The Fingers Attached to the Prints
Tiffany
From my window seat I watched Mom and Dad pull out of the driveway for that work thingy. It wasn’t quite seven and the sky was already dimming. Justin was in his room, reading some book at his desk. Mario’s dad was being dragged by their unruly huskies down the street, and I watched Hannah Henderson pull their van into their garage and start unloading groceries.
Everything was so familiar and normal, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that something awful was about to happen. After the screaming and the fingerprints, I didn’t like the idea of being home alone at night. It gave me this headache behind my eyes and made my ribs tighten.
What I hadn’t told anybody all day was that the morning had been a horror movie. I awoke trying to shake off the dream of being force-fed hamburgers by a tall skinny clown; I tore apart my closet, in tears, trying to find anything that didn’t look like it had been rejected by a homeless person three years ago; and when I finally decided on a short dress, leggings, and combat boots, I saw them.
The fingerprints were back.
And they had doubled.
I glanced at the mirror but decided to focus my energy somewhere else.
I could shake it.
I wasn’t a baby anymore.
I picked up the dry erase markers and wrote, Hi Justin!!! on the window. When he didn’t look up, I used my mom’s old school cell phone they gave me to use for Wi-Fi texting and texted Justin. Its only other use was for playing some stupid snake game, and I couldn’t make calls or anything on it.
Justin, on the other hand, had his very own cell phone.
His. Own. Phone.
That was something I had daydreams about.
I wrote persuasive essays about it.
Last birthday I saved up enough money to buy one, but my hopes were ruthlessly squashed when my parents explained how much monthly service would cost.
For some kids it’s getting a dog. For me, it was a cell phone.
I’m pretty sure that everyone in the whole school had a cell phone except me. Oh, and Mario. I guess Kevin Sendheim had mentioned once that he didn’t have one because he didn’t want one (again, proof that he is strange), but almost everyone else did.
Hannah bought Justin’s phone so she could keep track of him. I guess it makes sense, but doesn’t seem fair at all. I don’t even think Justin likes having a cell phone.
Justin flipped open the phone on the desk then looked across the street at me. He leaned in a little to read the message I wrote, smiled, then sat up on top of his desk and started writing on his window.
Hey, Tiffy. Sleep tight.
I gave him two thumbs up, and he climbed down and went back to reading.
My headache felt better, so I cleared the campaign posters from my bed and went to grab my backpack off the top of my dresser.
Then froze.
Fingerprints.
On the mirror.
I had washed off this morning’s prints. I knew I had. All of them.
The headache was back. No worse. Rock-concert pounding.
The fingerprints were tiny and there were smeared handprints as well. The size of an apple.
I struggled for an explanation. Had my mom watched some kid during the day? She didn’t say anything about it. I kept envisioning a bus full of ghost kids at Gravity Hill. These pale-faced, dark-eyed, chilling young faces that hated the living because they were dead.
Had they followed me home?
I backed away from the mirror.
It was straight up dark now, and the only light on in my house was my bedroom’s. The hall looked so dark and ominous, like the White Witch was going to come bounding from the evil blackness and snatch me up.
I had to get a grip on myself.
I stepped over to the door and looked down the hall. No sinister beings. Good. It was still too dark for my comfort, so I grabbed the umbrella from behind the door (because clearly this was a good weapon if there was a sneak attack) and bolted down the hall to the light switch by my parent’s room.
One flick and the light banished all of the scary darkness. Well, not all of it, but the hall looked normal, and I kept telling myself that my imagination wasn’t the boss of me.
But the fingerprints weren’t my imagination.
And the scream from the night before.
And was Justin lying about the White Witch? I clutched the umbrella tighter. I didn’t mean to, and I didn’t want to, but the image of the black eyes and mouth were seared into my mind. A sick heavy feeling fell down my chest and into my stomach. Like I had eaten thick mud for dinner.
He must have been lying. White witches with black mouths weren’t real. And the scream was part of a dream. I was half asleep and half awake and it just felt real. And the fingerprints . . .
. . . were unsettling.
BANG.
The noise came from my room.
Something had just made a crashing sound in my room.
I debated whether to go and see or to test my running skills. Either one was probably going to make me throw up.
But I was just in my room. Nobody went past me. It had to be nothing. I told myself that, over and over again, as I made my way down the hall.
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
Reaching my door I jumped into the room screaming like police and ninjas do in movies. To my relief it was empty. Curious, I poked under the bed with the umbrella.
BANG.
I looked towards the sound, and two of my Michael Jackson mugs were lying on the ground. The Jackson 5 one and the “Thriller” mug. It was curious because the whole collection had sat on my dresser for two years without ever falling off, but it was at least good to know what had made the noise. They weren’t broken so I picked them up and put them back.
BANG.
The “Smooth Criminal” mug rolled on the carpet until it stopped at my bare feet. I frowned. The handle looked chipped.
No! That was one of my favorites!
Wait.
How could that have possibly happened?
I was facing the mugs the whole time. What made it fall? I touched the top of the dresser to see if it was wet, but it wasn’t.
That was the end of my logical mind being in control.
Alarm bells rang in my head. Something totally wacked out was happening and I needed to get out of there fast. I backed away from the dresser, without taking my eyes off of the remaining mugs and ended up slamming my calf on the bed boards. All I needed to do was ignore my throbbing legs and reach the phone on the other side by the window.
Before I made it two steps, the door slammed shut. I sucked in a stuttering breath so hard that it felt like the thick mud from my stomach had lodged in my throat.
I looked at the door.
Three children—
standing stock still—
staring at me.
A young girl, maybe five or six years old, a toddler boy of two or three, and a baby in the girl’s arms. Void of all color like a black and white movie, with bodies that looked almost solid but not entirely.
The girl had dark short curls and a ribbon bow in her hair. The boy had light shaggy hair and wore shorts with long socks. The baby looked an awful lot like a life-size version of one of my grandmother’s creepy porcelain dolls.
I screamed and crab-crawled up over my bed.
Quickly changing from stalk stillness to jerky movement, they seemed to scatter before my eyes. The boy took off towards the window and the girl with the baby went to the dresser. There was a “now-you-see-them, now-you-don’t” disappearing thing that they did, making them impossible to follow.
They were going to kill me.
They were going to pop in front of my face, scream the scream of death, and kill me so that I would haunt the earth for an eternity, just like them.
In what couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, I watched the boy climb up on my window seat and jump down, then repeat the task. The girl hefted and readjusted the babe, and the little one reached out and tried to knock down my “We Are the World” mug. I found myself involuntarily leaping off of the bed, grabbing the mug, and clutching it to my chest.
The baby reached for me and I scrambled up and over my bed to the window. I was relieved to find that the boy had deserted it for the closet. I wanted to get out of there, but they were blocking the way to the door. I threw the window open. I pressed up against the mesh screen so hard I was bound to break right through it.
“Justin!” I shouted across the street. I whipped my head back and forth checking on the kids and trying to get Justin’s attention. He put down his book and leaned towards his window.
I motioned with my hand for him to come and mouthed, Help! I don’t know why I was afraid that the other neighbors would hear me. Probably because if they asked me what was the matter, I would have to say ‘ghosts’ and sound as crazy as Justin.
Justin shrugged his shoulder and brought his hands up in the universal I-don’t-know-what-the-heck-you’re-trying-to-say-to-me gesture.
The baby reached for my Michael Moonwalk mug, my sparkly favorite, so I leapt across the bed and rescued the remaining mugs from the tiny destructo.
She started screaming.
That scream.
The one from the night before.
The chilling, horror-film, can’t-hear-anything-else scream.
I jumped back over the bed and tossed the mugs on the window seat. Pulling down the window I grabbed the markers and wrote:
Come over now!!!!
It was hard to write and watch the kids, but I was afraid if I took my eyes off of them they would disappear—or do something awful like rip up my unicorn poster or possess my body. When I turned back I couldn’t see Justin, just the light shining through his bedroom door.
The scream continued. It wasn’t like a baby wailing, it was like a woman dying. A freaky sound coming out of the face of a child.
I didn’t hear Justin knock or even come up the stairs, but I heard him run down the hall and throw open my door. “What is it?” he said, out of breath.
I could barely hear him over the screaming but it was easy enough to read his lips.
I pointed at the children and he looked over at the dresser.
“A mouse?”
“Don’t you see them?”
“Who? Why are you yelling?” His eyebrows shot up. “Do you see them?”
I ran over towards him so I could hear him better.
Gesturing in the general direction, but afraid to say the word first, I said, “Do you see children? Shimmery lights? A disturbance in the Force?”
“What are you talking about?” His face looked really worried and he leaned towards my ear like we’re trying to talk in a concert or something. “Do you see something?”
They were right there. In front of him.
How was it possible that Justin, the ghost-seer, was making me feel crazy for seeing ghosts?
The screaming kept steady. The girl was looking straight at me making me very uncomfortable. The boy was looking in the mirror, poking at his reflection with his tiny fingers.
“Umm.” Maybe I was crazy. Maybe my brain was creating images to go with the sounds it had created yesterday. Maybe our houses were built on the site of a nuclear contamination, and before too long all of us would be as loony as Justin. But how was my brain coming up with these kids? They seemed so real.
There was nobody better to confess your crazy to than to someone who already lived in crazy-town. And if it wasn’t a vision but something more real and sinister, Justin was the only one I knew who probably had an answer to the question, How do you keep a specter from killing you?
“Ghosts.” I said it. I said the word. “I think I see ghosts. Kid ghosts,” I clarified.
“Are they screaming?” He turned to my ear again.
He knew. He knew they screamed. “Just one of them.” I was hopeful he could help. “Don’t you hear it?”
“No.”
Shot down. Hopes dashed against the rocks of sanity. I might as well have packed my stuff and checked the crazy-town classifieds.
“Do they seem angry?” he asked.
“The baby’s the screamer, but the others seem fine.” I put one of the mugs on the dresser, just out of the baby’s reach. The baby quieted down and groped for it. “There, she stopped.”
“Then they probably aren’t here to hurt you.”
Probably?
Was that the best guarantee he could offer?
Comforting.
Justin scratched his scalp. “Do you know them? Like in real life?”
How could he be so calm? “No, they’re dressed like American Girl dolls or Amish people or something. Like from a long time ago.” The baby knocked the mug to the floor and Justin’s eyes got big.
“Why can’t I see them?” he said, more to himself than to me.
I shrugged.
He looked at my window and back at me. “Hmmm, do you see any adult ghosts?” He looked at the window again.
I tried to follow his gaze but there was nothing over there. “Why?”
“Nothing by the window or anything?”
I walked to the window and he came with me, but I didn’t see anything.
Except my dad’s car sitting in the driveway.
“Crap, you can’t be in my room,” I said in his ear so as to be quiet. “My parents will kill us.”
As if on cue, my dad appeared at the bedroom door. His expression went from surprise to anger. “Tiffany, you know better. Justin, it’s time you went home.”
“Yes, sir.” He walked out the door past my dad. I tried to follow after him, I wasn’t going to stay in the ghost room by myself, but my dad grabbed my shoulder.
“Tiffany, where do you think you’re going?”
I looked back in my room. The ghosts were gone. No phantom little faces. No shaggy hair or curls. No ghostly screams. They didn’t seem to be anywhere anymore. Maybe they followed Justin out.
“To brush my teeth?”
He lectured me on the rules of our house while I got ready for bed, especially the one about no boys in my room and not being allowed to date until I move out.
As if I was about to run away with Justin Henderson.
After only a few minutes in the ghost room, I decided I couldn’t sleep in there and dragged my blanket out into the hall to sleep on the floor by my parents’ room.