Diary of a Haunting

by M. Verano

  It took me a moment to even process what she meant. For a second I thought she was talking about the walled-up door inside. But then I followed her eyes and saw it: Tucked away around the back of the house and down a small flight of stairs was another door. A basement door.

  I followed Chloe down the stairs and she tried the knob. The door gave way, groaning slightly as it opened. She gave me the briefest of looks over her shoulder, then stepped into the darkness. I took as deep a breath as my fear-constricted lungs would allow and joined her. At first, compared to the moonlit night outside, the basement seemed fathomlessly dark, but after a moment I noticed the same blue glow we had seen through the windows. Chloe obviously saw it too and moved toward it, though I remained frozen in place. I was aware of her dark form blocking the glow as she progressed, until it became clear that she had made it to a doorway. I heard her give a strangled yelp, and that was all it took to free me from my paralysis. I screamed.

  “What the hell?” I heard a voice through my scream, and it wasn’t Chloe’s. It was a guy’s voice. “What are you doing in here? Calm down, Jesus, calm down.”

  A bright light came on, and I stopped screaming. Chloe’s black-clad form came into view just in front of me as my eyes adjusted. And in front of her, slightly blocked by her, was a pale, lithe guy with a tangle of dark, curly hair flopped over his forehead. His eyes were dark and serious, and were framed by straight, sharp eyebrows. He was standing in his underwear. And he was staring at us.

  “It’s okay,” said Chloe. “He’s just a . . . I don’t think he’s a ghost.”

  “Pretty sure I’m not a ghost,” the guy said. “Who are you?”

  I didn’t know what to say, and not because I was distracted by his incredible body. Definitely not that. “I live here,” I tried.

  “No,” he said. “I live here. Look, can you hold on a sec? I want to have this conversation with pants on.” He disappeared from my view a minute, during which time I realized that the blue glow we had seen must have come from a TV or a laptop in his bedroom. The boy came back wearing jeans and pulling a white T-shirt on over his head. He gave us both a once-over.

  “You live upstairs, don’t you?” he said to me. “I saw you when you moved in. And you . . . you’re the weird girl who walks past this place three times a day and always stares at it.”

  “She’s not weird,” I said, feeling suddenly defensive on Chloe’s behalf. But Chloe apparently didn’t need my support.

  “Sure I am,” she said. “It’s kind of my thing.”

  At least she owns it. As the less weird member of our investigative team, I went ahead and introduced us both. He said his name was Raph (short for Raphael, I guess), and when he shook my hand, I may have trembled a little.

  “Why did you scream?” said Raph. “You broke into my apartment, I should be screaming.”

  “Your door was unlocked,” Chloe pointed out.

  “Small-town Idaho. Who locks their doors? That’s not an invitation to come wandering in at all hours of the night.” A dark smile flickered across his face, his lip curling wickedly. “Small-town Idaho. You’re lucky you didn’t get shot for trespassing.”

  I couldn’t help grinning back at him. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just, I didn’t know anyone was living here. I didn’t even realize this house had a basement until a few days ago. Why are you living here? Does anyone know?”

  “I’m not a squatter, if that’s what you’re asking. I pay rent.” Raph suddenly looked a little sheepish. “Most of the time, anyway. Sometimes. My mom owns this place. She’s your landlady. I go to school,” he said, nodding vaguely in the direction of the university. “The previous owners refinished this basement to be a mother-in-law apartment, and then my mom took over the house, and last year when I . . .” He combed a hand roughly through his hair. “Well, I decided to move off campus, and my mom said I could move in here. I help out around the place, fix stuff up when it needs it.”

  “There’s a lot left to be fixed,” I said, then blushed at my rudeness.

  “You should have seen it before.” He explained how the place had stood empty for years, and was falling apart when she bought it. Raph had patched the roof and fixed up some of the plumbing, repaired some holes in the stairs. Guess he hadn’t gotten around to insulation yet.

  Chloe, ever on the prowl for macabre mysteries, asked why the house had been abandoned. “Did something bad happen here?”

  “What, like a murder?” said Raph.

  Chloe didn’t say anything, but she gave me a meaningful look. Raph snorted in amusement. “Yeah, something bad happened here,” he said. “Something bad happened everywhere. It’s called the housing crisis. Ever pick up a newspaper? There was a family that lived here a while back, but the guy’s store went out of business and they couldn’t pay the mortgage and the bank foreclosed on them. The whole family moved in with his wife’s parents.”

  “So the bank kicked them out, even though no one else wanted it?”

  “It’s what banks do,” said Raph with a shrug. “Once it started to look run-down, the price went down, and my mom had the idea that she could turn it into a bed-and-breakfast. I didn’t think she’d find anyone to rent such a big, weird old place in the meantime, but then you and your mom came along.”

  “It wasn’t a morgue, then?” said Chloe.

  “You’ve heard about that, huh? Yeah. There was a morgue down here in the basement once, back when it was the town’s hospital. Is that why you guys thought it was haunted?” He looked between us, obviously amused. “Cute,” he said. “But who would haunt a morgue? Think about it. A morgue is really just a way station. A place bodies rest a little while, between when they died and when they get buried. If you were a wandering spirit, why would you hang around a morgue? You’d probably go to the place you died, or where something bad happened, or go find the person who wronged you. A morgue would be boring.”

  “You don’t believe in ghosts,” said Chloe, clearly disappointed.

  Raph pressed his lips together. “There are no ghosts down here.”

  After that, Chloe and I left Raph alone and snuck back into the house and up to bed. It was very late by then, but we lay awake for some time, discussing what Raph had told us about the house. As for me, I found it kind of a relief to hear his stories. I was just as happy to hear that this house is not haunted, and it was just our overactive imaginations playing tricks on us. Chloe, though—I think she was actually disappointed. Maybe that’s what it means to live in a small town. Life is so boring here, you start wishing for supernatural evil just to liven up the weekends a bit. Easy for her to say—she doesn’t have to live here.

  Eventually the spaces between our comments grew bigger, and I got the idea that Chloe was just about asleep. I closed my eyes, but before I drifted off, I put forward one last topic of conversation.

  “Chloe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Raph is kind of cute, I think.”

  “Um,” said Chloe. “If by cute you mean devastatingly gorgeous, then yes. Kind of.”

  “But he’s too old, right? I mean, how old do you think he is?”

  Chloe considered. “Well, he’s in college, obviously. And I don’t think he’s a freshman . . . so he’s probably like 20, at least.”

  “That’s totally gross, right?”

  “Gross and illegal,” she confirmed. “Still . . . as ghosts go, Raph is definitely sexy.”

  Ha! Raph the sexy ghost. I like that.

  MONDAY, JANUARY 26, 5:15 P.M.

  The flies aren’t gone, and neither are the spiders. If Mom’s theory about spiders eating flies were correct, you’d think we’d see a diminution in one or the other. But this morning I saw five of the spiders standing together in the corner near my book bag, almost like they were plotting. And the flies just kept swooping around without a care in the world.

  I’m really trying not to be such a baby about this stuff, but when I saw the spiders, I couldn’t help it: I yelped. Logan cam
e over to see what was wrong, and without even flinching, he just leaned down and scooped them up and tossed them outside. God, I have never been so grateful for my annoying little brother.

  I felt a bit stupid as we walked to school together, and I was like, “You must think I’m pretty pathetic, huh?” But he was cool about it. He said he got used to dealing with gross stuff because of all the science experiments he does. It’s not that he doesn’t get creeped out, it’s just that he’s learned to control it. When you turn it into science, it stops being scary or gross, and just becomes data.

  I asked him how I could turn the bugs into data, and he said to keep a notebook.

  Ha. Is it really that simple?

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 27, 4:10 P.M.

  Spiders: 2 in the shower, 1 on the windowsill in my bedroom.

  Flies: Too many to count, but maybe there are fewer? In any case, the cloud seemed a little thinner this morning. So maybe the spiders are pulling their weight around here after all?

  Which really just begs the question: Which is better, spiders or flies? Or let me rephrase that: Which do I loathe least? On the face of it, this seems like an easy choice, because I have a phobia of spiders, and no phobia of flies. I don’t love flies, God knows, but I’m not morbidly terrified of them either.

  But the flies in this house . . . it’s just that there are so *many* of them. And they’re so unavoidable. It’s weird how they cluster by the door. I can’t see what is drawing them there. Wouldn’t you expect them to be near the food, or the trash? A drain, maybe? But they insist on hanging out at the front door, which makes every trip into or out of the house into a kind of horror show.

  Spiders, on the other hand . . . well, at least they keep to themselves, mostly. You catch sight of them out of the corner of your eye, but you don’t have to go swimming through vast hordes of them (ugh, that thought, why did I even think that?). But maybe it’s not the spiders I see that worry me. For every spider you see, you know that there are at least a dozen more, hiding and waiting for you to go to sleep so they can walk on you and nip at you with those awful fangs . . .

  *shudder*

  I wonder if I could get the flies to eat the spiders? Or maybe they can both eat each other in a revolting free-for-all.

  I’m not sure this is what Logan meant about thinking like a scientist.

  Right. Moving on to cheerier subjects . . . we got our first real snowfall since I’ve been here! I woke up yesterday morning and my room was so much brighter than usual. I couldn’t figure out why at first, but then I realized—the rolling brown hills outside my window weren’t brown anymore. They were sparkling white! A big improvement, though it did make walking to school a bit of a pain.

  Maybe after school tomorrow Logan and I can have that snowball fight we were promised.

  Classes are fine, though I am still the school outcast. I guess one nice thing is that I pay a lot more attention in class now than I used to, when I was popular. Makes my homework easier.

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 27, 11:30 P.M.

  Mom continues to be annoying. She got into this weird thing with me this evening when I was unpacking groceries. I was just trying to be helpful! But instead of thanking me, she started nagging about where I put stuff away. She was going on about how she bought two jars of pasta sauce and a whole crate of granola bars a few days ago, and now she can’t find them anywhere in the kitchen. Like, how is that my fault? So she is micromanaging me about where to put all the stuff away, and I open a cabinet and there are SIX jars of pasta sauce. Ha! I have no idea why she bought so much pasta sauce, though. And apparently neither does she, since she swore she only bought two.

  Then Logan was like, “It was probably ghosts.” I laughed. What kind of ghosts mess with marinara? But Mom seemed to like the idea that we might be sharing the house with some “restless spirits.” She is such a freak sometimes.

  It’s weirder from Logan. He’s never shared in any of Mom’s otherworldly interests. He’s the scientist of the family, and pretty much always has been. I pointed this contradiction out to him, but he just shrugged. “Science means trusting the evidence of my senses.” Whatever that means . . .

  But Logan has been acting a little strange lately. He’s been having trouble sleeping. I think it’s because of the move and the divorce, not to mention the flies and the spiders and the wind screaming in the walls every night. But Mom seems a bit worried about him. I think mostly she feels guilty—under the circumstances, I guess it’s easy for her to blame herself. No wonder she’s a little absentminded . . . I guess I should cut her some slack.

  Oh, but I did manage to ask her about Raph. I tried to be all, “So, uh, there’s a dude living in our house, jsyk,” but it turns out she did know, so then I felt dumb. Then she got on my case, and was like, “Paige, I *told* you the landlady’s son lived downstairs, but you never listen to anything I say,” blah blah. Why is it that the minute someone says, “You never listen to a word I say,” I immediately start to tune them out?

  Weirdly enough, Mom seems to be a total fan of Raph. Apparently she has been going down to his place now and then while I’m at school to bring him proper meals, because he’s “much too thin.” Hmm, that’s one way of putting it. I would have gone with “lean” or “svelte” or maybe “outrageously gorgeous.” Wait, does this mean Mom has been checking out Raph’s body? Ew, I don’t know why I even thought that. Don’t think about that.

  Anyway, she actually told me that he “seems like a nice boy” and that I should get to know him. Mom wants me to cozy up to a scorching hot college boy? Uh, okay, don’t mind if I do.

  SATURDAY, JANUARY 31, 3:15 P.M.

  Sooo that was awkward.

  The good news is, I figured out an excuse to go see Raph again. (Mom’s permission or no, it felt weird to just knock on his door and be like, hi! wanna make out? ahem.) So yeah, I was trying to log on to the Internet to update this journal, but the stupid Wi-Fi has been crapping out lately. I don’t know what is up with it. I reloaded a million times and kept getting different error messages. Rebooted the router, blah blah troubleshooting, but each time it would work for like a minute and then fritz out again. I need to bug Mom about it, along with the cable, which is still cutting in and out. (And doing odder stuff too—like the other day I was watching the end of a show, and instead of the next show coming on, the same episode started playing. I’m lazy, so I watched the whole thing again. But then it started playing again! And I know there was another show that was supposed to be on. The weird thing is, we don’t even have a DVR.)

  Anyway, I was checking the Wi-Fi network for the fiftieth time when it suddenly occurred to me that this situation might have a silver lining. There was this other network, very strong, called “The Morgue.” It had to be Raph. Password protected, of course, but what better excuse to wander down and strike up a conversation? I know, pretty crafty!

  So I head down there (after putting on some makeup and my best pair of jeans) and he answers the door in this pale blue T-shirt and was just looking . . . delicious, and I’m trying to be all supercool, like um, hey, my Wi-Fi is out, can I borrow your password? And he’s like, yeah, if you want, but mine’s been all over the place today too. Is it windy today? Sometimes the wind messes with the wires or something. So I’m like, mmm, yeah, wires. And he gives me the password and then we’re, like, staring at each other.

  So obviously I start babbling like an idiot, because I have nothing to say but I don’t want to leave. So I say, “I hope I’m not bothering you. My mom told me to come down and ask. She really likes you or something, I guess.” WTF am I even saying. So he’s like, “Whaaa?” and I’m trying to think of a single flirty thing to say that doesn’t make me look like an idiot, and I settle on, “Yeah, normally she is kind of uptight about me hanging out with older boys. Especially ones who . . .” and then right there I lose my nerve to say what was on my mind, so I just sort of peter out. I’m so cool.

  Raph had been smiling pleasantly, adorably, through t
his whole performance, but right then, when I didn’t end the sentence, he . . . I don’t know, he looked serious all of a sudden. Or more than that, he looked . . . nervous? I kind of want to say haunted, but that’s probably just because I have hauntings on the brain, thanks to Chloe. Anyway, I expected him to just smile and move on, maybe give me an “Okay, weird girl” look, but instead he gets this very intense look about him. I can see the muscles in his shoulders and arms tense up (not that I was checking out his body! okay, I was), and he’s like, “Ones who what?”

  Now I *really* don’t want to say what I was thinking, except whatever *he’s* thinking is apparently even worse, so I kind of have to. So even though I am feeling entirely flustered and awkward and embarrassed, I try to sound nonchalant as I say, “Ones who look like you.” And then obviously blush like a dork.

  But it wasn’t allll bad because it brought the smile back to his face, and his shoulders relaxed, and then he looked down and ran a hand through those amazing curls and omg but HE WAS BLUSHING TOO. And it was pretty much the cutest thing I have ever seen. “Oh,” he said. “Um . . . thanks.”

  And right then I was probably the happiest person in the world.

  Yeah, that didn’t last.

  “I think I know why your mom is cool with us hanging out,” he said, still looking all sweet and bashful and incredible. And I’m like, mmmm? And he says, “Probably because I told her I’m gay.”

  I know. I know. What is my life even.