by K. F. Breene
“Whoa, Scarlet, dial it back,” I said. She’d never been overly found of Odis, but this was taking it a step too far.
“Ella?”
That deep voice cut right through me. I stepped forward without meaning to, then my feet just kept on going until I almost shoved Buffy out of the way to get to Braiden.
“What’s going on?” I asked, stopping by his side.
He turned his focus back to the mansion. “You shouldn’t have come, Ella. It’s not safe for you here—”
“It’s not safe for any of us here.”
“But…at this point…I don’t know if turning back is an option.” He jerked his chin toward the house.
I followed his gaze and saw it immediately. My startled gasp had Scarlet hurrying over.
“What is it?” she asked, huddled by my side.
“Did she see something?” someone whispered behind us.
“Shhh.”
A pixie-like little girl sat in one of the rocking chairs on the porch, her little legs dangling. Stringy hair draped around her thin face and a ruffled dress covered her slight frame. She was almost totally translucent. If it weren’t for Braiden pointing her out, I would’ve missed her, as had everyone behind me.
“That is freaking creepy,” Scarlet said, clutching my arm. “Come on, Ella.” She pulled at my sweater. “Let’s leave Odis to his new friends.”
The little girl on the porch scooted to the end of the chair and hopped off before disappearing into nothing.
“Did you see that?” someone said. I saw a pointed finger in my peripheral vision. “Look! The chair is moving.”
Lights clicked on and beams found the chairs on the porch, the one on the left slightly rocking.
“Ha!” the girl said triumphantly.
“That could’ve been the wind,” someone said.
“Turn the lights off! Do you want the whole neighborhood to know we’re here?” Dirk said.
The flashlights clicked off one by one and the group at large shifted and settled down.
Warmth continued to fill the air, leading to the sticky suffocation I’d felt earlier. Clouds drifted out of the sky, releasing the moon and stars. Insects started to sing, softly at first, then in a loud, monotonous whine.
“What’s going on?” The light from the full moon showered Maria as she hugged herself, looking at the sky.
“I told you it wasn’t going to storm.” DJ, the quarterback of the football team and built like a brick, pushed forward.
“Okay, but…I don’t remember it being a full moon,” Maria said.
“It was,” someone in the back answered confidently, and it sounded like Shana.
“No, it—”
“Let’s look around.” DJ glanced behind him at the distant street beyond the grounds. Seeing the all-clear, he mounted the stairs to the porch, making his way slowly and testing each footfall. Boards creaked under his weight.
“Be careful,” a pretty girl with long hair said. I didn’t recognize her from school.
“The wood isn’t rotted.” DJ carefully took the handle on the front door and paused.
We all leaned in a little, waiting with bated breath.
He pulled his hand back slowly and looked upward.
“What is it?” Emily asked.
“It’s locked.” DJ moved aside. He peered in through the dark window before cupping his hand near his eyes to block out the light.
“What light is he trying to block out?” Scarlet muttered.
“You seem awfully interested for someone who wants to get out of here,” Odis said.
“I didn’t say I wasn’t interested in this mansion, I just said that Ella shouldn’t be here. Well, none of us should be. But since she won’t budge, I might as well be a participant.”
“Wow, you two talk a lot,” someone murmured.
“We use words instead of grunts, yes,” Scarlet said. “They take longer, but are infinitely more helpful.”
“Doesn’t seem like it to me.”
DJ turned from the porch. “It’s all dark in there. I don’t see anything.”
“It’s a vacant house. Did you expect to see a party or something?” Buffy asked with snark in her voice.
DJ stared at her for a moment, straight-faced, before stepping off the porch and heading toward the side.
“See?” the guy at the back said. “He didn’t say a word, and Buffy knows exactly where he wants her to shove it.”
“Shut up, Carl,” Buffy said.
I racked my brain to place “Carl.” A baseball player, I thought. I didn’t have him in any of my classes. Maybe he was the one who kept getting suspended from the team because he couldn’t maintain the two-point-oh grade point average. Which didn’t bode well for the combined brainpower in this gathering.
“What should we do?” one of the girls asked Buffy. “Should we follow?”
“I’m going to.” The pretty girl hurried after DJ. The rest drifted slowly after them.
Braiden continued to stare at the house.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You were right, Ella. I was a fool for thinking this could be solved by waltzing in and telling the entity to leave you alone. I can feel the badness of this place. Like a black pit. It’s worse than anywhere else I’ve seen in this town. Worse than that mill.”
“You’re admitting I was right?” I snickered. “I didn’t think guys like you admitted to things like that.”
“Only with you.” The moonlight illuminated his crooked grin. He reached up to trace his free thumb along my lips. “What should we do, Fella? How do we keep you safe?”
“I stay in my house when the Old Woman comes around, and you stay in yours. Did you hear that? You stay in yours. Don’t go trying to banish her, either. That doesn’t work around this town.”
“Yes it does.”
“What’s that?”
“Banishing. Of course it works.” He gave me a funny look. “Haven’t you told the entities in your house to leave?” He leaned down a little and turned me so my face was in the light. “Tell me you have told the spirits trapped in your house to leave. Because that is ghost hunting one-oh-one.”
“You’re a ghost hunter?” Scarlet asked, having stayed beside us even though Odis had tentatively crossed the distance to the others.
“I watch a lot of those shows. Anything paranormal, actually. It has always fascinated me. Now I know why.”
“Why?” Scarlet inched closer. “Because you can sense them?”
He shook his head a little and his hand flattened against the side of my neck, but he didn’t comment.
“I’ve told them to leave, yes,” I said. “And some of them do, but the guy in my room doesn’t care what I tell him.”
Braiden’s head tilted. “Really?”
“Oh yes, nothing is normal where it concerns Ella and this stuff,” Scarlet said matter-of-factly.
Braiden dug something out of his pocket, a tubular shape about a palm’s length. “I brought a smudge stick. It was the best I could find on short notice. I was hoping it would help.”
“A smudge stick?” Scarlet edged forward to look. “Do you know the ritual to go with it?”
Braiden glanced at her before putting the small bundle back in his pocket. “The smoke and telling the spirits to go should be enough.”
Scarlet huffed and turned away. “Confidence is one thing, but delusion is a different thing entirely. Oh hey, they’re going around the corner. Should we follow them? I mean, we should either follow them or head home. The only way people don’t get killed in horror movies when they split up is if someone actually goes home. They are always the rescue party. I’d like to be the rescue party.”
Braiden dropped his hand. “What do you say, Fella?” he teased. “Should we head home and check out your room?”
Odis stuck his head out from around the corner. “You guys, DJ found an open window! They’re going in!”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Braiden an
d I both reacted, though very differently—I took a few quick steps in Odis’s direction, and Braiden tugged me back.
“Ella,” he said in warning.
Scarlet stalled ten feet away and hunched, clearly guilty that she’d been about to sprint off with the others—and excited and scared and, most of all, desperate to sate her curiosity after hearing stories about this place all her life. I knew exactly how she felt. The house had a strange sort of draw. It pulled in a way that was hard to communicate. I often wondered if people in the town honestly didn’t believe in the paranormal, or if they just couldn’t seem to escape the pull of the house, and therefore ignored the strange happenings to keep some sort of sanity. When you were trapped, you tended to make the best of it.
Here, right beside it, that pull intensified until it was almost a suction, dragging us closer.
“Right,” I said, stilling. “We should take a moment and think this through.”
“Are you guys coming?” Odis called.
Braiden glanced at the sky. “Nothing has changed since we’ve been standing here. If we leave now, maybe nothing else will change. Maybe they’ll just check out a haunted old house and head back to school on Monday with stories of what they found.”
“And how cowardly you were,” Scarlet said. She put up her hands. “That should be mentioned. Otherwise it’ll be a surprise when everyone laughs at you, and you’ll vehemently blame Ella. I’ve seen it before.”
“That’s probably true,” I muttered. “There have been a few examples.”
“Let’s go,” Odis called. “They aren’t going to wait forever.”
“A man is never cowardly for leaving his friends to go spend time with a woman. Especially a woman as beautiful as you.” Braiden squeezed my hand.
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Scarlet said. “Her black cloud of weird eclipses her appearance, trust me. Now, if you went away with Buffy—”
“Scarlet, don’t help,” I cut in.
“Right. Sorry. I’m hungry.” She rubbed her stomach. “It affects my communication filter.”
“I think Braiden knows that by now,” I said dryly.
“So what do we do?” Braiden asked.
I shifted from side to side, thinking. Feeling the pull of the house. The electricity in the air.
“We really should go home,” I said.
“We should.” Scarlet bit her lip.
“The push and pull in the air is getting more extreme,” I said.
“The push and pull is getting more extreme, yes,” Scarlet agreed. “I feel it, too.”
“It is only a matter of time before something bad happens,” I said. “Or we see something we really wish we hadn’t.”
“Or the Old Woman steps out of her house and sees you right at her doorstep, easy for the taking.” Scarlet crossed her arms.
“On the other hand, we don’t actually have to go in.”
“We could take a look without actually crossing the threshold.” Scarlet nodded.
Braiden shifted, and I could just make out a smile at our antics.
“It’s still relatively early as far as the Old Woman is concerned,” I said. “And there isn’t that much electricity in the air…”
“We still have a while,” Scarlet confirmed.
“And I have always wondered what the inside of this magnificent house looks like…”
“It is a pretty cool old house, despite the malignant feel of it. Worst case, we just peer in a window. Nothing bad ever came from peering in a window…”
“If anything changes, I’ll sense it right away, and we can make a run for it. A Corvette is super fast. No ghost would be able to keep up.”
“And we are super fast, when running for our lives.”
“Right.” I nodded. Then shook my head. “No, this is crazy. We should go.”
But when Odis called out to us again, something came over me. A need so extreme it blotted out my thoughts. Shut down my logic.
I was walking after him without registering the desire to move. “Just a look,” I heard myself say, losing grip of my self-control. This house had loomed over my life for as long as I could remember. Maybe it was time to face my fear. Maybe Braiden really could help.
Or maybe it already had me in its clutches.
“Are you sure about this, Ella?” Braiden asked, by my side. I half wondered if he could read my mind.
“Do you feel the urge to go in?” I looked up at the old house, at the windows staring down at us. It was so massive and forbidding, stoic on its big hill. But under that, something about it sang to me. Beckoned me and called me into its depths. It was like the Old Woman herself, singing me a lullaby. I’d resisted for so long, but part of me had always been eager to heed her call. And now, this close…
“Yes,” Braiden whispered. “But I’m at war with my internal logic. It feels like this is the way to end this. Like I need to go in there and confront the entity that has a grip on you. But when I actually think about it, the idea seems preposterous. All of this seems preposterous. Yet…here I am, desperate to go inside and wage war.”
“With what, the Old Woman?” Scarlet asked.
He shook his head helplessly and entwined his fingers with mine. “That’s just it. I have no idea. I don’t know what possessed me to come here. I can’t be the only one who’s tried to banish her. It seemed like such a good idea until you started talking sense.”
“Scarlet is good at talking sense,” I murmured.
“It’s a buzzkill superpower if ever there was one .” Scarlet pursed her lips.
Odis waved us on, his movements jerky, before disappearing behind the corner. We were there a moment later, striding down the side of the house. A mosquito whined next to my ear and I waved it off. Scarlet slapped the side of her head, then pulled her hand away and tried to see the damage. It was too dark to see little insect bodies, though. She wiped her hands on her jeans.
“I wonder if the others have realized that it is too late in the year for insects to be out,” Braiden asked. “Too cold, too.”
“It isn’t too cold at the moment,” Scarlet answered. “That’s all they’ll probably think about. If they were going to apply logic to any of this, they would’ve done it already.”
“The mansion has them distracted,” Braiden said. “Has us all distracted.”
“That’s a nice way to get around commenting on their intelligence,” Scarlet said. “Although, being that we’re in the same boat as them, it is a moment for self-reflection, I’ll tell you that much.”
“You need to start carrying a bar of chocolate or some nuts with you, Scarlet,” I whispered. “This lack of a filter issue is getting out of hand.”
“There they are.” Braiden pointed.
About halfway down the side of the mansion, the others were gathered around a window. Because of the slope of the land and how the house was situated, the bottom windowsill was at about chest height. DJ had pushed it up and had both hands on the sill, looking in.
“What is it?” Emily asked, wringing her hands.
“I thought I saw something moving in there,” DJ said.
Dirk shoved his hands in his pockets and took a step back. He caught sight of us, but his expression didn’t change. He was apparently tired of telling me to get lost. Then again, with Scarlet and Odis crashing the party, maybe he felt there were just too many of us to chase away.
“What was it?” Buffy asked anxiously, then cleared her throat and fixed her hair. She shrugged. “I doubt it was anything.”
“Nice cover.” Cliff chuckled darkly and stepped closer to DJ. “Need a boost?”
I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. A flicker. A moment later, I made out a door tucked into the wall down the way, deeper than a normal door would be. Moving closer, I realized why: this portion of the house was all odd angles and slopes, the architecture looking like a patch job at best.
“This probably used to be the carriage house,” Braiden said, looking around.
Something about the door drew my notice. It wasn’t the look of it, though, it was the feel. A heaviness exuded from it—the kind of amped-up air density that always seemed to accompany the paranormal. More so than the rest of the house (at the moment), this door called to me. Begged me to check it out and see what, or who, was behind it.
“Through here,” I said softly, inching closer to Braiden. “It’s through here.”
“What is?” Cliff hastened over and DJ paused in his attempt to get in the window. “What’s through there, Fella? You sniff something out with your Spidey sense?”
“Spider-Man doesn’t have an extra-keen sense of smell,” Scarlet said dryly. “And he doesn’t combat ghosts.”
“Did you try the handle?” DJ stalked up, not an ounce of fear in him. He stopped beside us, clearly giving us the right of way. But after a moment of inactivity, he cut in front and grabbed the handle.
My belly fluttered. Before he turned the rusted, mottled knob, I already knew two things—it would fully turn, and a moment later, the door would swing inward.
The gasp of the crowd punctuated exactly that sequence of events.
“Ta-da,” DJ said triumphantly.
Everyone pushed forward to see through the wide-open door.
“I guess you were wrong about that Spidey sense, weren’t you, Super Brain?” Cliff huffed and pushed passed Scarlet.
“I wasn’t wr—” Scarlet threw up her hands in exasperation. “There are no words. No words.”
“Are we…” Despite the growing heat, Emily clutched her sweater tighter across her chest. “Are we going in there?”
DJ paused at the door, and I squeezed Braiden’s hand. Most of me hoped he wouldn’t step in. That he would feel the evil emanating from inside that dark cavern and decide the best thing to do would be to turn around and get lost.
But I couldn’t deny that part of me wanted to push in right behind him. To experience this old house and its past. To understand it.
“Everyone have their flashlights?” DJ felt along the inside of the wall. “Because I don’t feel any switches.”
