Scare Me

by K. R. Alexander

  She lifts her head, revealing nothing but black space behind her veil.

  Then frigid lake water spills from her broken neck, pouring to the ground and splashing toward me. I stumble, try to avoid the water that I know will freeze me to the bone. Just like it froze her, before her parents dragged her back to shore. She isn’t crying anymore, but screaming. Screaming my name.

  I take another step back.

  But I’m too slow.

  Water sloshes around my ankles. Cold as ice.

  Cold as death.

  Cold as—

  “Are you swimming in the swamp?” Tanesha asks.

  I jolt and look around. Sure enough, I’m standing in my kiddie-pool swamp, water sloshed up to my ankles. My heart is in my throat and I can still hear the ghost bride’s scream ringing in my ears. But when I look around, she’s nowhere to be seen. Just my friends, standing with their mouths open, as if they’re worried I’ve lost my mind.

  I’m starting to worry the same thing.

  “Just, er … thought I dropped something.”

  “So you stepped in the swamp to get it?” Tanesha asks. Her eyebrow rises. Once more, she doesn’t believe me. I’m honestly surprised she hasn’t interrogated me. Yet.

  I shake my head.

  “Tripped.”

  “Right,” Tanesha says. She and Julie share a look.

  They don’t ask me any more questions, though. They just go back to final decorations, mumbling that I better not get anything wet.

  I step out of the swamp and start untying my shoes.

  What in the world is going on?

  The real show hasn’t even started, and the haunted house already seems to be haunting me.

  With thirty minutes to spare, we are ready for the test run. Everything’s in place … except for the bride. But I’m going to have to wait for that.

  The lights are focused and the smoke machine (finally) works and all the animatronic skeletons have performed without a single glitch. Everything seems to be running perfectly. More importantly, I haven’t had another hallucination. It must be that. Must just be me not getting enough sleep or being overstressed or something.

  I mean, there’s no other rational explanation, is there?

  “Is it time?” Tanesha asks. She practically bounces when she says it. I think she’s as excited about this as me. She even painted her nails as ghosts to get in the spirit. Pun intended.

  “I think so,” I reply. “Do you two want to practice your scares?”

  “Sure!” Tanesha says. Julie’s agreement is a little bit more reserved.

  We only have to perform opening night—the rest of the time, the house is open as a walk-through attraction on Friday and Saturday nights. Not many people come for the rest of the month. The majority of the town will be there for tomorrow night.

  This is our chance to make sure everything works as it should, because tomorrow, the house opens for real.

  I jog up the steps to find Mr. Evans.

  I find Patricia instead.

  “Running away?” she asks. She peers behind my shoulder. “Or are you opening the door so your teammates can throw away more junk?”

  I grit my teeth and remind myself of what my dads said: Talent is more important than fancy props.

  “No, actually,” I say, trying not to sound angry. “We’re all finished. I was just going to find Mr. Evans; he asked to be the first to see it.”

  The last bit is a lie, but I don’t care. I watch her face when I speak, hoping she’ll be upset that someone wanted to see our exhibit first. Instead, she just shrugs.

  “He’s upstairs,” she says smugly. “He’s been helping us hang a few of our heavier props.”

  She looks around, though the kids who are transforming this floor are nowhere to be seen.

  Patricia leans in to whisper: “He’s already told us we have the scariest room he’s ever seen.”

  Then she stands upright.

  “I’ll just go get him for you, shall I? Don’t want to ruin our big surprise.”

  Then, with an infuriatingly innocent smile, she turns on her heel and bounds up the stairs, leaving me staring at my reflection in a mirror.

  Something blurs at the corner of the frame and I turn away before I can see what it is.

  I don’t want to see the bride staring back.

  Around me, I can hear the music and laughter of our opponents—the Masked Mummies—as they put the finishing touches on their ground-floor fun house. But I ignore them. Because right now, Mr. Evans is in the basement going for a tour of my haunted graveyard, and I have maybe five minutes to find the mannequin and slip it downstairs without him noticing. I told Julie to keep him by the swamp and show off the various lights and special effects.

  She and Tanesha think I’m using the bathroom. I have to be fast. I have to hope Patricia is too busy upstairs to wander down and spy again.

  As quick as I can, I make my way down the back corridor toward the broom closet. This part of the mansion is off-limits for decorating, and it’s strange to see all the original furniture once more. I swear the hall tilts back here—it feels like walking on the deck of a ship. There are so many doors, but I vaguely remember which one holds all the excess stuff. We had to grab the vacuum from here last year to clean up some of the glitter Patricia had thrown over the floor of our lab.

  Thankfully, the door isn’t locked, and there’s no mistaking the mannequin in the corner: She faces away from me, her long dress covered in dust and cobwebs. Seeing her there, facing away with a veil draped over her broken neck, brings my dreams back to focus. Suddenly, this is the very last place I want to be.

  I try to take it as a good sign.

  “Sorry,” I mutter. Then, before I can talk myself out of it, I grab her around the waist and take her out of the storeroom. The mannequin is a lot lighter than I expect her to be. And much colder, too.

  My heart thuds in my chest so loud I can practically hear my pulse as I creep down the long hallway. I pause at every single noise or creak. I haven’t thought of a good explanation for if Mr. Evans comes back early, or stops me on the stairs. Immediately, I kick myself for not thinking this through. Maybe I should have grabbed the mannequin while he was up looking at Patricia’s stuff. But she went and got him before I could stop her, and how would I have known he was there in the first place?

  Miraculously, I make it back to the basement steps without Mr. Evans or anyone else stopping me. I pause at the door and open it a crack, trying to make out the sounds below. I try to ignore it—it must be my overactive imagination or nerves—but I swear I feel the mannequin breathe.

  Over the recorded sounds of crickets and thunder, I faintly hear Julie explaining how we made the water look so murky. Good. I need to get this thing hidden quick before I get discovered or drop and break it. If it keeps creeping me out, it might happen on purpose.

  One step at a time, I make my way down into the basement. My breath catches with every creaky step down, but there’s no turning back now. I just have to get her to the back corner where I already have a few trash bags hanging as a changing area of sorts. I make it off the stairs. Around the corner of a hanging trash bag. I’m in the clear! The stretch from here to the changing area is completely hidden away by a trash bag wall and there’s no way Mr. Evans would come back here.

  Phew!

  I take three steps in, and the bag behind me rustles. I stop cold.

  “What are you doing?” Tanesha asks. Thankfully, she asks it quietly.

  Slowly, I turn around and face my friend and teammate. She stands there in the makeshift hall with her hands on her hips and a very disapproving look on her face.

  “I, uh—” I stammer.

  She just shakes her head. “You’re stealing the mannequin? I can’t believe you.”

  “Just borrowing!” I whisper fiercely. “I’ll put it back.”

  “Kevin …”

  “I know, I know. But look at it! It’s so creepy!”

  I tur
n the mannequin to face her. She actually flinches away when I hold it out.

  “Ugh,” she responds. “You said you were going to get a replacement.”

  “I couldn’t find one in time,” I lie. It had to be this one. I’ve known it all along.

  Tanesha looks like she’s going to argue.

  “Please,” I say. “No one has to know. She’s going to be hidden until the very end, and it’s a quick jump scare. No one will really see it, and Julie and Mr. Evans are the only ones who’d recognize it. They’ll believe us if we tell them it’s a different one. Inspired by the basement bride.”

  “They’ll believe you because you always tell the truth,” Tanesha says. “At least, you did.”

  That stings.

  “I know it’s wrong,” I say. “But I also know that this prop and the bride story are what will win. I have to beat Patricia this year. I have to.”

  Tanesha looks at me for a long time. Sizing me up. But she knows that I’m telling the truth about this at the very least. When we lost last year, I was torn up for weeks. Even after the illness, I couldn’t eat or sleep or focus. It had felt like my dreams of getting out of here and doing something big with my life had been ripped from my hands.

  She’d been the one comforting me and telling me that this year we’d win, no matter what. I can tell she’s regretting it.

  “Fine. Just … if anyone realizes this is the original mannequin, it’s all on you. I want nothing to do with it. Got it?”

  I nod.

  “Thanks,” I whisper. For not telling on me. For still being my friend. I think. I’m not so certain about the last part. I worry this might have taken it too far—lying not just to Mr. Evans, but to my friends. Then I remember Patricia’s gloating earlier today, and the worry fades. Or at least turns from sickness to resolve. I have to do this. Have to.

  Tanesha doesn’t respond, just shakes her head and disappears back into the haunted basement. I think I hear her mutter, “Unbelievable,” as she leaves.

  Relief flooding through my veins, I lean the mannequin carefully against the wall. I’ll come in early tomorrow night to set her up, before the others get here.

  “Tomorrow,” I say to the mannequin as I drape a trash bag over her, hiding her almost completely.

  When I turn to go, I hear a female voice whisper to my back.

  “Tomorrow.”

  I’m so amped up on adrenaline for tomorrow that it takes forever to fall asleep. I don’t even have the ability to feel afraid over what happened earlier—I’ve chalked up all the strange occurrences to electrical malfunctions or exhaustion-induced hallucinations. There’s no such thing as ghosts or haunted mannequins or possessed dresses.

  Everything is explainable.

  Everything terrifying has a logical cause.

  I can’t let my imagination get in the way of us winning this competition.

  And tonight, I have to ensure that I know precisely what I will say tomorrow. I have to know the story of the ghost bride inside and out. So after finishing my homework, I spend my night rereading the articles from before. Trying to memorize the tragic tale of the drowned bride and her creepy parents.

  Maybe it’s that, or maybe it’s my own creativity, but as the night grows heavier I start to feel the same eyes on the back of my neck as before.

  I’m being watched.

  I can even hear her breathing.

  “Not going to work,” I tell myself aloud. “I refuse to be scared by my own imagination.”

  The sensation fades. A little.

  I read through the articles a few more times, and I start to understand what my friends were saying. I feel sorry for the ghost bride. She lost her fiancé, and then her family wouldn’t even let her rest in peace. They kept her memory alive for eternity by creating the mannequin.

  Maybe Tanesha was right. Maybe we should just let her be. There’s still time to find another mannequin and another dress.

  Then I think of Patricia’s prank.

  No.

  It has to be the real thing. It has to be the true scare.

  “What does it matter anyway?” I whisper. “She’s dead. She doesn’t care.”

  It’s my imagination. I know it.

  Somewhere, in the shadows of my room, I hear her whisper: “But I do.”

  I really, really need to get more sleep.

  I flip off my computer and close my eyes, mentally walking through our cemetery installation and going over my lines.

  As sleep creeps closer and my dreams take over, I don’t even realize when I’ve stopped imagining and have fully started dreaming. Or maybe I am awake. It’s hard to say. All I know is that as I imagine walking through our haunted graveyard, I’m no longer in a basement. The concrete beneath my bare feet begins to squish. Cold mud seeps between my toes and a biting wind cuts through the willows, their long branches scratching together like skeletal fingers.

  I want to stop, but once more, my feet drive me forward. Over the hills and soggy glens, under the snapping branches of the willows. A full moon hangs heavy above me, just above the horizon, and thick clouds skirt against it in agitation. As if not even the clouds want to be out here.

  In the far-off corner of memory, I worry that I am being led back to the gazebo. Back to the weeping bride and her cavernous maw. But my feet don’t drag me down that dirt path. No, I am led as if on a string, through the soggiest bits of the swamp, marsh weeds brushing against my hips with every step.

  Slithery things slink wetly around my ankles. I bite back a gasp as one hisses past me, fearing the sting of serpent teeth. Still, I keep going, through the infested mire. Murky water squelches up past my ankles. A new panic races through me.

  What if I’m being led to the water to drown? What if I walk straight into the center and keep going, down into the deepest depths of the swamp, where the forgotten bodies of wanderers past float restlessly?

  My path doesn’t lead me into the bubbling swamp, however, but past it. I skirt the edge and soon the land rises again. Straight up I go, up a hill covered in nothing but grass. No trees. No tombstones. Not even wisps of fog dare tread here.

  For some reason, the empty hill scares me more than even the snakes I walked through to get here.

  Because inside the hill, vibrating up through my heels, I feel a heartbeat. Slow and ominous and deep.

  Thud

  thud.

  Thud

  thud.

  Thud

  thud.

  I pant as I reach the top of the hill. My work isn’t done yet.

  I drop to my knees and dig my fingers into the soft soil, mud caking my nails.

  I don’t want to dig.

  I don’t want to unearth the heart, the beats louder with every handful of dirt.

  I don’t have a choice.

  Soon, I am covered in dirt and grass and sweat, and even though the night is cold as winter my muscles burn and my chest is hot.

  Faster

  and faster

  I dig,

  and faster

  and faster

  the heart races.

  Thud

  thud

  thud

  thud

  thud

  THUD—

  My fingers scratch against wood.

  A casket.

  Rotten, moldy wood.

  I clear away more dirt, and between one handful of dirt and the next, the coffin lid is clear.

  I don’t know who lies inside.

  I know who lies inside.

  I press my palm to the cold wood, and it gives like cheese under my fingers. A hole, large enough to see through.

  When I see inside the casket, my lungs finally let out a scream.

  And when the body within—my body, me—opens his eyes,

  both the heartbeat in the hill

  and the one in my chest

  stop.

  I wake up covered in sweat.

  When I look at my hands, dirt cakes the undersides of my nails.


  All day at school, I have to fight off the faint trace of fear that lingers in my veins.

  I can’t look directly into the bathroom mirrors—I’m too afraid of what I’ll see.

  I can’t look around corners, for fear of the flash of a white wedding dress.

  When Tanesha finds me after the final bell, I feel like every nerve in my body is ready to snap. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell myself it’s just my imagination, that it’s a good sign—the dream sticks to my thoughts, and even rational, logical me is having a hard time pushing past the primal fear.

  “You look like you’re sick,” Tanesha says. She presses the back of her palm to my forehead. “No fever, though. You feeling okay?”

  “I didn’t sleep,” I explain.

  I spent all of lunch in the library. Not because I wanted to do homework, but because being in crowds made me feel strange. I swore, every single time I walked down the hall or let my gaze relax in a classroom, I saw her, from the corner of my eye. A woman in white. Watching at the edges. Waiting.

  “You’re avoiding us,” Tanesha says.

  I shake my head.

  “You are,” she continues. She shoulders her bag and walks down the hall, heading toward the exit. I can see Julie farther on—she waves when she spots us. “It’s about the mannequin. You’re afraid to come clean to Julie.”

  “Shh,” I reply. “I am not.”

  “Then I’ll just tell her. Hey, Julie!” She holds up her arm in salute, and I slap it down.

  “Don’t! It’s just … okay, yes. I don’t want her to know it’s the same mannequin. I know she wouldn’t approve. You know how she feels about breaking the rules. And she already feels bad enough about using the bride’s story.”

  “She’s your teammate and she’s going to find out eventually.”

  “Yes, but ideally not until much later.”

  Tanesha stops and looks at me.

  “You’re really willing to risk losing the trust of your best friend to win this thing?”

  My mouth gapes.

  “I …”

  Julie bounces up to us, and whatever I was stumbling to say silences in my throat.