The Haunted

From downstairs came the sounds of her parents getting ready for bed. The television was shut off, doors were closed, a toilet flushed.

Gradually, the house grew silent.

Too silent.

Lying there, she began to think that she was the only living person in the house. The idea was absurd, but all attempts to convince herself of that failed, and the thought soon hardened into a conviction. Finally, she could no longer restrain herself and leaned over the side of the bed to make sure her friends were still alive. To her great relief, they were. Julie was snoring slightly, and Zoe stirred on the feather mattress. Kate coughed.

Happy to have her fears dispelled, Megan leaned back on her pillow—

And glimpsed movement out of the corner of her eye.

Her heart leaped in her chest.

Slowly, she turned her head to the right.

The monster emerged from the wall where it had been hiding, retaining some of the color and shading of not only the wall but the dresser and door. She was the only one who saw it, the only one awake, and she remained perfectly still, afraid to move, watching through squinting eyes that she hoped made it look as though she were asleep.

The creature was as wide as it was tall, and its head nearly brushed the ceiling. If that was its head. For the parts of its form seemed to have no correlation in the human or animal world. Indeed, its form was constantly shifting, what had seemed an arm retracting into a torso, the torso twisting and turning, becoming a head and then a foot.

The only constant was that there was a face. It might change position, but it was there, and it was a terrible thing to see, a raging chaos of unblinking eyes and ferociously fanged maw.

The monster hovered over her friends on the floor before gently lifting the sheet that covered Zoe. It pulled up her oversize T-shirt, but she did not awaken, and a long tentacle—for that was what it looked like—reached out and slipped beneath the material. Megan wanted to scream—

Didn’t that work last time?

—but she was paralyzed with fear, and she watched, holding her breath, unmoving, as the tentacle withdrew and the face, now in the center of the ill-defined body, turned toward her. The mouth, with teeth the color of the objects in her room, smiled slyly.

Take off your pants.

It wanted her. She was the one it had come for, and she opened her mouth to scream for her parents.

And then it was gone.

It didn’t fade again into the background, didn’t fly out the window or walk through the door. It simply disappeared, winking out like a projection that had been shut off.

Megan didn’t scream. She remained unmoving, ready to scream, for several moments longer, afraid it might return, afraid it might come for her. But it did not return, and she could see no trace of it in any area of her room, although Zoe’s sheet remained pulled down and her T-shirt pulled up. Megan thought about fixing that—the assault to her friend’s dignity made her sick to her stomach—but she was afraid to leave her bed, and instead she pulled the covers over her head, fingers curled tightly around the edges of the blanket, holding it down.

She waited for morning.

Ten

“Look what I found.”

James stared admiringly at the traffic cone in Robbie’s closet, more impressed than he was willing to admit. They had both been trying to find furnishings and decorations for their headquarters—which was what they’d agreed to call the upstairs room in James’s garage—but so far James had not really come up with anything. Oh, he’d scrounged up a couple of folding chairs, and his dad had given him a junky bookcase, but he hadn’t found anything cool.

Like the traffic cone.

“That’s not all,” Robbie said. “Check it out.” He went over to his bed, crouched down and from underneath pulled out a life-size cardboard cutout of the stick-figure Greg Heffley from Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

James couldn’t hide his excitement this time. “Where’d you get it?”

“The garbage. Can you believe it? Our neighbor, Mrs. Asako, works at The Store, and I guess she took this home when the last book came out. She must’ve got tired of it, because it was in her garbage this morning, and I snagged it before anyone else could.”

“Awesome,” James said, grinning.

“What I was thinking was that we could check out other people’s garbage cans. We might find some good stuff.”

“Especially in alleys, like the one behind our house. People dump a lot of things there!”

“Yeah. And even if we don’t find anything today, we might next week. Or the week after that.”

“I bet we can fill up our whole headquarters within a month!”