Post by mmmj on Jul 25, 2015 7:49:02 GMT
I finished the thing I started on Monday. Originally it was gonna be cutesy and about ghosts teaching dumb kids the true meaning of friendship and other educational lessons, but I'm the worst so it turned into a 10k tedious coming-of-age story. Whoooops. But I finished a thing, which is unusual for me! Help definitely needed. Please help me make this less boring and weirdly abrupt. Link to properly-formatted Google doc here.
The Time Traveler of Larchdale House
When Johnny bought the EMF reader off the internet-- a PayPal transaction with a website that looked like it had been preserved in amber since 1998-- he was already mentally composing the opening sequences for their totally sick ghost-hunting TV show.
"We'll start out putting episodes on YouTube, like Marble Hornets did, but to be honest I think it'll get picked up by Spike or Discovery within maybe a season," he had told his parents over dinner the night before, unbothered by their uncertainty, since that was their response to pretty much every cool thing he had ever tried to do, like when he was going to be a pro skater, or like last summer when he and Rich were going to be the next Fall Out Boy. "Hopefully they won't make us change the name."
The name of their show was "Fuck Ghosts!" It had won out against "Ghost Hataaaz," which Rich said was too derivative (Rich had totally gotten a perfect score on the PSATS and was a little obnoxious about it) and "The Unstoppable Ghost Killers" because that felt like promising a little too much. Johnny didn't know anything about killing ghosts but he was confident he could annoy them, and that was what people really wanted to see from ghost hunters anyway. Exorcists were dumb as hell. Getting rid of ghosts was slaying the goose that shat the golden egg; the money was in cornering paranormal phenomenon and making it do freaky shit. On camera. And then selling t-shirts with your face on it to hot chicks with big tits.
"How do we know it's even a real EMF reader?" asked Shelley on the way to their first location. She was messing with all the equipment Johnny had carefully assembled in his grandpa's old briefcase-- a steel bearing pendulum and an old mercury thermometer, and an old TalkBoy that had belonged to Rich's oldest brother back in the 90's, and Rich's mom's bible, which was perfectly old and scary looking with its cracked black leather binding and near-transparent paper. Shelley hadn't had anything to contribute to the kit, but she was Rich's girlfriend and she owned a really good LED flashlight, so Johnny couldn't just make her stay at home. Plus having a girl on camera would be good for ratings. But now she was waving the EMF reader around in the passenger seat of Rich's old Mazda and the more it screeched intermittently the more Johnny was beginning to wish he'd just arranged for this first case to happen when she had a Physics Club meeting and couldn't come.
"Ghost diiiicks," Shelley said, waving the EMF reader at Johnny's face. "In a ghooooost car."
"You can suck my ghost dick, Shelley," Johnny snarled, trying to take the EMF reader back.
"Guys, fucking cut it out," Rich snapped. "If you guys are gonna fuck around we're gonna get caught and get arrested, okay, and then I'm gonna go to jail and I'll never get into Cornell and--"
"Oh my god fuck off with Cornell already," Johnny retorted.
"-- and if you're not gonna be SERIOUS about this for once in your goddamn life John--"
"SERIOUS?" Johnny shouted, slapping the headrest of Shelley's seat to pull himself up into the front of the car, beyond indignant. "I am hella fucking serious, you-- you overgrown ass turd pubic lice motherfucker, this was MY idea, this is MY show, don't fuckin' lecture me on being serious when you don't know a goddamn thing about this shit, okay? All you know about the paranormal is what you read on Wikipedia during English last week, you thought EMF was a type of dance music, okay? I'm dead serious, you just trust me on that." Johnny shook his finger in Rich's face for emphasis, feeling pretty cool and wishing they were filming this, too. "So shut up and drive."
Rich raised an eyebrow, lips tight. "I'm not driving anymore."
"Oh why are you always the biggest fucking baby--"
"We're here, dude."
And they were. Johnny had been too wrapped up in his head again to notice, but they were here, and Johnny experienced a vivid but impossible sensation of his stomach dropping lower than his body could actually allow.
As if they'd practiced it-- and maybe they had, the fucks-- Shelley and Rich both got out of the car simultaneously, Shelley taking the EMF reader with her, leaving Johnny crammed awkwardly between the driver and passenger seat, making what felt uncomfortably like eye contact with the house in front of them.
The sudden thrill of fear rolling through his body was stupid, because he'd passed in front of this stupid house nearly every year of his life. Sure it had scared him when he was, like, six, and his mom had dressed him as a pirate for Halloween and he was only just becoming cognizant of what fear was and how people might construct it recreationally. Maybe it had even scared him at fourteen, when he'd made his own costume (a zombie murderer, which was a murderer that died and then came back from the dead to keep killing, so it was doubly cool) and had totally seen like every scary movie out there and only sometimes slept with the bathroom light on. But he was nearly sixteen now, and just a few weeks before he'd finally made a name for himself at school by coming to this place on Halloween and casually walking up to its looming, crooked front door. Every kid in their suburban neighborhood, and every kid that came from less nice neighborhoods to trick-or-treat here where most of the houses gave out full-size candy bars, came to the Larchdale House to pay respects to what was definitely the most haunted house in town. So there had been a sizeable crowd standing around to watch Johnny, wearing a black hoodie splattered in red paint and a Ghost Face mask pushed back on the crown of his head, strutting up through the overgrown weeds to jiggle the partially-shattered glass doorknob of the front door like it was No Big Deal.
That was the traditional, long-standing dare. Most kids only made it a step or two through the wrought-iron gate before being repelled back into the waiting mixed admiration and disgust of their less-brave friends. A really determined or really cool kid might get all the way to the door to knock-- one rap, two, three, ding dong ditch-- before turning heel. It was harder than it sounded, anyone who had even tried would tell you for sure. At the gate it was all a joke, a Goosebumps book or an Are You Afraid of the Dark episode, totally theoretical chills. One step in and it became mysteriously but concretely real, a vertigo plucked from its usual home and redelivered to you with your feet planted firmly on cracked cement and what ought to be just a regular old house staring you down. This feeling rooted itself inside of you and spread the farther you walked in, wrapping tendrils of Get Out Get Out Go Go Go Leave around your knees and your lungs and the base of your spine. And Johnny had felt all that, for sure, but the Varsity lacrosse team was standing behind him, hooting, some of it encouragement but most of it jeers, and his crush at the time, and stupid Rich with his stupid test scores and his car and his cool hair, and a whole bunch of other people besides. So he had walked all the way to the front door, trying to disguise the wobbling of his knees with an exaggerated swagger he hoped was funny. And he had jiggled the door knob.
And it had been unlocked.
So what was he supposed to do then? He wasn't six, or fourteen, and even though the kids twenty feet behind him had all fallen silent, he could feel the combined weight of their gaze pushing him forward like a mother pushing a child into the classroom on the first day of kindergarten.
In that first few seconds, even Johnny himself hadn't thought he'd really go in. It wasn't even an option. His mind had leapt only to a series of less terrifying options that he could go with and still save face, like shout "Helloooo! Any body home?" into the darkness, or maybe pull out his iPhone and take a selfie while giving a big goofy thumbs up. But then, without even really thinking it through, he'd pulled his stupid Party City Ghost Face mask down and--
--and--
-- and he'd stepped inside. And he'd shut the door behind himself.
And no one in the crowd saw what happened after that, but Rich nearly called the cops, and everyone swore he was in there nearly ten minutes, maybe twenty, maybe an hour in one version of the story circulating in school on Monday. And then Johnny had reappeared. Come back out and walked calmly back to them, and held up something spindly and metal and kind of dusty and gross: an old candle stick, so painfully Victorian and antiquated it could have been a prop in a movie.
"Yeah, I mean, it was a little creepy, I guess," Johnny had demured some days later, on his hundredth re-telling of the story. "I definitely felt, you know, A Presence. But I mean, who even really knows what ghosts want? Maybe they just want someone to, you know, acknowledge them. So they can move on and junk." Johnny liked this theory because it was something he could empathize with. No one had ever really acknowledged Johnny before, either, and in a way he felt a little bit like he'd been a ghost, too, walking through school hallways unseen and unappreciated, getting more frustrated with each passing semester of absolute boring anonymity. But in the weeks after Halloween, suddenly classmates knew his name. A whole bunch of people wanted to go see the latest Paranormal Activity with him. Afterwards they all hung out in the mall food court and everyone listened to him talk about how much he hated the movie, how fake it was. No one told him to shut up or changed the subject. It was great.
But by Thanksgiving their attention was waning. People weren't going out of their way to talk to him anymore, and maybe he got told when Stuff Was Happening a little more often, but if he showed up he wasn't going to be the center of attention, he was just one more hanger on, which in some ways was even worse than not hanging on at all. At least when no one invited him to anything at all he hadn't really known what he was missing.
So here they were, back at the Larchdale House. Only a dozen or so people that mattered had seen Johnny's first foray into paranormal investigation, and most of what had happened was left to their imaginations. This time Johnny was prepared, and afterwards he was going to have proof. Really cool, scary proof that would be all over Reddit and 4chan and all that shit in no time, and afterwards he'd go on and do even more cool, scary shit. He and Rich had assembled a list: after conquering the Larchdale House they'd move on to the cool asylum just a few miles upstate, and then there was another even bigger one across the river, and also a long stretch of road even further out in the boonies that everyone swore was haunted by a ghost hitchhiker. And by the time they were through with that list they'd definitely be making tons of money and could go even farther away, to even more famous haunted things, and stuff like school and college and what his classmates thought of him wouldn't even matter anymore.
Out on the sidewalk, Shelley had her hands in her pockets and was eyeballing the Larchdale House with a little too much calm, collected intent for Johnny's comfort. It would make way better footage if she was scared. No one wanted to see a whole bunch of people in a haunted house not being scared, and obviously Johnny wasn't going to be the one who was really scared, because this was all old news to him and anyway he was the leader, and Rich would be behind the camera so no one would really be able to tell if he was scared or not. That left Shelley, who was gonna need to earn her keep by making Johnny look even cooler and braver than he already was, which was pretty cool and brave, to be honest.
With Rich occupied with doing something or other with the hulking VHS camera they'd borrowed from the school's AV department (there were newer cameras available, but they'd both agreed that VHS tapes sounded more legit for ghost hunting), Johnny sidled up to Shelley and tried to imitate her relaxed, serious posture.
"So I know that you know that there's nothing to be afraid of, really," he said, as casually as possible. "But I do just wanna warn you that there might be a lot of, you know, activity around you. A lot more than there was around me. I mean I experienced a lot of stuff," he stumbled over his words when she actually deigned to look at him then, one eyebrow raised, "But like not really NEGATIVE stuff, just stuff, you know? But I mean. You know the stories. All the stories about this house, and what happens to girls in this house."
"What do you mean, 'what happens to girls in this house'?" Shelley asked. "Nobody's gone in this house in a billion years 'til you tripped and fell inside."
"I didn't trip, I strode in with purpose, thanks," Johnny sneered. "And maybe you don't know the stories, huh? Maybe you don't know everything."
He wished that had come out more mysterious and less cranky, but it was done now. He snatched back his EMF reader, finally, and stalked through the gate. It was easier to ignore the gut instinct to run this time, maybe because it was still light and not Halloween, the apex of a three week long binge diet of horror movies and creepypasta consumption, or maybe because he'd really gotten braver on the other side of his first experience, or maybe because he knew he had to play this right if he was going to get Shelley to bite the little piece of bait he'd just laid out.
He stopped at the front step, a few feet shy of the door still, and let Shelley come up behind him, pausing as she stepped through the gate just long enough to assuage Johnny's ego a little. Richard was definitely stalling back at the car, the pussy.
"John," Shelley said, taking this seriously, finally, after all that joking around in the car and in the week preceding. Perfect. "What do you think happens to girls in this house?"
He would have to be careful here, more careful than he was usually capable of being. If he scared her too much she just wouldn't come in at all, and then Rich wouldn't come in, and then Johnny might have to go in by himself and it was feeling really very important to have someone to be braver than when he went back in there. With just Rich and Shelley here to witness it, he might not even go back in at all. It would be too easy to pretend to be disgusted with their cowardice and just go home and watch Netflix instead. And then by the new year he'd probably be back to his same old self, uncool, a little too desperate to be worth anyone's time, always jumping from one thing to another and giving up when the going got tough.
"Not girls, I guess," he said, conjuring a solemnity easily with thoughts of failure so close. "Just one girl, the first girl in the house. And the last. The reason this place is abandoned. Rich!" he called out. "Get your ass over here and get that camera rolling, we have to do this before people start coming home from work and call the cops on us."
His 'first girl, and the last' comment had been really good, but he couldn't use it again when Rich started filming or it'd ruin the effect. Maybe he could work it in after as a voice over. When Rich had Johnny framed in front of the front door, backed up sufficiently to also get the grey and dirty windows, boarded up except in places where boards had come loose from years of neglect, he tried introducing himself in a couple of different ways. He told the viewers who he was, and mentioned Rich and Shelley, just to be fair, even though they might get replaced by real actors when the show got picked up for real. And he did a really solid job introducing the house, he thought. There was a familiarity in his voice, like he and the Larchdale House were old friends. He even called the house she, and talked about it like it was a person, the way people did about boats or mountains, because that seemed like it fit the character he was building for himself. But he didn't mention anything else about the girl. If he was lucky he wouldn't have to.
And then the whole plan nearly collapsed.
Johnny was just opening to door, Shelley and Rich tucked uncomfortably close to him, when an unexpected noise nearly made Johnny shit himself. He had been so busy telling himself to not be afraid of what was inside the house that even though the noise wasn't coming from inside, he reeled back from the front door, had to catch himself on the splintery old door frame to stop himself from bolting, in fact. The noise was coming from down the street, still well around the corner, but any second it was going to come down into this secluded little cul de sac where every other house was empty, its occupants at work and school for another hour, unlike Johnny and his friends, who had skipped the last three periods of school so they could come here and do something technically illegal, something still technically considered trespassing, that would be viewed with probably a lot less leniency than the kind of resigned amusement adults seemed to view their Halloween rituals with.
There wasn't enough time to bolt back to the car. And if they did bolt back to the car, they'd never get back to this front door. Johnny hauled Rich and Shelley inside and pulled the door shut behind them.
Inside it was near pitch dark. As frightening as that was, as much as fear was crawling up his spine in a frenzy, it was almost a blessing to be able to attribute that fear to the sound of a car driving all the way up to the house and stopping in front, right next to where they themselves were parked.
"Shit," Rich swore.
Johnny had to make himself breathe, remind himself that it was stupid to hold his breath. There was no way anyone outside could hear him breathing, even if it felt unnaturally loud, as disruptively loud as it had sounded the last time he had stood in this peeling entryway.
The last time he had been in this hallway, he had been frozen stiff inside his mask, barely passable bravado warring with numb paralysis as he had used his iPhone to light a scant four-by-four-foot sphere around himself. He had seen the bannister of the silent, crooked steps, and the low antique table, covered in bric-a-brac, shrouded in dust. And he had seen nothing else.
He had counted to one hundred, back pressed to the door, eyes tracking every square millimeter around him, as if just looking might prevent there from being anything there. And then he had snatched up his souvenir and left. In the days after, he had frantically invented to fill the amount of time everyone else was already convinced he'd spent inside. It had been hard, at first, to keep it vague enough to be bulletproof in case it turned out someone else had already been in the house. But the more people asked, the more convinced Johnny had become that no one was going to come forward, and besides, he decided later, when he'd resolved to come back, if things didn't match up perfectly he could just ascribe the discrepancies to some kind of paranormal phenomenon. The house playing tricks. That stuff happened, he'd looked it up. It was in some really good urban legends, too.
Now, really back, standing where he had stood a little more than a month ago, he was psyching himself out like a real fucking idiot. The stories he'd told felt worse than lies, now. They felt like spiteful lies, like mean gossip, like the time he had told Rich and the other guys in his computer programming class about touching Shelley's breasts last year, when it really hadn't happened like that at all but he'd wanted to seem cool. It felt like he had violated something, someone.
If he was going to believe his own bullshit he was never going to get anywhere with this.
In the here and now, there was at least a lot more natural light to work with than there had been on Halloween. Sunset was still another hour or so off, and the loose boards on the windows let in enough amber late-afternoon light that now the entire staircase was illuminated, although that made the darkness of the first landing all the more concerning, and the water stains trailing down every wall were unsettlingly organic, like the house had been sweating for years and years, like an old man in a yellowing undershirt.
In this unpleasant and sick-seeming light, Shelley had beaten Johnny to the window and was peering out already, seemingly unbothered by the atmosphere of gut-clenching fear and guilt that was holding Johnny stock still, and at least seemed to be affecting Rich similarly, since he had his back pressed against one weeping wall and was hyperventilating a little bit but was at least still holding the camera on Johnny, whose fear was hopefully not completely apparent on film.
"I don't think it's a cop," Shelley said, annoyingly pragmatic.
This inspired Rich into action, who was suddenly at her side also peering out. "Shit," he kept saying, which was good for the footage but also left Johnny alone by the doorway. The sensation that someone was leaning over his shoulder, head bending down to look at him from some greater height was intense and startling, but when he glanced over his shoulder and at the ceiling above nothing was there but disturbed dust. The feeling persisted even when he was sure there was nothing there, and he was grateful Rich had his camera pointed out the broken window and not at him as he spun a quick, frantic circle.
"Fuck," said Rich. "That is a cop."
"You're full of crap," Shelley said.
"It's an undercover cop, listen, my dad works with cops all the time, that's what their cars look like."
"It's just some guy in a car," Shelley said.
"Well then maybe it's the owner."
"It's not the owner," Johnny said, pulling his confidence in how much more he knew about this than Rich, for fucking once, over himself like a security blanket. "The owner's like a million years old. He lives in Florida. I looked up the family. One of his grandkids got arrested for a DUI last year." He cleared his throat and assembled his thoughts a little more coherently, remembering the camera, focusing on that, centering himself.
"This house has been owned by the same family since it was built in 1901, but no one has lived here since the Great Depression. But the family's never sold it. They couldn't even if they tried," Johnny said, pausing for dramatic effect. "But they've never tried. What happened in this house was too awful, and they know that if they sold it, the whole world would find out what they did. Why no one lives here. Why no one can live here."
Johnny paused again, this time annoyed.
"Rich, I'm talking. Point the fucking camera at me."
Rich was still staring bug-eyed out the window.
"Are you seriously still talking about ghosts when I am about to get arrested?" he demanded. "That cop out there is probably writing down my license plate number right now. We should just, like, go out there right now and just, like, apologize and, I don't know, tell him we thought this was, like, our friend's house and we're dumb teenagers and--"
Johnny resisted the uge to check over his shoulder again, trying to subtly move so that his back wasn't to the stairwell and darkened hallway and the rest of the house beyond.
"Rich, don't be a fucking idiot, that guy out there is just, like, looking up directions. Or he heard about the haunted house and wanted to take a look, or I don't know, he's waiting to get his dick sucked and this is where he's meeting his boyfriend or something, it could be fucking anything. We're inside now. We can't go out the front door, that's stupid. We're gonna walk through this house like we goddamn planned, and then we'll sneak out the back door, OK? We'll say we were walking on the train tracks," Johnny decided outloud, coming up with the plan as he spoke, impressed with himself even as he was talking. "Whoever that guy is, even if he's like the head fucking police officer or the goddamned CIA, he can't arrest us if he can't prove we were in here, and he can't prove we were in here unless he sees us come out."
"He'll know we were in here when you post everything on YouTube," Shelley said.
"Yeah, but by then we'll be famous for catching ghosts on film and it won't matter," Johnny explained. Christ, Shelley thought she was smart but she wasn't really.
Rich had finally taken the video camera off of the stupid not-a-cop car and was at least pointing it vaguely around the front room of the house, getting footage of what Johnny could now see as his eyes adjusted to the beams of gloaming light: a moldy armchair, once maybe pink but now turning green in the middle and distressingly black in the very center, like a burn mark, and thin, antique copper wires strung from the ceiling, connecting greying light fixtures that were aesthetic cousins of the candle stick he'd made off with last time, which he was now feeling he ought to have returned on this trip, as a sign of good will, because the sense of wrongness was getting harder and harder to ignore.
Johnny was just turning to the sideboard where he knew he'd find an impression in the dust, where that candlestick had been for who knew how long before he'd grabbed it a month ago, when, as if agitated by Johnny's own thoughts and the reminder of this particular trespass, the feeling of wrongness still riding on his back became abruptly pervasive and saturated the room entirely, and this time even Shelley and Rich seemed to notice because Shelley gave a full body shudder, like she had just seen something disgusting, and Rich started up his "Shit" litany again, and one of the light fixtures turned on.
Which was insane. Johnny didn't know a lot about how electricity worked but he was pretty sure no one would bother paying the bills for a house that had been abandoned for like 90 years. And this was not a normal light, or even the horror movie light that Johnny had been expecting, almost, the universally spooky flicker of bad fluorescent lighting. Everything happened very quickly: the fixture lit up, softly at first, an old and dying light that fit right in with its surroundings, and the "ping!" of the light fixture turning on had barely even stopped resonating in the room when Rich was already trying to yell at Johnny for turning a light on, and Johnny was trying to say that he hadn't touched anything, and the light was getting brighter, too bright, and then it was shattering.
And then it was dark again.
Shelley had her hand pressed tight over her mouth, to keep a scream in, maybe, but Johnny only knew that because he could hear her breath coming in ragged breaths around the meat of her hand, because the flare of the light fixture-- of the Activity! a part of his brain was celebrating, even as he was fighting with the sensation of being about to drop on a roller coaster and wanting to get off off off off out out out-- had temporarily blinded him. Or so he thought, he was sure that was it, but then Shelley was turning on her high powered heavy duty flashlight, and he could see the whole room but this time--
This time there was no light coming in through the cracks in the boards.
It was if it had suddenly become night.
Rich had apparently had the same realization and was back at the window again, trying to look out, moaning unhappily and steadily and Johnny wanted him to shut up because he needed to hear if anything was moving, because he felt absolutely like something was moving right behind him, except nothing was there, there was nothing but them in this room, and the shadows, and in particular one shadow.
One shadow sitting in the armchair, the perfect figure of a man, less than two feet from where Rich was crouched by the window. Sitting perfectly still, refusing to dissipate even as Shelley shone her flashlight directly at it.
"Rich," Shelley said, over Rich's pathetic shitty moaning. "Rich, come here right now."
Rich had never been able to follow basic ass instructions when they were coming from Johnny, his best goddamned friend, but he managed for Shelley, who he'd only even been dating for two or three weeks, and if Johnny wasn't busy being out of his mind with terror he'd be jealous, but he didn't have time for that just at the moment.
Rich's stupid sub-vocal moaning stopped, at least, once he seemed to get a good look at The Thing in the Chair.
"Don't move your light, Shelley." Johnny said, as quiet as possible while still being loud enough that the camera could pick him up, hopefully. "Whatever you do, don't take your light off of it." He turned to look in the other direction, forcing himself to turn his back on the Thing, forcing himself to think of how cool this would look on tape in just a few hours, because they were going to go right back to the AV lab and look at all the footage and they were gonna be famous. Ghosts never really did real shit to people. Johnny knew all about ghosts and paranormal sightings and no one was ever really in danger, they just thought they were. Well they had their proof now, it was sick as hell, he was going to be the coolest guy in school and the town and maybe even the whole country in just a few days, and they could just quietly leave the house and they'd deal with whatever was going on with the guy in the car out front, it'd all be fine.
The door they had come in through wouldn't budge.
The knob, which had turned so easily today and on Halloween, might as well have been solid metal, not even attached to any moving parts. It didn't even pretend to try and turn.
"Okay," Johnny said. To Rich and Shelley. And also the house. "Okay. We're very sorry, and we're ready to leave now. We are so ready to leave. And we'll come back tomorrow, to return the candlestick we took--"
"Not we, you!" Shelley interjected, and Johnny couldn't bring himself to turn around and see if that was precipitated by some sign from the Thing, by any change in the Thing.
"-- and then we'll make sure no one ever comes here again, I swear. You'll be left in peace. We can even stop the Halloween visits."
"Or make them bigger?" Rich was offering, his voice as nervous as it had been when he'd asked Shelley to be his girlfriend, Johnny awkwardly forgotten in the back seat of the car after they'd gone to the movies, wishing he was a million miles away instead of hearing his best friend make out with fucking Shelley, of all people. "We can bring more people to you, if that's what you want. Really, it's up to you. We're reasonable people, we can compromise--"
All this with the pitch of Rich's normally unfairly deep voice escalating steadily, and Johnny had only just summoned his courage to turn and look at The Thing again only to see that it was standing now, much closer, much closer to them, much too close, and Shelley was pushing and they were barrelling into the darkness of the house, into the unknown, and Shelley's flashlight was swinging forward to illuminate a long and dusty hallway, and Johnny found himself screaming in a voice that did not sound like his own: "Don't take the light off of it! Don't take the light off! Don't!"
For half of a breath Johnny thought that maybe she had listened to him, and he was regretting it as much as he was relieved because this meant he now had no idea what he was looking at, but the thud! and then the clatter of the flashlight and the strobe effect as it bounced on the floor were the exact opposite of what Johnny had wanted, and the sound of a body being dragged rapidly back towards the front entrance was almost entirely drowned out by the sound Johnny and Rich made running full-speed into what felt like a table.
Johnny heard Rich, taller and more top heavy, hit the table and curse, falling partially onto it and sending a variety of objects clanging and shattering onto the floor with himself some feet away. Johnny, for his part, hit the table edge cleanly with his solar plexus and dropped to the ground, wheezing, absolutely expecting to be dragged backwards by the hands of the Thing That Had Been Looming Behind Him this entire time, at any moment.
But nothing touched him, and in the total darkness he could hear Rich trying to right himself, mere feet away, cursing again.
Feeling more like an idiot than usual, he fumbled his iPhone out of his pocket and stabbed with clumsy fingers for the Flashlight app he had downloaded purposely before coming here, commending himself at the time for thinking ahead and downloading it while he was still connected to Wi-Fi so he wouldn't use up too much data. With fear running his body more completely than he had ever run it himself, his fingers were clumsy and inept at things he normally did without thinking, a second nature, an extension of his own brain nurtured for all of his childhood. At fifteen, he could barely remember a world without smartphones and had no knowledge of a world without small personal computers always on hand in at least some capacity.
"Oh god," Rich was saying, shuffling towards Johnny as soon as the screen illuminated him in the darkness, no matter how faintly. The ground around Rich was littered with cracked porcelain, broken plates and cups that had been lying out on the table, some still with what might have once been food on them. Johnny finally opened the Flashlight App and turned his phone's now-steady beam of light on the darkness behind them, in the direction where Shelley had been moments before.
She wasn't there.
Neither was the flashlight.
The inside of the door stood at the end of the hall, a replacement guard for the Thing From the Chair that had taken Shelley. Its stern countenance was rigid and upright on this side, nothing like its crooked and frail-looking twin on the outside.
Johnny turned the flash beam to the side, to look at Rich, who squinted and put up his arm to block the light. He was dripping blood, and at first Johnny didn't even register that, as used to horror movie gore as he was at this point.
"Fuck, dude, don't move."
"Why," Rich snapped, eyes opening as he froze and looked frantically around himself, transparently thinking of the Thing, the phantom.
"No, fuck, dude, you're bleeding. You're all fucked up."
"Oh," said Rich. "Shit." He looked down at himself. "I don't even feel it. I think I'm in shock," he explained, sounding a little bewildered by the concept.
"Fuck," said Johnny, unable to summon anything more useful. He took a moment to nervously scan the room they were in with his phone's light, realizing suddenly that the Thing could have snuck up on him, could sneak up on him at any moment, how desperately unsafe he was. This wasn't a horror movie. He wasn't just riding this out til the credits.
They had to get Shelley, and they had to get out of here.
They were in a dining room, the fine china as fancy as anything he'd ever seen on Antiques Roadshow, the whole room looking much less worn and decrepit than the molding front hall. If it hadn't been for the dust and now Rich's blood smeared everywhere, it could have been a display in a historic village or museum, arranged to emulate a long-gone time period and bore the fuck out of Johnny. But he sure as hell wasn't bored now.
He pulled Rich carefully away from the pile of sharp porcelain shards and grabbed the camera. He was gonna be damned if they left this shit behind. He tried to ignore the unhealthy gritty feeling of Rich's blood, suggesting sharp ground porcelain working its way into his friend's freely-bleeding wounds.
"Hold this, don't move. If anything comes at you, don't bother running, just beat it with the goddamned camera. It's from the 90's, it can withstand anything."
"Can you beat ghosts, John?" Rich said, voice unfamiliarly tremulous and high. "They're ghosts, you can't touch them. That's how ghosts work. It's in the Wikipedia article," he said, a clear note of hysteria coming through that Johnny would have found satisfying if this was all going to plan. Shelley would be seeing what a huge pussy Rich was right about now.
"This ghost was solid enough to take Shelley," Johnny said. "So it's gotta be solid enough to get its ass beat. You hear that?" he said, talking to the house again, which made him feel better even though it hadn't done shit last time. He moved from the dining room further into the house, which turned out to be a kitchen, a massive old stove his mother would have died for squatting in the center, totally vintage. "You're gonna get your ass kicked! Just let me and my friends out of your shitty old person house, or I'll make you wish were for real dead instead of shitty half-assed dead!"
Johnny felt a thrill of inspiration, realizing that if he was in the kitchen, there was probably a back door nearby. Kitchens were always where the back door was, in case you needed to open the door to get all the smoke out when you burned poptarts or tried microwaving one of your old cell phones, like Rich and Johnny had done when they were ten.
Sure enough, right next to the stove was a door with a boarded-over window in it. At first glance Johnny thought the deep darkness that had engulfed the front of the house reigned over this, too, but up close he could see the darkening amber of sunset over the railroad tracks that ran behind the house. How long had they been inside the house? They had stood in that front room for maybe only two minutes, panicking about the now irrelevant-seeming not-a-cop car, and it couldn't have been more than a minute or two since they had run from the Thing. But Johnny abandoned that line of thinking, remembering the not-a-cop-- someone who was probably an Adult, and if you had asked Johnny an hour before if he thought there was any safety to be had in grown ups he would have told you to fuck right off, but now, here, his friend's blood wet on his hands and his crush of three years disappeared inside of this terrible house, all Johnny could think was that he would get stupid Rich out of this stupid house and they would go grab the not-a-cop, whoever or whatever he was, and he'd know they were being serious because they would see how fucked up Rich looked, and they could make the grown-up come inside the house with them and they'd find Shelley and nothing weird or unexplained would dare happen in sight of a Grown Up. That was The Rules.
Johnny turned around to go back into the dining room and tell Rich he'd found their way out. He was too weak to bust that door open, but Rich was on the track team and had legs like a horse. He'd be able to kick a hundred-year-old door down for sure. But he'd told Rich to stay put, and of course, Rich never fucking listened. He'd tracked his stupid blood into the kitchen with him, was off poking around in what Johnny suspected was a larder or some other antiquated thing like that.
"Rich, I found our exit point, quit fucking around, we've gotta get help."
"Who are you talking to?" Rich asked, from exactly where Johnny had left him in the dining room.
Johnny froze, one hand on the frame of the door to the larder, bloody footprints under his own feet, someone or some Thing mere feet away. Rich came into the room, still holding the giant video camera.
And the looming feeling returned. Some Thing was beside Johnny now, as he looked steadily back over his shoulder at his best friend. It had come to him at the entrance of the larder, and it breathed with him, existed practically in the same space he existed. It smelled like deep, old rot, a smell he had no memory of ever smelling before but felt completely confident in his appraisal of it now, as if knowing this scent was a memory he had from birth, a prehistoric warning system all humans carried buried inside of themselves and hoped never to need.
"John," Rich said unsteadily. Johnny could see that Rich was seeing the Thing now, was watching it caress Johnny. Johnny could feel what passed for its hands drifting along his right arm, which was holding the still-illuminated iPhone. It had gone for Shelley first, with her flashlight, and now it wanted him.
"Film this," Johnny managed. His voice sounded years younger. "Film me." He was shaking, his voice was shaking.
Rich pointed the camera at him.
The darkness enveloped him.
He was thudding into the wall.
He was being dragged through Rich's blood, and the broken dishes.
When Johnny reached the stairs, he had only a moment to grapple desperately for the front door, but the Thing was too fast, and he was thudding feet-first, face-down up the crooked, looming steps he had first seen when he'd first come to this house. His head bounced off of a step, he felt a gash rip open above his eye. There were splinters in it, he was sure. He tried to crab walk himself up the last few steps to spare his head from any more hits and his left arm caught awkwardly on the banister and broke, unfairly, so fast and easily that Johnny was more pained by his body's betrayal to him than by the actual physical pain of the break, which he did not especially feel, except in the sickening snapping sound of his own bone.
He was still reeling from that, adjusting to a new version of the world where his arm didn't work anymore, when he realized that he wasn't being dragged anywhere anymore. The Thing had deposited him in a room, and the door was slamming shut, and then he was alone in the darkness with the oppressive miasma of whatever his captor was.
But not really alone.
The dark disappeared, just for a moment.
In the flash of a strange light, he saw the shape of his captor again, more defined than it had been when it had been in The Chair.
It took three flashes of this light for him to realize what it was: the flashlight.
In the fourth flash of light he managed to turn his head in time to see Shelley's face, illuminated from below by the flashlight. She was bleeding profusely from her scalp, and her expression was as grim as it had been when he'd walked back out of this house the first time, on Halloween, and he had thought for sure she would kiss him out of admiration, but she'd just yelled at him for scaring everyone.
In the fifth flash, he turned back to the Thing, and kept watching, and Shelley kept flashing her flashlight. On, off. On, off. The Thing seemed held at gunpoint, scared or maybe transfixed by the flashlight. Johnny watched it, starting to see more detail with each burst of light. Soon it seemed impossible that he'd only seen the black outline of a man-- it was very clearly a girl, or had once been a girl. But something dreadful had happened to her. Her face and body were skeletal, pulled taut over every fiber of herself. She would have been pale, but she was so pale that she was practically translucent, and under the transparency of what had been her skin at, Johnny began to realize, the time of her death, her blood and muscle and organs and the rot that was overtaking them made her countenance instead appear dark. She was a walking bruise.
Johnny was jolted from this trance by the sound of screaming.
It was coming from downstairs, which made no sense, and something else sounded wrong about it also. The Girl Thing was also loosed from whatever had captivated her about the blinking light, and in a rush of phantom darkness she was gone. Shelley turned out the light.
"Shelley, the light," Johnny said, spitting blood out of his mouth and maybe also a tooth. "Keep the light on." He tried to pull himself forward. There was still time to escape. The Thing was distracted, whatever was happening downstairs had drawn it away, and he was realizing slowly in the back of his head what the screaming had been, why it sounded so strangely unfamiliar, because if it had been Rich screaming he'd know it immediately, it was--
"The batteries are dying," Shelley said. She said this so maturely and bleakly and without any hope and full of fear that it ground Johnny to a halt where he was struggling to pull himself to her.
"I was going to put fresh batteries in. Before we left," Shelley explained. "But I forgot."
"Shelley," Johnny started.
"If it stops she'll kill me," Shelley whispered, certain, so so certain. "Don't--"
And then the door was banging open again, and Rich was with them again, and the video camera, too. He'd had the little LCD display open, was replaying what Johnny now fully realized was what he had filmed in this house, that the screaming they had heard downstairs that had brought the House's Thing down on Rich's head was Johnny's own screaming, mere moments beforehand, while being dragged up the steps.
Johnny hadn't even realized he'd been screaming, but he had.
Rich was dead.
He had maybe hit his head on something wrong, or just twisted the wrong way, there was just too much of him, he was too tall and it had never been fair, and now in the process of being dragged from wherever he'd been in the house-- god, probably right where Johnny had left him, Rich was such a fucking idiot, he probably had never even thought about just bolting and going to get Grown Up Help-- his neck had twisted the wrong way, and snapped. It lolled at an unnatural angle now, eyes and mouth open, staring at a point just behind Johnny, not directly at him but still somehow accusing.
Shelley turned on the flashlight.
Shelley turned off the flashlight.
In the on-and-off, on-and-off, Johnny watched tears streak down Shelley's face and her chin and mouth work in a way that was super unattractive, she'd have made a terrible horror movie Scream Queen, Johnny never should have let Rich invite her along.
If Shelley hadn't been there in the crowd on Halloween, Johnny never would have gone up to the door of this stupid house. It scared him. It had always scared him, he sometimes felt it scared him more than it even scared everyone else. He felt often that he was more scared of everything than everyone else, scared of himself, and of other people, and of the dark and of girls and of having to grow up and face the future. But wanting to impress Shelley had made him feel brave, or at least he had thought it was bravery that pushed him up there and up the front steps and inside of the house. But he wasn't sure now. Maybe it would have been braver to turn around, today, and forget about finding some short cut to solve all his stupid problems. Go back to school and get noticed for trying hard at something, for once, anything at all. Deal with his best friend dating his crush, deal with maybe not being the center of the fucking universe. Deal with being scared, accept it, use it.
Shelley was right about the batteries. The LEDs dimmed slightly with each flick of the switch. It started taking a few seconds for them to pop back on.
"What did you mean," Shelley said, through her tears. "About girls in this house."
"Just one girl," Johnny said, closing his eyes, not wanting to look at the light getting dimmer each time it turned back on. "The first and only girl to live here."
In his mind, Johnny tried to imagine the House's Thing as she might have been. He had seen a picture of her, after Halloween, when he'd looked everything up. She had been young, younger even than he was, posed carefully and unsmilingly in her formal portrait. People never smiled in old photos because it took so long to take the photo. Technology was shitty back then. Now everyone took photos all the time, they carried things that took great photos in their pockets like they were a pack of gum or their car keys. But this girl had lived long before that, and the camera that took her picture was probably the most advanced piece of technology she'd ever witnessed, or would ever see again in her life. Not long after the photo had been taken, the stock market had crashed and her family had lost a whole lot but not as much as some pople, and her dad had gone maybe a little wacky, or maybe he had the right idea-- keeping her away from other people, keeping her away from the temptations of the modern world and the jealousy of outsiders and the cruelty and pettiness of desperate human beings. Her older brothers had gone out into the world and moved on, made mistakes but also made their lives, and that girl had stayed hidden in this house, shut away from the world, going as crazy as her father, and she'd died in this house.
And then, apparently, she'd just kept on going. Trapped in time while the world moved on without her. Gas lamps and fine china. A world where an LED flashlight or an iPhone or a VHS camera were marvels.
Johnny had planned out his whole monologue about the tragic story, even wriitten down notes about it so he could talk about it while they were filming, but he explained it to Shelley now without any of that, in bits and pieces, fumbling and clumsy, going back and forth in the timeline to explain it and what had maybe happened, and how he had landed them here.
When he stopped talking, he opened his eyes.
Shelley was holding the flashlight on, tucked under her chin like she was the one telling ghost stories. She was looking at him calmly. He was pretty sure he was in love with her, but in that moment he was realizing that for a girl, maybe having a boy love you didn't actually mean shit. Him being in love with her wasn't going to stop what was about to happen.
The flashlight died. The House's Girl Thing made a noise, like water rattling in pipes or a crow squawking at the same time. Johnny could hear Shelley crying, muffled, mixed maybe with a little laughter, and then she was screaming and Johnny heard the flashlight drop to the floor again and roll away, and he felt the warm spray of blood hit him.
Moments later, Shelley still making a gurgling noise that might have meant she was still just a little alive but not for much longer, Johnny felt the Thing pressing close to him again. His hands flew around him, reaching for the flashlight, thinking, maybe, if she was solid enough to kill Shelley and drag the three of them around like puppets, maybe--
Johnny found his iPhone instead.
His flashlight app wasn't working anymore-- he thought maybe his phone's flash was busted, or covered in blood maybe-- but the glow of the screen got the Thing's attention anyway. He opened his camera roll, started flipping through pictures. She settled around him again, like she had when he'd first entered the house. Craning her neck to look over his shoulder, captivated. He showed her pictures of Shelley and Rich, being gross, holding hands. Eating french fries at Denny's. Laughing at him at school. His mom and dad, looking bored but patient in the backyard at home.
Johnny got all the way back to Halloween from the year before, when he'd made his own costume and been really excited about trick-or-treating still, before his battery started to fuss at him. The flashlight app had been a real power-eater. Trying to still hold the Thing's attention, Johnny began feeling on the ground near Rich's now-cold body. When his iPhone finally crapped out, Johnny turned the clunky old VHS camera back on. He rewound it to the beginning, like Rich had. In the darkness, with his dead friends a few feet away, Johnny and the Thing that had killed them watched the last few minutes of their lives on the camera's tiny LCD screen, from Johnny and Rich messing around with it in the AV lab yesterday afternoon, to the car this morning, Johnny's introduction outside of Larchdale House, the inside of the house. The Thing's appearance, the Thing taking Shelley. Rich, filming his own hands, caked in blood. Johnny, looking at the camera, begging Rich to film him. Johnny screaming. Rich's death.
He rewound it and they watched it again. And again, and again, and one more time until that battery gave out, too.
Johnny found one more thing, waiting for him in his pocket. Never tested.
It was the EMF reader.
In total darkness, now, Johnny couldn't see Her reaction to this new gadget, but he knew where she was at any given point in time. The EMF reader screeched loudest and most shrilly when it was pointed at Her; was near silent whenever she drifted away. She seemed to understand this, and was playing with him, after a fashion. Drifting out of his reach and then swooping back in, trying to catch him unawares, get close to him without being caught.
The screeching was very loud. The screaming had been, too. Johnny entertained himself, in his last minutes, hoping that the man parked out front had heard them. Could hear this now. Was calling the real cops, who at any moment would burst in to arrest Johnny for breaking and entering, and save his life.
Towards the end, he heard banging, and thought maybe it was really happening-- police breaking down the front door. But he didn't kid himself very long. The rhythm was all wrong.
Someone was finally boarding up the front door of Larchdale House.
Halloween revelers would be disappointed next year, Johnny thought, sadly, but he was also a little excited.
He'd go down in history as the last kid to ever touch the door of the most haunted house in town.
The Time Traveler of Larchdale House
When Johnny bought the EMF reader off the internet-- a PayPal transaction with a website that looked like it had been preserved in amber since 1998-- he was already mentally composing the opening sequences for their totally sick ghost-hunting TV show.
"We'll start out putting episodes on YouTube, like Marble Hornets did, but to be honest I think it'll get picked up by Spike or Discovery within maybe a season," he had told his parents over dinner the night before, unbothered by their uncertainty, since that was their response to pretty much every cool thing he had ever tried to do, like when he was going to be a pro skater, or like last summer when he and Rich were going to be the next Fall Out Boy. "Hopefully they won't make us change the name."
The name of their show was "Fuck Ghosts!" It had won out against "Ghost Hataaaz," which Rich said was too derivative (Rich had totally gotten a perfect score on the PSATS and was a little obnoxious about it) and "The Unstoppable Ghost Killers" because that felt like promising a little too much. Johnny didn't know anything about killing ghosts but he was confident he could annoy them, and that was what people really wanted to see from ghost hunters anyway. Exorcists were dumb as hell. Getting rid of ghosts was slaying the goose that shat the golden egg; the money was in cornering paranormal phenomenon and making it do freaky shit. On camera. And then selling t-shirts with your face on it to hot chicks with big tits.
"How do we know it's even a real EMF reader?" asked Shelley on the way to their first location. She was messing with all the equipment Johnny had carefully assembled in his grandpa's old briefcase-- a steel bearing pendulum and an old mercury thermometer, and an old TalkBoy that had belonged to Rich's oldest brother back in the 90's, and Rich's mom's bible, which was perfectly old and scary looking with its cracked black leather binding and near-transparent paper. Shelley hadn't had anything to contribute to the kit, but she was Rich's girlfriend and she owned a really good LED flashlight, so Johnny couldn't just make her stay at home. Plus having a girl on camera would be good for ratings. But now she was waving the EMF reader around in the passenger seat of Rich's old Mazda and the more it screeched intermittently the more Johnny was beginning to wish he'd just arranged for this first case to happen when she had a Physics Club meeting and couldn't come.
"Ghost diiiicks," Shelley said, waving the EMF reader at Johnny's face. "In a ghooooost car."
"You can suck my ghost dick, Shelley," Johnny snarled, trying to take the EMF reader back.
"Guys, fucking cut it out," Rich snapped. "If you guys are gonna fuck around we're gonna get caught and get arrested, okay, and then I'm gonna go to jail and I'll never get into Cornell and--"
"Oh my god fuck off with Cornell already," Johnny retorted.
"-- and if you're not gonna be SERIOUS about this for once in your goddamn life John--"
"SERIOUS?" Johnny shouted, slapping the headrest of Shelley's seat to pull himself up into the front of the car, beyond indignant. "I am hella fucking serious, you-- you overgrown ass turd pubic lice motherfucker, this was MY idea, this is MY show, don't fuckin' lecture me on being serious when you don't know a goddamn thing about this shit, okay? All you know about the paranormal is what you read on Wikipedia during English last week, you thought EMF was a type of dance music, okay? I'm dead serious, you just trust me on that." Johnny shook his finger in Rich's face for emphasis, feeling pretty cool and wishing they were filming this, too. "So shut up and drive."
Rich raised an eyebrow, lips tight. "I'm not driving anymore."
"Oh why are you always the biggest fucking baby--"
"We're here, dude."
And they were. Johnny had been too wrapped up in his head again to notice, but they were here, and Johnny experienced a vivid but impossible sensation of his stomach dropping lower than his body could actually allow.
As if they'd practiced it-- and maybe they had, the fucks-- Shelley and Rich both got out of the car simultaneously, Shelley taking the EMF reader with her, leaving Johnny crammed awkwardly between the driver and passenger seat, making what felt uncomfortably like eye contact with the house in front of them.
The sudden thrill of fear rolling through his body was stupid, because he'd passed in front of this stupid house nearly every year of his life. Sure it had scared him when he was, like, six, and his mom had dressed him as a pirate for Halloween and he was only just becoming cognizant of what fear was and how people might construct it recreationally. Maybe it had even scared him at fourteen, when he'd made his own costume (a zombie murderer, which was a murderer that died and then came back from the dead to keep killing, so it was doubly cool) and had totally seen like every scary movie out there and only sometimes slept with the bathroom light on. But he was nearly sixteen now, and just a few weeks before he'd finally made a name for himself at school by coming to this place on Halloween and casually walking up to its looming, crooked front door. Every kid in their suburban neighborhood, and every kid that came from less nice neighborhoods to trick-or-treat here where most of the houses gave out full-size candy bars, came to the Larchdale House to pay respects to what was definitely the most haunted house in town. So there had been a sizeable crowd standing around to watch Johnny, wearing a black hoodie splattered in red paint and a Ghost Face mask pushed back on the crown of his head, strutting up through the overgrown weeds to jiggle the partially-shattered glass doorknob of the front door like it was No Big Deal.
That was the traditional, long-standing dare. Most kids only made it a step or two through the wrought-iron gate before being repelled back into the waiting mixed admiration and disgust of their less-brave friends. A really determined or really cool kid might get all the way to the door to knock-- one rap, two, three, ding dong ditch-- before turning heel. It was harder than it sounded, anyone who had even tried would tell you for sure. At the gate it was all a joke, a Goosebumps book or an Are You Afraid of the Dark episode, totally theoretical chills. One step in and it became mysteriously but concretely real, a vertigo plucked from its usual home and redelivered to you with your feet planted firmly on cracked cement and what ought to be just a regular old house staring you down. This feeling rooted itself inside of you and spread the farther you walked in, wrapping tendrils of Get Out Get Out Go Go Go Leave around your knees and your lungs and the base of your spine. And Johnny had felt all that, for sure, but the Varsity lacrosse team was standing behind him, hooting, some of it encouragement but most of it jeers, and his crush at the time, and stupid Rich with his stupid test scores and his car and his cool hair, and a whole bunch of other people besides. So he had walked all the way to the front door, trying to disguise the wobbling of his knees with an exaggerated swagger he hoped was funny. And he had jiggled the door knob.
And it had been unlocked.
So what was he supposed to do then? He wasn't six, or fourteen, and even though the kids twenty feet behind him had all fallen silent, he could feel the combined weight of their gaze pushing him forward like a mother pushing a child into the classroom on the first day of kindergarten.
In that first few seconds, even Johnny himself hadn't thought he'd really go in. It wasn't even an option. His mind had leapt only to a series of less terrifying options that he could go with and still save face, like shout "Helloooo! Any body home?" into the darkness, or maybe pull out his iPhone and take a selfie while giving a big goofy thumbs up. But then, without even really thinking it through, he'd pulled his stupid Party City Ghost Face mask down and--
--and--
-- and he'd stepped inside. And he'd shut the door behind himself.
And no one in the crowd saw what happened after that, but Rich nearly called the cops, and everyone swore he was in there nearly ten minutes, maybe twenty, maybe an hour in one version of the story circulating in school on Monday. And then Johnny had reappeared. Come back out and walked calmly back to them, and held up something spindly and metal and kind of dusty and gross: an old candle stick, so painfully Victorian and antiquated it could have been a prop in a movie.
"Yeah, I mean, it was a little creepy, I guess," Johnny had demured some days later, on his hundredth re-telling of the story. "I definitely felt, you know, A Presence. But I mean, who even really knows what ghosts want? Maybe they just want someone to, you know, acknowledge them. So they can move on and junk." Johnny liked this theory because it was something he could empathize with. No one had ever really acknowledged Johnny before, either, and in a way he felt a little bit like he'd been a ghost, too, walking through school hallways unseen and unappreciated, getting more frustrated with each passing semester of absolute boring anonymity. But in the weeks after Halloween, suddenly classmates knew his name. A whole bunch of people wanted to go see the latest Paranormal Activity with him. Afterwards they all hung out in the mall food court and everyone listened to him talk about how much he hated the movie, how fake it was. No one told him to shut up or changed the subject. It was great.
But by Thanksgiving their attention was waning. People weren't going out of their way to talk to him anymore, and maybe he got told when Stuff Was Happening a little more often, but if he showed up he wasn't going to be the center of attention, he was just one more hanger on, which in some ways was even worse than not hanging on at all. At least when no one invited him to anything at all he hadn't really known what he was missing.
So here they were, back at the Larchdale House. Only a dozen or so people that mattered had seen Johnny's first foray into paranormal investigation, and most of what had happened was left to their imaginations. This time Johnny was prepared, and afterwards he was going to have proof. Really cool, scary proof that would be all over Reddit and 4chan and all that shit in no time, and afterwards he'd go on and do even more cool, scary shit. He and Rich had assembled a list: after conquering the Larchdale House they'd move on to the cool asylum just a few miles upstate, and then there was another even bigger one across the river, and also a long stretch of road even further out in the boonies that everyone swore was haunted by a ghost hitchhiker. And by the time they were through with that list they'd definitely be making tons of money and could go even farther away, to even more famous haunted things, and stuff like school and college and what his classmates thought of him wouldn't even matter anymore.
Out on the sidewalk, Shelley had her hands in her pockets and was eyeballing the Larchdale House with a little too much calm, collected intent for Johnny's comfort. It would make way better footage if she was scared. No one wanted to see a whole bunch of people in a haunted house not being scared, and obviously Johnny wasn't going to be the one who was really scared, because this was all old news to him and anyway he was the leader, and Rich would be behind the camera so no one would really be able to tell if he was scared or not. That left Shelley, who was gonna need to earn her keep by making Johnny look even cooler and braver than he already was, which was pretty cool and brave, to be honest.
With Rich occupied with doing something or other with the hulking VHS camera they'd borrowed from the school's AV department (there were newer cameras available, but they'd both agreed that VHS tapes sounded more legit for ghost hunting), Johnny sidled up to Shelley and tried to imitate her relaxed, serious posture.
"So I know that you know that there's nothing to be afraid of, really," he said, as casually as possible. "But I do just wanna warn you that there might be a lot of, you know, activity around you. A lot more than there was around me. I mean I experienced a lot of stuff," he stumbled over his words when she actually deigned to look at him then, one eyebrow raised, "But like not really NEGATIVE stuff, just stuff, you know? But I mean. You know the stories. All the stories about this house, and what happens to girls in this house."
"What do you mean, 'what happens to girls in this house'?" Shelley asked. "Nobody's gone in this house in a billion years 'til you tripped and fell inside."
"I didn't trip, I strode in with purpose, thanks," Johnny sneered. "And maybe you don't know the stories, huh? Maybe you don't know everything."
He wished that had come out more mysterious and less cranky, but it was done now. He snatched back his EMF reader, finally, and stalked through the gate. It was easier to ignore the gut instinct to run this time, maybe because it was still light and not Halloween, the apex of a three week long binge diet of horror movies and creepypasta consumption, or maybe because he'd really gotten braver on the other side of his first experience, or maybe because he knew he had to play this right if he was going to get Shelley to bite the little piece of bait he'd just laid out.
He stopped at the front step, a few feet shy of the door still, and let Shelley come up behind him, pausing as she stepped through the gate just long enough to assuage Johnny's ego a little. Richard was definitely stalling back at the car, the pussy.
"John," Shelley said, taking this seriously, finally, after all that joking around in the car and in the week preceding. Perfect. "What do you think happens to girls in this house?"
He would have to be careful here, more careful than he was usually capable of being. If he scared her too much she just wouldn't come in at all, and then Rich wouldn't come in, and then Johnny might have to go in by himself and it was feeling really very important to have someone to be braver than when he went back in there. With just Rich and Shelley here to witness it, he might not even go back in at all. It would be too easy to pretend to be disgusted with their cowardice and just go home and watch Netflix instead. And then by the new year he'd probably be back to his same old self, uncool, a little too desperate to be worth anyone's time, always jumping from one thing to another and giving up when the going got tough.
"Not girls, I guess," he said, conjuring a solemnity easily with thoughts of failure so close. "Just one girl, the first girl in the house. And the last. The reason this place is abandoned. Rich!" he called out. "Get your ass over here and get that camera rolling, we have to do this before people start coming home from work and call the cops on us."
His 'first girl, and the last' comment had been really good, but he couldn't use it again when Rich started filming or it'd ruin the effect. Maybe he could work it in after as a voice over. When Rich had Johnny framed in front of the front door, backed up sufficiently to also get the grey and dirty windows, boarded up except in places where boards had come loose from years of neglect, he tried introducing himself in a couple of different ways. He told the viewers who he was, and mentioned Rich and Shelley, just to be fair, even though they might get replaced by real actors when the show got picked up for real. And he did a really solid job introducing the house, he thought. There was a familiarity in his voice, like he and the Larchdale House were old friends. He even called the house she, and talked about it like it was a person, the way people did about boats or mountains, because that seemed like it fit the character he was building for himself. But he didn't mention anything else about the girl. If he was lucky he wouldn't have to.
And then the whole plan nearly collapsed.
Johnny was just opening to door, Shelley and Rich tucked uncomfortably close to him, when an unexpected noise nearly made Johnny shit himself. He had been so busy telling himself to not be afraid of what was inside the house that even though the noise wasn't coming from inside, he reeled back from the front door, had to catch himself on the splintery old door frame to stop himself from bolting, in fact. The noise was coming from down the street, still well around the corner, but any second it was going to come down into this secluded little cul de sac where every other house was empty, its occupants at work and school for another hour, unlike Johnny and his friends, who had skipped the last three periods of school so they could come here and do something technically illegal, something still technically considered trespassing, that would be viewed with probably a lot less leniency than the kind of resigned amusement adults seemed to view their Halloween rituals with.
There wasn't enough time to bolt back to the car. And if they did bolt back to the car, they'd never get back to this front door. Johnny hauled Rich and Shelley inside and pulled the door shut behind them.
Inside it was near pitch dark. As frightening as that was, as much as fear was crawling up his spine in a frenzy, it was almost a blessing to be able to attribute that fear to the sound of a car driving all the way up to the house and stopping in front, right next to where they themselves were parked.
"Shit," Rich swore.
Johnny had to make himself breathe, remind himself that it was stupid to hold his breath. There was no way anyone outside could hear him breathing, even if it felt unnaturally loud, as disruptively loud as it had sounded the last time he had stood in this peeling entryway.
The last time he had been in this hallway, he had been frozen stiff inside his mask, barely passable bravado warring with numb paralysis as he had used his iPhone to light a scant four-by-four-foot sphere around himself. He had seen the bannister of the silent, crooked steps, and the low antique table, covered in bric-a-brac, shrouded in dust. And he had seen nothing else.
He had counted to one hundred, back pressed to the door, eyes tracking every square millimeter around him, as if just looking might prevent there from being anything there. And then he had snatched up his souvenir and left. In the days after, he had frantically invented to fill the amount of time everyone else was already convinced he'd spent inside. It had been hard, at first, to keep it vague enough to be bulletproof in case it turned out someone else had already been in the house. But the more people asked, the more convinced Johnny had become that no one was going to come forward, and besides, he decided later, when he'd resolved to come back, if things didn't match up perfectly he could just ascribe the discrepancies to some kind of paranormal phenomenon. The house playing tricks. That stuff happened, he'd looked it up. It was in some really good urban legends, too.
Now, really back, standing where he had stood a little more than a month ago, he was psyching himself out like a real fucking idiot. The stories he'd told felt worse than lies, now. They felt like spiteful lies, like mean gossip, like the time he had told Rich and the other guys in his computer programming class about touching Shelley's breasts last year, when it really hadn't happened like that at all but he'd wanted to seem cool. It felt like he had violated something, someone.
If he was going to believe his own bullshit he was never going to get anywhere with this.
In the here and now, there was at least a lot more natural light to work with than there had been on Halloween. Sunset was still another hour or so off, and the loose boards on the windows let in enough amber late-afternoon light that now the entire staircase was illuminated, although that made the darkness of the first landing all the more concerning, and the water stains trailing down every wall were unsettlingly organic, like the house had been sweating for years and years, like an old man in a yellowing undershirt.
In this unpleasant and sick-seeming light, Shelley had beaten Johnny to the window and was peering out already, seemingly unbothered by the atmosphere of gut-clenching fear and guilt that was holding Johnny stock still, and at least seemed to be affecting Rich similarly, since he had his back pressed against one weeping wall and was hyperventilating a little bit but was at least still holding the camera on Johnny, whose fear was hopefully not completely apparent on film.
"I don't think it's a cop," Shelley said, annoyingly pragmatic.
This inspired Rich into action, who was suddenly at her side also peering out. "Shit," he kept saying, which was good for the footage but also left Johnny alone by the doorway. The sensation that someone was leaning over his shoulder, head bending down to look at him from some greater height was intense and startling, but when he glanced over his shoulder and at the ceiling above nothing was there but disturbed dust. The feeling persisted even when he was sure there was nothing there, and he was grateful Rich had his camera pointed out the broken window and not at him as he spun a quick, frantic circle.
"Fuck," said Rich. "That is a cop."
"You're full of crap," Shelley said.
"It's an undercover cop, listen, my dad works with cops all the time, that's what their cars look like."
"It's just some guy in a car," Shelley said.
"Well then maybe it's the owner."
"It's not the owner," Johnny said, pulling his confidence in how much more he knew about this than Rich, for fucking once, over himself like a security blanket. "The owner's like a million years old. He lives in Florida. I looked up the family. One of his grandkids got arrested for a DUI last year." He cleared his throat and assembled his thoughts a little more coherently, remembering the camera, focusing on that, centering himself.
"This house has been owned by the same family since it was built in 1901, but no one has lived here since the Great Depression. But the family's never sold it. They couldn't even if they tried," Johnny said, pausing for dramatic effect. "But they've never tried. What happened in this house was too awful, and they know that if they sold it, the whole world would find out what they did. Why no one lives here. Why no one can live here."
Johnny paused again, this time annoyed.
"Rich, I'm talking. Point the fucking camera at me."
Rich was still staring bug-eyed out the window.
"Are you seriously still talking about ghosts when I am about to get arrested?" he demanded. "That cop out there is probably writing down my license plate number right now. We should just, like, go out there right now and just, like, apologize and, I don't know, tell him we thought this was, like, our friend's house and we're dumb teenagers and--"
Johnny resisted the uge to check over his shoulder again, trying to subtly move so that his back wasn't to the stairwell and darkened hallway and the rest of the house beyond.
"Rich, don't be a fucking idiot, that guy out there is just, like, looking up directions. Or he heard about the haunted house and wanted to take a look, or I don't know, he's waiting to get his dick sucked and this is where he's meeting his boyfriend or something, it could be fucking anything. We're inside now. We can't go out the front door, that's stupid. We're gonna walk through this house like we goddamn planned, and then we'll sneak out the back door, OK? We'll say we were walking on the train tracks," Johnny decided outloud, coming up with the plan as he spoke, impressed with himself even as he was talking. "Whoever that guy is, even if he's like the head fucking police officer or the goddamned CIA, he can't arrest us if he can't prove we were in here, and he can't prove we were in here unless he sees us come out."
"He'll know we were in here when you post everything on YouTube," Shelley said.
"Yeah, but by then we'll be famous for catching ghosts on film and it won't matter," Johnny explained. Christ, Shelley thought she was smart but she wasn't really.
Rich had finally taken the video camera off of the stupid not-a-cop car and was at least pointing it vaguely around the front room of the house, getting footage of what Johnny could now see as his eyes adjusted to the beams of gloaming light: a moldy armchair, once maybe pink but now turning green in the middle and distressingly black in the very center, like a burn mark, and thin, antique copper wires strung from the ceiling, connecting greying light fixtures that were aesthetic cousins of the candle stick he'd made off with last time, which he was now feeling he ought to have returned on this trip, as a sign of good will, because the sense of wrongness was getting harder and harder to ignore.
Johnny was just turning to the sideboard where he knew he'd find an impression in the dust, where that candlestick had been for who knew how long before he'd grabbed it a month ago, when, as if agitated by Johnny's own thoughts and the reminder of this particular trespass, the feeling of wrongness still riding on his back became abruptly pervasive and saturated the room entirely, and this time even Shelley and Rich seemed to notice because Shelley gave a full body shudder, like she had just seen something disgusting, and Rich started up his "Shit" litany again, and one of the light fixtures turned on.
Which was insane. Johnny didn't know a lot about how electricity worked but he was pretty sure no one would bother paying the bills for a house that had been abandoned for like 90 years. And this was not a normal light, or even the horror movie light that Johnny had been expecting, almost, the universally spooky flicker of bad fluorescent lighting. Everything happened very quickly: the fixture lit up, softly at first, an old and dying light that fit right in with its surroundings, and the "ping!" of the light fixture turning on had barely even stopped resonating in the room when Rich was already trying to yell at Johnny for turning a light on, and Johnny was trying to say that he hadn't touched anything, and the light was getting brighter, too bright, and then it was shattering.
And then it was dark again.
Shelley had her hand pressed tight over her mouth, to keep a scream in, maybe, but Johnny only knew that because he could hear her breath coming in ragged breaths around the meat of her hand, because the flare of the light fixture-- of the Activity! a part of his brain was celebrating, even as he was fighting with the sensation of being about to drop on a roller coaster and wanting to get off off off off out out out-- had temporarily blinded him. Or so he thought, he was sure that was it, but then Shelley was turning on her high powered heavy duty flashlight, and he could see the whole room but this time--
This time there was no light coming in through the cracks in the boards.
It was if it had suddenly become night.
Rich had apparently had the same realization and was back at the window again, trying to look out, moaning unhappily and steadily and Johnny wanted him to shut up because he needed to hear if anything was moving, because he felt absolutely like something was moving right behind him, except nothing was there, there was nothing but them in this room, and the shadows, and in particular one shadow.
One shadow sitting in the armchair, the perfect figure of a man, less than two feet from where Rich was crouched by the window. Sitting perfectly still, refusing to dissipate even as Shelley shone her flashlight directly at it.
"Rich," Shelley said, over Rich's pathetic shitty moaning. "Rich, come here right now."
Rich had never been able to follow basic ass instructions when they were coming from Johnny, his best goddamned friend, but he managed for Shelley, who he'd only even been dating for two or three weeks, and if Johnny wasn't busy being out of his mind with terror he'd be jealous, but he didn't have time for that just at the moment.
Rich's stupid sub-vocal moaning stopped, at least, once he seemed to get a good look at The Thing in the Chair.
"Don't move your light, Shelley." Johnny said, as quiet as possible while still being loud enough that the camera could pick him up, hopefully. "Whatever you do, don't take your light off of it." He turned to look in the other direction, forcing himself to turn his back on the Thing, forcing himself to think of how cool this would look on tape in just a few hours, because they were going to go right back to the AV lab and look at all the footage and they were gonna be famous. Ghosts never really did real shit to people. Johnny knew all about ghosts and paranormal sightings and no one was ever really in danger, they just thought they were. Well they had their proof now, it was sick as hell, he was going to be the coolest guy in school and the town and maybe even the whole country in just a few days, and they could just quietly leave the house and they'd deal with whatever was going on with the guy in the car out front, it'd all be fine.
The door they had come in through wouldn't budge.
The knob, which had turned so easily today and on Halloween, might as well have been solid metal, not even attached to any moving parts. It didn't even pretend to try and turn.
"Okay," Johnny said. To Rich and Shelley. And also the house. "Okay. We're very sorry, and we're ready to leave now. We are so ready to leave. And we'll come back tomorrow, to return the candlestick we took--"
"Not we, you!" Shelley interjected, and Johnny couldn't bring himself to turn around and see if that was precipitated by some sign from the Thing, by any change in the Thing.
"-- and then we'll make sure no one ever comes here again, I swear. You'll be left in peace. We can even stop the Halloween visits."
"Or make them bigger?" Rich was offering, his voice as nervous as it had been when he'd asked Shelley to be his girlfriend, Johnny awkwardly forgotten in the back seat of the car after they'd gone to the movies, wishing he was a million miles away instead of hearing his best friend make out with fucking Shelley, of all people. "We can bring more people to you, if that's what you want. Really, it's up to you. We're reasonable people, we can compromise--"
All this with the pitch of Rich's normally unfairly deep voice escalating steadily, and Johnny had only just summoned his courage to turn and look at The Thing again only to see that it was standing now, much closer, much closer to them, much too close, and Shelley was pushing and they were barrelling into the darkness of the house, into the unknown, and Shelley's flashlight was swinging forward to illuminate a long and dusty hallway, and Johnny found himself screaming in a voice that did not sound like his own: "Don't take the light off of it! Don't take the light off! Don't!"
For half of a breath Johnny thought that maybe she had listened to him, and he was regretting it as much as he was relieved because this meant he now had no idea what he was looking at, but the thud! and then the clatter of the flashlight and the strobe effect as it bounced on the floor were the exact opposite of what Johnny had wanted, and the sound of a body being dragged rapidly back towards the front entrance was almost entirely drowned out by the sound Johnny and Rich made running full-speed into what felt like a table.
Johnny heard Rich, taller and more top heavy, hit the table and curse, falling partially onto it and sending a variety of objects clanging and shattering onto the floor with himself some feet away. Johnny, for his part, hit the table edge cleanly with his solar plexus and dropped to the ground, wheezing, absolutely expecting to be dragged backwards by the hands of the Thing That Had Been Looming Behind Him this entire time, at any moment.
But nothing touched him, and in the total darkness he could hear Rich trying to right himself, mere feet away, cursing again.
Feeling more like an idiot than usual, he fumbled his iPhone out of his pocket and stabbed with clumsy fingers for the Flashlight app he had downloaded purposely before coming here, commending himself at the time for thinking ahead and downloading it while he was still connected to Wi-Fi so he wouldn't use up too much data. With fear running his body more completely than he had ever run it himself, his fingers were clumsy and inept at things he normally did without thinking, a second nature, an extension of his own brain nurtured for all of his childhood. At fifteen, he could barely remember a world without smartphones and had no knowledge of a world without small personal computers always on hand in at least some capacity.
"Oh god," Rich was saying, shuffling towards Johnny as soon as the screen illuminated him in the darkness, no matter how faintly. The ground around Rich was littered with cracked porcelain, broken plates and cups that had been lying out on the table, some still with what might have once been food on them. Johnny finally opened the Flashlight App and turned his phone's now-steady beam of light on the darkness behind them, in the direction where Shelley had been moments before.
She wasn't there.
Neither was the flashlight.
The inside of the door stood at the end of the hall, a replacement guard for the Thing From the Chair that had taken Shelley. Its stern countenance was rigid and upright on this side, nothing like its crooked and frail-looking twin on the outside.
Johnny turned the flash beam to the side, to look at Rich, who squinted and put up his arm to block the light. He was dripping blood, and at first Johnny didn't even register that, as used to horror movie gore as he was at this point.
"Fuck, dude, don't move."
"Why," Rich snapped, eyes opening as he froze and looked frantically around himself, transparently thinking of the Thing, the phantom.
"No, fuck, dude, you're bleeding. You're all fucked up."
"Oh," said Rich. "Shit." He looked down at himself. "I don't even feel it. I think I'm in shock," he explained, sounding a little bewildered by the concept.
"Fuck," said Johnny, unable to summon anything more useful. He took a moment to nervously scan the room they were in with his phone's light, realizing suddenly that the Thing could have snuck up on him, could sneak up on him at any moment, how desperately unsafe he was. This wasn't a horror movie. He wasn't just riding this out til the credits.
They had to get Shelley, and they had to get out of here.
They were in a dining room, the fine china as fancy as anything he'd ever seen on Antiques Roadshow, the whole room looking much less worn and decrepit than the molding front hall. If it hadn't been for the dust and now Rich's blood smeared everywhere, it could have been a display in a historic village or museum, arranged to emulate a long-gone time period and bore the fuck out of Johnny. But he sure as hell wasn't bored now.
He pulled Rich carefully away from the pile of sharp porcelain shards and grabbed the camera. He was gonna be damned if they left this shit behind. He tried to ignore the unhealthy gritty feeling of Rich's blood, suggesting sharp ground porcelain working its way into his friend's freely-bleeding wounds.
"Hold this, don't move. If anything comes at you, don't bother running, just beat it with the goddamned camera. It's from the 90's, it can withstand anything."
"Can you beat ghosts, John?" Rich said, voice unfamiliarly tremulous and high. "They're ghosts, you can't touch them. That's how ghosts work. It's in the Wikipedia article," he said, a clear note of hysteria coming through that Johnny would have found satisfying if this was all going to plan. Shelley would be seeing what a huge pussy Rich was right about now.
"This ghost was solid enough to take Shelley," Johnny said. "So it's gotta be solid enough to get its ass beat. You hear that?" he said, talking to the house again, which made him feel better even though it hadn't done shit last time. He moved from the dining room further into the house, which turned out to be a kitchen, a massive old stove his mother would have died for squatting in the center, totally vintage. "You're gonna get your ass kicked! Just let me and my friends out of your shitty old person house, or I'll make you wish were for real dead instead of shitty half-assed dead!"
Johnny felt a thrill of inspiration, realizing that if he was in the kitchen, there was probably a back door nearby. Kitchens were always where the back door was, in case you needed to open the door to get all the smoke out when you burned poptarts or tried microwaving one of your old cell phones, like Rich and Johnny had done when they were ten.
Sure enough, right next to the stove was a door with a boarded-over window in it. At first glance Johnny thought the deep darkness that had engulfed the front of the house reigned over this, too, but up close he could see the darkening amber of sunset over the railroad tracks that ran behind the house. How long had they been inside the house? They had stood in that front room for maybe only two minutes, panicking about the now irrelevant-seeming not-a-cop car, and it couldn't have been more than a minute or two since they had run from the Thing. But Johnny abandoned that line of thinking, remembering the not-a-cop-- someone who was probably an Adult, and if you had asked Johnny an hour before if he thought there was any safety to be had in grown ups he would have told you to fuck right off, but now, here, his friend's blood wet on his hands and his crush of three years disappeared inside of this terrible house, all Johnny could think was that he would get stupid Rich out of this stupid house and they would go grab the not-a-cop, whoever or whatever he was, and he'd know they were being serious because they would see how fucked up Rich looked, and they could make the grown-up come inside the house with them and they'd find Shelley and nothing weird or unexplained would dare happen in sight of a Grown Up. That was The Rules.
Johnny turned around to go back into the dining room and tell Rich he'd found their way out. He was too weak to bust that door open, but Rich was on the track team and had legs like a horse. He'd be able to kick a hundred-year-old door down for sure. But he'd told Rich to stay put, and of course, Rich never fucking listened. He'd tracked his stupid blood into the kitchen with him, was off poking around in what Johnny suspected was a larder or some other antiquated thing like that.
"Rich, I found our exit point, quit fucking around, we've gotta get help."
"Who are you talking to?" Rich asked, from exactly where Johnny had left him in the dining room.
Johnny froze, one hand on the frame of the door to the larder, bloody footprints under his own feet, someone or some Thing mere feet away. Rich came into the room, still holding the giant video camera.
And the looming feeling returned. Some Thing was beside Johnny now, as he looked steadily back over his shoulder at his best friend. It had come to him at the entrance of the larder, and it breathed with him, existed practically in the same space he existed. It smelled like deep, old rot, a smell he had no memory of ever smelling before but felt completely confident in his appraisal of it now, as if knowing this scent was a memory he had from birth, a prehistoric warning system all humans carried buried inside of themselves and hoped never to need.
"John," Rich said unsteadily. Johnny could see that Rich was seeing the Thing now, was watching it caress Johnny. Johnny could feel what passed for its hands drifting along his right arm, which was holding the still-illuminated iPhone. It had gone for Shelley first, with her flashlight, and now it wanted him.
"Film this," Johnny managed. His voice sounded years younger. "Film me." He was shaking, his voice was shaking.
Rich pointed the camera at him.
The darkness enveloped him.
He was thudding into the wall.
He was being dragged through Rich's blood, and the broken dishes.
When Johnny reached the stairs, he had only a moment to grapple desperately for the front door, but the Thing was too fast, and he was thudding feet-first, face-down up the crooked, looming steps he had first seen when he'd first come to this house. His head bounced off of a step, he felt a gash rip open above his eye. There were splinters in it, he was sure. He tried to crab walk himself up the last few steps to spare his head from any more hits and his left arm caught awkwardly on the banister and broke, unfairly, so fast and easily that Johnny was more pained by his body's betrayal to him than by the actual physical pain of the break, which he did not especially feel, except in the sickening snapping sound of his own bone.
He was still reeling from that, adjusting to a new version of the world where his arm didn't work anymore, when he realized that he wasn't being dragged anywhere anymore. The Thing had deposited him in a room, and the door was slamming shut, and then he was alone in the darkness with the oppressive miasma of whatever his captor was.
But not really alone.
The dark disappeared, just for a moment.
In the flash of a strange light, he saw the shape of his captor again, more defined than it had been when it had been in The Chair.
It took three flashes of this light for him to realize what it was: the flashlight.
In the fourth flash of light he managed to turn his head in time to see Shelley's face, illuminated from below by the flashlight. She was bleeding profusely from her scalp, and her expression was as grim as it had been when he'd walked back out of this house the first time, on Halloween, and he had thought for sure she would kiss him out of admiration, but she'd just yelled at him for scaring everyone.
In the fifth flash, he turned back to the Thing, and kept watching, and Shelley kept flashing her flashlight. On, off. On, off. The Thing seemed held at gunpoint, scared or maybe transfixed by the flashlight. Johnny watched it, starting to see more detail with each burst of light. Soon it seemed impossible that he'd only seen the black outline of a man-- it was very clearly a girl, or had once been a girl. But something dreadful had happened to her. Her face and body were skeletal, pulled taut over every fiber of herself. She would have been pale, but she was so pale that she was practically translucent, and under the transparency of what had been her skin at, Johnny began to realize, the time of her death, her blood and muscle and organs and the rot that was overtaking them made her countenance instead appear dark. She was a walking bruise.
Johnny was jolted from this trance by the sound of screaming.
It was coming from downstairs, which made no sense, and something else sounded wrong about it also. The Girl Thing was also loosed from whatever had captivated her about the blinking light, and in a rush of phantom darkness she was gone. Shelley turned out the light.
"Shelley, the light," Johnny said, spitting blood out of his mouth and maybe also a tooth. "Keep the light on." He tried to pull himself forward. There was still time to escape. The Thing was distracted, whatever was happening downstairs had drawn it away, and he was realizing slowly in the back of his head what the screaming had been, why it sounded so strangely unfamiliar, because if it had been Rich screaming he'd know it immediately, it was--
"The batteries are dying," Shelley said. She said this so maturely and bleakly and without any hope and full of fear that it ground Johnny to a halt where he was struggling to pull himself to her.
"I was going to put fresh batteries in. Before we left," Shelley explained. "But I forgot."
"Shelley," Johnny started.
"If it stops she'll kill me," Shelley whispered, certain, so so certain. "Don't--"
And then the door was banging open again, and Rich was with them again, and the video camera, too. He'd had the little LCD display open, was replaying what Johnny now fully realized was what he had filmed in this house, that the screaming they had heard downstairs that had brought the House's Thing down on Rich's head was Johnny's own screaming, mere moments beforehand, while being dragged up the steps.
Johnny hadn't even realized he'd been screaming, but he had.
Rich was dead.
He had maybe hit his head on something wrong, or just twisted the wrong way, there was just too much of him, he was too tall and it had never been fair, and now in the process of being dragged from wherever he'd been in the house-- god, probably right where Johnny had left him, Rich was such a fucking idiot, he probably had never even thought about just bolting and going to get Grown Up Help-- his neck had twisted the wrong way, and snapped. It lolled at an unnatural angle now, eyes and mouth open, staring at a point just behind Johnny, not directly at him but still somehow accusing.
Shelley turned on the flashlight.
Shelley turned off the flashlight.
In the on-and-off, on-and-off, Johnny watched tears streak down Shelley's face and her chin and mouth work in a way that was super unattractive, she'd have made a terrible horror movie Scream Queen, Johnny never should have let Rich invite her along.
If Shelley hadn't been there in the crowd on Halloween, Johnny never would have gone up to the door of this stupid house. It scared him. It had always scared him, he sometimes felt it scared him more than it even scared everyone else. He felt often that he was more scared of everything than everyone else, scared of himself, and of other people, and of the dark and of girls and of having to grow up and face the future. But wanting to impress Shelley had made him feel brave, or at least he had thought it was bravery that pushed him up there and up the front steps and inside of the house. But he wasn't sure now. Maybe it would have been braver to turn around, today, and forget about finding some short cut to solve all his stupid problems. Go back to school and get noticed for trying hard at something, for once, anything at all. Deal with his best friend dating his crush, deal with maybe not being the center of the fucking universe. Deal with being scared, accept it, use it.
Shelley was right about the batteries. The LEDs dimmed slightly with each flick of the switch. It started taking a few seconds for them to pop back on.
"What did you mean," Shelley said, through her tears. "About girls in this house."
"Just one girl," Johnny said, closing his eyes, not wanting to look at the light getting dimmer each time it turned back on. "The first and only girl to live here."
In his mind, Johnny tried to imagine the House's Thing as she might have been. He had seen a picture of her, after Halloween, when he'd looked everything up. She had been young, younger even than he was, posed carefully and unsmilingly in her formal portrait. People never smiled in old photos because it took so long to take the photo. Technology was shitty back then. Now everyone took photos all the time, they carried things that took great photos in their pockets like they were a pack of gum or their car keys. But this girl had lived long before that, and the camera that took her picture was probably the most advanced piece of technology she'd ever witnessed, or would ever see again in her life. Not long after the photo had been taken, the stock market had crashed and her family had lost a whole lot but not as much as some pople, and her dad had gone maybe a little wacky, or maybe he had the right idea-- keeping her away from other people, keeping her away from the temptations of the modern world and the jealousy of outsiders and the cruelty and pettiness of desperate human beings. Her older brothers had gone out into the world and moved on, made mistakes but also made their lives, and that girl had stayed hidden in this house, shut away from the world, going as crazy as her father, and she'd died in this house.
And then, apparently, she'd just kept on going. Trapped in time while the world moved on without her. Gas lamps and fine china. A world where an LED flashlight or an iPhone or a VHS camera were marvels.
Johnny had planned out his whole monologue about the tragic story, even wriitten down notes about it so he could talk about it while they were filming, but he explained it to Shelley now without any of that, in bits and pieces, fumbling and clumsy, going back and forth in the timeline to explain it and what had maybe happened, and how he had landed them here.
When he stopped talking, he opened his eyes.
Shelley was holding the flashlight on, tucked under her chin like she was the one telling ghost stories. She was looking at him calmly. He was pretty sure he was in love with her, but in that moment he was realizing that for a girl, maybe having a boy love you didn't actually mean shit. Him being in love with her wasn't going to stop what was about to happen.
The flashlight died. The House's Girl Thing made a noise, like water rattling in pipes or a crow squawking at the same time. Johnny could hear Shelley crying, muffled, mixed maybe with a little laughter, and then she was screaming and Johnny heard the flashlight drop to the floor again and roll away, and he felt the warm spray of blood hit him.
Moments later, Shelley still making a gurgling noise that might have meant she was still just a little alive but not for much longer, Johnny felt the Thing pressing close to him again. His hands flew around him, reaching for the flashlight, thinking, maybe, if she was solid enough to kill Shelley and drag the three of them around like puppets, maybe--
Johnny found his iPhone instead.
His flashlight app wasn't working anymore-- he thought maybe his phone's flash was busted, or covered in blood maybe-- but the glow of the screen got the Thing's attention anyway. He opened his camera roll, started flipping through pictures. She settled around him again, like she had when he'd first entered the house. Craning her neck to look over his shoulder, captivated. He showed her pictures of Shelley and Rich, being gross, holding hands. Eating french fries at Denny's. Laughing at him at school. His mom and dad, looking bored but patient in the backyard at home.
Johnny got all the way back to Halloween from the year before, when he'd made his own costume and been really excited about trick-or-treating still, before his battery started to fuss at him. The flashlight app had been a real power-eater. Trying to still hold the Thing's attention, Johnny began feeling on the ground near Rich's now-cold body. When his iPhone finally crapped out, Johnny turned the clunky old VHS camera back on. He rewound it to the beginning, like Rich had. In the darkness, with his dead friends a few feet away, Johnny and the Thing that had killed them watched the last few minutes of their lives on the camera's tiny LCD screen, from Johnny and Rich messing around with it in the AV lab yesterday afternoon, to the car this morning, Johnny's introduction outside of Larchdale House, the inside of the house. The Thing's appearance, the Thing taking Shelley. Rich, filming his own hands, caked in blood. Johnny, looking at the camera, begging Rich to film him. Johnny screaming. Rich's death.
He rewound it and they watched it again. And again, and again, and one more time until that battery gave out, too.
Johnny found one more thing, waiting for him in his pocket. Never tested.
It was the EMF reader.
In total darkness, now, Johnny couldn't see Her reaction to this new gadget, but he knew where she was at any given point in time. The EMF reader screeched loudest and most shrilly when it was pointed at Her; was near silent whenever she drifted away. She seemed to understand this, and was playing with him, after a fashion. Drifting out of his reach and then swooping back in, trying to catch him unawares, get close to him without being caught.
The screeching was very loud. The screaming had been, too. Johnny entertained himself, in his last minutes, hoping that the man parked out front had heard them. Could hear this now. Was calling the real cops, who at any moment would burst in to arrest Johnny for breaking and entering, and save his life.
Towards the end, he heard banging, and thought maybe it was really happening-- police breaking down the front door. But he didn't kid himself very long. The rhythm was all wrong.
Someone was finally boarding up the front door of Larchdale House.
Halloween revelers would be disappointed next year, Johnny thought, sadly, but he was also a little excited.
He'd go down in history as the last kid to ever touch the door of the most haunted house in town.
