“No,” she said, touching his arm to get him to sit back down. “No, it’s not like that. We’re just neighbors.”
“Don’t talk about me like I’m not standing here,” Eddie said, his voice flat. He met her gaze, and then looked away.
It hit Hendricks that it must’ve been incredibly difficult for him to approach her here, while she was sitting with these people. She felt a deep twist of guilt.
She didn’t know Eddie, though, Hendricks reminded herself. It wasn’t her responsibility to defend him to her friends.
Eddie didn’t look Hendricks’s way again as he stalked to the front of the restaurant. He just pushed the door open with his shoulder and was gone.
But for a long time she watched the spot where he’d stood.
CHAPTER
16
“Hello?” Gillian shouted, and Hendricks heard a flat, slapping noise, like hands pounding against wood. “Hello?”
“Gillian?” Hendricks let the front door slam shut behind her. Gillian wasn’t sprawled across the couch, like she usually was. “Where are you? Are you okay?”
“Hendricks?” The pounding grew more frantic as Hendricks hurried across the living room, following the sound to the little closet beneath the stairs. She pulled the door open and Gillian stumbled out, gasping.
“Oh my God.” Gillian snaked both hands up around her head, her lavender hair sticking through her fingers. Her eyes were wide and red. “I thought I was never going to get out of there.”
“Did you lock yourself in?” Hendricks asked, confused, but Gillian didn’t seem to hear her. She hurried across the room, snatching Brady’s video monitor from the coffee table with shaking hands.
Hendricks felt a cold wave of fear hit her.
Oh my God, Brady—
But Gillian’s shoulders slumped, and a relieved breath escaped her lips.
“Thank God,” she said, staring down at the grainy video of Brady on the monitor screen. “He’s still napping. This is going to sound crazy, but it was like I was . . .”
She trailed off, swallowing hard.
Hendricks felt sick. She put a hand on Gillian’s shoulder. “Like you were what?”
Gillian blinked like she was coming out of a trance. “It was like I was trapped,” she said after a moment. “It was like I was intentionally trapped . . . by the house, or something. I—I heard something beneath the stairs and I thought it might be something from outside, like a raccoon? So I went to check it out and—and the closet door just slammed shut behind me. And then I couldn’t get out again.”
Gillian looked at Hendricks and forced a smile. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. The closet must lock from the outside or something, it just really freaked me out.”
“Yeah,” Hendricks said, distantly. The back of her arms began to creep.
Gillian shoved her schoolbooks into her backpack, a camo-print Herschel bag that was already so full the seams were beginning to unravel. “I think I just need to get out of here now that you’re home. This place is so freaky.” She headed out the front door, still shaking her head.
Hendricks’s muscles grew a fraction tighter with each pound of Gillian’s combat boots down the front porch steps.
Wind sent tree branches tapping against the windows. The kitchen faucet dripped. Somewhere in the distance, a car backfired.
They were all normal, everyday sounds. But beneath them, Hendricks thought she heard something else. The house seemed to constrict, like it was inhaling.
It was like I was intentionally trapped . . . by the house.
Hendricks glanced at the closet door. She was pretty sure it didn’t lock from the outside.
The hair on Hendricks’s arms rose straight up.
“No, guys, you don’t need to come over tonight, I’m perfectly fine,” she muttered under her breath, replaying her last few moments with Portia, Raven, and Connor back at Tony’s pizza place. They’d offered to hang out until Hendricks’s parents came home, but Hendricks had still felt weird about how they’d been making fun of Eddie, and she told them she was cool on her own. Now, she wished she’d taken them up on their offer.
She headed for the kitchen, flicking switches as she went until every light on the main floor was blazing. She thought all that light would make her feel better, but it just made the flat, black darkness outside the windows seem flatter and blacker. She thought she saw movement in the window above the sink, but when she jerked around to see what was there, she saw only her own reflection staring back at her.
An uneasy prickling grew under her skin. Anyone could be outside, looking in.
“Stop,” she told herself, dragging her eyes away from the windows.
She slid her elbows onto the kitchen island, anxiously tapping her fingers against the butcher-block counter. The clock on the microwave read 4:43, which meant that her parents would be home in about an hour. It seemed like an impossibly long time from now, so she distracted herself by rooting around in the fridge. She hadn’t eaten lunch that day, and she’d barely been able to finish her slice of pizza after talking to Eddie. She should be starving, but she found herself zoning out, staring at a bottle of almond milk for a full minute without really seeing it. The icy refrigerator air sent shivers down her spine.
Mew.
No no no no, Hendricks thought. Her grip on the refrigerator door tightened. Her knuckles turned white.
“Who’s a good kitty?” said a deep voice. It was muffled. Coming from upstairs. Then a small, high-pitched giggle reverberated around the house.
Hendricks’s throat constricted. Heart hammering, she walked over to the staircase, stopping just before the thin plastic sheet. She held her breath, listening.
For a long moment, all she could hear was the blood pumping in her ears, the slow rasp of her breath in her throat. Then—
Bang! Something heavy crashed to the floor in the room directly over her head.
Brady’s room.
A wave of fear and panic crashed over her. Hendricks ripped back the plastic and took the steps two at a time, the grating laughter still echoing in her ears.
She was at Brady’s door a second later, fumbling for the doorknob. It wouldn’t open.
“Brady!” she shouted, slapping frantically at the wood. “Brady!”
Frustrated tears sprung to her eyes. She threw her shoulder against the door, but she was too small to force it open. The wood shuddered in its frame but held. Her heartbeat thrashed in her chest like a wild animal.
“Let me in!” She banged on the door wildly, and screaming his name.
She grabbed for the doorknob again, and this time, the door swung wide open, sending her stumbling into the nursery.
A boy stood in the middle of Brady’s room. He was Hendricks’s age, or close to it, and he didn’t look like a ghost, except that his baggy jeans and loose-fitting polo shirt seemed a little dated. His hair was parted in the middle and hung down around his ears, reminding Hendricks of pictures she’d seen of her dad in high school.
The boy stared at Hendricks with intense, black eyes, head cocked at an unnatural angle.
Brady’s crib lay on its side in the middle of the floor, surrounded by his toys and stuffed animals. But the boy with the black eyes was holding Brady in his arms. He absently stroked the top of his head, his fingers flattening Brady’s baby-fine hair.
“Who’s a good kitty,” the boy said.
Brady squirmed against his chest, his face reddening. “Ha-ha,” he said, spotting Hendricks at the door. He held his arms out to her and repeated, insistently, “Ha-ha. Ha-ha.”
Hendricks’s fear became cold and hollow inside of her. She noticed Brady’s blankie lying on the floor at the boy’s feet and felt her breath catch. He needed that blankie. He must be so scared without it.
She crouched, reaching for it, when another, higher voic
e spoke. “Don’t hurt him. Please.”
Hendricks whipped her head around, searching the room. She didn’t see another ghost.
“Poor Saggy Maggie. What are you going to do about it?” The boy’s mouth took on a cruel slant. “You going to cry?”
Hendricks knew the ghost wasn’t talking to her, but she felt the sobs well up inside her throat anyway. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe.
She could smell something now. It was a familiar, damp smell that grew heavier the longer she focused on it.
It was earthy, at first, reminding her of the yard after it rained. And then it seemed to grow sweeter, stronger.
Now it was flowers rotting in a vase. Fresh manure. An animal carcass in the garden.
And, underneath that, the cloying smell of Grayson’s cologne.
Hendricks gagged, and lifted a hand to cover her nose and mouth. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. “Please,” she choked out. “Please, let my brother go.”
The boy looked directly at her, as though seeing her for the first time. His smile stretched tight over his teeth.
As Hendricks stared back, the boy’s face changed.
His skin went first, bloating and warping before Hendricks’s eyes. Pockmarks opened up on his formerly clear face. Then, with a sound like raw meat dropping to the floor, a ragged strip of skin fell from his skull, revealing bone and muscle and tissue beneath.
Hendricks felt bile rising in her throat. She balled a hand at her mouth, choking it down.
The boy’s lips curled back, revealing rotten teeth and bleeding gums. A maggot squirmed through the mess of soft pink muscle and tissue.
And his eyes . . . the pupils weren’t the only things that were black anymore. The darkness had expanded, seeping into the whites, so that two oily pits stared out from his skull. There was nothing remotely human about them.
“Fine,” the boy said, looking down at Brady. His hair moved through the air like he was underwater, snaking and drifting behind him. “I’ll let him go.”
And he lifted Brady’s wriggling body over his head. Brady was shrieking now, his face scrunched in fear. Hendricks could just make out the sound of her name through his screams.
“Ha-ha! Ha-ha!”
And then the boy threw him against the wall.
CHAPTER
17
Hendricks was slumped in a plastic waiting room chair, her knee bouncing anxiously. She looked up when the doors to the intensive care wing whooshed open and her parents stumbled out.
“He’s okay.” Her mom pulled Hendricks to her feet and folded her into a bone-crushing hug. “The doctor said he broke his leg badly when he fell, and that he’ll need to be in a spica cast for six weeks.”
Her dad closed his eyes for a beat, breathing hard. “Because he’s so young, the doctors want to keep him at the hospital for a couple of days to make sure his leg sets properly. But he’s okay.”
He’s okay. For a moment, Hendricks leaned into her mother’s shoulder, breathing in the familiar floral and fruit scent of her perfume. But then she remembered how terrified Brady had looked when he was lying on the floor back home. The way tears had filled his eyes as he’d reached for her. Ha-ha.
Brady might be okay, but all of this was still her fault. If she’d only gone to his room when she first heard the laughter, none of this would have happened.
Hendricks sucked in a deep breath. “I’m so sorry,” she said carefully. “I should have been with him, I should have been watching him—”
“Honey, it’s not your fault,” her mother said. “This kind of thing happens with toddlers.”
Hendricks’s throat felt thick. “You don’t understand,” she said quickly. “Brady didn’t climb out of his crib. There was something in the room with him, something like a . . .”
She stopped talking, her mouth suddenly dry. How was she supposed to tell her parents that a ghost hurt Brady?
Her mom frowned. “Something like what?”
“Something,” Hendricks said, more insistently this time. Her cheeks were burning. She didn’t want to say it out loud, but she needed them to understand. There was something wrong with that house. They couldn’t go back there. “It was something not . . . not normal.”
Her mother was studying her now, a strange expression on her face. “Honey, you aren’t making sense.”
“Did an animal get into his room?” her dad added, scratching his chin. “That damn window. Didn’t I say I was having a problem getting it to stay latched?”
“It wasn’t an animal. It was a thing. I think . . . I think it was a ghost.”
Her parents exchanged a loaded look. Hendricks could see immediately that they didn’t believe her.
“Haven’t you heard about that little girl that died?” she rushed to add. “There’s something really wrong with that house. Something bad.”
Her mother pinched her nose between two fingers, like she felt a migraine coming on. “It’s just an old house. I know it’s creaky and drafty, but—”
“You guys aren’t listening to me.” Hendricks was vaguely aware that her voice was getting louder. A few of the nurses on the other side of the room looked up and were frowning slightly in her direction. Fast, before she could lose her nerve, she said, “I’m telling you I saw something in Brady’s room. This wasn’t the first time! This has been happening since we got here. The house is dangerous.”
An uncomfortable silence followed her outburst. Hendricks could feel people staring over at her, wondering. Her skin itched.
“Why don’t you head on home and get some rest.” Her dad leaned close to her, voice lowered. “It’s been a long night.”
Rest? “But I—I want to see Brady!”
“He’s sleeping now,” her mom said. “Go home, and we’ll call you when we know anything new.”
Her dad patted her once on the shoulder, and then he and her mom walked over to the nurses’ station.
Hendricks trudged through the front doors of the hospital in a haze, flinching when the automatic doors whooshed open and allowed a flurry of cold air to sweep in and wrap itself around her. For a long moment she just stood beneath the neon hospital sign, staring dazed into the darkness of Drearford, unsure what she was supposed to do next. The idea of going home to rest was ludicrous. But where else was she supposed to go?
Drearford was a small town, and the hospital wasn’t far from where she lived. She hadn’t really needed to call an ambulance; she could’ve carried Brady here. Even now, she could see the gray shingles of Steele House peeking out over the tops of the trees, just a few blocks away. Hendricks wrapped her arms around her chest, shivering. The last thing she wanted to do was go back there.
Without really thinking, she started walking. She didn’t bother making her way over to the sidewalk but stepped right onto the neatly maintained lawn, dead grass crunching beneath her sneakers. When her shoes hit the concrete of the parking lot, she started to run.
Something was happening. Her parents might not believe her, and she might not know what the hell was going on, but she couldn’t just ignore it anymore.
Wind cut straight through her thin shirt, making her shiver. The moon hung high in the sky, and it painted the sidewalks silver and black. Hendricks could hear animals rustling around in the bushes as she ran. Owls hooted. Dogs barked.
It didn’t take her long to reach Steele House. She cut through her backyard and darted around the side of Eddie’s house. She took the stairs two at a time, not caring about how loud her footsteps were against the wooden stairs, how it seemed like Eddie’s entire house was shaking beneath her.
“Eddie!” she shouted, banging on his front door. “Open up! Please!”
Just as before, the door flew open, as though Eddie had been expecting her. “What do you want?”
Hendricks flinched at the anger in his voice. “I—I
didn’t know where else to go.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have come here.” Eddie started to close the door but Hendricks reached out, stopping him.
“Wait, please. I need to talk to you.”
His face remained impassive. “I tried to talk to you earlier.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Hendricks said, staring down at her hands. She felt Eddie’s eyes move over to her, and she forced herself to keep talking before she could chicken out. “Those guys were being assholes, and I should’ve stuck up for you—”
“Whatever,” Eddie said, cutting her off.
Now she did look at him. “No, it’s not okay.”
He met her eyes. “You’re right. It’s not.”
Hendricks shivered. She’d run all the way over in nothing but a T-shirt, even though the wind made the hair on her arms stand straight up. She twisted her finger in the hem of her shirt, trying to ignore the cold. “You were right,” she said. “About Steele House. It’s haunted.”
Something in Eddie’s expression softened. He pushed the screen door open and joined her on the porch. “You saw something?”
“Yeah.” Hendricks closed her eyes, fighting tears. “And whatever it was, it tried to kill my little brother.”
Eddie looked like he was about to respond but instead he pressed his lips together, jaw tight.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said suddenly.
Hendricks knotted her hands together as they drifted into Eddie’s backyard, squeezing until the blood drained from her fingers. Something inside of her had been tightening and tightening all night. She had thought that seeing Eddie and telling him what happened might cause it to release, but it didn’t. She felt tense as ever.
“I hate this place,” Eddie muttered out of nowhere. He wasn’t wearing a coat, and Hendricks could see goose bumps pop up along his arms.
She lifted an eyebrow. “You hate Drearford? Or just this street?”
“All of it.” Eddie hugged his chest, shoulders hunching up around his ears. “You feel it, don’t you?”
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