled home and I would have waited by myself for my mum to pick me up but, today, Jay said he would wait with me, and I was grateful to him for that.

  “Thanks,” I said. “And thanks for holding my hand when the lights went out.”

  He gave me a sharp look. “I didn’t hold your hand.”

  A prickly feeling started to creep over my skin. “Yes, you did.”

  “Sophie, I didn’t. You must have… You must have imagined it. It was pretty crazy in there.”

  I thought of those cold fingers curling around mine and shook my head. “Someone was definitely holding my hand when it went dark,” I said. “And if it wasn’t you, then who was it?”