“My arm! My shoulder!” Danny jumped about like he’d been lit on fire, waving his arms up and down. “Make it stop!”
“What’s wrong with you?” Clint said. “Quit flapping around like a damn bird.” He grabbed him by the shoulders to still him.
It didn’t work.
“It hurts. It burns!” Danny squirmed in Clint’s grasp.
Clint held him and shook him. “Snap out of it. Hey!” He pulled Danny close and looked into his eyes. “Settle down!”
“What’s wrong with you?” Heather asked. “Danny, what is it?”
“My arm’s tingling. And my shoulder, it burns. Like somebody held an iron up against it.” He yanked himself free of Clint and pulled at the top of his shirt, exposing his shoulder. His eyes grew wide. A burn, in the shape of a hand print. “Look here. My skin is burned.” Speaking faster now, his words a jumble. “When we were up in the other room, I couldn’t move. It was there in my house, I think. No, the creature, it was everywhere. The footsteps, my mom, the creature, and then I tried to get in through the door in the floor, but it grabbed me by the shoulder. And then you pulled me through, Reid.” He took a deep breath, catching up to himself.
“It touched him, and it burned him. Whoa.” Clint took a few steps backward, away from Danny, his gaze on him the whole time. He rubbed his hands on his jeans like he was trying to scrape off some unseen cooties.
Danny watched as his best friend shied away from him.
“What was it, though?” Alex asked. “I didn’t see anything. Anyone.” He surveyed Danny’s burned shoulder from afar. “You think it was the creature? That smoky thing that did this?”
Danny was crying now, slumped to the floor in defeat. “What if that’s, you know, a mark, by the creature? And now it’s gonna come for me first.” His body racked with sobs, his chest heaving and falling with each one. “I wanna go home, I wanna go home, I wanna go home.” Like a mantra, he kept repeating it to himself until his crying lessened.
Snot was dripping down his face, to his lips, so he pulled his shirt bottom up, exposing his belly, and wiped at it. He gave off a combination of a snort and a sniffle, sucking the rest back in.
“Maybe you’re imagining the whole thing,” Clint said. “Your arm burning and all that.”
Spit came flying out of Danny’s mouth. “Maybe the picture didn’t change right in front of our eyes. Maybe an invisible ghost didn’t chase us down here. Maybe we never saw a smoky demon-thing, either! None of that happened, right? Oh, yeah, it did. So shut up!”
“Maybe the demon’s inside you already.” A grin lit up Reid’s face. “That’s why you’re foaming at the mouth right now.”
“Stop!” Alex yelled. “Everybody, just stop. Fighting each other is not helping.”
He stepped in between Reid and Danny, but Danny noticed how much distance Alex was keeping between him.
Danny finally calmed himself and looked around the room. A basement. The entire floor was made of cement. The walls were made of that same cold material, a dark gray finish. How the hell did we make it through the door in the floor and fall to a cement floor without getting hurt? I don’t even remember hitting the floor. He scratched his head.
Light was spilling in through a small rectangular window at the top of the basement wall. No flashlights needed here. He breathed a sigh of relief. Things were less scary in a room with some light. It made him think of his own house. His basement had looked a lot like this before his little sister Rebecca was born. Sad and cold. Once Rebecca was born, everything lightened up. Dad took the deadbolt off the basement door and started a project to turn it into a livable space.
But before that, Danny remembered venturing down those stairs to his basement, unnoticed, one morning. The air around him had grown colder as he descended, sending a chill through his pajamas. Barefoot, he could feel the cold cement on his tiny feet. At the bottom, he flipped on a light and the basement came to life.
He’d immediately grabbed at the first thing he saw—a tarp. He peeled it back to reveal a crib. The same crib he’d seen when he was younger. The crib that never once contained a baby. It was wrapped tight in something that looked like cellophane, preserving it forever as new. As he journeyed further, taking tarps off everything he saw, he had discovered a world of baby things he’d never seen before. They hadn’t been his.
A flipping feeling in his tummy forced him back to the present with his friends in the old haunted house.
“Guys, I don’t feel right,” he said. “I feel dizzy. Is it hot in here? It’s hot. I’m hot.” When he spoke, his breath came out in visible puffs in front of his face.
“You’re sweating like a pig,” Reid said. “But it’s freezing down here.” His words left trails of hot air wafting through the cold basement as well.
“You don’t look so good.” Heather reached out with the back of her hand, toward Danny’s forehead.
Before she could make contact, Alex swatted her hand away.
“What’d ya do that for?” Heather crinkled up her nose. “Stop hitting my hands.”
“Just don’t…don’t touch him.” Alex diverted his eyes from Danny.
Danny couldn’t believe what was happening. They were afraid of him. Afraid of what he might have. Contagion. Death. A whimper escaped him. He slapped his hand over his mouth.
“I was just gonna check if he has a fever.”
She reached her hand out again, but Alex caught it and pushed it down to her side, once again.
“See, even you think that thing got to me.” Danny’s mouth pulled downward as he fought back a cry.
“It’s not that.” Alex met Danny’s eyes this time. “Don’t be so dramatic. Maybe you got a flu-bug or something. Mom will kill me if I bring Heather home sick.” He shrugged.
“Besides,” Clint’s deep storyteller voice came out, “there’s nothing in the history of this house to suggest that touching is a problem.”
“Right,” Heather said. “So that should make you feel a little better?”
“But…” Clint said, “we are in uncharted territory. I’ve never heard of someone being inside this house. No one’s ever set foot within these four walls and walked out to tell a story of what happened, what they saw—”
“You’re not helping!” Danny yelled. He wavered on his feet. “The room is spinning. I smell smoke. And I think…” He sank down to his knees and leaned over, clutching his stomach. “Gonna puke.” He coughed and dry heaved. Wheezing, he whipped his head back, trying for air.
“Calm down. You’re panicking.” Alex kept his distance.
Danny didn’t care anymore. Not that his friends were afraid of him, the looks they gave him, or how they wouldn’t touch him. All he could care about was the fever brewing, stirring up a storm of nausea.
“It burns.” Danny’s voice came out hoarse. “Like a fire in my stomach and throat.” He rubbed at his neck, scrunching his face.
“Dag, man,” Clint said. “It’s just stomach acid, that’s all.” He didn’t sound convincing.
“No, something’s wrong.” Danny laboriously climbed to his feet and leaned against the cement wall. It felt soothing to his hot body. He pressed his cheek into the wall. “Gotta cool down.”
Sweat dripped down his temples in rivulets and trickled down his neck, into his shirt. His lungs burned and ached from deep inside. Each breath felt more labored, more strained. And sounded that way, too.
“Maybe it’s your allergies.” Reid crossed his arms and stepped back. “Dude, maybe you have asthma.”
Danny opened his mouth to speak but shook his head instead. He bucked again, back down to his knees. Everyone took a step back. A brownish stream of vomit spewed from between his lips. Everyone jumped back further. Danny choked and gagged, fighting it the whole time. When he was finished, he flung his head back, eyes to the ceiling, and took in a raspy constricted breath.