by Alex van Tol
“What do you want?” I hiss. “What do you want from me?”
The lid heats up under my fingers, superhot. Agonizing. The heat travels up through my fingers and across my wrists. It’s like having hot wax shot through my veins.
“Ahhh!” I scream.
Shannon stops pounding. “Elliot?” Silence. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”
The heat fades as quickly as it came. I’m left sweating, panting, my hands throbbing.
“I don’t know what you want, you goddamn freak spirit.”
The door starts rattling again as Shannon yanks and pounds on it. “Elliot, open the door!” she shrieks. “This isn’t funny!” I can hear the fear in her voice. It feeds mine.
I open my mouth to tell her I can’t. Before I can speak, the heat flares again. Up through my forearms and into my shoulders this time.
“Aaaaaaauuugh!” Pain descends on me like a red haze. The noises blur together. Me screaming. Shannon screaming. Shannon pounding on the door with both fists, then kicking it with her boots.
“What do you want, Jessica?” I scream. That last bit, the name. I didn’t know I was going to say it. It was pulled up from inside me. Thrown out of my mouth. By something other than me.
And just like snapping your fingers, all the craziness stops. The board releases me. I lurch sideways and fall over, hitting my head against a shelf.
There’s a little metal plinking noise, and the door swings open. Shannon’s standing there holding a brick, like she’s about to plow it into the door. The lantern burns on the ground beside her, casting her face in an eerie underlight.
“What the hell is going on in here?” she bellows.
She looks at the door, then at me, lying on the floor.
She drops the brick and steps into the boathouse. I sit up and lean against a post, rubbing my head.
“What happened?” she demands.
“I’m okay,” I say. “Thanks for asking. Can we leave now?”
She ignores my question. “Why were you screaming?” Her eyes fall on the Ouija board on the floor beside me. They narrow. She looks back at me. “You didn’t.”
“I couldn’t help it.”
“Bullshit!” she shouts. “I told you not to touch the board, Elliot! And you went ahead and did it by yourself!”
“I didn’t do it on purpose!” I shout back. “It wouldn’t let me go!”
Shannon tilts her head. “Oh, sure.” She nods. “The Ouija board just reached up and grabbed you.”
I shake my head. “No. Well, yeah, it did. I tried to move it out of the way so I could get by, and my fingers got stuck on the lid and it wouldn’t let me go.”
“Right. And you were powerless to pull away.”
“I was,” I say angrily. “It was like it was burning me.” I point toward the door. “You heard me. You think I was making that up?”
She stares at me, trying to decide whether to believe me. “Why’d you lock me out?”
“I didn’t.”
“You goddamn well did, Elliot,” she says, her voice rising.
“I didn’t,” I say. I haul myself to my feet with the help of a nearby shelf. “I didn’t even touch the door. I propped it open with the brick when you left!”
Shannon looks like she’s about to hit me.
“I didn’t lock it,” I insist. “I was sitting right there,” I say, pointing to the floor. “I couldn’t get up. The board wouldn’t let me. The lid was moving and spelling out letters, and the door just…closed.” I shudder. “It locked by itself.” Even as I say the words, I know how crazy they sound.
Shannon’s eying me warily. “That’s crap,” she says. But the anger is gone from her voice. “Doors don’t close and lock by themselves.”
I raise my eyebrows in the direction of the door. “This one did. I watched it.”
“That’s impossible.” She folds her arms and stares at me. “That stuff only happens in movies.”
A movement at our feet catches our attention.
From where it came to rest after releasing my fingers, the lid stands up.
Stands right up.
On its side, slowly.
If my hair wasn’t already curly, it sure as hell would be now.
As we watch, the cap starts to spin. Slow revolutions at first. It spins faster and faster until it’s nothing but a white blur. It stays precisely, impossibly, in one place.
“Yeah?” I say. I look at Shannon. “What movie would you say we’re in?”
The blood drains from her face. Her hand creeps up to cover her mouth.
This party isn’t over yet.
I ignore the crawling feeling inside my lower abdomen as I look down at the Ouija board. The cap’s still spinning, hovering over just one word.
HELLO.
Chapter Eleven
“Did you say goodbye?” Shannon whispers. She can’t tear her eyes from the board.
“No,” I say. “I didn’t say anything. I was just trying to put it away.”
“What did it say?”
I don’t answer. The last time that name hit the air…it wasn’t me saying it.
“What did it say, Elliot?”
My head jerks up like I’ve been hit.
“Jessica.” As I say it, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I feel sick. I want that cap to stop spinning.
I hear Shannon’s sharp intake of breath. “What do you know about her?” she asks.
“Who, Jessica?”
“Yeah.”
I shake my head. “I don’t know anybody with that name.”
“Oh my god,” she whispers. Shannon’s looking at me like maybe I’m going to sprout horns and a pitchfork. “This is real,” she says. “This really is real. It really is.”
I’m about to ask her who the hell this Jessica is, but then, without warning, she stomps on the spinning lid, smashing it flat with her heavy boot.
SLAM!
I jump about three feet. “What the hell?” I yell.
She winds up and kicks the Ouija board. It skitters away, under a wide shelf. It hits the wall with a thump. The lid spins out and comes to rest under a rack of life jackets.
“Act of god?” she says.
Then she starts to laugh. Big weird belly laughs.
I take it as a sign it’s time to leave.
I grab Shannon’s arm. “Okay,” I say. I keep my voice calm. “You know what? We need to get out of here.”
She stops laughing and stares at me for a second. Green eyes. Orange stripe in the left one.
I read the fear in them.
“Okay,” she says.
But then the hysteria bubbles up again. I can see her trying to clamp down on it, but the laughter squeals out between her lips like air from a whoopee cushion.
Damn. She’s freaking out.
I grab both of her arms then, just above her elbows. Crank her body around to face me.
“Shannon. We’re leaving. Now.” I give her a hard shake to bring her back down to Earth. “Get your things together.”
She stops laughing. A shudder passes through her.
“But she’s dead, Elliot,” Shannon says. She seems dazed. “Don’t you see? If Jessica’s here, talking to us through a Ouija board, that means she’s dead. She didn’t just run away. Now we know for sure that Troy killed her.”
“Who’s Troy?” I cut her off before she can answer. “Never mind. Tell me later.” Once we’re headed home. As fast as my gas-guzzling 1988 Volvo station wagon will take us.
I steer her toward the door.
A new thought occurs to Shannon. She pulls her arm out of my grasp. “Oh my god, though, what if it maybe wasn’t Troy? What if she was abducted and, like, held hostage by some creepy man? Like those stories you hear about girls who are stolen and then kept in some guy’s backyard shed for decades before they escape? But maybe he got mad at her because she tried to escape and he killed her by accident?”
Shannon’s voice is rising. I want to tell her to c
alm down, but I’m afraid it might make things even worse. Sometimes that happens with girls.
I also really want to know what the hell she’s talking about. But not now. Right now, we’ve got only one job to do—and that’s to get our asses out of here.
“But no, that can’t be,” Shannon’s saying now. “She couldn’t have been abducted and held hostage all summer, because she said she died in June.”
I grab hold of her arm again. “I want to hear all your ideas. But once we’re in the car, okay?” I pull. “We’re leaving now.”
“Okay. Right. Let’s go.” She nods, then looks at me. “But if she’s dead, then what happened to her body?”
“Shannon.”
“Okay, okay, I’m coming,” she says. “But who’s going to believe us about all this?”
God, the girl’s brain is like a butterfly on Red Bull. I can’t keep up.
We leave the board under the shelf—let someone else find it and wonder—and go to grab our bags. I sling mine over my shoulder and push open the door. I turn and hold it for Shannon.
“Hang on,” she says.
“Come on, woman.”
“And, but—wait,” Shannon says. She cocks her head. “Why is she here, in the boathouse of all places?”
Now that we’re leaving, her fear has taken a backseat to the excitement of solving a mystery. She’s got a headful of theories.
And I’m sure she’s going to fill mine with them on the way home.
Not an entirely bad way to pass the time, I think.
She bends to gather the lip gloss and books back into her bag.
That’s when the door slams on my hand.
Chapter Twelve
The world combusts in a blistering explosion of agony.
I scream.
All this screaming. It’s like we’re part of some sort of psychotic carnival attraction. Come one, come all! Come hear what it sounds like when two dumb teenagers set an angry spirit free with a Ouija board!
My fingers are a rage of pain, and I’m pulling on them, yanking on them, but they’re clamped tight between the frame and the door.
In my mind, I see those weekend warrior guys who go into the wilderness and get trapped between rocks and shit and end up having to saw their own limbs off.
No. I can’t think about that right now.
Shannon turns to see what all the hollering’s about. I see, rather than hear, her gasp.
“Oh my god, Elliot!”
She takes a step toward me, letting her bag drop. A pen bounces out. The books clatter back to the wooden floor. The yearbook falls open. Sunny faces smile up at me.
Suddenly the door loosens. I snatch my fingers back and stumble away from it. I grab my fingers with my other hand. The pain is indescribable. I fold myself forward, holding both hands between my knees.
Dimly, I can hear yelling.
I’m pretty sure it’s me.
I run out of breath. Right in that tiny pause where I’m deciding whether to scream again or just moan a little or maybe even sit right down and have a good old-fashioned cry, something in the boathouse changes.
The air. The pressure. It’s like we’ve been shot up into the jet stream. All the way up to 30,000 feet, instant plane ride, with no time to adjust. My eardrums bow under the pressure.
Shannon smacks her hands over her ears.
The walls creak and groan. The floor squeals. Like nails being pulled up. There’s a snapping sound from the beams above our heads.
The boathouse is taking a breath.
It feels like everything is sucking in—then a sudden wind blows outward from the center of the building. The floor cracks like thunder, and the whole place shakes like there’s an earthquake below our feet. I grab for a pillar. The hangers holding the PFDs shimmy on the metal racks. The shades on the hurricane lanterns rattle.
What the—?
And then the whispering starts. It’s like we’re suddenly surrounded by twenty people. More. Dozens. Invisible people. Angry people, whispering loudly, all shushings and chatterings and hysterical, muffled shrieks.
Across the room, Shannon’s hands are still covering her ears. But her face tells me she can hear the whispering too.
One word. Repeated over and over.
Listen.
Listen? To what? To whatever schizo ghost is living in this possessed shitshack? The same one that just broke all my fingers?
No thanks.
But I’m not so sure I have a choice. I can feel the voices inside my head. There’s no other way to explain it. They’re chewing at my brain.
I can’t deal with this.
“Stop,” I whisper.
Nothing.
“Stop.” Louder.
“Stop!” I yell it this time.
A piercing spike of white pain drives itself through my eye sockets. I fall to my knees, clutching my head. Shannon screams.
“Aauughh! No!” I shout.
In a flash, I see the little boy from The Sixth Sense. He’s looking across his bedroom, at the tent that’s got a little hump in it. The tent he just ran away from. He bolted when the ghost of that little girl showed up and puked on herself.
He stands there, watching the hump, terrified. She’s waiting for him.
He doesn’t want to see her.
But he has to. Because he knows what’ll make her go away. He has to give her what she wants.
All she wants is to be heard.
He swallows his fear. Crosses his bedroom floor. Climbs back inside the tent. Sits down in front of the dead, barfing little girl.
And says, “Do you want to tell me something?”
All of a sudden, I get it. The whispering.
I get it.
Listen.
Do you want to tell me something?
“Okay,” I say, quietly at first. “I hear you. I get it. You can quit now.” The pain in my head intensifies, matching the agony in my fingers.
I crumple forward onto the floor. I wonder how much more I can take before I pass out.
“Elliot!” Shannon screams. “Elliot!” She scrambles over to my side and puts her hands on my shoulders, like she’s trying to wake me from a bad dream.
“I get it!” I say. I’m almost sobbing now, the pain is so intense. My hands. My head. Shannon’s screaming reaches me through the blur of voices clawing the insides of my mind. “You want me to listen,” I say. “You just want to be listened to.”
The pain ebbs, pulling away quickly like the tide sucking water from the rocks. But not enough.
I moan.
Shannon’s draped over my back, hugging me and pulling on me and sobbing, and I’m kneeling on the floor, hanging on to my head with my busted fingers screaming, talking nonsense to an invisible thing that’s tearing my brain apart.
The poor girl’s going to lose her mind.
I might beat her to it.
“Jessica. It’s Jessica, right?” I say. “I know you’re here. I hear you. What do you want? I’ll listen. I WILL LISTEN! Okay? Just—stop.”
And just like that, everything stops. The pain, the whispering, everything.
It surprises me.
It’s so quiet after all that noise.
I let out a ragged breath. Shannon sits back, but she keeps a hand on me. Slowly, I lower my hands.
My head feels fine. Clear and painless.
I sit up and flex my fingers, looking from one hand to the other. They feel fine too.
No blood.
No breaks.
No biggie.
I look at Shannon in wonder.
“Are you okay?” she says.
“I’m not sure if okay’s the word,” I say. “But my fingers are fine.”
Shannon lets out a long breath.
I look at her. “That was scary.”
Shannon’s wide eyes follow my gaze toward the door. She runs her hands through her hair. “That was Amityville scary.”
“Amityville?”
“Yeah. Didn’t you
ever watch The Amityville Horror?”
“No. Do I want to?”
“Probably not, after today.”
We’re quiet for a few seconds. “Act of god?” I ask.
She gives a weak laugh. “Well, I hope to hell that wasn’t karma.”
She looks at me. She tries to smile, but her lower lip trembles. When she speaks, her voice is only a whisper. “Are we going to get out of here, Elliot?”
Chapter Thirteen
This is bad.
We’re trapped in an old boathouse on a Friday night with a ghost that’s as pissed as a bull whose balls have just been burned off.
But I think I’ve got it figured out.
“We are going to get out of here,” I tell Shannon.
I can tell she doesn’t believe me.
“Right,” she says, gesturing toward the door. “Like we can just open the door and walk out.” She stands and walks to the door. Pushes on it. It won’t budge.
“See?” she says. “So easy. Look! I’m outside already!”
She braces both arms against it and shoves.
“Shannon,” I say, my voice a warning.
She ignores me. Pounds on the door with her fist. Kicks at it. Slams her shoulder into it.
Nothing. Which is probably good, because this is usually around the time all the weird stuff starts to happen. This ghost doesn’t want us to leave, and any movement we make in that direction seems to rile it up.
Shannon points at the hook, which is dangling down, clearly not locking us in. “You think we’ll get out?” she asks. “How do you figure? You just saw for yourself how easy it is to leave, Elliot.” I can hear the tears in her voice. “We’re trapped in here.”
“We are not trapped,” I say. Maybe it’s a lie. But the words make me feel better.
Shannon leans her head against the door. I hear her sniff. “I don’t want this to be happening,” she whispers.
“Well, we’re in it now,” I say. “Not much we can do except to give this… Jessica…what she wants.”
“Which is?”
“To be heard. She seems to have something to say.”
Shannon snorts. “I’ll say.”
“Why don’t you spare me all the mystery, Shannon, and tell me who she is?”
After a moment, Shannon lifts her head. She turns and slides down the door until her butt’s resting on the floor. She leans her elbows on her knees and sighs. “She was a senior,” she says. “Jessica Chapman. She was pretty. Beautiful. Ridiculous, really. Captain of the cheerleading team. She disappeared after a football game last spring. Just vanished. It made the news and everything. They had a manhunt going for days. They couldn’t find any trace of her.” She shivers.