“Please do your best to keep Addie Rose upstairs with you,” I say finally. “You both should be safe there.”
“You think so?”
I swallow again and nod. I’ve suspected the dark truth for a while now.
“What about you? Why don’t you come stay with us too?”
“I can’t.”
Her eyes narrow. “Why not? You’re obviously afraid of her. Plus, with your latest episode you shouldn’t be alone.”
“Lena, I can’t.”
“Why not?” She crosses her arms. “If you’re so sure she’s back and waiting down here, why would you stay?”
I draw in a deep breath, shivering as I stare out into the emptiness. “Because if I’m right, she’s here for me.”
In a lot of ways dusk is worse than the dark. Pale streaks of color cast confusion over the dingy basement that’s become my home. I study it now, seated stiffly at the edge of the blankets while I watch for her. I know she’s here. I feel her stalking me from a plane I can’t access. Her presence runs ice over my skin.
The oil furnace in the far corner hasn’t worked properly for years. A botched retrofit probably because this house never would have welcomed such a modern update. The original coal furnace stands regally beside it with disdain for its inferior replacement. I saw a movie once where a serial killer stuffed bodies into a cast-iron furnace just like that one. Hell, the movie could have been filmed in this house for all I know. Every other detail is the same as any horror flick. Dirt floor, massive support beams protruding from the ceiling without a care in the world for functionality or aesthetics. This house was built in a time when basements were designed to hide secrets, not host parties. And this one has plenty.
I’ve spent hours inspecting the rustic shelves lining the walls, their contents telling the chilling story of this place. If this were a killer’s lair, they’d be filled with jars of macabre trophies. Hair, fingers, other parts and prizes that have no business being on display. Instead, the actual relics haunt with their mundane testament to forgotten eras. Food that will never be consumed, possessions that have long outlived their owners. Is Grave Lady a ghost of the past or the present?
A shadow flickers by the coal furnace. My blood runs cold as my brain battles the instinct to hide. I’m here to face her, right? I told Lena as much. If Grave Lady really wants me, I have no choice anyway. The shadow moves again, and that bravery I crave flickers right along with it. If I just close my eyes… It worked that once.
I don’t. I can’t. With a hand clenched around the door frame, I squint into the darkness.
“What do you want?” My voice sounds more angry than scared. I’m grateful for the lie.
Silence. She’s ignoring me? No. Stalking me like a predator reading her prey.
“I’m here! What do you want from me?”
My gaze locks on the furnace, waiting for the shadow again. The air thickens around me and lodges in my chest. She’s here. My skin tingles from the breath of her. It’s like it wafts through the space between us. If I could just see her. What is it about fear being in the unknown?
“I’m here! What?!”
A shriek.
I release my own shout as a figure flies toward me, dark hair fluttering behind her, the faded dress flapping in the rush. Its siren screams knock me back and send me crashing to the blankets. Just a split-second. A flash. That’s all it takes for the dark nothing to become Grave Lady.
Is the new shrieking her or me? I can’t tell as I’m pressed into the blankets, paralyzed by more than fear. Physically, I’m frozen, overpowered and locked down as her prisoner. I twist against her hold while she hovers over me, blank face a vortex of sinister swirls and screams.
“Raaaaaah.”
Over and over that contorted face screams inches from mine. “Raaaaaah! Raaaaaah!”
Shredded fabric brushes my skin, and for the first time I smell her. Roses?
Tears bleed from my eyes. I feel them burn, but I don’t think they’re mine. They’re for whatever black hell has just hijacked my soul. The dark tentacles of her pain reach into my brain and latch on with an agonizing grip.
Stop! I’m screaming but not with my voice. I have no voice anymore. I’m just hers to torture. Please. Please!
God it hurts. My body writhes from the agony of her assault.
“Raaaaaah!”
“Raaaaaah!”
What do you want from me?!
I can’t take any more. Blood slams through my body, rocking arteries and veins with each violent jerk. I won’t survive this. How could I? She’s killing me, and I’ll disappear never knowing why. The blackness seeps into my vision, going beyond and into the depths of my consciousness. At least the fear will fade too. The guilt. The visions. No more pain and tortured memories. No more Bev and Sinclair. No more Roy or demons or Grave Lady and—a sigh filters through my lips. Is this it? The end? Is this… peace?
No.
I gasp in a fierce breath, filling my lungs for the first time in what feels like hours. Heart pounding, I push up on my elbows. My gaze darts around my room, then to the darkness beyond. There’s no sign of her, physical or otherwise. The basement is empty; the shadows take on their normal form, and my body is my own again. My mind, too. I’m alive. I’m free. I’m… disappointed? Devastated.
Yes, devastated, because I’m still here.
The monster still exists.
This time when I collapse back on the blankets, the tears are my own.
Chapter Three:
Silent Screams
“Addie, would you please go to my room and play for a while?” Lena asks from the doorway.
Addie Rose brightens from her seat beside me on the blankets.
“Can I play with the dolls?”
“Of course.” Lena’s smile looks sincere. She’s almost as good at masking truths as I am. Maybe I’ve misjudged her. Maybe her sins run deeper than I’d thought.
The second we’re alone, her expression dims.
“Tell me…” She takes the spot vacated by Addie.
I look away, my chest compressing into a brick.
“Milo, I see it in your eyes. She came last night. What happened?”
What happened? How do you explain that nightmare to yourself, let alone someone else? I spent the rest of the night trembling in the dark, fearing she’d come back. The waiting—like the silence—is worse, I’ve learned.
“Yeah, she came,” I say.
“And?” Lena presses when I stop.
My gaze floats to the furnace. Such a lying piece of shit that thing is in the daylight. Look at it standing there like it’s not a shelter for blood-thirsty ghosts.
“She definitely wants me.”
The horror on her face is the reason I didn’t want to have this conversation in the first place.
“Wants you, how? What does that mean?”
I shrug, fighting my rising panic. “I don’t really know.”
“But for what? To send a message? Physically? Sexually? ‘Want’ could mean anything.”
“I know.” I pull in a breath. “I mean it that way.”
“Did she hurt you?”
“She almost killed me,” I blurt out.
“But…?”
“And then it stopped.”
Lena quiets as her arms snake around her knees. She looks how I feel, and that’s why I use every bit of strength I have to hide the rest of my reaction.
“She just stopped? Why?”
“I don’t know.” Why did she stop? She wanted me. She had me. Mind, body, and soul I was hers while she locked me against the blankets.
Lena studies me in the long silence. I focus on the floor. How do you give answers when you can’t even form the questions?
“What are you going to do?” she asks finally.
“What can I do?”
Her shoulders lift. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“I guess not?”
She grunts and shoves my notebook to my chest. �
��This is how it started, right? This must be what she wants.”
The first image that appears on the page is the same as the others. I stare at the blank face, all too real and fresh after last night. What was once a picture, now has touch, sound, and smell. Taste, that’s the only thing I’m missing, and an ember burning deep inside of me says it’s only a matter of time.
“What do you want?” I mutter to myself. Maybe to her—I don’t know—but she’s not here. Not like she was yesterday anyway.
Her shrieks still surge through the recesses of my memory.
“Raaaaaah!”
What does that mean? I’ve never heard distinguishable sounds from her before. It was always just a screech. Does it mean she’s getting stronger or am I getting weaker? Who controls the shield separating us?
I shudder, gripping my pencil hard as it finds a new page. Closing my eyes, I focus on the memory of those few horrible moments, and let go.
My hand moves blindly. The scratching of lead on paper competes with the flutter of activity on the floor above me. The war doesn’t rage for long, though, and soon I’m locked back in a trance. I’m nothing again, just a hand moving on someone else’s command. Brain dark, vision blurred, I sketch for what feels like hours. What is time to someone like me anyway? She can have it all. That swirling face returns to the void behind my eyes. Twisting, shrieking, blank and… wait. No. The blackness isn’t nothingness.
Despite my fear, I focus on the twisting void. The black nothing that somehow isn’t. What is it? Flashes of something else start to flicker from the whirlpool of my mind. Wait, her face isn’t nothing. It’s more than that. It’s… everything. Yes, I see it now! Memories, regrets, dreams, it’s all there swirling into an indecipherable mass. But whose is this mass and why does it want me? Who is the Grave Lady?
My eyes snap open when the vision stops. There’s no movement over the page anymore. In fact, the tip of my pencil has snapped when I look down.
Gasping, I drop my pencil. Grave Lady has a face. It’s—young, haunting, and contorted in a scream.
“You wanted a drawing. Here it is.” I shove the notebook at Lena, wanting nothing to do with it anymore. Grave Lady’s face is worse than the nothing. Pure anguish, that’s the scream staring back at us from the page. Only a face from Hell could look like that, could hold that kind of torture. And now—
Shit! Not again! I just…
Somewhere far away I cry out in pain and crumple to dirty blankets. Somewhere I hold my head, screaming while my helpless friend looks on. Somewhere there is something that isn’t this.
“Take it.”
“What?”
The large man pushes me toward the purse on the table in the foyer while he waits just outside the open door.
“Hurry up before the old bitch gets back!”
“Just steal it?”
The man is angry and shoves me forward.
“If she sees you, we have to kill her.”
“No! She—”
My brain rattles from the blow, my left eye going numb. I pick myself off the floor as tears smart behind my vision.
“Take the fucking purse, Milo!”
My hand shakes as I reach for it. Mrs. Simpson had been nice to me. Maybe the only person in my first fifteen years. All she wanted to do was give an unwanted boy from Dump Town a chance. It’s my fault we’re here. Once Dad found out about her, there was no other way for this to end.
She makes the best cookies. Still warm when I sneak by on the way home from school. She always sends an extra one home with me too. Yesterday I forgot to hide it.
Footsteps clap toward us from the kitchen. She leaves her front door unlocked, so getting in wasn’t hard. It’s leaving I find impossible. The scent of chocolate chip wafts through the air. Is she baking those for the hungry teenager who will be stopping by at any minute? I want to scream to her that I’m here. That she should run. That I’m sorry. But I don’t. I do nothing. I don’t even leave with the purse so she can live.
No, I do nothing because this vision isn’t about what I did. It’s about what I didn’t do.
“Milo! Milo!”
The bin is at my mouth before I can even beg for it. Lena holds it while I vomit. It’s still not enough when I’m nothing but coughs and ragged breaths. I want to throw up every last shred of this tattered soul rotting inside me. Why didn’t Grave Lady kill me? God, I wish she’d killed me.
I’m hunched over, arms wrapped around my mid-section. There can’t be much left, can there? But I’ve thought that for a long time and I’m still here, retching out memory after memory I thought I’d purged. This was my third cycle through Mrs. Simpson, each one progressively worse.
For a long time, I thought I understood the process, why all of us are here, what we have to do to leave. But lately, the rules we’d all come to accept have been dragging me over burning coals with aimless precision. They still slice hard and deep, but in no decipherable pattern I can hold onto anymore. What had been a map to recovery has become a maze in my head, pushing me blindly into the same walls again and again. Mrs. Simpson gets darker, cuts deeper with every collision. Who’s next? Will Bev be back? Paul? Sinclair and his robotic pursuit of evil? My stomach clenches just thinking about another encounter with Sinclair. And now, just when the visions have shifted to unbearable, I’ve been cursed with Grave Lady.
I’m practically on all fours, spitting into a bucket, when an acerbic laugh drifts over us. I glare toward the door and force myself back to face Roy’s poison from a strengthened position.
A shadow washes over Lena’s face as well. “Not now, Roy,” she says.
I almost laugh at her pathetic attempt at hostile. Roy is even less impressed and crosses his arms with a smug look.
“Aww, does the golden boy’s tummy hurt?” he mocks.
“Shut up,” I snap back, swallowing another wave of nausea. Please not in front of Roy. Where’s Grave Lady when you need her? “Why are you even here?”
“What do you mean? I can’t check in on my roommate? Was worried about you, bro.”
My expression darkens. This is how you do hostile, Lena.
“What do you want, Roy?” I punch him with my voice since I’m too weak to use my fist.
“Oh, I was just wondering if you had any updates on you-know-who.”
“No,” I lie.
“Milo,” Lena warns. I cast her an irritated look. She might be too good to pick a side, even against asshole Roy, but I have no problem expressing my dissent.
“He’s drawing her again,” she says anyway.
Maybe it was worth it for the brief flicker of fear that washes over his features.
“Same as before?” he asks.
“Yes,” I reply.
“No,” Lena draws out, eyeing me with a tragic attempt at a warning look. Before I can stop her, she shoves my notebook into Roy’s hands.
All color drains from his face as he meets the ghost from my nightmares.
“It’s a woman.” His voice is little more than a whisper.
“It always was,” I say.
“Yeah but… an actual face and…” He shudders and tosses the book to the blankets near me. “Why is she screaming?”
I shrug, trying to suppress the memories and remain calm. Roy already knows way more than he deserves.
“We should tell the others,” Lena says, and I snap her a startled look.
“No, we definitely shouldn’t,” I say.
“Pete and Ethel—”
“No!” I pull in a deep breath. “No one else can know she’s back. Not until we know why.”
In the recesses of my brain, a shrieking banshee hovers over me, clawing at my soul. Scratching, scratching…
Not until I know why.
“You look like you’re gonna puke again, pretty boy.” Roy’s taunting is the last thing I need right now.
“You got your answer. Why are you still here?” I spit back.
“Maybe I like watching the golden boy
squirm. That pretty face looks so good with puke all over it.”
My blood is burning for a fight. Old Milo would have broken the jerk’s jaw five minutes ago. It’s everything I can do to keep from adding another crime to my mental rapsheet.
“Roy, please,” Lena says softly. “Not now. He’s…”
“Gonna cry like a little bitch? Yeah, I can see that. Boo-hoo—”
“Milo, no!”
Her concern is for me and my own sanity. Too bad that means shit when Old Milo breaks out of his cage.
“I’m fine! Just go check on Addie Rose. Please, Lena? Make sure she doesn’t come down.” I send her a pleading look from my place by the laundry basin I use to clean up.
“You can’t let him get to you like that. You can’t!”
She’s right of course. The visions I suffered immediately after the fight were worse than the battle, but that’s not a weight I need her carrying on her conscience right now. Got it covered, thanks.
“I’ll be fine. The visions seem to have stopped. Just go take care of Addie Rose.”
Lena releases her arms with a huff and charges up the stairs.
Once I’m alone, I lean over the sink, doing my best to keep the blood from our fight under control. I don’t need Addie Rose coming back down to fresh stains. The bruises will be enough.
Fuck! I slam my palms against the edge of the sink. This is exactly what he wanted. He knows he’s never leaving and hates the fact that I might get out. Despises it. It’s been his personal mission to make me like him. To prove I’m not the golden boy he thinks. If only he knew… And now?
I have no one to blame but myself. I knew what he was doing. Hell, even Lena picked up on his quest the second she arrived at 723 and witnessed our feud. Giving in makes me the failure. The laughing stock because this is my journey not his, and in a brief moment of weakness, I gave that asshole the reins. All I had to do was nothing.
“Fuck!” My voice cuts through the silence. Eerie since just minutes ago this room was a flurry of activity. Now, it’s the slow drip, drip, drip of blood from my face to the rusted sink basin.
Haunted Melody: A Ghost Story Page 2