The Haunted (11 page)

Megan didn’t see what was so funny. They were kind of old, yeah, and they were
Finding Nemo
pajamas, which was kind of babyish, but …

Julie pointed between Kate’s legs, where the tail of an orange Nemo was protruding from a seam directly over Kate’s crotch. Megan started laughing, too, and Kate said, “All right. That’s enough. Truth or Dare: who’s going first?”

“I’ll go,” Zoe volunteered.

“Truth or dare?”

Zoe and Julie both opted for truth, and to much delighted squealing, they answered questions about their feelings for two of the hottest boys in school. But when it came time for Megan’s turn, and she chose truth, Kate asked her, surprisingly, “Why did you stop the Ouija board?”

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
.

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.

“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!”

Actually, James had to admit, they’d gotten a lot done over the past few days. Robbie and his brother didn’t have to go to camp this week, since their mother had taken vacation days off from work, and James and Robbie had been able to work on their headquarters. The first day had basically been spent cleaning up, and yesterday they’d started to plan out what they were going to do and where things were going to go. With his dad’s help, they’d moved the bookcase to the right of the window and the two folding chairs against the opposite wall (in case they ever found a desk to go with it). He and Robbie had tried to rig up a secret entrance, connecting twine to the trapdoor at the top of the ladder and threading it back through a hole so they could pull the twine and the door would open, but it didn’t work.

The most interesting thing that had happened was that they’d found the skeleton of a puppy in a small box in the corner of the loft. Robbie said that it was most likely a family pet, that someone had probably intended to bury it and forgotten to do so. But the box didn’t look like a coffin, and James thought that someone had bought the skeleton and intended to display it. Either way, it was cool, and they
did
display it, setting it up on the top of the bookcase.

“We should have cards made up,” Robbie said. “Business cards.”

James nodded. He’d read the Brains Benton book Robbie let him borrow, and he liked the idea of the two of them starting their own detective agency. It seemed possible. It seemed like something they could do. “My dad’ll let us use his computer.”

“I still like the R.J. Detective Agency.”

“We’ll see.”

They’d been trying to come up with a name for themselves, but so far had not been able to reach an agreement. Robbie wanted to call their organization the R.J. Detective Agency, the
R
standing for Robbie, the
J
for James. James preferred the FBI, the letters standing for Freelance Boy Investigators, although that was something they would never reveal to outsiders. “Besides,” he’d argued, “we’d get real cases that way, because people would think they were calling the
actual
FBI.”

It was going to be difficult to find a name they both agreed on.

James’s dad would be picking them up in less than an hour, so they used the time to comb the street, looking for castoff furniture or decorations that they could use in their headquarters. The only thing they found was a metal wine rack, and while they didn’t really have a use for it, the object was too good to pass up, and they took it anyway. They’d figure out something to do with it later.

They were a lot luckier in the alley behind James’s house. After taking the traffic cone, the Wimpy Kid cutout and the wine rack up to their headquarters, they cut through the backyard and went out to the alley, where, halfway down the block, they discovered an old exercise bike. It was standing in front of a fence, beside a trash can, with a piece of paper taped to its handlebars on which someone had written the word
Free
.

“Awesome!” James said, grabbing the handlebars and pulling the bike out farther into the alley so they could get a better look at it.

“There’s no chain,” Robbie pointed out.

“Big whoop.” James sat on the seat, held the handlebars and pedaled. “It still works without it.”

“And we could always get one.”

James swung off the bike. “This would be perfect for when we’re brainstorming. We could take turns riding the bike and thinking when we’re working on a case. It’ll help us relax and clear our minds.”

“But how’ll we get it up there?”