The Haunted

Startled, Megan didn’t immediately respond. She briefly considered lying, but her friends had all been honest, and it wouldn’t have been right for her to be the only one not telling the truth. Besides, she’d already admitted it. “Because I was scared,” she said.

They all laughed, but to her relief, no further questions were asked. That was the end of it. After her, Kate chose dare, and when she refused to lift up her pajama top and show them her chest, her punishment was to go into James’s room and kiss his pillow.

On the next round, Julie got to ask the questions and decide the dares, and when Megan’s turn came up and she once again chose truth, Julie asked, “Why were you scared of the Ouija board?”

Megan looked at the faces of her friends, who were all watching her intently, as though the fate of important issues rested on her answer. She saw no trace of humor on any of their faces and wondered whether they had planned this, whether this line of questioning was intentional, an attempt to … to … what?

Nothing. She was just being paranoid. She forced herself to laugh, and they laughed, too, and the spell was broken. Once again, she decided to answer honestly. “Because I think my house might be haunted.”

That did not go over the way she thought it would. Instead of being greeted with derision and laughter, her admission was met with a weak chuckle from Zoe and nervous glances around the room from Julie and Kate.

They feel it, too.

That was why they were pursuing this line of questioning.

Megan suddenly felt cold. As if on cue, the lights flickered, and all four of them jumped. Zoe, Kate and Julie tried to laugh it off, but Megan wasn’t laughing. And neither were her friends. Not really. They were anxious, frightened. Megan looked around. The room seemed darker than it had a few moments prior, the corners filled with a gathering gloom. It was probably nothing, she told herself, but even as she did so, the darkness in the far corner seemed to become less amorphous, more of a … shape.

Zoe saw it, too. “Look,” she whispered, pointing.

There was a figure in the corner now, a tall, thin form with the nebulous, wavy contours of a plume of smoke, and it twisted and turned until its vaguely humanoid shape was facing them full-on.

It moved toward them.

The girls screamed. All of them. Spontaneously. Their simultaneous cries of terror melded into a single earsplitting screech, and the figure promptly disappeared.

“Keep it down up there!” her mom ordered, calling from the foot of the stairs.

Instantly, the real world reasserted itself. Gone was the gloom in the corners, the dimness of the light. Everything reverted back to normal, and, more grateful than she had ever been for anything in her life, Megan called down, “Sorry, Mom! We will!”

She looked about the room, saw nothing out of the ordinary, nothing suspicious or unusual, only her furniture and possessions and the luggage and sleeping bags of her friends. She walked over to her bed, not wanting to meet anyone’s eyes. No one said a word, and when she suggested that they go to sleep, there were no objections, only murmured agreement.

Everyone got under their covers or into their sleeping bags. Without asking any of her friends, Megan left her desk lamp on, and none of them asked her to turn it off, although, immediately, she wished she’d left all of the lights on. The lamp was dim, its glow yellowish and weak, the feeble illumination throwing the corners of the room into a too-familiar darkness. But she watched and waited, and the darkness never resolved itself into anything more, and after a few minutes, she allowed herself to relax and settle back, satisfied that, whatever had happened, it was all over now.

Haunted.

It was the first time she’d said the word aloud, the first time she’d even thought about it that directly, but she believed it. So did her friends. She heard surreptitious whispering from down on the floor and wondered what they were saying to one another. Probably that they were never going to come over to her house again.

She couldn’t blame them. She didn’t want to be here—and this was her home.

Why in the world had they moved?

James.

As usual, that little pansy was at the root of all her problems.

Megan stared up at the ceiling, wondering what, if anything, she should tell her parents about tonight. Would they believe any of it? Maybe they would if all of them described what had happened, although she wasn’t sure her friends would be willing to admit to anything in the morning. Daylight somehow had the effect of making night fears seem less real.

The whispering had stopped. She wanted to ask Zoe whether she was asleep yet—Zoe was the one person who might not run away from all this—but didn’t want to wake Kate or Julie, didn’t want them to hear what she had to say. So she remained silent, trying not to think about what had happened but unable to think of anything else.

Haunted.