He retracted his head and closed the door slowly. Although he’d been certain moments ago that he’d heard a sound, he now questioned whether he’d imagined it. Had he invoked that noise since it had bothered him earlier, and he needed to get some sense of closure?
If so, mission accomplished. Nothing inhabited the hall.
But could his brain have created the same sound three times? And could it have made the noise seemingly draw closer each time? That seemed far-fetched.
Outside the door, metal chains clinked across the floorboards.
11
All sense of drowsiness had faded from Logan’s mindset. He glanced back at his siblings.
Neither had moved.
So had he truly heard what sounded like chains dragging across the ground?
Definitely. He couldn’t have mistaken the way the metallic sound scraped against the ground. First footsteps echoed and a string of metal followed it. Yet no one in the house owned chains, so how else would they have reverberated in the hall?
The sound was noticeably louder than the shifting feet. So why hadn’t Ashleigh or Tyler awoken? Despite their affinity of falling into a deep sleep, how could they not have heard chains getting lugged across the floor?
This time, rather than rush to the door and open it without fear, Logan couldn’t draw from the same well of courage as he had earlier. In fact, he lay there paralyzed, gasping as air pushed and pulled through his dry throat. Well, he wasn’t completely incapacitated: his hands trembled in a bad way.
He wanted to open the door. He’d have been satisfied with lifting his arm and placing a hand around the doorknob. But no matter how hard he willed it to happen, the muscles in his arm wouldn’t budge. So he just sat there, quaking all over.
The chains shifted across the floor at an agonizingly slow pace toward the other end of the corridor. But that didn’t seem any less threatening.
If no one had entered their home, there was really only one possibility: a supernatural entity made its way through their home. Logan could no longer pretend otherwise. He needed to contact Eloise. He should have listened to Ashleigh and forsaken looking like a desperate fool to text Eloise after midnight.
Logan labored to move without a sound, but doing so became uncomfortable and he lost his balance. He spun around and slammed his back against the door, jarring the wood deep into the frame.
Ashleigh took in a violent gasp. She smacked her lips and moaned. “What the hell!” A blanket shifted against the sheet below it. Squinting, she placed her hand to her head. “Logan, what’re you doing?”
“Go to sleep,” Tyler said, lifting his upper body from the ground like a mummy rising from an open coffin.
Ragged bursts of air entered and exited Logan’s mouth. He stared at them, saying nothing because he was too worried about the creature in the hallway…that had stopped moving.
“Yeah,” his sister said. “Stop making so much noise.” She lowered her body back to the bed, grasped the blanket tight around her, and sighed. Then she lay inert.
Tyler shook his head. “You can be really annoying sometimes.”
“Uh, huh,” Ashleigh agreed. Within ten seconds though, soft inhalations left her mouth.
Likewise, Tyler sank back into his blanket, covered up, and lay on his stomach.
Wired, Logan glanced from one sibling to the other, wondering whether he should awaken them. They needed to know that they’d assumed correctly. Even more important, they would want to know what lingered in their home.
Just as he finally worked some saliva into his mouth, Logan decided against telling them. Not because he didn’t want to update them. More than anything, he sought to offload this burden of knowing that something supernatural had entered their house. Beyond that, he needed some company to not feel so alone. But Logan wouldn’t wake them unless the thing in the hallway threatened them. Telling them now could cause them to panic. That would accomplish nothing.
Logan turned his ear back to the door and placed his head near the slight pocket of air between the door and the frame. He listened.
Silence.
He stayed in that sitting position until his lower extremities tingled. They’d fallen asleep. Trying not to make a sound, Logan shifted around until he relieved the tension in his legs and managed to face the door.
He waited. The air that passed through his lips registered as the only sound to hit his ears. Had the spirit vanished? Had Ashleigh’s and Tyler’s voices scared it away?
Logan cursed his naiveté. His breathing pattern finally normalized.
The chains slinked across the floor again. The heavy yet dull sound tapped against the ground, probably not emitting a loud enough thud to awaken his siblings.
Why was it here? What did it want? Why was it dragging chains?
Logan had no answers to those questions. And unlike a short while ago, he had no intention of opening the door to find out. Not when it had chains. If the thing out there dragged metal across the floor, it could mean the chains were real. He didn’t want to open the door to find a heavy piece of metal soaring through the air before whacking him in the forehead. If that happened, Logan could only defend himself with a pillow, a blanket, some sheets, and his phone.
No, he’d guard the door until the entity left or disappeared.
But would it? Who knew how long it would walk up and down the hall.
The chains stopped rustling in the hallway.
Logan remained stationary. He squeezed the phone in his hand, perhaps in an effort to retain some semblance of control over something. He hated the utter silence. If the chains moved in the other direction, he could at least identify where it headed. In the quiet, he had no idea if it stayed in place or if it had disappeared.
After at least forty-five minutes of waiting without hearing another sound emanate from the corridor, Logan got enough of a grip on his emotions to do an internet search on Eloise. He found her blog, and just as his sister had stated, Eloise claimed to not only detect spirits but communicate with them. She seemed like a sincere person, so Logan doubted she’d lied.
It seemed he’d fallen for someone with links to the paranormal.
How did she get those powers? Had she dabbled in the occult? Was it a dangerous line of work?
These questions and others bombarded his brain, and while she described some very frightening situations in her blog posts, Logan suspected she’d done so to convince others of her gifts and experience. It had worked. Otherwise, Eloise stated that the vast amount of ghosts were harmless or wanted only to pass along information to the living. As he continued reading about her gifts, what supernatural situations she’d encountered, and what cases she went on, Logan began to breathe a little easier because talking with ghosts didn’t seem unsafe.
Of course, only some of what he’d read sunk in because he’d been operating on so little sleep, but Logan wished she’d mentioned an encounter with something like what his family had been dealing with the past few days. A creature that wandered the halls with chains seemed far from innocuous. It seemed pretty threatening.
Logan pushed those thoughts aside. He couldn’t concentrate on the negative aspects of this calling. He needed to focus on the situation at hand, so he began his text message to her:
“Did you see the books my sister and brother checked out yesterday? I thought they were overreacting, but tonight I think they’re right. There is something in our home.”
Logan went on to detail the strangest events that occurred over the last few days. He even added his address, in case she wanted to drop by and determine if he was exaggerating. When he finished, he wasted ten minutes debating whether or not he should send it.
He didn’t want a text message to awaken her in the middle of the night. Of course, he didn’t expect her to jump out of bed and hurry over. If anything, he hoped she’d sleep peacefully, wake up to find his text, and give him a call in the morning. With that prospect in mind, he hit send.
Considering everythin
g that he’d read on her blog, Eloise seemed to have a lot of experience with the supernatural, and he hoped she’d be able to identify the creature lurking in their home and rid it from their lives forever. For the first time in hours, hope bloomed in Logan’s chest, but his hands still shivered.
He checked his phone. It was past four in the morning. The sun wouldn’t rise for a couple more hours. He was still wide awake. Not by choice, of course, but fright kept him too alert to let his eyes close for an extended period of time.
12
After the sun rose, Logan’s eyes didn’t want to open. He hoped the entity wouldn’t return now with the break of day, and he finally considered it somewhat safe to welcome sleep.
From the bed, Ashleigh yawned. “I sooo needed that.”
Tyler broke out of a snore. “Huh?”
Logan wanted to cry. He finally had a chance to sleep, and his siblings had chosen the exact wrong moment to wake up.
“Hey, Logan,” said his sister. “Why were you trying to wake us up last night?”
“I wasn’t,” he said, using his knuckles to rub away the weariness from his eyes. “It was an accident.”
“It didn’t sound like one,” said Tyler, tilting over on his side. He scratched his bed head, where thatches of hair poked out all over the place. “Were you trying to get back at us or something?”
“No way.” At least they weren’t ignoring him anymore. He’d rather take that than a solid night of sleep. “I’m sorry about last night. I was a jerk. I don’t know what got into me.”
“I do,” said Tyler. “A bug crawled up your ass.”
“Cool it with the swear words.”
“Hey, Ash,” Tyler said. “Do you know how to get a bug out of your butt? Like this…” He lifted his bum off the ground, and a splattery-sounding fart ripped through the air.
“Gross!” Bed springs popped as Ashleigh scrambled out of bed. “God, I hate you!”
“God can’t save you from my farts. And I won’t stop until you say they’re fun.”
“Screw you!” His sister’s feet pounded onto the floor, and she lunged toward the door. “Out of the way.”
Logan remained in place.
“What are you doing?” she shrieked. “It’s going to smell in here within seconds.”
He pushed his bedding materials away from the door, but wouldn’t let her squeeze her way to it before him.
“Logan, the stink!”
He didn’t want to smell it either, so he grabbed the doorknob, opened it, and peered into the hallway. It was empty. He sighed with relief.
“Come on, let me out!” Ashleigh waved her arms up and down and even hopped a little. “It’s here, it’s here!” She now held her breath that made her cheeks puff out.
Logan would need to venture around the rest of the house to ensure the entity hadn’t occupied any given room, but judging by how red his sister’s face had gotten from holding her breath, he needed to let her leave immediately. He stepped away from the door.
She pushed the door open and jumped through the threshold.
He got to his feet and followed after her.
While Ashleigh rocketed down the steps, Logan entered every bedroom on this level, taking only a few moments in each room to ensure that it was both vacant and silent. When he’d been certain nothing paranormal existed upstairs, he went downstairs and repeated the process in each room on that floor.
From all accounts, nothing otherworldly haunted them. For the moment. That’s when he remembered that he hadn’t checked his phone. With all the drama last night, he’d expected it to be the first thing on his mind, but the fitful night made his mind hazy.
He hoped that Eloise had texted back, but he doubted she’d be up this early. His sister was right: he was desperate to hear back from her. But this time, it wasn’t for romantic reasons. His mind swerved toward his mother and whether she’d gotten back to him.
Logan checked his phone for messages. None existed. He ground his teeth. A hollow sensation entered his gut, one that left him feeling helpless. Since he couldn’t pester Eloise again, he called his mother again, but she didn’t answer, so he left yet another message for her. Her absence had really begun to stress him out.
He understood that she was in another region of the world, and while it was expensive to reach out to him, she should have made a bigger effort to contact him. Logan pushed those thoughts from his brain and focused on the immediate task at hand: telling his siblings what he’d experienced last night.
He heard Tyler turn off the water in the shower, so he neared the bathroom door. “I’m going to make pancakes.”
“Cool.”
“And I’d like to talk with you two about something.”
Silence.
“About the research we’ve been doing.” He didn’t want to jinx things by mentioning what he’d seen last night lest it appear. He doubted that would happen, but he’d also doubted anything supernatural had entered his home. And look how that had turned out. So, he wasn’t taking any risks.
“Okay,” Tyler said. “Be right down.”
Logan went downstairs and got busy at the stove while Ashleigh set the table. “I told Tyler I’d like to talk about all the reading we did yesterday.
A bright grin lit her face. “I’m totally relieved that nothing bad happened last night. I was so glad to get a good night’s sleep.”
Logan consoled himself that she was well-rested and more comfortable even as his anxiety had spiked. After he spilled a few circles of batter into a pair of large pans, he heard his phone vibrate on the countertop. He snatched it as if it was a life preserver, and he was on a sinking ship. He saw Eloise’s name appear on the screen. He gasped with relief.
Tyler entered the room and plopped down in a chair at the table. He grabbed his fork and knife and pretended to play drums an inch above the surface of the table. “Family meeting on ghosts!”
“I’ve checked my social media sites again for like the hundredth time,” Ashleigh said. “I’m glad my friends didn’t post anything about my freak out the other day. Each of them texted, asking what happened. I told them I’d hardly got any sleep from studying so much during finals week. So glad they bought it. I’ll have to shut up on the topic of ghosts though if I plan on keeping them as friends.”
Logan was glad to hear that her friends were supportive and hadn’t turned against her. Thinking of the specter made him want information on whatever looked after them. More than anything, he wanted to read Eloise’s text message, but hearing his brother speak about the entity in their home, he wanted to tell them exactly what happened. Afterward, he could hopefully give them an update, based on Eloise’s response.
“You’re crazy,” Tyler said, scoffing at his sister. “Captain Kirk is not a better pilot than Han Solo. He doesn’t even fly the Enterprise. He tells Sulu to do it. Kirk just sits in his chair and acts cool.”
“But Captain Kirk was already a great pilot,” said Ashleigh. “How do you think he got to be captain? He was promoted. He commands a ship full of people, so he’s better.”
At any other time, Logan would have enjoyed this debate. But not after what transpired last night. “Guys, I wanted to talk about the ghost.” He turned over the flapjacks.
“That doesn’t make Kirk a better pilot,” Tyler said, ignoring his brother. “Han Solo pilots his own ship. He’s a pilot and a captain. That makes him better than Kirk.”
“Han gets help from Chewbacca. Kirk gets help from Sulu and Chekhov. He’s got two guys who’re waiting on his orders. That makes him more important than Han Solo, which makes him a better pilot than—”
“Hey!” Logan shouted, hating that they disregarded him. His severe tone halted their discussion. Or maybe it was that he breathed heavily and his eyes grew enormous.
“Whoa!” said Tyler, snapping to attention in his chair. “We’ve wanted to talk about the ghost for days, but you’ve been blowing us off.” He may have used a lighthearted tone, but the way he sa
t rigidly showed that he respected the anger in Logan’s voice.
Logan found that odd considering their blowup last night. It lent further credence to the idea that whatever had appeared in the hall last night had affected their moods.
“Yeah,” Ashleigh agreed. “So we didn’t think it was that important. What’s the matter? You look like—”
“I’ve seen a ghost?” Logan asked. “Not quite. But something happened last night while you two were asleep.”
Tyler’s easygoing demeanor vanished. His lips parted as he stared at his brother.
“What…” Ashleigh said, but she didn’t even try to finish her sentence. The intensity in her gaze made it obvious that her brother’s words had corralled her attention in a major way.
“A couple of nights ago,” Logan said, “I saw a shadow outside my door. I thought Tyler was playing a joke on me. When I went to check on things, he was asleep.” Then he told them about seeing the apparition on the television screen as well as the creaking floorboards last night followed by the sound of chains dragging across the floor.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” asked Ashleigh.
“Because I…well, I didn’t know what to think about what I’d seen reflected on the TV. But last night convinced me that something has been visiting us.”
“It would have been nice if you believed us,” Ashleigh continued. “You acted like we were crazy.”
Logan nodded. “Not crazy. But I definitely thought you were exaggerating.”
“I’m over all that,” Tyler said. “Tell us about the chains.” He lowered his gaze to the table. “I don’t get—”
“Same here,” Logan admitted. He turned around to check on the pancakes. They were done, so he turned off the burners and used a spatula to slide a couple on the plates in front of Ashleigh and Tyler.
Ordinarily, Tyler would have reached for the container of powdered sugar while his sister would have grabbed the maple syrup. Neither moved a muscle. They stared at Logan, their faces crimping inwards.
After Logan slipped a couple of pancakes onto his plate, he rinsed the pans and placed them in the dishwasher before taking a seat at the table. In that time, his siblings still hadn’t uttered a sound. He’d never seen them so patient…or so frightened.
The Descendants Page 10