It was a scream that woke her. Chris sat up in bed and turned on the light. Beside her, Marsha lay paralyzed with her arms pinned to her sides, her face a mask of terror. “Marsha, what—”
“Help me!” she cried, and then started making gagging noises as if she couldn’t breathe. Chris threw off the covers and got to her knees. The cat shrieked and darted under the bed. Chris shook Marsha, hoping to snap her out of it, but something hit her, hard, and knocked her onto her back.
The knob on the bedroom door rattled, followed by pounding on the door. “Chris!” Derek yelled. “Let me in!”
With a glance at Marsha, Chris got unsteadily to her feet and staggered to the door. The knob wouldn’t turn. “I can’t open it!”
“Stand back!”
She hurried back to Marsha. Bruises began to form on her neck. Her eyes bulged, and her face turned purple. Chris still could see no visible sign of the entity. “Ron!” she screamed while behind her, Derek slammed into the door. It didn’t open.
Ron and Joe both appeared in the room. Joe swore uncharacteristically at the sight of Marsha. “What’s doing that to her?”
“I can’t see anything.” Chris looked at Ron. “Can you?”
“No. What do we do?”
“Help Derek get the door open so we can get her out of here.” While they went to work on the door, Chris managed to get Marsha into a sitting position and tried doing the Heimlich maneuver, but it didn’t work. It wasn’t something she swallowed that was choking her.
Finally, the door opened, and Derek rushed in. “We have to get her out of here,” Chris told him. He scooped Marsha into his arms and turned to carry her out of the room, but the door slammed shut. Objects from the dresser, things Marsha had arranged there, flew at them. The furniture began to vibrate and shake, as though the entity was trying to muster the strength to make it fly as well.
Ron caught a can of hair spray out of the air right before it smacked Chris in the head. She turned around and threw it as hard as she could at the window. “You’re not the only angry spirit in this room,” she shouted at the entity as she grabbed a flying hairbrush and went to finish the job on the window. “This way!”
“The window,” Chris told Derek, pointing. “Get her out on the roof.”
Chris climbed out onto the top of the front porch cover and turned to help get Marsha through the window. Once they were outside, Marsha suddenly gasped and started coughing. Behind them, inside the bedroom, all the flying objects suddenly fell to the floor with a clatter, and the door opened.
Chris blew out a breath of relief as Marsha continued to draw air in. “It’s okay,” she said, kneeling beside Marsha and patting her back. “B b reathe.”
“She needs an ambulance,” Derek said. “We should at least drive her to the emergency room and get these bruises checked out. She might have serious damage to her esophagus.”
Marsha shook her head. “No,” she gasped. “No hospital.” And then she started to sob.
Joe leaned out the window. “Whatever that thing was seems to be gone. Or it’s behavin’ itself for now, at any rate.”
“Let’s get you back inside,” said Chris. “It should be safe now.”
“No!” Marsha scooted away from the window. “Not back in there!”
“Do you have a ladder?” asked Derek.
“Yeah. It’s around back. There’s a little lean-to against the house.”
“Wait here with her. I’ll go get it. You can both climb down and come in through the front door.” He leaned down to make eye contact with Marsha. “Is that okay?”
She nodded. With another look at Chris, he climbed in through the window.
As soon as he was gone, Marsha’s face crumpled. She buried her face in her hands. Chris knelt beside her, patting her silently on the back, not sure what else to do. After it became clear that Marsha needed some tissue, and lots of it, Chris started to duck back inside. But Marsha gripped her arm and pulled her back. “Don’t leave me!”
“I’m going to get you a tissue.”
“Don’t go in there. It’s not safe.”
“I’ll be all right. Derek made it okay, see?”
Marsha shook her head. “I don’t need a tissue. It’s fine.” She wiped her nose on her pajama sleeve.
“Okay.” Chris rearranged herself until she was sitting next to Marsha. “I’m not going anywhere, see?”
With a weak smile, Marsha said, “Thanks.” Then, after a long pause, she asked, “Why is this happening to me?”
“I don’t know. But we’re not going to stop until we find answers. I promise.”
“Do you have any theories?”
Chris sighed. “Well, we’re pretty sure it’s a poltergeist.”
Marsha looked at her in alarm. “Like the thing in that movie that trapped the little girl in the TV?”
“That was only a movie. I’m pretty sure that’s never actually happened.”
“Only pretty sure?”
“Well, these things aren’t exactly predictable, as you’ve seen.”
“But what is it?”
“A poltergeist is a mischievous spirit that can impact the material world more than your average ghost.”
“Spirit. Are we talking, like, a demon?”
“I honestly don’t know. That’s one theory. Another is that poltergeists are the spirits of infants and small children who never developed a capacity for reason. Since we know that human ghosts like my sister can channel emotional energy into becoming solid enough to touch and move objects, it makes sense that an infant ghost driven purely by emotion could be this volatile…”
She trailed off as she noticed the pained look on Marsha’s face. It was hard to tell in the soft glow of the street lights, but it seemed like she had grown even paler than before. “I’m sorry. You don’t need to hear all of this right now.”
Marsha merely nodded. They sat together in silence until the top of a ladder clattered against the edge of the roof. The sound made Marsha jump. “Come on down, ladies,” Derek called up.
“Why don’t you go first?” Chris suggested. “I’ve got your back.”
Marsha nodded and crawled over to the ladder. Once she climbed down, Chris followed. “Why don’t we go back inside?” she asked once her feet were on the ground. “We’ll go in the living room. Derek and I will both stay with you. Since we’re all up, maybe we can hash out some ideas and figure out what’s going on.”
Again, Marsha nodded and allowed herself to be guided inside. In the living room, she tucked herself into a corner of the sofa. When Derek brought her a drink from the kitchen that was quite a bit more potent than wine, she accepted it with a murmur of thanks, but otherwise, she barely spoke a word.
“Can we talk for a minute?” Derek asked.
Chris tore her gaze away from Marsha. “Sure, what is it?”
He glanced at Marsha, then jerked his head toward the hall. “Out here.” Without waiting for an answer, he headed out of the room, clearly expecting her to follow.
Chris watched him go, torn between following him and staying with Marsha. “Go,” said Marsha. “It’s fine.”
“Are you sure?”
She offered Chris a weak smile and held up her drink. “Sure. I’ve got all the courage I need right here.”
“We’ll be right out here. This should only take a minute.” Marsha nodded, and Chris went out into the hall, where Derek was pacing back and forth. “What is it?”
“What on earth happened tonight?”
“I don’t know. Everything was fine when we went to bed. Then I woke up and that thing was choking her.”
He took hold of her face with both hands and turned her cheek toward him. “And how did you get this?”
Chris raised a hand to her cheek and felt a tender bruise along her cheekbone. In all the frenzy, she’d forgotten about getting knocked down. Now that he’d drawn her attention to it, it began to throb. “It knocked me away when I tried to help her.”
Releasing her, Derek closed his eyes and swore. “You’re lucky that was all it did. What if that thing had decided to choke you instead of her?”
“Then I guess I’d be the one huddled on the couch with a glass of Jameson’s.”
“Don’t joke about this.”
“I’m not. But I’m not the one that thing is fixated on.”
“So? You don’t know how this thing thinks. You don’t know whether it might decide to target you.” He rubbed his face and shook his head. “I told you it was a bad idea to—” He seemed to check himself and glanced into the living room at Marsha. Then he jerked his head toward the kitchen and headed down the hall. Chris followed. Once they reached the kitchen, with his voice lowered, he said, “It was a bad idea to bring her here.”
“Then what should I have done?”
“I don’t know!” He started to pace. “Man. This thing… You told me these things could get dangerous, but I don’t think I realized how dangerous.”
Chris’s heart sank. She let out a knowing laugh as she folded her arms. “Well, it took you longer than most, but I guess I always figured you’d get there eventually.”
“Don’t.” Derek held up a finger to stop her. “Don’t you dare. You think I’m afraid for myself? You’re the one who could’ve been killed tonight. And yeah, that terrifies me. So sorry if that makes me a bad boyfriend.”
She sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Yeah, you did.”
“I’m sorry.”
He raked his fingers through his hair. “I don’t want apologies. I want you safe.” With his hands on his waist, he looked around the kitchen as if he might find answers there. Finally, he looked at her. “Maybe you should think about calling it quits.”
“What? I can’t abandon Marsha.”
“No, I don’t mean that. Of course you can’t. But do you have to put yourself so deep in harm’s way to help her?”
“Do you see another way?”
“No, but maybe that’s because we haven’t looked hard enough.”
Chris leveled her gaze at him. “I’ve told you from the beginning. This is what I do. You can’t expect me to walk away.”
“Why not? Not from Marsha, don’t look at me like that. You think I don’t want to help her too? But after this, if it doesn’t kill you first, maybe it’s time to think about retirement.”
“I can’t do that!”
“Why not?” he asked again. “When will you be able to, Chris? What happens when we have a family?” At her shock, he closed his eyes. “If. If we have a family. Someday.”
“Then we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. If we come to it. But you’re not my husband and you don’t get to make these decisions. And you wouldn’t even if you were!” She turned to go, but he hurried over and grabbed her arm.
“Chris, wait. You know that’s not—”
“I need to get back to Marsha. She shouldn’t be alone.” She pulled away from him and went back to the living room. Marsha wasn’t there. “Marsha?” she called.
Derek came in behind her. “Where’d she go?”
“I don’t know.”
Ron and Joe appeared. “We searched the house from top to bottom,” said Ron. “We couldn’t find anything. Of course, if this thing is invisible to us, then we don’t really know what to look for.”
“Did you see Marsha?”
“I saw her headin’ back up to your room,” said Joe.
“I’d better go check on her. You guys wait here.” Chris started for the stairs. She was only up a couple of steps when she heard a car door slam outside. She retreated and hurried to the front door in time to see a yellow cab pulling away from the curb, her stomach sinking as it went. She swore and ran up the stairs. When she reached her bedroom, she flung the door open.
Marsha was gone. So was her bag and her stuff.
Ron popped into the room and looked around, then looked at Chris. “Where did she go?”
“I don’t know. But for her sake, we’d better find out fast.”