Home, Sweet Haunt

by P. J. Night

  Nora got right up into Caitlin’s face. “Can’t you see me?” she asked, beginning to wonder if maybe this was part of that odd dream she’d been having. It was possible that Nora was still asleep.

  “I thought she had a good time,” Caitlin said with a frown. “I don’t understand why Nora ditched out.”

  “Maybe her parents discovered she was missing and came to get her?” Aleah suggested. “They are worriers.”

  “And she left without saying good-bye?” Caitlin wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know Nora very well, but after what she did to get here”—Caitlin pointed to the dumbwaiter panel—“it’s hard to believe that she’d leave without a word.”

  “Maybe she left a note,” LL suggested.

  “No note,” Nora said. “Come on, guys. I didn’t leave.”

  She lay back down on her sleeping bag and closed her eyes. “Okay,” Nora told herself. “I know you’re tired, but it’s time to wake up.” She acted like she was hypnotized. “On the count of three, you are going to open your eyes and be awake.” She counted. On three, Nora snapped her fingers and opened her eyes.

  “Ugh!” Nora rolled out of the bag and onto the floor as Caitlin swept up the bag and Aleah took the pillow out from under her head.

  “I’ll toss these in my room. Then let’s get breakfast,” Caitlin told the others. It was as if they’d given up looking for Nora.

  “But I’m here,” Nora said, her voice dropping as sorrow sank in. “Why can’t you see me?”

  Nora followed the girls down the hallway into Caitlin’s messy room. Caitlin tossed the sleeping bag and pillow onto the beanbag chair and said, “Maybe this afternoon we should go up to the tenth floor and check on her. I bet Aleah’s right, her parents must have found out she wasn’t in her own bed and come down to get her.”

  “Makes the most sense,” LL said with a nod. “Nora’s so nice she probably didn’t want to wake us all up.”

  They all agreed that was what had happened and that after breakfast they’d go knock on Nora’s door.

  “But . . .” Nora began to follow them to the kitchen. She was still confused, but now she felt another emotion: anger that they were ignoring her. “Hey!” Nora exclaimed as Caitlin shut her bedroom door. The door slammed hard in Nora’s face. It should have hurt, but it didn’t.

  “That’s weird,” Nora said with a shiver as she realized the door had passed through her. It hadn’t actually hit her.

  Maybe the girls were playing one last Halloween prank on her? Nora had to get out of there to find out.

  As she reached for the knob, Nora noticed there was a mirror on the back of Caitlin’s door.

  She didn’t see herself in the glass. “Huh?” Nora got closer. In Caitlin’s messy room it was possible the glass was dirty or . . .

  No. The mirror was the cleanest thing in the room.

  Nora got so close to the reflective surface that she should have seen the flecks of gold in her eyes. She should have been able to count every freckle on her face. She should have seen—well, she should have seen her reflection.

  But Nora didn’t appear in the glass.

  Nora was invisible.

  CHAPTER 15

  “You’re not invisible,” Nora’s mother explained after Nora had told her what happened at Caitlin’s. “You’re a ghost.”

  “We all are,” her father said.

  Nora was back in her own apartment, sitting on the smoky, burned, and uncomfortable red velvet sofa.

  After discovering she didn’t need to open the door to leave Caitlin’s bedroom, Nora slid through the apartment door at Caitlin’s, took the elevator up, and stormed into her own apartment without turning the knob.

  Her parents were upset that she’d snuck out and been gone all night.

  “Go ahead and punish me!” Nora exclaimed. “What are you going to do? Kill me? I’m already dead!” So it wasn’t the best way to handle the situation, but Nora was furious. “You should have told me!”

  “What’s going on?” Lucas came in from his bedroom just then. His hair was sticking straight up. “What’s with all the shouting?” He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked at his sister. “Nora?”

  “Ask them,” Nora growled.

  That was when the Wilsons called a family meeting. The third in Nora’s life. No, actually the third since Nora’s death.

  Lucas sat next to Nora on the couch. Their parents both stood.

  “I’m a ghost?” Lucas asked. He was very excited to hear it. “That explains so many things!” He gave a sigh of relief. “I was beginning to think Mom and Dad were crazy,” he told Nora. “They aren’t crazy! They’re dead. We all are!” Lucas bounced on a squeaky couch spring. “This is great news.”

  Nora spun to face her brother. “What is so great about it?”

  “Well,” Lucas said, “think of the adventures we can have.”

  Nora plugged her ears. “No adventures.” She rotated back to face her parents. “How did this happen?” Nora needed to know. “I saw the newscast. I know we were rescued.”

  “Oh. Right.” Lucas stopped bouncing. “I remember the fireman who carried me downstairs.”

  The mystery deepened.

  Nora’s father began the explanation. “Yes, Nora. We were all rescued. But the person who owned the building insisted the fire was our fault and claimed we should pay for the damages.”

  “I saw the report. You didn’t have insurance.” Nora wanted him to skip forward to the dead part of the story.

  “We couldn’t afford to fix the apartment.” Mrs. Wilson picked up the telling. “And it wasn’t our fault.” She looked at Lucas since he was the one who hadn’t seen the TV newscast. “So, after the fire was out and we could come back to the apartment, we refused to leave. And the person in charge refused to fix the damage.”

  “A week passed.” Mr. Wilson paced the living room as he spoke, and Nora was reminded about the people on the ninth floor who heard ghosts moving around. The haunting was in 10H. Her apartment.

  “Then apartment management cut off our phones and refused to allow anyone up to see us,” Nora’s mom said. “We were at a stalemate with the apartment owner. No repairs were done. I didn’t want you kids to go to school for fear that you couldn’t get back inside. I was worried that someone would nab you and use you to lure us out. I was stubborn.”

  She went on. “And frustrated. It was hard, but I used every argument I could think of to convince your dad that we needed to leave the apartment. We needed to hire a lawyer. I mean, we’d filed maintenance reports and those were public record. The fire department had confirmed that the fire was caused by faulty wiring. There was no way we’d lose a lawsuit. They’d have to fix the apartment.”

  “I finally agreed.” Mr. Wilson stopped pacing. He put an arm around his wife.

  “I went to see a lawyer.” She glanced at the door. “But couldn’t leave.”

  “What do you mean, ‘couldn’t’?” Nora asked.

  “Was the door jammed like in the fire?” Lucas asked.

  “No,” Mrs. Wilson replied. “My feet couldn’t cross the doorway downstairs, the one leading outside the building.”

  “I tried also,” Mr. Wilson put in. “It was as if there was an invisible wall.”

  “That’s when we discovered that there had been a carbon monoxide leak,” Nora’s mom began. “We don’t know where the leak came from, but it must have happened while we slept. We never realized that the carbon monoxide detector was destroyed in the fire so the alarm never went off. We’d been dead awhile before we realized what had happened.”

  Nora remembered Aleah mentioning a carbon monoxide news item when she’d been looking for horror stories online. Nora just hadn’t realized that particular story was about her family.

  “I didn’t know we’d all died until that moment,” Mrs. Wilson said, her voice cracking.

  “Why didn’t you tell us right away?” Nora asked. “We’d have understood.”

  “Get real.” Luc
as gave Nora a shove. “We’d never have believed them.”

  “We wanted to shield you from the news for as long as we could,” Mrs. Wilson said. “Plus we didn’t know how this ghost stuff works.”

  “I can walk through walls,” Nora reported. “That’s how I came home this morning.”

  “Sooooo coool!” Lucas said. Nora could see his head spinning with a plan to use his newly discovered superpower. “We can fix the dumbwaiter and do all sorts of things.”

  At Nora’s parents’ questioning glance, she explained how she’d gone down to Caitlin’s in the dumbwaiter. She’d left that part out when she’d stomped into the apartment, demanding answers. They’d asked where she’d been, but hadn’t stopped to wonder how she’d gotten there in the first place. The door was still locked, after all, not that it actually mattered.

  “Not like I was in any mortal danger,” Nora said with half a smile.

  Her mother gave Nora a glare. “You left the apartment without permission. You will be punished.”

  “Ugh.” Nora rolled her eyes. “I’m a ghost! Isn’t that punishment enough?”

  In that moment, Nora realized what she was good at. She didn’t need art classes or gymnastics, or dance, or theater, or anything else. Nora was good at Halloween! She was great at scaring people. That was her best and favorite skill, and now she would be scary forever. No costume necessary.

  Nora had a goal. And it was a doozy.

  She smiled. She finally understood what her parents meant when they’d said “the veil was thinner.” It meant she could be seen on Halloween. She could even leave the building, but only on that one day.

  “I was thinking we don’t need to wait until next Halloween to start haunting,” Lucas said. “We can begin sneaking around the building today. Let’s take stuff off Mrs. Daugherty’s tables. Rearrange her furniture. We can hide her slippers in funny places.” He clumped his way across the room. “Does it hurt when you pass through?”

  “I don’t know about the walls. Going through doors didn’t hurt,” Nora replied. “It was easy.”

  “Oh yeah!” Lucas fist-pumped the air. “I can’t wait to get started.”

  “Nora, you are grounded for a week. After that, there will be rules,” Mrs. Wilson said. She had a very serious look as she shook her head. “We are still having homeschool. And you can’t go out of our apartment without permission. We need to know where you are. And—”

  Interrupting, Mr. Wilson winked at the kids. “I want to come along sometimes.”

  As part of their science homework that evening, Nora and Lucas were discussing how they were going to fish the dumbwaiter out of the basement. They’d convinced their mom that it was a physics issue and raising the platform would involve math skills.

  Suddenly the knob on the front door turned. Nora and Lucas looked up.

  “Did you lock the door when you came in this morning?” Nora’s father asked, setting down the book he was reading.

  “I walked straight through the wood, remember?” Nora said.

  There were voices in the hall.

  “I was worried about this,” Nora’s mother said. “Ghost hunters.” She shooed the kids into Nora’s room. “They’ll come in with their infrared cameras and EMF meters. If they find signs of paranormal activity, we will never be left alone again!”

  “We need to convince Mom and Dad that it’s our duty to scare the hunters away.” Lucas smiled. “We don’t want anyone to move in, so we need to keep up the fright factor.”

  Standing on Nora’s bed, Lucas began to jump up and down. “How cool is this? We need to ‘borrow’ a Ouija board from a neighbor. We could use it to practice our spelling words for school.” Lucas swiveled his hands as if he were working the pointer. “Tonight, I hope someone does a séance. I have some messages I’d like to pass to the living.” He flopped back on the mattress with a final body bounce and giggled. “We can make up anything we want.”

  Nora rolled her eyes. “Or we can scream ‘Boo!’ ” She sat down on the bed near Lucas’s feet.

  “Yeah,” Lucas said dreamily. “That’s awesome.”

  “Shhh,” Nora’s father warned. “I can see that your mother was right. We need to discuss the parameters of this haunting thing. Until then”—he put a finger over his lips—“no noise.”

  Whoever was on the other side of the door picked the lock and came in. Nora realized that she recognized the voices entering the apartment.

  “Mom, wait!” she said, before her mother shut Nora’s bedroom door and barricaded it. “That’s Caitlin.” She cupped her ear. “And LL. And Aleah.” Nora could hear them comment on the empty apartment. “They’re looking for me.”

  “Get out there and start haunting!” Lucas kicked Nora in the back. She fell off the bed, landing on the floor with a heavy thump.

  “What was that?” Caitlin’s nervous voice echoed through the burned-out space.

  “A big rat?” LL sounded scared as she admitted, “I don’t know.” Nora liked that she’d finally gotten under LL’s skin. The scientist was a little less sure of herself now.

  Aleah was definitely scared. “I think we should go downstairs,” she said with a quiver. “I don’t see Nora anywhere. In fact, it doesn’t look like anyone lives here. How could they? This is just a burned-out shell of an apartment.”

  “Come on, Nora.” Lucas sat up on the bed. “Let’s give them a real fright.”

  “I think I already did,” Nora said, considering how she’d disappeared from their sleepover, and then when they’d gone to find her, they’d discovered that her apartment was empty. Nora smiled. “I’ll let them freak out a little for now. They should wonder what happened to me. Leave a bit of mystery. And then haunt them all year, just a tiny scare at a time.”

  “Build it up for a big Halloween surprise?” Lucas asked as the front door to the apartment slammed shut.

  “For sure!” Nora went out into the living room and stared at the back of the door. She could hear her friends’ footsteps, as they decided to take the stairs, too frightened to stay on the tenth floor and wait for the elevator.

  Nora smiled. “Next year will be the best Halloween ever.”

  EPILOGUE

  364 DAYS LATER . . .

  Nora was hiding behind the couch when she heard the voices. She didn’t want to be seen until the moment was right.

  Caitlin and Lindsay were following Hallie through the front doorway of Hallie’s apartment. LL and Aleah were with them. They were all friends now.

  “I think it’s great that we all wore matching costumes,” Caitlin said, cheerfully pulling off her wig. Her bracelets jangled as she brought her arm back down.

  “We were the most awesome hippies out there,” Aleah replied in a far-out voice.

  “Totally, yeah,” said LL, giving the peace symbol. “Now let’s check out our loot.” She dumped her candy onto Hallie’s family room floor. The girls had set out sleeping bags for a slumber party.

  Nora knew they were planning to watch scary movies. She was going to make the night even scarier.

  Looking over her collection of candy bars and other wrapped snacks, Lindsay said, “Our apartment building has the best trick-or-treating.” She raised a handful of treats and let them rain through her fingers. “So much candy.”

  “Last year LL and I had a good time at Caitlin’s,” Aleah said, as if she’d forgotten that Nora had gone with them. Or tried to forget. “But this year was totally better. Way more candy.”

  Nora would have to make sure that no one forgot her after this year.

  “Ready?” Lucas whispered, settling down into the small hiding space beside her. He was wearing a white sheet with holes cut out for the eyes. Classic ghost.

  Her brother was as annoying as ever, but now instead of chasing him away, Nora hung out with him. They were partners in haunting, and business was booming.

  Turned out they didn’t need to fix the dumbwaiter in their building at all. With a little practice, they discovered th
ey could go up and down all they wanted by melting through doors, walls, and even ceilings. Haunting inside the apartment building was great, but tonight was Halloween. Time to up the scares a lot. Maximum fright.

  “Do you have the supplies?” Nora asked her brother.

  He held up a canvas sack. Over the year, he and Nora had collected the perfect haunting supplies. They’d all been tested, effectively convincing the family in 6C to move away.

  Haunting their own building was fun, but Nora had been waiting for this night for fifty-two weeks—364 long days and nights.

  LL and Aleah climbed into sleeping bags while Caitlin and Hallie set up the first movie. Lindsay turned down the lights.

  The TV cast an eerie glow across the room and set the perfect mood for haunting.

  Nora gave Lucas a nod. He laid out his supplies behind the couch.

  Lucas was not only an excellent actor, but he was a great director, too. They’d prepared a perfectly staged production.

  Their show started with a bell. Lucas rang it near the TV once, then moved to the other side of the room. He moved around, in and out of walls so no one could see him, not yet. It was something Nora and Lucas had just discovered that night. On Halloween they could be seen, but only if they wanted to be seen.

  The girls sat up on their beds, looking around for the source of the chimes, but never saw anything. Lucas came back to the couch and handed the bell to Nora. Then he went around the apartment stomping his feet and slamming doors.

  He crashed and clomped until Lindsay got up and turned the light back on.

  “That’s odd,” she said with a shiver. “So much noise.”

  “The people upstairs must be having a party,” LL remarked.

  Nora winked at Lucas. It was time for phase three. He rattled chains. At the same time, Nora moved to the switch and turned the lights all off again.

  Lindsay turned them on.

  Nora turned them off.

  It was a game for Nora and her brother. For Lindsay and the others, it wasn’t very fun. Their faces were growing pale. Their eyes began to bulge. Nora could see a bead of sweat on Hallie’s forehead and goose bumps on LL’s arms.