I hold my breath, and it feels like the manor holds its breath with me, which is how I hear the click, followed by the slightest creak of a door opening above me. Three footsteps follow, another creak, and a door groans shut.
I hear Cat hiss. Another creak above sounds like a footfall. I dart to the kitchen and take cover, pressing my back to the wall that separates it from the foyer.
Wait, why am I hiding? This is it! The broken boy has finally decided to make his entrance. It’s been almost a month. Time to get this first face-to-rotting-face over with.
The footsteps on the upper floor resume, except they aren’t so much footsteps as they are footdrags. An unwelcome memory of the white-haired woman with veiny feet flashes behind my eyes. Every inch forward drags, slaps, drags, slaps again on the floor in the upstairs hallway. My hands flinch against the wall.
One by one, the broken boy’s labored steps inch down the hallway until they reach the top of the narrow side staircase. One by one, his feet slap down the wooden steps until they reach the bottom, then drag themselves over the flimsy plank covering the hole.
When he reaches the foyer, there’s a moment of thick silence. Then there’s the rotting stench again and this time a sound I haven’t heard before: a horrible, high wheeze, a gasp that never stops—it’s like a death rattle.
Right when I think I’m going to pass out, the smell fades along with the rattle. I can hear him traveling away from the kitchen, but it isn’t until a tiny note echoes from what sounds like a long tunnel that I realize he’s in the sewing room, playing the harpsichord.
This is the moment to face him. I push away the image of his little decayed fingers plucking the ivory keys and prepare to round the corner and head for the sewing room. But before I can gather the strength to take a step, the stench returns with a vengeance, and I know he’s back in the foyer. Except now I feel a rush of cold, damp air hit my face. All the bravery I’ve gathered turns to confusion. When I peer around the corner, I see one of the massive front doors standing open.
The boy is gone.
“No,” I whisper before running to the open door. “Hey! We’re doing this now!”
I grab for the handle and fling the door open the rest of the way. “We’re getting this over with!” I shout, but I’m shouting it to myself because the boy is gone, and I missed my chance!
I’m about to reach for my shoes by the door when I feel something furry on my foot. I glance down in time to catch a well-fed rat with a pink tail scurry across the porch, disappearing into the fog.
“So, you know, I hid a dead rat in every room of the manor. Good luck finding them all.”
“Son of a badger butt! You’re no ghost. You’re ferretin’ Charlie Cleave!”
I never understood the saying “seeing red” until now. All the blood in my body is rocketing straight to my brain. I’m angrier than I’ve ever felt in my life, angry enough to go charging into the dead of night in my dog-and-heart flannel pajamas with no shoes on to get back at Jeremy Cleave’s little rat spawn, Charlie. Red Wings fan or not, this kid is going down. I’ll deal with Mom’s “use your words instead” conversation later.
“Come out here!” I yell into the dense fog. “Or are you too afraid? I know it’s you, Rat Wrangler!”
The fog and inky darkness leave nothing but hiding places. After standing there for a minute or two, the red I was seeing dims, and I’m left feeling cold, alone, and ridiculous.
Until I hear that horrible death rattle cut through the silence again.
“That’s cute,” I say, my voice shaking. “But sound effects don’t scare me.”
What does scare me is when the breathing grows louder, because that’s when I realize how close it is. I hardly have time to put it together when the fog parts and through it walks a nightmare in rags.
This is not Charlie Cleave. This is the boy from the cemetery, the broken boy. Three lunges and he could be on top of me. Those unblinking eyes. Those cracked blue lips. His skinny, crooked body barely holding up the cloth that clings to him.
Legs shaking, I take a couple steps closer to him. The boy backs away, and I slow my pace, remembering not to scare him off.
“It’s okay,” I say, hands up. “We met on my first day, remember?”
The boy tilts his head all the way to one side, confused, except his head keeps tilting, and I’m terrified it’s going to splinter off his neck and fall to the ground. I look away and wait for him to straighten it out. When I turn back, he’s staring blankly again.
“Um,” I say, trying a different approach. “I’m Gus.” I press my hand to my chest. The boy’s cavernous eyes glare through me like he’s waiting for more.
“Sometimes, you . . . those like you . . . want me to know about, you know, their lives. Or how they died. It can help you to—”
All at once, the boy’s fingers curl into fists. His jaw—visible through the hole in his decaying cheeks—clenches so tightly I can hear his teeth grind. Before I understand what’s happening, the boy lunges for me, swiping his blackened nails across my neck.
“Ahhh, what the—”
I stumble backward, searing pain penetrating layers of skin. I hold my hand over my neck because I can’t believe that I’m actually feeling this. It has to be a nightmare, but when I pull my palm away, the blood from my neck is as real as the pain, and before I know it, I’m crab-walking backward toward the doors and pleading for the boy to stop because I think he’s about to take another swipe at me.
They can’t touch you, Dad had said.
Well, this one can.
Fear pours through me as my nightmare scenario finally turns real. They can hurt me. Nothing can protect me now. But the physical pain on my neck sharpens my mind momentarily.
“Wait!” I spit out. I scramble to my feet as I reach for the doorknob behind me.
The boy takes another step toward me.
I’ve dealt with angry ghosts before. Granted, none this vicious, but one thing that always seems to work is letting them be angry. Maybe the boy just needs a good ole rage-fest, preferably not directed at me.
“I get it. You’re angry. Why not . . .” I look around desperately and find inspiration along the circular drive. I turn back toward him. “Why not punch one of the trees over there?”
The boy looks over his shoulder momentarily while I fiddle with the door handle behind my back.
“Go ahead—you won’t hurt them. They’re already dead, like you!”
The boy looks back at me, unamused.
I continue fumbling with the knob and cup my neck with my other hand, moving my necklace cord away from the fresh scratches. Thank goodness the wound isn’t too deep.
For some reason, seeing me fiddle with the string around my neck makes the boy’s anger slip momentarily from his distorted face. He reaches for his own bare, bony neck. Then he pats his whole body down, top to bottom, searching frantically for something he’s lost. I couldn’t care less what the kid’s lost because I’m pretty focused on why this doorknob isn’t moving—
“Oh no. Nononononono,” I whisper.
The automatic lock. Mom’s words now. I can see us locking ourselves out. That would be a nightmare!
I release the knob and bang my fist against the wood until my knuckles feel raw.
“Mom! Mom! MOM!”
She’s never going to hear me; her room is too far away. And Mom sleeps like the dead. Ha! Ahahahaha! THE DEAD! Get it together, Gus.
A doorbell. There has to be a doorbell. I frantically search the entryway for a button or a chain or gong or stupid airhorn, but I can’t find anything.
I whip around to find the rotting boy another step closer. I can see the map work of bone and tendon protruding under his loose skin. His jaw is moving up and down like it’s aching to get something out, but I don’t care about that anymore.
“Stay away from me!”
He takes another step toward me. The circles under his eyes practically swallow his gaunt face. He reaches a small, sallow hand toward me. I press my back against the door, and my heart is ready to break through my chest. My feet are rooted to the cement. I can’t outrun him. I can’t get back inside, and anyway, he’d follow me in. I’m out of moves. And he can touch me. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but he can touch me. He can hurt me. He already has.
He’s still searching himself with one hand for whatever he lost, but now he’s looking at me like maybe I have it, like maybe he could claw it out of me if he wanted to.
“Kid, I don’t know what you think I did, but I didn’t,” I eke out. If the boy understands a word I’m saying, he sure doesn’t seem to give a flying—
“Fry?”
Mom.
“Fry, is that you?”
The boy backs away. He’s distracted, searching the ground frantically now.
I spot a string hanging from part of the rags wrapped around his chest. It’s barely visible through the fog, and he’s moving so fast I’m not sure whether what I’m seeing is real, but it doesn’t matter because this time when I hear Mom call my name, she sounds closer. I feel again for the handle behind me.
The boy’s frail body goes rigid, but he doesn’t look angry anymore. He looks frightened.
I want to answer Mom, but I have no idea what the boy will do. Lunge at me again? Melt into a gooey ectoplasmic puddle right there on the driveway?
“Gus?” I hear her call.
The boy stares saucer-eyed over my shoulder.
I hold my hands up, showing him my palms, a universal sign for surrender, but I can’t think of a single thing to say that’ll make this situation better.
The handle rattles behind me, and I whip around. Mom swings the door open. I practically push her back inside with me on the threshold, blocking her from whatever the boy might do. Mom stares at me, bug-eyed.
“It’s three o’clock in the morning!”
I turn to show her the boy, but he’s gone. Not a trace of him remains.
“This is the part where you say something,” Mom cries. She searches me for all the reasons she should worry, and there are plenty.
“I . . . locked myself out,” I sputter.
“I gathered that much,” Mom says, exasperated. “Would it be too much to ask what you were doing out there in the middle of the night?”
Yes. It would absolutely be too much to ask.
“And what happened to your neck?”
The scrapes are starting to burn now. “Um.”
Tell her.
But the conversation over mac ’n’ cheese from the other night is still fresh in my mind, as fresh as the cuts on my neck.
“I scratched it on the dock the other day getting out of the boat,” I say.
Mom is unconvinced. “They look new.”
She goes to touch the skin, and I shrink away. “I’ll put some ointment on it. I’m fine.”
“Let’s sit down,” she says.
We’re quiet for a second in the living room, each of us sitting on my rumpled sheets.
“Sorry,” I say.
“That isn’t exactly an explanation,” Mom says. “What were you doing?”
“I thought I heard something,” I reply, another lie that isn’t exactly a lie.
“Like a wild animal? A prowler?”
“Um, yes?”
“And you thought you’d go out there and check it out all on your own without waking me up?” Mom asks. “That seemed like a good idea to you?”
She pushes past me and flings open the door, leaning from the threshold into the damp night. A breeze wafts the hem of her flannel robe as she cranes her head left and right, searching the dark for the same danger she’s mad at me for investigating. I peer from behind her, but there’s still no sign of the broken boy. Mom closes the door and pushes one final gust of the night breeze past our feet. She turns to me.
“So are you going to give me a real answer?” she asks and crosses her arms.
“Which, um, which question?” For someone who has no rhythm, I’m getting pretty good at dancing around giving her the full story.
Mom takes two quick strides toward me and grasps my shoulders, which makes me flinch. My head is still swimming from what happened outside.
“Gus,” she says, “you could have been stuck out there all night. It gets cold this close to the Sound! Colder than you think, especially at night with the wind.” She looks down. “And with no shoes!”
If only she knew that so much worse than being cold could have happened.
She’d know if you would tell her, dummy.
“I know,” I say, curling my toes. “It was stupid.”
Again, not a lie. Mom lets go of my arms.
“I don’t know about this place at all,” she says, finally sounding a little more like Mom and less like a flannel-clad-early-morning-banshee.
“Okay,” I say, not sure where this is headed.
Her brow furrows. “I don’t know how to keep you safe.”
I don’t know why hearing her say this makes me feel so guilty, but it does.
“Mom, I’m fine. Nothing happened—”
“But it could have,” she cuts me off.
“Okay,” I say again. There’s nothing more to say, really.
“You’re spending the rest of the night upstairs,” she says.
“But there’s no place for me to—”
“My room,” she says.
“On the floor?”
“You’re really going to argue with me?”
No, I’m not. I don’t like having to be under Mom’s supervision, but her room also means I’m safe from the broken boy, and to be honest, I really don’t want to be downstairs by myself. So I make a little nest on the floor of her room out of some blankets and try to tell myself it’s comfortable enough to sleep on, but I’m a bad liar, even to myself. Which I guess is why I can’t make myself believe it’s any safer in Mom’s room than it is downstairs by the sewing room or the cemetery or the front porch.
From where I’m “sleeping,” I have a perfect view straight down the darkness of the hallway leading to the tiny arched door that let the ghost out. For the rest of the night, I expect every sound will be the sound of him coming back home.