Shallow Grave (3 page)

“Yeah, but…”

“But nothing, man. You just about gave me a coronary.” My heart's beating a frenzied rhythm somewhere around my molars. I bend over and pick up the tarp I dropped when she screamed.

“But…” Shannon says. She tears her eyes away from the door and looks at me. “You propped it open, Elliot.”

She looks back at the door. “With a cinderblock.”

Chapter Five

It wasn't a cinderblock though. Not really. Just a big brick. Big enough to have stood up to the wind, I thought, but apparently not.

I guess one strong gust was all it took to just…tip it over.

It's freezing outside anyway, and there's not much daylight left, so I close the door all the way. There's a little hook-and-eye clasp on the inside. I drop the hook into the eye.

“There. No more banging,” I say. “We are locked in.”

I'm feeling a bit looser after that scare. And after our conversation. I might be stuck in a boathouse with a dorky punk chick, but it's actually more fun than…well, than cleaning my room and doing homework.

“I'm not so sure that's such a good thing,” Shannon says. She throws me a sidelong glance.

“What, being locked in?” I ask. “Why? You afraid of the boogeyman?”

“There's no such thing,” she says.

I open my mouth, but before I can say anything, my stomach growls. Loudly.

Shannon laughs.

“So maybe there's no boogeyman,” I say. “There is, however, such a thing as hunger.”

I pull out my phone and glance at it. 4:09. “You hungry?”

“I could eat,” she says. “I have pita and hummus from my lunch. Enough for two.”

“Pita and hummus,” I scoff. “How about Texas donuts?”

Shannon's mouth drops open. “You have Texas donuts?”

I nod. “Fresh from the fundraiser,” I say. “People who ordered but never picked up.” I realize how nerdy that must make me sound, especially to her. Fundraisers. Her kind don't exactly go in for that.

More like welfare.

As soon as I think it, the thought makes me ashamed. Until today, I'd never met anyone whose home life was like Shannon's.

If you can even call it a home life.

In fact, until today, I'd never really even talked to someone like Shannon. So who the hell am I to judge?

“Texas donuts,” Shannon is saying in a dreamy voice. “Act of god? Or pure karma?”

She's so bizarre.

I pull a cardboard sleeve from my bag and flip it open to reveal two gigantic donuts. They're squashed, and the cheap chocolate icing is sliding off the top, but we dig in like two starving animals.

Shannon looks around as she chews. “There's something weird in here.”

“Like what? Did you find a hair?”

“No,” she laughs.

She laughs a lot, but somehow the sound catches me by surprise every time.

“Not in the donut,” she says. “In the boathouse.”

“Think so?” I ask. I take another bite and look around. “Like?”

“I don't know. Something.”

“Well, there's the rats,” I say.

“No, no, more like…something else. A presence.”

“Maybe it's a ghost,” I say. “O-o-o-o.”

Shannon raises one perfect, dark eyebrow and fixes me with a stare. “Maybe it is.”

My turn to laugh. “Oh, come on. Do you actually believe in stuff like that?”

She shrugs. “Who's to say spirits don't exist?”

I roll my eyes. “Oh my god. So do you believe in
UFO
s too?” Come to think of it, she seems like the type to believe in anything.

She gives a little half smile. “Maybe.” She looks around the boathouse. I can see her forming an idea. When she turns back to me, her eyes are shining.

This can't be good.

“I have an idea,” she says.

Aaaaand there it is.

I speak slowly, imagining my words as a fine mist of wisdom heavy enough to weigh down her impulsivity. “Your ideas have been known to get people into trouble,” I say.

“I think we should make a Ouija board,” she says.

She's not feeling the mist.

“I think we should finish our work and go home.”

“No, no,” she says. “I want to see if there's something in here.”

I don't like the way this is headed.

“Those Ouija board things are bunk,” I say. “They don't even work.”

I have no idea if this is true. I'm grasping at straws here.

“Oh, they work all right,” she says. “I've done it before. It's freaky. The way the thing moves around all by itself and everything.”

I look at her. She looks like a kid who's just been told she's leaving for Disneyland tomorrow.

There's no way I'm going to be able to talk her out of this.

“Are you a glutton for punishment or something?” I say. “Weren't you just screaming in abject terror not five minutes ago because the door slammed?”

She laughs. “It wasn't
abject
. It just surprised me, is all.” She looks around. “But seriously, what if there is something here?” She takes another bite of donut and brushes a couple of crumbs from her lap.

I'm not sure what to think. Maybe she's one of those people who likes to feel bad things. Like when your braces get tightened and your whole jaw aches, but you still clench your teeth because you get off on the pain.

Okay, I'll admit I've done that.

Maybe I should just loosen up a bit, I think. Maybe it's not that big a deal. It's not like I've got any fantastic plans for later tonight anyway.

Besides, Ouija's just a party game. They sell it in boxes at Toys “R” Us, for god's sake. How real can it possibly be?

Chapter Six

Shannon finishes the rest of her donut. She crumples the paper towel and tosses it toward the door, where our garbage pile is growing.

Her tongue piercing flashes as she licks her fingers. I look away.

When I look back, she's sitting cross-legged, staring expectantly at me.

“What?” I ask. Maybe she saw me staring at her tongue.

“You ready?”

I sigh. “I see you don't know how to take no for an answer,” I say.

“No?” she says. She cocks her head and furrows her brows in mock confusion. “What's that?”

I fight a smile. “Fine. I'm down,” I say. “Let's just do it and get out of here.”

Shannon's face lights up, and she leans toward me. For a panicky second, I think she's going to kiss me and I try to think of what to do. Look away? Lean backward? Kiss her back? What do I do about the tongue thing?

But she doesn't kiss me. She puts both her hands on my knees and gives them a little squeeze.

I feel pretty dumb.

And a little disappointed.

Shannon grins and scrambles to her feet. “This is going to be so much fun!” she says.

“There's only one problem,” I say.

“What's that?”

“We don't have a Ouija board.”

Ha. See what she says to that.

She points to a nearby bin. “I saw some old chalkboards in here,” she says. “We'll use the back of one of those.”

“You can't do that,” I say. “Those don't belong to us.”

Shannon stares at me. “You can't be serious,” she says.

“I'm totally serious.” I'm not, really, but she already thinks I'm such a Goody Two-shoes. Maybe she'll agree with me and just forget about the whole idea.

“Then what else are we supposed to use?” she demands.

I shrug and look around. I point to the yearbook on the floor.

Her eyes follow my finger. “What? No way.” She sounds shocked, like I've just suggested she take all her clothes off and dance naked at the next assembly. “I just bought that today. That cost me fifty bucks! I'm not going to go marking it up with a Sharpie.”

The irony kills me. “Oh, so you're okay with making a mess of other people's stuff, but not your own?”

She opens her mouth, then closes it again. She raises her chin and looks at me.

“We'll use chalk.” Her eyes dare me to argue.

There's no winning.

She reaches into the bin. Her hand pops back out holding up a flat board about the size of a breakfast tray.

“This,” she says, handing it to me, “is perfect.”

“Wow,” I say, turning the board around in my hands. “It's so old school. How does it work?”

“No idea. I can't find the power button.”

I laugh. I try not to notice her eyes lighting up.

“So you can actually just…make a Ouija board?” I say. “I thought you had to buy them.”

“They're actually more effective when they're made by hand,” Shannon says. “More powerful.”

“Are we going for powerful?”

She doesn't answer. Just motions for me to put the board down on the floor. She turns back to the bin and digs around until she comes up with a short stick of chalk.

“You've done this before?” I ask. She kneels on the floor beside me. I watch as she bends her head and writes YES in the top left corner.

“Couple times,” she says. She writes NO in the top right, then drops down a line and starts writing the letters of the alphabet.

“What's it like?”

Shannon's concentrating on making her letters neat and evenly spaced. She touches her tongue to her upper lip as she works. I think about that metal barbell again.

She finishes the first row, A through K, and sits up straight. “It's cool,” she says. “But it can be kind of scary too. You have to stay in control of the board at all times. You can't just take your hands off, or walk away. There's rules.”

“Yeah, but you're no good at following rules,” I say.

“Shut up!” She boots me in the ankle. “I know how to follow rules. I just choose which ones are important. And which ones aren't.” She gives me a meaningful look.

Her earlier jab hangs between us, unspoken. I let it.

“Why's it so important to keep your hands on the board?” I ask. “Do things get out of control if you don't?”

She starts on the second row. The letters follow a slight curve, like a rainbow.

“Don't know. I've never taken my hands off,” she says. Her hand moves smoothly as she writes. P. Q. R. S. She's careful not to smudge the other letters as she works.

“You ever had weird things happen while you're doing it?” I've heard the stories people tell. The one where people were doing Ouija and something fell on the floor upstairs. When they went to investigate, they found that a Bible had fallen off a shelf.

I'd also heard the story about the two long claw marks found on the back of a basement door.

And the two trees that fell side by side at the same time, smashing a garage to pieces. Strong trees. No wind.

All different stories. I'd always dismissed them as crap.

But now, sitting in the gloom of an old boarded-up boathouse with the cold seeping through the cracks in the floor, I'm not so sure.

Shannon finishes the second row and straightens. “Yeah, I've had freaky things happen,” she says, studying the board. “One time the spirit I was talking with wouldn't say goodbye.”

“So? What's the big deal with saying goodbye?”

“Well, when you use a Ouija board, you're opening a portal to the spirit world,” Shannon replies. She bends forward to start on the final few letters. “Maybe you get a friendly one, and maybe you don't. It's hard to tell. But friendly or not, you still have to say goodbye.”

“Yeah, but can't you just take your hands off the board? Break the connection or something?”

She shakes her head. “No, because remember? Then you're giving up control. Leaving the portal open. And if you don't close out your session with an actual goodbye that the board consents to, you can't close the portal.” She writes the digits one through zero near the bottom of the board.

I snort. “What, so you leave open the door to hell?”

Shannon blows the chalk dust away, then glances up at me. “You might.”

I feel a chill.

“Almost done,” she says.

Then I think of something. “Won't the chalk wipe off?” I ask.

She answers without looking up. “Better hope not.”

On the bottom left-hand side of the board, Shannon neatly letters HELLO.

On the right, she prints GOODBYE.

Chapter Seven

By the time the board's ready for action, I'm ready to pack it in. My feet are freezing, and my adrenal glands are pumping out enough juice to fuel sixty thoroughbreds on a long-distance race.

“Okay,” Shannon says. “We need to find something that will work as a planchette.”

“A what?”

“The thing you put your fingers on. The thing that slides around the board.” She looks around. “A lid would work.”

I guess we're really going through with this.

“How about the cap to a bleach bottle? There's some homemade bailers over there,” she says, nodding to a cardboard box in the corner. “They've all got caps on the bottom.”

I go and retrieve one of the bailers. I unscrew the white lid from the plastic neck and hand it to Shannon. She places it on the board and motions for me to sit across from her. I do.

“Okay, so. Ground rules,” she says.

I nod.

“First, no taking your hands off the cap.”

“Or else we'll lose control and Satan will enter the room.”

Shannon slaps at my arm. “Stop saying that!” But there's a smile in her eyes. “Second, I'll ask the questions.” She gives me a pointed look. “It's important to be respectful and polite.”

I raise an eyebrow. “And you think that's a problem for me?”

“You're a smart-ass, Elliot. If I let you run this session, you'll get us both killed.”

I sigh.

“And third, don't ever do it alone,” she says. “Not that you'll be alone today. But if you ever do it again.”