That night, after sharing Chinese takeout dinner with my mom, I headed over to the abandoned house that my friends and I had started to refer to as our clubhouse. My fortune cookie had said: Take advantage of opportunities for new adventures. Obey the fortune cookie, I decided.
When we met up at the clubhouse, we decided we were all too tired to clean. We decided to just poke around in the basement, see what was there.
Something about going down into the basement of that abandoned house seriously creeped me out. I guess it was the idea of getting trapped down there and having someone with evil intent come down there and find us. We weren’t supposed to be there.
I decided to tell George and Kailee about the guy who had showed up at my front door the night before. I told them about the warning he had given me and about how I recognized him as one of the guys who had pushed a crying girl into a van the same night that Annie had gone missing.
The information definitely troubled them. They decided to lock the house doors, although they were still determined to explore the basement. They wanted to see what was down there. Curiosity killed the cats, all of them, was the thought that passed through my seriously freaked-out mind.
Fighting a lump of panic in my throat and a hotbed of complete terror in my stomach, I slowly descended the creaking staircase to the basement. When a cobweb brushed across my face, I started screaming.
Then apologized to my companions. Get a grip.
When we stepped down into the subterranean level, it didn’t actually seem so bad after all. Mostly, the basement was just messy. The house had a finished basement with carpeted floor. It was fairly well-lighted.
It was definitely messy, though. It looked like a hoarder’s paradise: piles of boxes everywhere, stacks of newspapers, toys and dolls scattered throughout the rooms.
We were trying to decide what to do first when George found an old Ouija Board with bent corners and stains. He and Kailee decided they wanted to mess around with it. I did not want to do that. I wanted to get up out of the basement and do something else. Something lighter, more fun—like dance or sing or play cards or something.
Two against one. We were going to consult the Ouija Board. And, to make the situation even more eerie, they wanted to stay in the basement, turn off the overhead lights and use a lamp down there that had a dim orangish lightbulb. It was a kid’s lamp, but it was weird. It had a clown face on it that was completely and utterly creepy. Who gives that type of thing to a kid, anyway? The kid’s probably totally disturbed by now.
A thought passed through my mind that maybe the kid was all grown-up. Maybe he or she had revenge fantasies centered on that basement. And tonight would be the night that they would take out that revenge.
I shivered.
Get a grip.
So we sat down with the Ouija Board. First, we spread out a rolled-up carpet decorated with a fancy Oriental design. It was dusty, but really quite beautiful and thick and comfortable. Then we unfolded the Ouija Board and set down the planchette on its slick surface. Kailee and I put our fingertips on it.
There was a red stain on the words GOOD BYE at the bottom of the board. I thought it looked like red fruit punch a little kid might have spilled there. George thought it looked like blood. Kailee pointed out that old blood would be brown. George suggested it might be new blood. I suggested he shut up.
George changed the subject. He started a discussion on what we should ask the Ouija Board.
Kailee dove right in. She spoke directly to the Ouija. “I’m guessing you saw lots of things down in this old basement.”
Oh, great. Saw lots of things? Including evil things? Gee, thanks, Kailee, for bringing that up.
A shiver ran down my spine. Goosebumps broke out all over my arms. I swear my hair stood on end.
Kailee continued, “We’re just hanging out here tonight and would love to talk with anyone who knows anything about this house, things that might have happened here, down in this basement or throughout the whole house.”
The light flickered. The clown’s teeth blackened. His eyes sparked with dim orange flashes.
I stifled a scream.
Nothing happened on the Ouija Board’s side. It did nothing.
I yawned.
All of a sudden, the heart-shaped planchette moved. For a split second, I swear, the plastic piece vibrated with some kind of electricity. Without thinking, I pulled my hands away, afraid I’d get an electric shock.
Kailee screeched. “What are you doing, Shade? Put your hands back on!”
I realized there was no electricity, no battery, nothing that could harm me in that stupid heart-shaped piece of plastic. I put my fingertips back on it.
Once again, it moved; but this time there was no buzz or anything coming out of it. It just started spelling out stuff.
First, it spelled out: What are you doing here?
Oh, my God. I thought I was going to wet myself.
Kailee looked up from the board. She looked at George and me with some kind of wildness in her eyes. There was fear there. But also determination, and that worried me. I wasn’t sure if she’d be too reckless with what we were doing.
She looked back down at the board and continued, “Like I said, we’re just hanging out here. Just friends getting together. We’ve been working on cleaning up this house, by the way. Who are you?”
George added, “Did you live here at one time?”
Silence. Then a strong gust of wind blew against the house, rattling all kinds of loose things outside.
All kinds of loose things rattled around in my brain. I suffocated more screams.
Then the planchette moved. It spelled out: “Who are you?”
Without glancing up, Kailee gave the spirit communicating through the Ouija Board our names! I figured she couldn’t look me in the eye because she was totally crossing boundaries and betraying us. Or at least betraying me. I didn’t know who we were talking to. I didn’t want whoever it was to have my name.
And they would never forget my name. Oh, why oh why could I not have Leotard Girl’s Plain-Jane name of Jane Smith? Why did I have to be Galactic Shade Griffin? No one ever forgot that name.
I piped up, my voice shaking like a tambourine in the hands of a drunken gypsy, “Now you know who we are...” I glared at Kailee. “...thanks to my friend Kailee here. But who are you?”
The planchette skittered across the board, spelling out: It doesn’t really matter who I am. I need to warn you of something important. There’s a girl who frequents The Tiger’s Den. You need to tell her to stop coming into this neighborhood.
I tried to figure out what that meant. Me? Kailee? “You mean one of us needs to stop coming into this neighborhood?”
My fingertips were pulled toward letters that spelled out: Do you know Misty Perkins?
Well, God, yeah. She was the cheerleader who had photographed her nasty, infected, self-inflicted cut and posted it in The Tiger’s Den under the name of Jane Doe, and then I talked her into going to the hospital emergency room, and then I found out she wasn’t actually Jane Doe but was the gorgeous cheerleader Misty Perkins. I said, “Yes, I know her.”
The plastic piece responded: You need to warn her to stay away from this neighborhood.
After that, the planchette refused to move except to slide a fingertip’s width at a time due to our hands trembling from trying to hold them on top of the plastic piece for so long.
George suggested we call it quits. We gladly agreed.
Going back upstairs, we tried to decide if we should say anything to Misty. We decided we shouldn’t. Kailee pointed out that we’d probably just sound nuts. “Ummm, yeah, an old Ouija Board told us to warn you to stay out of its neighborhood.”
We had a good laugh over that.
The next day, we heard news circulating quickly throughout our high school. Misty Perkins, the cheerleader, was missing. Her parents had reported it to the police last night.
CHAPTER 13
I receive
d a voice mail on my cell phone sometime in the morning while I was in class. It informed me that I had gotten the job at The Daily Buzz.
At lunchtime, I stepped outside a set of back doors in our school and returned the call. I played the role of best actress in the world, squashing down my horror at the news that Misty Perkins had gone missing after a Ouija Board had warned us that we should protect her. I just acted out the lines I wanted to say about how happy I was to get the job, when do I start, all that good stuff.
I was to start my job one week later.
Shortly after making the call, I found myself in the lunchroom. I didn’t actually remember going there. I must have wandered, with my brain on autopilot, through the halls and into the noisy cafeteria at the scheduled time. My mind was on Misty Perkins and the Ouija Board.
I grabbed a sandwich and a bottle of water. I sat down at a table filled with noisy, chatting, laughing students. I remained lost in thought.
It dawned on me that we should have listened to the telepathic spirit that had tried to reach us through the planchette. I felt extremely guilty.
It was so weird. Somehow, a ghost had communicated with us through a heart-shaped piece of plastic with a little window in it that hovered above letters of the alphabet, painstakingly spelling out one word at a time.
I thought back to the time that Annie and I had consulted the Ouija Board at my house. What had it spelled out? Basically innocuous stuff like Happy Halloween! and Candy Corn! and Kids love candy! But it did seem to know that it was Halloween night, and that was weird. And then Annie went missing.
Was a ghost from the beyond kidnapping students?
Oh. My. God. A ghost! I should ask Brandon about that. Did every ghost know all the other ghosts? Could he figure out what was going on?
I got up from the lunch table. Still on autopilot, as though my body was a marionette being moved along by something greater than myself pulling all the strings, I ended up in the nurse’s office. I complained of the worst headache and the worst cramps ever, as if I were experiencing the prelude to a monster storm of a period, the likes of which no human female had ever before experienced. I even managed to shed a few tears, although I suspect those tears were for Annie and Misty.
The nurse gave me some Tylenol capsules and sent me home.
Yaaay, periods. They were the best excuse ever for getting out of stuff with grown-ups. I mean, as long as you didn’t report a period lasting a month or anything. But, even then, periods could be highly irregular and that worked to my advantage. This period in particular ... not that I actually had my period that day ... but this particular made-up period was going to be quite irregular. I had one week before my job at The Daily Buzz started. Before then, I needed time to talk to Brandon and figure out how the hell I could search for Annie and Misty.
When I got home, I bolted up the stairs, two at a time. I slammed and locked the door to my bedroom. I got the amulet out of the dresser drawer where I had left it that morning. Clutching it in my hands, I sat on my bed and called out to Brandon.
Five minutes later, I was still waiting. Brandon was nowhere to be seen. Well, at least not by living, breathing humans. I wondered what his world was like, how Purgatory looked and felt to him when he disappeared into it.
My cell phone buzzed. I practically jumped out of my skin, I was so on edge.
It was a text message from Brandon. Oh, for God’s sake. I typed a response: Where the hell are you? I thought better of it. I deleted the word hell. He was in Purgatory; he might not like the implication of the word hell.
I waited eleven whole minutes. He never answered. He just materialized in front of me, this time green eyes first, then his foggy form. It was disconcerting, to say the least, to have a pair of green eyes just floating in front of me, staring.
When his cloud body had formed, Brandon smiled.
I did not smile back.
He knew something was wrong. The smile faded from his face. He asked me what was going on.
I explained about Misty Perkins.
Brandon floated over to the couch and sat down. “I have an idea. I found my grandmother in the afterlife. I could talk to her, see if she could help.”
I gave Brandon a hopeful look. “You found your grandmother? How? Where is she, exactly?”
Brandon looked kind of glum. “Well, that’s the thing. She appeared to me. I guess, actually, she found me. I don’t understand the afterlife well enough to know where she is or how to see her again.”
Jumping off my bed, I sat down next to Brandon. Taking his hand in mine, I felt a sudden surge of ecstasy. It scared me, so I just squeezed his hand, which resulted in my hand sinking into a cloudiness from which I pulled back. Awkward. Then I got serious about the issues at hand. “Brandon, we should have a séance.”
He laughed. “A what?”
I felt myself getting ready to pout. I felt too vulnerable to be mocked by him, especially with Annie and Misty missing. “A séance. You know, where you contact the dead.”
He laughed again, even more enthusiastically this time. “Shade, I am the dead! Remember?”
I felt like an idiot. “Ummm, yeah, I realize that. But you don’t know how to reach your grandmother. I thought I could try to contact her. She might appear to me, especially if she knows you’re here with me, and then we can talk to her.”
“I guess that might work.”
I said, “I’d like to use the Ouija Board. Somehow, when I was with Annie on Halloween, a spirit communicating through my Ouija Board knew what night it was. It spelled out: Happy Halloween! and Candy Corn! and Kids love candy! Then, last night, I went to an abandoned house that I’m fixing up with two of my friends. We found a Ouija Board in the basement. We talked to it. It told us to warn another student named Misty Perkins to stay away from the neighborhood where that house is. And guess what? Today, we found out that Misty Perkins is missing!”
Brandon turned to me, concern in those brilliant green eyes of his. “Shade, if you were warned that Misty should stay out of that neighborhood, shouldn’t you stay out of it, too?”
I shook my head no. “People go missing in lots of different places. Maybe Misty had an enemy there, or maybe she has an abusive boyfriend who kidnapped her or something. That’s why I want to talk to your grandmother. Maybe she sees things happening here on Earth from wherever she is. Maybe she could help us out.”
Brandon decided to go along with my idea. We got out the Ouija Board and placed it on my desk. Then we sat down across from each other and placed our fingertips on the planchette. I hoped it would work. Brandon’s fingers were lighter than air, literally.
Brandon told me his grandmother’s name: Harper Yates. Wow, Harper? I loved that name!
Brandon suggested I try to contact her. So I tried. For twenty-two long, agonizing minutes, I tried. I kept saying things like, “Mrs. Yates ... Mrs. Yates ... I’m with your grandson, Brandon, who’s in Purgatory now. We need your help.” But there was no answer. My arms started cramping up and my fingers started shaking so badly, I was causing the planchette to skitter around the area where we had placed it.
Brandon said, “It’s trying to zip down to the GOOD BYE section, I know it. Even my own grandmother doesn’t want to see me anymore. I’m a horrible person! I don’t blame her at all. I killed my brother; I killed myself. I totally messed up my parents’ lives...”
I interrupted him. “I don’t think that’s true...”
Brandon’s green eyes glowed in a menacing way. I felt scared. I couldn’t read him precisely. I wanted to look at his overall body language, but he didn’t have an actual body. It looked to me like the cloud substance resembling his human form was turning darker, going from white fog to more of a storm cloud in appearance. It had more gray and black in it and the edges of it were tattering, disintegrating. I wasn’t sure what I wanted more: for him to not implode and disappear forever or for him to do exactly that because his darkening presence was frightening me so badly. Really, I want
ed him to calm down.
I tried a different approach. “Brandon, let’s try it again. Can I ask your grandmother for help, maybe tell her how incredibly helpful and kind you’ve been?”
With an electrical popping sound, Brandon’s shape, all of him, completely disappeared. A wind tore through the room, sweeping papers off my desk. Damn, Leotard Girl was forever taking a beating, first from faeries and now from a belligerently angry ghost! With a loud cracking sound, the rods holding up the curtains behind my window seat snapped in pieces. The curtains fell to the cushions and onto the floor.
I was so confused. I felt angry, sad, frightened and on the verge of screaming when something very strange happened.
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