by Sarah Dalton
I pull the knife from the bag. Jack’s eyes widen.
“I have the Athamé in case anything goes wrong.”
Even Willa stops dancing around when she sees the knife. At least we’ve refocused as a group.
“How do we summon her?” Willa asks.
“I’m just going to say her name,” I say.
“Oh,” she says.
The four of us settle into a circle. Jack, Lacey, and Willa all turn to me.
“Go on, then,” Jack says. “Let’s get this over with.”
There’s a prickle of irritation when I realise he probably has another date. The guy is a total manwhore. I shake my head and try to focus on the task. My palm sweats against the hilt of the knife, and my blood thuds in my ears.
“Judith?” I whisper.
Lacey crackles on and off. Her hair is caught on an invisible breath of wind. She lifts her chin up to the ceiling.
“Judith,” I say again.
The room is quiet, apart from the sound of breathing. Little light comes in through the small windows, leaving us immersed in inky shadows.
This time, I’m louder. “Judith.”
The cymbal on the drum kit rattles. A little air passes through an abandoned clarinet. Jack forms fists by his sides. This time I feel the breath of air passing across my neck as though someone has sighed against my skin. There’s the pluck of a violin string, and tension works its way through my body.
No one is laughing. No one is dancing. The atmosphere is one of complete concentration. Willa’s gaze roams around the room, lingering in the corners, waiting for something to leap out at us.
“Judith, show yourself.” It’s my voice, but it’s different. It quivers in anticipation. Even with eyes open, my mind runs through every dark and scary thing I’ve ever seen. Black eyes, loose skin, rotting flesh. The glint of a serial killer’s knife. The peek of bloodshot eyes beneath an oil slick of hair. Fangs.
The temperature plummets. The hairs stand up on the backs of my arms. My heart beats hard against my ribs.
The cello music begins. But this time, it’s different. It isn’t that low rumble of pure rage that I’ve become accustomed to since starting Ashforth. It doesn’t grip my insides and feel as though someone is trying to tear out my intestines. It isn’t the violence and sorrow of the cello music from an angry spirit, it’s beautiful. Its melody rises and dips like the swing of a pendulum. More strings join the cello, a string quartet of glorious song. The music swells and swells. Even Jack is moved. His eyes are damp, his mouth strangely vulnerable and parted. Willa closes her eyes and tilts her head back, opening her arms as though embracing the wonderful sound. Lacey watches Willa, more moved by her than the music.
I say it one more time. “Judith.”
And then she’s here. I gasp, still shocked by how suddenly a ghost can come to me. Willa opens her eyes and smiles kindly at the spirit. Lacey crackles before moving into a defensive pose.
“Where am I?” Judith asks.
She’s almost exactly as she was in the YouTube videos: an average girl, slightly chubby, with pretty features. But her talent was exceptional, and I thought her almost regal with the cello in front of her. A goddess of melody.
“You’re in the music room,” I say.
Judith’s eyes are furtive. She glances to her right and flinches. “I’m not alone.”
“That’s okay. This is my friend, Lacey. She’s also a ghost,” I say.
“Nice to meet you.” Lacey offers her a hand to shake.
Judith backs away. “She’s coming for me again.”
“Who?” I ask.
She shakes her head. Her mouth opens and shuts, but nothing comes out. Her head shakes back and forth, inhumanly fast. My stomach lurches as I watch her squirm and crackle on and off.
“I have to go,” Judith says.
“I can help you.” I step forward, but Judith moves away. “I can help you move on, if you’ll let me.”
“No,” she says. “If I go, she’ll hurt people again. I can’t let her.” Her hair begins to move as though independent from the rest of her body, and her skirt ripples. She loses her colour, turning grey and green-tinged.
A chill works its way down my spine, seeping through my body. Willa hugs herself for warmth. Lacey’s expression turns grim.
“Is she here now?” I ask.
There’s a moment where Judith’s eyes go so black that there are no features inside. Her humanity ebbs away before she bends low and squirms. She claws at her legs, fighting some internal struggle.
“She… she makes me dark,” Judith says. “With the fear.” Then her voice becomes high-pitched, strange coming from the body of a teenager. “Mummy. The girl is hurting me again. Make her stop.”
Judith leaves, and I am rigid. When I exhale, steam comes from my mouth.
“There’s someone else here,” I warn.
By now, the room is so cold, we’re all hugging our bodies for warmth. My hand holding the Athamé trembles, but I can’t work out whether it’s from the cold or from my fear.
“Who are you?” I ask. “Tell us what you want. We can help you.”
This time, the cello music is deep and dark. The notes are frantic, scraping so hard against the strings that I imagine the bow wearing down to the wood. Rage drips from every note. That same pain creeps into my stomach, ripping my insides apart, gnawing and longing. Jack rushes towards me as I double over and drop the Athamé.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, his arms propping me up.
I can hardly breathe. I can’t speak. My feet are frozen to the floor.
This spirit is so different from Judith. It’s nothing but fear and fury. The atmosphere of the room has completely changed. Willa huddles next to Lacey, her face pure white. Even Jack is afraid. His body trembles next to mine, quivering like a beaten tambourine.
It starts with a finger. The nail is sharpened. There is dried blood around the cuticle. It reaches up through the floor, like a monster emerging from the sea. The hand that follows is bony. Every tendon shows. The veins are dry and gnarled. The wrist is a twig. And then comes the forearm. Bone and skin. It’s like a skeleton stretching through rubber. Willa backs away.
“I see it,” Jack whispers. “I see it.”
Now he’s huddling next to me for support. My hands ball his jacket inside my fists. We move closer to each other in an instinctive need for human contact in the midst of terror.
Those long, claw-like fingers grip the floor, dragging out the rest of her body. A dark head emerges, bowed, bony, brittle. Hair falls forward, leaving only a glimpse of a blood-red mouth. Then bent shoulders. The shoulder blades poke through the skin, so sharp they could be dragon wings pushing out of her back. The spine is a series of bumpy nodules, almost like scales. Her breasts are little more than flaps of loose skin, and you can count the ribs protruding out before the concave of a stomach and the sharp pelvic bones.
This is not Judith.
“Who are you?” I whisper.
The head snaps up, neck twisted. One eye shows through the hair. “What do you care?” The voice is raspy.
My fingers clutch onto Jack. “We can help you.”
This ghost is more monster than spirit. Instead of walking towards me, it gets on all fours and crawls, scuttling so fast Willa lets out a scream.
“We have to get out of here.” Jack drags me back away from the ghost, but I resist.
“I can help you move on,” I say.
But the room grows colder. The emaciated ghost seizes my ankle, digging its fingernails deep into the skin. Lacey bares her teeth and flies at the ghost, knocking it onto its side. It swipes at Lacey with its fingernails, but she dodges away. I bend down and pick up the Athamé. When the ghost sees the knife, it hisses, scurrying back. Before I can shout for it to stop, it seeps back into the floor as though nothing ever happened.
Chapter Seventeen
If anything is going to mess with your head, it’s going to be an emaciated ghost
rising from the floorboards of an empty classroom. Jack’s skin is tinged with grey by the time we come out of the art block. Willa is as pale as Lacey. My stomach still squirms from the rage and sadness that filled me up. This ghost treated me like an empty vessel waiting to be filled with poison. I dust myself down, trying to get the dirt off. Not even an hour-long shower will leave me feeling clean this time.
“So, that went tits up,” Lacey says eventually, breaking the silence as we head back to the school office to return the keys.
I clear my throat before I speak, to try to stop my voice from cracking. “But now we know that Judith is still here, and that the violent ghost is someone else.”
“The girl in the video,” Willa adds.
“But we don’t know who she is or what she wants,” Jack replies.
It makes me smile to know that Jack has come around to the idea of ghost hunting. Without realising, he’s become one of us.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Willa says. “The ghosts I’ve seen have been way, way different. Some were a bit scary, but nothing so… monstrous.”
“It was a shock for me, too,” I say. I try not to think of that hollow face and protruding eye sockets.
“I mean, she was like a skeleton,” Willa says.
I nip down to the school office and hand in the keys. The ladies in the office seem blissfully unaware of the aggressive ghost living in the same building as them.
Out in the carpark, the sun seems too bright. It’s a mild September afternoon with a fading sun, but still it seems too bright. The world is auburn, but I feel black. I feel like the shadows that come before night.
“We need to help Judith,” I say. “We can’t let this second ghost hurt her. I think Judith was really scared.”
Willa nods. “You’re right. Whatever happens now, we need to stop this ghost from hurting Judith.”
I pause by Willa’s car. “The last time we did this”—I gesture to Lacey to explain who ‘we’ is—“it helped knowing the ghost’s backstory. I think we need to speak to the orchestra again. If there was a second cello player who died recently, they would probably know about it.”
“They could have died a long, long time ago,” Willa says. “The only girl I know who died recently was Tasha MacIntosh, but she died of cancer. And she was the most popular girl in the school, so I doubt she’d have anything to be angry about.”
“We all have a story to tell,” I say quietly.
We get into the car and drive home in silence.
*
I don’t dream that night. Instead, I wake with the feeling that someone is watching me. I check for Lacey, but she’s not there. As I pad down the stairs, eat my toast, and kiss my dad goodbye, something is watching me. Lint floating in front of my eyes becomes long fingers reaching to scratch me. Every shadow is an eye watching me. I start when I catch my reflection in the mirror in the corridor. I keep expecting to see a warning. I half-expect a hallucination of a hundred corpses on my lawn. Whoever this ghost is, whether it’s Tash MacIntosh or some other tortured soul, they have well and truly got into my head.
Jack is alone in the car. “Willa has a cold.”
“Oh.”
“Apparently Lacey is looking after her.”
“Oh.”
Somehow, I’ve grown used to his laconic presence. The silence is a comforting one. I sink back in the passenger seat and try not to keep expecting a bloodshot eye to be watching me from the car mirrors.
We go our separate ways in the school carpark, barely acknowledging each other. Some girl I’ve seen in the sixth form common room slides her hand inside Jack’s before shooting me a dead-eye. She’s taller, prettier, less scarred than I am. I try to ignore her.
But my head is so muddled with everything—the ghost, Jack, Judith, and Lacey—that I step right into Colleen Brown’s path.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey,” I reply. “How are things?”
“I moved in with Mum,” she replies. “I basically told her that was how it was going to be.”
“Good,” I say. “I’m glad.”
Somehow we both end up walking in the same direction.
“I saw the video was down,” I say. “If you did that, then thanks. I really appreciate it.”
“Well, I took the footage, so I wouldn’t thank me if I were you.”
“Hey, do you know if Tasha MacIntosh played the cello?” I ask, deciding to seize an opportunity.
She shrugs. “Doubt it. Tash wasn’t a geek.”
“She died of cancer, right?”
“Yeah.”
“It must have been hard seeing her like that,” I say.
“Well, it would’ve been, but no one actually saw her,” Colleen replies.
“What do you mean?”
“Her family stopped visitation at the hospital. They wouldn’t let anyone see her. I think Travis was going out with her at the same time, so he was pretty pissed off. Grace, too. It was seriously weird. We tried sending stuff to the hospital but they usually sent it back. And then there was the funeral.”
“What happened at the funeral?” I prompt.
“Nothing, except that no one knew when it was. The family never released anything. It ended up that no one went. It was just family. I mean, I can get why they didn’t want many visitors, but to not let anyone come to the funeral is just wrong.”
“What was Tasha like?” I ask.
“She was fun. She was always the life and soul of the party. She drank a bit, but don’t we all. There were rumours that she was a bit of a mess outside school. Grace said she used to take a bunch of laxatives and diet pills. She was pretty thin already, so I don’t know why.” Colleen becomes visibly uncomfortable as we get closer to the form room, so I drop back and let her go ahead.
I don’t mind. I need a few extra minutes to mull over this new information. There’s something not right about Tasha’s death, and I need to know what it is.
*
Tasha’s parents are owners of a local estate agent. I manage to track down their office, but that feels too impersonal a place to talk about their dead daughter. Instead, I do a little more investigating and find the address of their house. Successful business owners don’t tend to be in at four o’clock on a weekday, but I decide to take a punt and ask Jack to take me. For once he doesn’t have places to be or people to screw.
Seeing as Jack’s general presence is about as comforting as a clown holding a chainsaw, I decide to go it alone. He waits in the car parked a few houses down on their street. It’s one of those houses that sit atop a sloping front garden, a good few feet above street level. There were many of these houses on the hill where I used to live. They always seemed a bit precarious to me, like they would topple forward and face-plant right in the street. But there’s a charm to their multi-level madness. I make it up the steep steps and rap on the door.
The woman who answers is wearing jogging bottoms and a t-shirt, but she looks nothing like the kind of person you’d expect to be wearing jogging bottoms and a t-shirt. Her striking features belong in a sequined dress on the cover of a magazine. She reminds me of the kind of women who married rock stars in the eighties and had beautiful children who went on to become the next ‘It’ teen.
“Hello,” she says. “Can I help you?”
“Hi. I’m from Ashforth Secondary School. I was friends with Natasha.” I pause. I had decided to say something like ‘I missed her and wanted to see her room’ or ‘I wondered if I might see some photographs’ but now that I’m face-to-face with this woman, I freeze up.
“Come in,” she says. She seems almost relieved.
I step through the door in surprise, trying not to look at Mrs. MacIntosh’s hollowed-out eyes or the painful tightness of her smile.
“It’s nice to meet one of Natasha’s friends,” she says, shimmying through the hallway.
I remove my shoes and line them up next to the door. This seems like that kind of place. No shoes on
the cream carpets. No eating on the fancy sofas. I follow Mrs. MacIntosh through to the kitchen.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” she asks.
“Yes, please.”
“Do you miss her?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer. “I do. Every day. I don’t think there’s a moment that passes where I don’t think of her. It feels good to say it out loud.”
I perch on a stool by the breakfast bar, letting my eyes trail over the stylish open plan kitchen-diner. There isn’t one photograph of Tasha.
“School isn’t the same without her.” I take the mug from her and move it towards my lips.
“Be careful, it’s hot,” Mrs. MacIntosh says with a smile.
I smile back and blow on it. “I… I wondered if maybe I could see some photographs of her. There are a few on her Facebook page, but—”
Her eyes light so bright that they could have fires behind them. “What a wonderful idea. I’ll go get the albums.”
My stomach twists with guilt. By coming here, I’ve set off some sort of maternal switch. This poor, grieving woman is desperate to mother someone. My insides squirm.
“Here we are.” She bustles back into the room with her arms full of albums. “Come sit on the sofa and we’ll go through them.”
The funny thing is, when I pictured this moment, I pictured it almost exactly like this. But the reality—of Mrs. MacIntosh’s sad eyes, the sweats, her tenacious grip on those albums—all makes me feel so uncomfortable that I could run straight out the door. But I need to think about the ghost stalking the halls at Ashforth Comp. I need to think about people who could be hurt by her. So I sit next to Mrs. MacIntosh and smile and coo over baby photos and toddler photos and then school sports days. Tasha was an active child. She was on all the sports teams. She even had horse-riding lessons.
After three albums I have to consider Jack waiting outside for me. “Mrs. MacIntosh, I wondered if I might see some more recent photographs of Tasha? I didn’t see much of her in the weeks up to… her passing. I was ill myself, you see.” The lie feels sour in my mouth.
