Ready for a Scare?

by P. J. Night

  Paige4peace421: I WOULDN’T.

  Kookykell2011: THEY HAD NO CHOICE. THEY PUSHED OPEN THE HEAVY WOODEN DOOR AND STEPPED INTO COMPLETE BLACKNESS. NO LIGHTS. THEY CALLED OUT BUT GOT NO ANSWER. MY FATHER REACHED AROUND DESPERATELY FOR A LIGHT SWITCH. SOON HIS FINGERS FELT ONE, AND HE FLICKED IT ON AND . . . BEHIND THE FRONT DESK SAT A SKELETON. WHO KNEW HOW LONG THE BODY HAD BEEN THERE, ROTTING AWAY? THE FLESH HAD DECOMPOSED AND ONLY THE BONES REMAINED . . . SITTING THERE, WAITING TO GREET THE GUESTS. THEN THE MOTEL PHONE RANG. IT RANG AND RANG. MY FATHER TOOK A HESITANT STEP FORWARD AND LIFTED THE RECEIVER. HELLO? HE SAID.

  SpenceX77: WHO WAS CALLING? WHAT DID THEY SAY?????

  Kookykell2011: HE SAID GOTCHA! KELLY RULES!

  She laughed as her friends typed back, annoyed that she had done it again.

  Kookykell2011: I AM THE QUEEN OF SCARES!

  She’d been scaring her friends for years. In elementary school, she was mostly about fake snakes and eyeballs. And while those were still awesome, especially when skillfully placed in a lunch bag, she’d moved on in middle school to creepy stories about monsters and creatures and ghosts. The real spine-tingling stuff. Everyone agreed that she was the master.

  Kelly glanced around her empty room, suddenly feeling a bit let down. A scary story wasn’t the same when she couldn’t see her friends’ reactions. That was the whole adrenaline rush. The look of pure fear. She couldn’t get that typing on a screen. This no-sleepover thing stinks, she thought. Everything was ready. Her green flannel sleeping bag was rolled out on her floor, with a plastic bag of scares tucked underneath. A fake fuzzy mouse to slip under June’s pillow. A book of ghost stories. A tiny, handheld device that emitted bloodcurdling screams and vicious growls. It would have been perfect, Kelly thought. She didn’t want to wait until next week.

  That was when she had a brilliant idea.

  Kookykell2011: LET’S HAVE A WEBCAM SLEEPOVER TONIGHT. ALL OF US.

  SpenceX77: WHAT’S THAT?

  Kookykell2011: JUST LIKE A REAL ONE BUT VIRTUAL. WE ALL PUT ON OUR WEBCAMS SO WE CAN SEE EACH OTHER AND JUST HANG LIKE WE WOULD IF WE WERE TOGETHER. EXCEPT WITH THE COMPUTER. SPENCER CAN HANG TOO.

  SpenceX77: EXCELLENT! NEVER BEEN TO A GIRLS’ SLEEPOVER.

  Kookykell2011: EIGHT O’CLOCK! WEAR PJ’S!

  Paige4peace421: AWESOME!

  Juney206: C U THEN.

  Kookykell2011: BEFORE YOU GUYS GO, I HAVE TO WARN YOU ABOUT SOMETHING.

  Paige4peace421: WHAT?

  Kookykell2011: IT’S SERIOUS.

  SpenceX77: SPIT IT OUT.

  Kookykell2011: GET READY TO BE SCARED! VERY SCARED!

  CHAPTER 3

  Kelly opened the front door that evening for Chrissie and immediately shivered at the drop in temperature. The air had plummeted to way below freezing, causing the snow of the past week to crust over into a shiny shell. Chrissie, pizza box in hand, slid a bit on the front walk. Her blond hair poked out of a knit cap, and a puffy navy parka swallowed up her thin body.

  Glancing out into the early evening darkness, Kelly still didn’t see her mother’s big storm approaching. Just the same heavy gray clouds, the Stones’ SUV pulling into their driveway across the street, and Mr. Golubic, wrapped in a thick wool coat, walking his black Labrador, weaving around the snowdrifts on the side of the road. The usual New England winter stuff.

  A little before eight, Kelly stood up from the over-stuffed family room sofa, where Ryan and Chrissie were watching reality-show reruns.

  “Time for the webcam sleepover?” Chrissie asked. She smiled knowingly.

  “Paige told you?” Paige and Chrissie had this weird relationship. Sometimes they were the best of friends, and sometimes Chrissie went into superior-older-sister mode, acting as if Paige were an alien life form best to be avoided. The hard thing, for an outsider like Kelly, was figuring out which dynamic was playing out when.

  “Yeah. Sounds like fun.” Chrissie smiled, crinkling her blue eyes the same way Paige did.

  Kelly had to admit that Chrissie was probably the best choice if she was forced to have a babysitter, which obviously she was. A senior in high school, Chrissie starred in all the school plays but wasn’t a drama queen. She was actually pretty laid-back, and she seemed more into talking on her phone than the whole babysitter authority thing. She was fine with letting Ryan and Kelly do what they wanted, which worked for Kelly.

  Chrissie’s ringtone trilled an upbeat tune from a current Broadway musical. “Just come downstairs every once in a while, so I know you’re still breathing,” Chrissie said before she walked away to answer her phone.

  Kelly closed her bedroom door and changed into striped flannel pajama pants and a long-sleeved sweatshirt with polka dots. She nudged Ezra off her desk chair. The ten-year-old black cat stared at her, then scampered along the windowsill to the top of her dresser. He was her dad’s cat. She wasn’t exactly sure what his problem was, but the cat refused to live on ground level. He’d climb to the highest point in any room so he could reign supreme, staring haughtily down at the humans below.

  Kelly pulled her hair into a ponytail, then switched on her webcam and logged into the conferencing site. Paige’s face peered out from the top box on Kelly’s screen. As perky as ever, she bounced up and down on her bed. Paige always bounced. On the bus. In the cafeteria. During class. Paige’s mom called it nervous energy. Kelly glanced enviously at Paige flopping on her new teal-and-gray bedspread. Totally sophisticated.

  Kelly waved into her webcam.

  “How’s Chrissie?” Paige asked. “Did she play games with you? Is she going to tuck you in?”

  Kelly screwed up her face. “Ha-ha. Very funny.”

  “I think it’s so cute that Kelly has a babysitter,” June cooed.

  Kelly gazed at a second box on her screen that framed June’s face. Forever the glamour girl, she wore pink satin button-down men’s-cut pajamas. Kelly doubted June owned a pair of sweats, and if she did, they were probably the velour kind, jeweled with rhinestones. June held two fingernails up to the camera. One was polished in iridescent purple; the other in a matte baby blue.

  “Color choice?” she inquired.

  Paige and Kelly both chose the sparkly purple. Kelly watched June, sitting at her vanity, her laptop certainly nestled among bottles of perfume and tubes of lip gloss, meticulously polishing her nails. Her long auburn hair fell like a curtain over her face as she bent in concentration.

  “Should we all polish our nails?” Paige asked.

  “Or we can make beauty masks,” Kelly suggested. “I read that if you mix avocado with honey and smear it on your face it makes your skin glow.”

  “You serving chips with that?” Spencer’s voice broke through as he appeared in a third box on her screen. “I mean, seriously, we’re not really going to sit here and watch you girls have some sort of spa session, are we?”

  “You would look good in a green face mask,” Paige quipped. “Might mellow out all those freckles.”

  “Whoa! Back off the freckles,” Spencer warned. “You only dream of having this much character on your face.”

  Paige laughed. “Just joking.”

  “So what’s the plan?” asked a voice from behind Spencer.

  “Who’s that?” Kelly spotted a silhouette hovering behind Spencer, just out of view of the camera.

  “Show yourself,” June commanded.

  “You guess,” said the voice.

  “Well, from your voice I can tell you’re a guy.” June giggled. Kelly rolled her eyes. June had recently started using this fake flirting giggle. Didn’t she know it was so transparent?

  “Do you go to our school?” Paige asked, leaning into her camera to catch a closer glimpse.

  “Yes,” the voice replied. Spencer sat at his desk, his secretive grin broadcasting to all their screens.

  “Are you in any of our classes?” June asked.

  “Kelly’s,” he said. “Math.”

  Kelly quickly did a mental scan of her math classroom. Who was Sp
encer friends with in that class? Everyone she thought of, she rejected. She couldn’t think of anyone that Spencer would hang with. She threw out a few random names, but the voice said she was wrong, wrong, and wrong.

  “I give up,” she admitted. “You win. Who are you?”

  “The mystery person is . . .” Spencer used his game-show-announcer voice. He moved away from the camera, and for a moment, all that was visible was the Avatar poster on his bedroom wall. Then a face filled the screen.

  Kelly gasped.

  His eyes were crossed and his upper lip curled back, exposing an expanse of gums and huge upper teeth. Gruesome!

  She needed a few moments to recognize Gavin Mahon. He was new to their school. He sat in the back corner of their math class. She had never spoken to him. She wondered how Spencer even knew him—and why he was hanging out at his house.

  Spencer squeezed back into the screen next to Gavin, who had now uncontorted his face, and introduced him to June and Paige. While they were comparing classes and saying hi, Kelly took a closer look at Gavin. He was so unlike tall, sturdy Spencer. Gavin seemed younger and skinnier than other boys their age. His arms were thin and his neck was wiry. He wore his black hair in a bowl cut, and she could make out a faint scar above his thick eyebrows.

  “Gavin started Adventure Guides with me,” Spencer was saying when Kelly tuned back into the conversation. That explains it, she thought. Spencer was into nature, hiking, and fishing. Adventure Guides was some sort of survivalist group. Of course, skinny Gavin looked like the last person to rough it in the outdoors. “He’s sleeping over tonight. A real sleepover.”

  “This one is real too,” Paige protested. “And you guys should be in pj’s if you want to participate.” She scowled at their jeans and T-shirts.

  Kelly was going to agree, when she heard a knock at her door. “Come in,” she called.

  Chrissie pushed open the door and pranced in, a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream in her hand. “Hello, sleepover people,” she chirped. “I brought a yummy bowl of ice cream. Your favorite flavor, right, Paigey-o? Sleepovers should have treats . . . oh, but, wait”—she poked her head in front of the webcam—“you’re not here to share it, are you Paigey-o? And I know there’s no ice cream at our house. So sad for you.”

  Paige jumped up from her bed. “Get lost, Chrissie!” she yelled to the screen.

  Chrissie continued to taunt her little sister. Kelly couldn’t believe her mom was actually paying Chrissie. I act more mature than she does, she thought. Moving away from her desk, she let Chrissie slide into her chair. She stood alongside, watching Chrissie chat with her friends.

  Suddenly Kelly sucked in her breath. “Oh, man. Chrissie, don’t move. Seriously. Don’t.”

  “W-what? What’s happening?” Chrissie asked, her voice shaking.

  Kelly tried to scream, but no sound came out. All she could do was point at the bare skin on Chrissie’s neck. It was horrible. So horrible.

  Chrissie stiffened. “Please. Tell me!”

  “It’s on you,” Kelly whispered. She inched backward. “Oh, watch out! It’s going to bite.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “A spider.” Kelly gulped. “There’s a huge spider on you.”

  Chrissie jerked her head, trying without success to see the spider. Her cheeks flamed, and her scream rose throughout the house. Ezra arched his back in protest. Leaping from the dresser onto the desk, he shot out the door in a black flash of fur, raising the pitch of Chrissie’s scream an octave.

  “Get it off!” she wailed.

  “I don’t know. . . . ” Kelly stared at the enormous black spider. “It’s so . . . so hairy!”

  “Help me! It’s going to bite. I know it!”

  Kelly took a deep breath. She reached over and, with the back of her hand, knocked the spider from Chrissie’s neck. She froze as it landed on Chrissie’s sneaker.

  Chrissie shrieked again. “Are you crazy?”

  “Gotcha!” Kelly cried. “Smile for the cameras!” All her friends laughed, as she waved the fake tarantula in Chrissie’s face. Paige danced on her bed, delighted that her big sister had fallen for the lamest scare ever.

  Chrissie scowled. “Ooh, that was bad. You freaked me out.”

  Kelly shrugged. “I am the master. With me, you should always be ready for a scare.”

  “Who’s there? Hey, Kelly! Hi! Hi, June! Can you see me?” Spencer’s six-year-old brother Charlie’s gap-toothed grin filled the screen.

  Charlie is way cute, Kelly thought. They’d all been friends since long before he was born, and Charlie kind of felt like a younger brother to her, too.

  “Get lost,” Spencer said, playfully pushing Charlie out of the way. “Aren’t you supposed to be going to bed?”

  “Take a hike, squirt,” Gavin added. Kelly detected a slight edge in his voice. As if he didn’t like Charlie.

  “You’re mean.” Charlie’s whine could be heard.

  “Yeah,” June agreed. “Be nice.”

  “Charlie, sweetie, leave your brother alone.” Spencer’s mom’s voice sounded faint, as if she was down the hall.

  The ringtone of Chrissie’s phone filled the room. “Ugh, I hate that song,” Paige said, leaning back against her oversize pillows and pulling out her own phone to check messages.

  “I kind of like it.” June stood and shimmied to the beat. “It’s got a good groove.”

  “Not when you hear the same show tune every two minutes,” Paige complained. “Chrissie’s obsessed with Broadway musicals.”

  Chrissie glanced at the caller ID, then let the call go to voice mail. “Okay, I’m done here. I’ll be downstairs watching TV with Ryan—” The Broadway hit trilled again. Chrissie screwed up her face. “Nobody has any patience. I gotta get this.”

  Kelly heard Chrissie talking into the phone as she padded down the stairs. Kelly plopped back onto her chair and kicked her feet up onto the desk. “What we need,” she announced, “is a ghost story.”

  “Ooh, good idea,” Paige said. “Everyone turn off the lights.”

  “Mood lighting,” June agreed.

  As she stood to reach for the light switch, Kelly glanced out the small window between her desk and her dresser. Through the overgrown tangle of tree branches, frosted white from storms earlier in the week, she could make out the first flurries slowly falling. The storm was starting.

  “Kel, don’t you have a big book of ghost stories?” Spencer asked, his face lit by the greenish glow of his monitor, the room behind him completely dark.

  Kelly nodded and was about to reach for it when Gavin said, “I know a story.”

  All eyes turned to him.

  “It’s a true story, though. Is that okay?” He sat on a chair next to Spencer, so the camera aimed on both their faces.

  “True is better,” June said, purple light surrounding her as if part of a surreal music video. June must have her bedside lamp on. The one with the purple bulb.

  “What’s it about?” Paige asked.

  “You need some background,” Gavin began. “I come from a small town in the way northern part of the state, right near the Canadian border. It isn’t really a town. More like a bunch of cabins in the woods. My dad worked for a lumber mill.”

  He blinked several times. “Things were different up there. People weren’t so friendly. Or so trusting. We pretty much kept to ourselves. Except for one night every year.”

  Kelly leaned closer, studying Gavin’s face. It had an intensity she had never seen before.

  “Every year, on January twenty-ninth, we’d gather at the old Richardson place. It wasn’t that we much liked the company. It was just accepted that on a night like that, there was safety in numbers.” He pushed his fingertips together, methodically cracking each knuckle. “The howling started at nightfall.”

  “What howling?” Spencer asked.

  “Animals. The attacks started small. Rabbits and squirrels. Then bigger animals. Foxes. Deer.” Gavin swallowed hard. “The cries would
then grow louder, more intense. The shrieks of geese. The wails of wolves.”

  “Why were they making all that noise?” Paige wrapped her arms around a pillow, hugging it close.

  Gavin blinked rapidly. A nervous habit? “Death is painful. Vicious. Especially under the powerful grip of the Lagad.”

  “The what?” Was Gavin making this up? Normally Kelly would have thought so. But that cold, faraway look in his eyes was the stare of someone who had witnessed horrible things.

  “The people who were natives to the woods called it—him—the Lagad. An ancient name.”

  “What was it?” Paige wanted to know.

  Gavin paused. “Hard to tell. Some said it was a man who had turned into a hairy, ravenous creature. Some said it was a huge creature that had humanlike traits. Whatever it was, it was supernatural and deadly. It descended from the mountains on this one night every year as an act of revenge against the loggers who had destroyed its lair on that very day generations ago. The Lagad returned to settle the score.”

  “By killing animals?”

  “It warmed up with animals,” he explained. “As the hour grew later, it tracked people. The same way some people hunt deer . . . silently following tracks . . . scents. Alone in your house, you were no match for the Lagad. You would hear the crunch of its footsteps, maybe the crack of a twig, the scraping of its claws against your door, and then it was all over.”

  “Did you ever see it?” June asked.

  His right eyelid twitched involuntarily as he measured his response. “Yes.”

  Kelly could hear herself breathing. Had the creature done something that had caused Gavin to leave his home? To move down here?

  Gavin stared into the distance, remembering that terrible time. “My brother and I were home alone. We should’ve been at Richardson’s place, keeping the vigil with everyone else. But we were waiting for my dad. His truck had broken down, and he was coming from the mechanic. To get us. It was too long a walk in the cold to Richardson’s, so we waited. We waited too long.”

  Kelly pulled her sweatshirt sleeves over her hands. The darkness of the room cocooned her, transporting her to that desolate cabin in the northern woods.