The Haunted

by Danielle Vega

Hendricks hesitated, second-guessing her decision to come down here alone. Even in the middle of the afternoon, with the light on and her two friends just a few yards away, this place was a little freaky. It hadn’t been renovated like the rest of the house had. The walls were old brick, covered in a thin layer of dirt and something reddish that was probably rust but looked like blood. The stairs were the kind without any backs, so she could easily imagine someone reaching through the slats to grab her ankles. The dirt floor gave her the sense of things buried just below her feet.

  And that little girl had died down here. They should’ve just filled the whole room up with cement.

  She inhaled and started down the steps. The cellar smell seemed to intensify as she descended. It was decaying leaves, and wet dirt, and something else. Something sweet.

  Cologne, she thought, her nose twitching. It reminded her of the cologne Grayson used to wear. Hendricks hugged her arms to her chest, pushing that thought away. It was just PTSD or whatever, like her dad said. It was all in her head.

  She made her way over to the wall of wine to examine the labels. She needed something sort of cheap, but she didn’t know anything about wine, so she decided to hunt for the crappiest-looking label she could. Crappy label meant cheap, right? Well, she hoped so. She picked up something called Quintessa. Shrugged. Worth a try.

  She was halfway up the stairs when she heard a sound below her, coming from the crawl space behind the stairs.

  Mew.

  She froze, the hair on the back of her neck slowly rising. She automatically shifted away from the back of the steps, suddenly certain that something was going to slither out of the darkness, grasping for her feet.

  The sound came again, clearer now: Mew.

  Hendricks relaxed. It sounded like a cat. She crept back down the stairs, her shoes kicking up little plumes of dirt when she hit the floor. The light bulb swayed a little from its chain on the ceiling, making the shadows around her seem to move.

  She squinted into the dark space beneath the stairs, eyes straining.

  She’d had a cat back in Philly. It was an old, fat cat named Blanche that her parents had adopted before she was born. Blanche had died when Hendricks was nine, and it had devastated her. She remembered crying so hard she felt like she couldn’t breathe.

  “Kitty?” she called. She crouched beside the stairs. “Here, kitty, kitty.”

  Two eyes blinked open.

  Hendricks flinched, her heart jumping. She couldn’t see the eyes, exactly, but she could see the light reflected off them.

  She held out her hand. “Here, buddy,” she murmured.

  The cat crept closer, and now she could see that half of his fur was matted against his skinny body, the rest long gone. His skin was patchy and red below, stretched tight over his ribs. She felt a sudden, sharp stab of pity. The poor guy looked like he’d gotten into a fight.

  “You hungry?” she asked, scooting closer. “Want me to get you some water?”

  The cat hissed, and Hendricks yanked back her hand, fear prickling up her skin. Even in the darkness, she could see the sharp points of his teeth.

  “Okay,” she said, voice a little softer. He was just scared. “How about some tuna—”

  The cat shot forward, and Hendricks stumbled backward, falling off her feet and hitting the ground hard on her tailbone. The cat leapt at her, and she braced herself, muscles tensing as she waited to feel its claws dig into her skin—

  But the cat never landed on her.

  He went straight through her.

  Hendricks’s heart stopped. She jerked around just in time to watch the cat bound across the floor and disappear through the shelves of wine.

  She pushed back up to her knees, trembling all over. That didn’t happen, she told herself. It was a trick of the light. Or maybe the cat knew about some hole or crevice in the wall, and it only looked like he’d disappeared because—

  “You bitch! I’ll make you pay.”

  It sounded like a boy’s voice, and it boomed off the cellar walls. Hendricks spun in place, her heart beating hard and fast in her chest. But there was no one there.

  There was no one there.

  Her breath was ragged, and her chest felt suddenly tight. It wasn’t possible. That voice was still ringing in her ears. It had been real. She curled her fingers tighter around the wine bottle she was still holding.

  “Who’s there?” she demanded, her own voice small and trembling. Without realizing what she was doing, she raised the bottle over her head, like it was a weapon.

  She waited, listening for the voice to speak again.

  Suddenly, the basement seemed filled with a thousand noises. Creaking and dripping and wind whipping at the trapdoor.

  And, below all that, hissing.

  Hendricks turned, slowly, toward the staircase, her eyes narrowing. There was something down there. As her eyes adjusted, she could just make out the shape of something moving through the darkness.

  Her palms grew sweaty, and the wine bottle slipped from her grasp, shattering as it hit the dirt floor. She leapt backward, swearing. She jerked her head up again, expecting the thing below the stairs to leap out at her, to strike—

  Without warning, every single wine bottle in the basement exploded. The sound was like firecrackers or gunshots, so loud that it kept popping in Hendricks’s ears. Glass shards flew at her, slicing into her cheeks and arms.

  She threw both hands over her head, cowering, as wine rained down on her.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Hendricks took the stairs two at a time, wine and blood dripping from her hair and sweatshirt. She threw the cellar door open and crawled outside. She didn’t shiver as the January air whipped over her bare arms; she didn’t even feel it. She didn’t feel the wine seeping through her bra, or the cuts that covered her arms. All she felt was numb.

  What the hell had just happened?

  Her father’s words from the night before floated through her head—something like forty percent of people with PTSD experience auditory or visual hallucinations—and she hesitated at the front door, hand poised halfway to the latch.

  Was that it? Was she crazy now?

  She swallowed. The thought of seeing Raven and Portia and trying to explain all of this made her feel vaguely ill. But it’s not like she had another choice.

  Steeling herself, she pushed the door open.

  Raven and Portia were leaning over the kitchen island, chatting happily. When they saw Hendricks, they stopped mid-sentence.

  “Whoa,” Raven said, and Portia’s jaw dropped. Actually dropped, like she was a cartoon. Hendricks might’ve found it comical if everything wasn’t so messed up.

  “Oh my God,” Portia said. “What the shit? What happened to you?”

  Lie.

  The voice seemed to whisper directly into Hendricks’s head.

  Yeah, no shit, Hendricks wanted to shout back.

  “I . . . am in so much trouble,” she said. “I—I was trying to get this bottle of wine out and it accidentally dislodged the whole shelf. It’s a mess.”

  Raven made a cringing face. “That sounds really bad. Are your parents going to be pissed?”

  “Probably,” Hendricks said. But when she looked back at Portia, she saw that her head was cocked to the side and she was studying Hendricks’s face like she didn’t believe her story.

  Out loud, all she said was “Right.”

  “We’ll hang some other night this week, I promise,” Hendricks said.

  “You’re coming tomorrow, right?” Raven asked.

  Hendricks frowned. “Tomorrow?”

  “Party at the quarry. We were talking about it at lunch, remember? I’ll text you the details.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Hendricks said, but she was already ushering the two girls toward the door.

  “And go
od luck with the wine,” Raven said, waving as she headed outside.

  “Yeah, good luck,” Portia added. But she pressed her lips together, like she was holding something back.

  Hendricks pushed the door closed behind them. Wine still dripped from her hair, seeping through the shoulders of her sweatshirt.

  She walked to the pantry in a trance and reached around inside until she found a thick roll of paper towels. But instead of pulling them out, she just stood there, staring.

  How was one measly roll of paper towels going to help anything? The entire basement was covered in glass and wine. Even if she managed to clean everything up, her dad was going to notice that every single bottle of his wine was missing.

  Hendricks lifted a shaking hand to her mouth, breathing hard. Her mind was going a million miles a minute.

  How did the wine explode? What the hell just happened?

  The front door slammed open and closed.

  “Hendricks!” her mother called. “Are you home?”

  “Shit!” Hendricks muttered. She started to turn, but she was shaking badly, and fumbled the paper towels. They fell to the floor, rolling to a stop at her feet. Hendricks looked down, and that’s when she noticed that a puddle of wine and blood had formed around her, the red liquid staining the soles of her shoes.

  Floorboards creaked, and the muffled sounds of voices drifted toward her. Hendricks grabbed the paper towel roll and hurriedly swiped it over the floor, wine dripping through her fingers and staining the creases of her knuckles.

  There was a screech of hinges as the kitchen door swung open. Her dad said, “Hendricks? Honey, you left a trail of something that looks like grape juice all over the—”

  Hendricks heard a quick intake of breath just behind her and froze. Her cheeks flared with heat. She was too embarrassed to turn around, so she kept trying to sop up the wine.

  “I—I’m sorry,” she stuttered, blinking back tears. “It was an accident, I swear, I’m sorry.”

  The door swung open again and now her mother called, “Hendricks? Honey, you have to be more—Oh, honey. What on earth happened?”

  Hendricks was already shaking her head. “I don’t know. I—”

  Her voice cracked and, in an instant, it was like something inside of her snapped. All of the stress and horror and anxiety of the past few days was suddenly too much.

  What kind of person sees cats disappear into walls? Or imagines that someone chopped off her hair? What kind of person hallucinates voices?

  A crazy person, that’s who.

  No, she told herself. She saw the wine bottles explode. And the wine was still here, pooling beneath her knees, so that meant she couldn’t have imagined it, right?

  Hendricks’s hands were trembling again. She dropped the paper towels and brought them to her face, covering her eyes.

  She found herself blurting, “I had some friends over, okay? I went to get us a bottle of wine, but then I got down there, and . . .”

  She hesitated for a moment. Clean slate. This move was for her. She didn’t want to cause any more trouble for her parents.

  And so she said, slowly, “I was trying to get a bottle from the top of the rack and I knocked the whole thing over.” She felt something inside of her lurch, and she found herself adding, “I know I shouldn’t have even gone down there, and I definitely shouldn’t have tried to take your wine, I just . . . I guess I just wanted them to think I was cool.”

  She felt like an idiot saying it out loud. But at least it wasn’t a lie.

  “Oh, honey.” Her mom reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “We know. We want you to make friends here, too.”

  Hendricks looked up, tentatively, and saw her parents exchange a look. There was an edge of concern to her father’s expression. Her mother gave a very small shake of her head.

  Hendricks squeezed her hands into fists, her fingernails digging into her palms. They were trying to decide whether they believed her, she knew.

  Please believe me.

  “You knocked the whole thing over?” her dad asked, grimacing. Her mom shot him a look and he quickly morphed the expression into a pained smile. “It’s fine. I’ll . . . figure something out.”

  “Let me run you a bath,” her mother said. And with that, Hendricks knew her story had been accepted. “You’re completely drenched. And is some of this blood?”

  “Maybe,” Hendricks admitted. “There was a lot of glass.”

  “Take a seat first and I’ll check your scratches for glass,” her dad said. “Then we can clean up the cellar together. How’s that?”

  Terrible, Hendricks thought. She didn’t want to go back down there. Ever.

  Some small part of her worried it would be like what happened last night, in the bathroom. What would she tell her dad if they opened the cellar door and everything was normal? No spilled wine, no broken bottles?

  She pressed a hand to her chest, horror rising inside of her like nausea. It couldn’t have been her imagination. She could still hear the sound of the wine bottles shattering against the wall. She could still remember that thing moving below the stairs, and how that cat had darted straight through her.

  Hendricks’s father checked her for scratches. When he was done, she followed him out of the kitchen, through the back door, and around the yard to where the cellar doors were still propped open, revealing the deep black darkness of the room below. All the while, she felt Steele House towering above her. It blocked out the darkening winter sky, casting deep shadows onto the grass, mocking her.

  CHAPTER

  10

  The quarry party started after dark, but it was January, so that came early. At seven o’clock, Hendricks called, “See you later!” to her parents and headed outside. She’d thrown on her heavy winter coat, but the weather had warmed up a bit. It felt like it was maybe fifty degrees out, warm enough that she left her parka unzipped and unwound the thick scarf from her neck.

  The quarry was technically outside of Drearford, but it wasn’t exactly far away. Hendricks followed the sidewalk to the end of her block and turned left, into the woods. According to the little map Raven had drawn her at lunch, Hendricks had to walk through the woods to what looked like an old, gnarled tree.

  Hendricks stopped and pulled out her phone, flipping on the flashlight app so that she could take a closer look at the map.

  Raven had actually written, “Walk until you hear running water.”

  “Seriously?” Hendricks shook her head. She slipped the phone back into her pocket. Back in Philly, they hadn’t had to rely on hand-drawn maps and goofy instructions. You could use Google to get anywhere. But this place was different. The woods weren’t plotted online, they were just a big gray nothing on Google Maps. It was pretty spooky.

  Hendricks listened to the woods around her. She heard animals rustling in the tree branches, and her shoes kept crunching on dead leaves. The hair on the back of her neck lifted.

  But it turned out that she didn’t have to listen for running water, or watch out for old trees. She heard voices as she descended deeper into the woods, and then she saw the red flames of bonfires flickering through the shadows. A minute later, she broke into a clearing, hemmed in on three sides by woods, while the fourth dropped off into a crevasse that led to a still, black body of water. It seemed like every single kid from school was here, drinking beer from red Solo cups and dancing to the music blaring from a wireless speaker balanced on an old wooden picnic table. Portia and Raven were standing near the keg.

  “You came!” Portia squealed, throwing her arms around Hendricks’s neck. Hendricks stumbled back a little.

  “You’re drunk,” she said, unwinding Portia’s arms from around her neck. Portia smelled like a distillery.

  “Tipsy!” Portia corrected, holding the Solo cup above her head. “Ladies get tipsy. Not drunk.”

  And then
she dissolved into giggles.

  “She pre-gamed while we set up the fires,” Raven explained, grabbing Portia’s elbow to steady her. “She found out that Vi’s not coming and took it pretty hard.”

  “Looks like I need to catch up,” Hendricks said. She filled a Solo cup with foamy beer from the keg and took a sip. It was a little flat, but still good.

  Raven grabbed Hendricks by the elbow and steered her toward the nearest bonfire. Hendricks expected Portia to follow them, but Portia just slumped against the picnic table, her eyes glassy.

  “She refuses to leave the keg,” Raven whispered, as soon as they were out of earshot. “She’s taking this thing with Vi pretty hard.”

  “What’s their deal?” Hendricks asked.

  Raven shrugged. “They’ve made out at a couple of parties, but Vi’s not really interested in anything official. And Portia’s not good at casual, so the whole thing is sort of a disaster.”

  “Poor Portia,” Hendricks said, following Raven’s gaze. Portia was staring into her Solo cup now, her shoulders sagging. Hendricks felt a stab of pity.

  They stopped outside a circle of people crowded around the bonfire. Hendricks stood on her tiptoes, trying to see what they were all looking at. Finn stood beside the fire, one leg propped up on a charred log, smoke billowing behind him.

  “Maribeth Ruiz was only nine years old when she was discovered in the cellar beneath Steele House”—Finn paused, firelight dancing in his dark eyes—“dead.”

  The beer on Hendricks’s tongue suddenly tasted sour.

  Please no, she thought.

  No matter where she went, she couldn’t escape Steele House.

  “Eddie found their older brother Kyle kneeling over her body, covered in blood, muttering the same thing over and over.”

  Hendricks didn’t want to hear this. She still had to walk past that cellar every day, and after what happened last night, she didn’t need another reason to be freaked out by it.

  She started backing away, but a few more kids had crowded in behind her, and there was nowhere for her to go.