One Hundred Candles [2] (4 page)

four

Everyone knows a ghost story. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who has seen or heard or felt something that just didn’t make sense, something unexplainable. For some reason, these stories tend to take place at night, in dark and isolated spots. Those stories never scared me. I understood that nine times out of ten there was a rational explanation behind the occurrences that tended to freak other people out. I knew that you could walk away, and leave the supernatural behind you.

For the most part.

But the things that could follow you home, the things that weren’t looking for a home but rather a living person to reside with—well, those stories were creepier. Thankfully, most of the tales being told around the flickering candles were garden variety ghost stories: something white and hazy descending a staircase at midnight, the outline of an old woman gliding through a wall and more than a few about footsteps heard pacing around empty attics.

Everyone knew a ghost story. And, according to the rules of the game, everyone had to share their most terrifying tale.

Or else.

After the initial uneasy feeling of coming across a group of our classmates sitting in a candlelit circle had worn off, I was able to focus on Gwyn, the girl from my history class. She was long and lean and wore her dark brown hair cut in a sharp bob that framed her face. I don’t think we’d ever spoken to one another. She played on the girls’ basketball team and had always seemed kind of serious in class, but that was all I knew about her. Harris had said her family was away. I wondered why she had chosen to stay behind in the huge house.

“The rules are simple,” Gwyn told us. The group of about a dozen people made room for us, and I sat in between Harris and Avery, with Noah sitting on the other side of Avery. “You have to describe, in as much detail as possible, an unexplained or paranormal experience that you or someone very close to you has experienced. After you finish your story, light a candle in front of you.” Gwyn waved a hand over the twenty or so candles still unlit. “Our goal is to tell a hundred stories and light a hundred candles. After all the candles have been lit, we will have a hundred spirits in the room with us.”

“And then what?” Noah asked. I detected a note of skepticism in his voice.

Gwyn sat in a lotus position and folded her hands. “And then we watch what happens.”

We’ll be watching for a long time,
I thought.
Nothing is going to happen.
I wished Harris hadn’t brought me here. Not only was it a waste of time, but it was exactly the kind of thing my parents frowned upon. More than frowned, actually. They basically forbid Annalise and I to ever participate in games like this, if you could call them games. Dad thought participation in any kind of weird ritual had the potential to hurt our family’s reputation as scientific debunkers. Mom would be angry, too, but for different reasons. She believed that while games like Ouija boards weren’t “real,” they could stir up dormant energy. Basically, she felt you could open yourself up to negative energy, inviting it into your life. Dad agreed with this, but didn’t believe it as wholeheartedly as Mom. Either way, they would be more than a little disappointed if they knew I was here.

I thought about Dad calling me a kid, and the way he had droned on and on about Ohio. I felt strangely pleased with myself for participating in something that he would be furious about if he knew.
Ignorance is bliss,
he’d said. Fine. I would apply his logic: if he didn’t know I was delving into stupid games, then he wouldn’t be hurt. Not that I cared if he was.

“It’s good that you guys are here,” someone said. I looked over and saw Callie, a friend of Avery’s and mine. “We were running out of stories,” she explained.

Harris reached toward an unlit candle. “I’ll go first.”

“Remember,” Gwyn said. “It has to be a true story, something that actually happened to you or someone you know. And it’s better if it actually happened to you. One fake story can mess up the whole thing.” She looked directly at me. “And we’re not here to judge. We simply listen. No questions. Understood?”

Gwyn stared at me. I stared back until I couldn’t take it any longer and looked down. It felt like she was accusing me of something.

“We get it.” Harris furrowed his brow. “This happened when I was little,” he said. “My grandma had this dog. It was a white poodle and she loved it, treated it like her own kid. It would always claw at my legs under the dining room table when we ate dinner at her house, trying to get me to feed it scraps. I hated that because then my leg would be all scratched up afterwards.” He paused. “Well, the dog got really old and died. A few months later, we were having dinner with my grandma and I felt this tugging at my pants. I looked down and there was nothing there. But it felt like the dog, like it was begging for food. That night, I was getting ready for bed and I saw it.”

“The dog?” someone asked.

Gwyn immediately shushed them. “No questions allowed,” she hissed.

Harris shook his head. “Not the dog. My leg.” He looked up. “My leg was covered with long red scratches.” After a moment, he leaned forward and lit his candle, then pushed the votive toward the center of the circle and handed me the lighter.

I picked up a candle. “This is gonna be good,” someone whispered. Suddenly, I wanted to leave. I could almost feel the expectations people had built for me and knew how they were waiting for me to come through, to tell them some ridiculously scary tale. Most of my stories weren’t that scary, though. Not to me, at least. Most of the things I had witnessed could be explained.

“I’ll tell one from when I was little, too,” I began. I had to think another minute, which I guessed people interpreted as dramatic suspense, but really, I just needed to come up with something that truly was unexplained. Something distant, I thought. I did not want to bring up Charleston, and I was hoping that Avery and Noah wouldn’t, either.

I cleared my throat. “Once, my sister and I were with our parents while they were investigating an old prison. It was daytime, and Annalise and I were walking down a hallway, just talking, when she stopped and touched the back of her hair. I was about to ask her what was wrong when I felt it, too.” I looked around the circle of my classmates. They were all watching me. “I felt a hand tug my ponytail. Hard, like someone wanted my attention badly. My sister and I ran as fast we could to get out of there.

“The thing is, when I asked my sister what she had felt, she had a different story. Her hair wasn’t pulled. Instead, she said it felt like someone’s cold fingers lightly grazing the back of her neck.”

Afterward, Annalise had demonstrated what the touch had felt like, and it still sent shivers down my spine. The sensation made me think of a tarantula climbing down my back. I lit my candle and added it to the circle. Then I passed the lighter to Avery, who started telling her story without hesitation.

“My mom and I were on vacation a few years ago. We used to always rent a bungalow near Myrtle Beach. One year, the house we were staying in felt weird. There was something not quite right, you know?” She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “The sink would turn on by itself, usually late at night, but sometimes in the daytime, too. We had a plumber come out and everything, but he couldn’t find a problem. The faucet would start running, and it wouldn’t stop until one of us got up and turned it off. We didn’t go back to that house.”

I tried to look around the room without moving my head much. About half the faces were familiar to me, mainly seniors I had classes with. I was surprised to see Bliss Reynolds sitting in the circle. Bliss and I had AV class together, and we weren’t exactly friends. I was under the impression that she was not a believer in anything even remotely paranormal, but she was sitting there with three lit candles placed directly in front of her.

Noah was next. I cringed, wondering if the events of Charleston were about to be revealed to our classmates. If people heard about the Circle of Seven and the ethereal lights we had witnessed, I would be inundated with questions and the kind of odd and unwelcome attention I thought had been put to rest for a while.

“We’ve lived in the same house since I was a baby,” Noah began. “And while I was growing up, we had the same neigh bor. Her name was Agnes, and she used to babysit me while my mom was at work.”

I felt relief as I listened to Noah. I was also curious. We’d had several discussions about the paranormal, but he’d never mentioned anything about his neighbor.

“Agnes was old, and we always made sure she was okay. My brothers would run errands for her and change light bulbs, stuff like that. In return, she was always giving us peaches.” He smiled. “She grew peach trees in her backyard, and she’d can the fruit and make jam and preserves and pies. Her house always smelled like peaches.

“She got cancer and died five years ago. We all took it hard, my mom especially. About a month later, we were talking about her, and after a few minutes, we could smell peaches. It was the strangest thing because it was winter and we were inside and there was just no way, you know? It was like someone had sprayed peach air freshener in the room, it was so strong.”

Noah reached for his candle. Before he lit it, he stopped. “It happened a few more times after that. We would be talking about her, and the room would smell like peaches. And once, when I was just
thinking
about her, it happened.” He lit the candle. “But it hasn’t happened in years. I think she went away.”

Bliss reached across the circle, and Noah gave her the lighter. “Last year, I went with the girls’ basketball team to a school about thirty miles from here for a game. I was covering the game for the school paper. It was raining really hard, and when we got to the school, the roof over the gym was leaking, and they were going to have to forfeit.

“We had to wait in the school library to see if we were going to play or not. Everyone was kind of grumpy. We were sitting there when we heard a thump. It sounded like something fell and hit the carpet, but we didn’t see anything. Every few minutes, though, we’d hear another thump.”

Everyone watched Bliss with the same solemn expression. I wondered how long they had been assembled here, telling their stories. It had to take hours to get through a hundred of them.

“One of the coaches came by to tell us the game was cancelled,” Bliss continued. “He came in a different door than we had, so he passed by the bookshelves where we had heard the noises. He got upset. He started yelling at us about how we should respect school property. We had no idea what he was talking about, of course.”

Bliss looked around the circle. “As we were leaving, we saw what he meant. There were books lying all over the floor between the stacks. Books that had come from some of the top shelves. And none of us had been anywhere near those shelves.”

I thought Bliss was trying too hard to make her voice sound dramatic, but other people nodded and seemed impressed.

“But the really weird thing was that all of the books were open and turned to page fifty-five.”

She lit her candle. I counted the remaining votives. There were eleven left, and I was glad we had arrived so late in the game. Sitting around coming up with stories was tough, but listening to a hundred? No, thanks.

The next few anecdotes involved incidents I’d heard about a thousand times. A boy claimed that he could hear a baby crying in the basement of his uncle’s house. A girl felt like someone was following her up a staircase where she worked. Others knew people who had witnessed wispy white ghosts or felt cold spots in otherwise warm rooms.

As I listened, I automatically debunked these stories in my head. Most of them were caused by the environment where they took place. Old paint and different kinds of mold could trigger intense hallucinations or strong feelings in otherwise normal, healthy people. Bad wiring and electrical problems also contributed to unexplained anxiety or even the sensation that someone was standing close by. And nine times out of ten, cold spots were simply drafts that no one had detected before. I had helped my parents with literally thousands of investigations, and over ninety percent of the time, there was nothing truly paranormal about what was happening, even if it seemed really spooky. Of course, it only took one seriously supernatural incident to shake you to the bones.

Soon, only two candles remained. No one was volunteering, and I guessed it was because they’d already exhausted every story they knew. Gwyn had jokingly called us “fresh victims,” but, as the silence stretched, I knew that everyone was counting on us to come up with the final two tales.

I pulled a candle toward me and described a memory from when I was younger and we lived in an old Victorian-era house. “The rocking chair would move by itself, like someone was sitting there,” I explained. “It happened all the time, usually right after dinner.”

As I lit my candle, I wondered if I had broken the rules of the game. I had told the truth, but Gwyn had asked for stories of the unexplained, and honestly, the rocking chair wasn’t totally paranormal. According to my parents, it moved because of residual energy. People who had lived in the house long before us had probably owned a rocking chair. Someone had likely sat in that chair every day after dinner for years, until the basic, repetitive act of rocking became its own kind of energy, and that energy imprinted itself upon the house. There was no human spirit residing in our living room, merely a thread of the past replaying itself over and over.

One candle remained. I was ready for the game to be over so we could turn on all the lights and go back across the street to celebrate the New Year. We’d been sitting in the circle for about an hour, and I was more than ready to get up, stretch my legs and even return to the noise and chaos of Harris’s house. It would feel normal, at least, to cram myself into a packed living room instead of listening to the quiet fears of others.

I was about to get it over with and take the last votive when someone else reached for it. I sat back and watched as Gwyn claimed the final candle.