The Ghost Files (12 page)

“I’m sorry, Squirt.”

“Don’t be,” I gave him my best and brightest and falsest grin. “I’m fine.”

“You’re always fine, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am. Now let’s get out of here, before Oliver decides to come through the door.”

He laughs softly and follows me to the kitchen, but I stop suddenly. There is something odd. The lime green walls are a little hazy now, almost like they’re shimmering. I cock my head and watch. The edges of the walls fade and it looks like I can see what I would call snow. The hazy snow of late winter. It’s eating the wall up and I shiver. Things flicker in the snow, shadows of things I can’t quite see. I take a step forward the snow branches out, creeping to the other wall where the fridge is. I’ve never seen anything like this before. What is it? The closer I get, the more I want to touch it. By the time I am standing a few inches from the wall, my hand is going up, fingers outstretched.

My fingertips graze the snowy wall. Screaming goes off in my head and I stumble back, falling to my knees. My stomach heaves from the force of the pain. I can hear Dan shouting at me, but the sound is faint; I can barely breathe past the screaming in my head. Then I look up and all I can see is the snow all around me. The world is covered in it. I try to stand and fall forward instead… and keep falling.

Then land face down on hard concrete. Ouch. That hurt.

I hear a hissing sound and push myself up.

Oliver.

Chapter Fourteen

Fudgepops, fudgepops, fudgepops.

Oliver is slowly winding his way towards me. I don’t know a whole lot about snakes, but the one thing I do know is that Oliver can wrap that body of his around me and crush me to death. I remember that from watching Animal Planet.

I push myself slowly up and wince. Yeah, of course, I banged my head pretty hard when I fell. And think my ankle is throbbing. Great. There’s blood oozing down the side of my face, too. Can snakes smell blood? Or is that sharks? Who cares? Panic is setting in full force. I can hear my heart pounding in my ears.

Calm, down. You’re a tough chickie. You haven’t survived the system just to get eaten by a freaking snake.
You’ll be fine. I scoot backwards. I have to get up and run before Oliver can reach me. This is so not good. I’m giving that old woman a piece of my mind when I get out of here! Big time!

My first instinct is to yell for Dan, but if I do that, Oliver there might decide he’s especially hungry for one terrified girl. I’m not sure the snake can actually hear me, but it’s not a chance I’m willing to take. Instead I look around, remembering the layout of the basement I’d just explored. I’m in the back corner, right under the kitchen. The stairs leading up to the main room is two rooms over. I can make a run for it, but my ankle is throbbing. I might have sprained it in the fall. No way am I gonna sit here and be snake food.

So I slowly scoot backwards towards the open door. I know the small bathroom is just outside this room. If I can make it to there, I can close the door on the snake and hopefully Dan will figure out where I am. But if he does, he’ll have to deal with Oliver too. Double fudgepops. Why, oh why, did I even try to help that old coot? I should just have stuck with my policy of ignoring the spooks. My life was a whole lot less complicated before. Stupid ghosts.

Oliver keeps up his slow and steady slithering while I speed up my scooting, afraid to take my eyes off the snake. I might be going in the wrong direction. No help for it, I have to take a peek behind me. Do it quickly. Okay, I’m so close! Only a few more feet.

“Mattie!”

Oh no. Dan is yelling, but the snake doesn’t look overly agitated. It’s still coming at me, mind you, but no faster than before. My hand finally hits what feels like tile instead of the hard concrete of the rest of the floor. Great. I shove myself through the doorway and gratefully slam the door. Safe. I’m safe.

“Mattie!” There is panic in his voice. He sounds closer. The snake. He needs to get back upstairs.

“Dan,” I shout through the door. “I’m okay, don’t come down here. The snake is right outside the bathroom door.”

“How did you get down there?”

Good question. I have no idea. “No clue!” I yell. “Any idea how to get me out of here?”

“Wait for the snake to wander away and make a run for it.’

“Nope, can’t. Think I sprained my ankle.”

“Just sit tight,” he yells at last. “I’ll figure something out.” I can hear him stomping back up the stairs. I have a feeling snakes terrify him as much as they do me. It almost makes me want to chuckle – almost, if not for the ten-foot, god-only-knows-what pound snake sitting right outside the door, waiting for me to come out.

How
did
I get down here? One minute I was in the kitchen and the next I was on the basement floor just a few feet from Oliver. It has to have been the snowy stuff. As soon as I touched it, pain exploded and then bam! I was here. But that doesn’t make sense. How could
that
have caused me to fall through the floor? The floor would have to have disappeared in order for me to be able to fall through it – and
that
didn’t happen. Or did it?

I’m so out of my depth with this spook stuff. All I want is for everything to go back to the way it was. I just want the ghosts to go away, for me to be able to ignore them, and get back to a semi-normal life. I wish I didn’t have this cursed gift. It sucks royally.

That thought causes me to think of my mom. Was that why she started to do drugs? Had she seen the ghosts too? Did shooting up keep them away? Did she try to kill me to protect me from this? These questions I have asked myself for years and as always, I have no answer. I don’t really know why those questions pop up at such random times, but I guess because they are always lurking
in
the back of my mind.

Sighing, I pull myself up, sit on the toilet and inspect my ankle. I wince. There’s a knot the size of a small baseball already forming and the skin is starting to bruise. Nasty sprain. Well fudgepops. How am I going to explain this to Jake? No way can I hop to the movies now. He’s already jealous of Dan and now when he finds out I spent the morning with him, it could get ugly.

After about twenty minutes of sitting and twiddling my thumbs, I get impatient. No, sitting idly and hoping someone will save me isn’t my style. I have always saved myself and right now isn’t any different. Okay… I hop to the door and crack it open. No sign of Oliver. Is it safe to try a hobble to the stairs? It’s only one room over. I set my foot down and put weight on it. Pain shoots up my leg into my hip. Uh, no. Crap. I ease off the pressure. Definitely a no-go. Pain I don’t do in any way shape or form.

I can still hop, though. I cut my foot going out the window in Jersey when I ran away. I had to hop and hobble to the train station and managed just fine. What is one snake compared to a fifteen-mile walk on a foot that ended up with nine stitches? I can do this. Maybe.

The door makes an awful creaking sound when I open it wider. I do a careful search of the surroundings for the snake, but can’t see him. Maybe he went back to his furnace. I can only hope so, then take one careful hobble and wait. No hissing. Now that I’m outside of the safety of the bathroom, of course, I get nervous. If I fall and can’t get up in time, the snake will wrap around me and it’ll be game over. I swallow, jump another step and listen.

Silence.

So far so good. Another hop, this one bigger than the last. I’m about ten feet from the bathroom door, but at least another ten or fifteen from the door leading into the main room of the basement where the stairs are. Oliver’s furnace is the next room over, to my right. He seems to be staying put. Maybe he found a rat or something to munch on.

Four more jumps and I’m at the door to the main room. Yes. I did it.

The hissing starts and I turn in time to see the snake slinking out from under the stairs. Well darn it. So much for that. Now can I make a run for it on one leg? That is the question. No. But I can jump. I turn without another look at the snake and start jumping.

It slithers between my foot and the one I have slightly raised and startles me enough to fall flat on my butt. The snake turns before I can get up, but I try anyway. It’s on me before I can even stand. Its body starts to wind around my legs. I can feel the pressure of it beginning to tighten as more of it winds up my body.

“DAAAAAAAAN!!!” The head, where’s the head? I look for it, trying not to panic any more than I am. The snake will only respond to panic by increasing more pressure. I reach out blindly, trying to find a weapon, but there’s nothing. Why couldn’t I have just stayed in the stupid bathroom? I can see those little beady eyes drawing closer, its tongue flickering in and out of its mouth. Oliver’s mouth opens and I see those awful sharp teeth.

“DAN, DAN, DAN, DAN, DAAAN!”

The upstairs door flies open and there are footsteps pounding down the stairs. Men in brown uniforms are there, harnessing the snake’s head mere inches from my own. It hisses and only tightens its hold on me, truly crushing me. If they don’t get it off soon, I’m going to have broken bones. Then mercifully, the other one starts to unwind the snake and then I’m free.

Dan is there, picking me up and carrying me upstairs. Tears slip free. I can’t help it. I’ve never been more scared in my life. Paramedics are there too, and a few police officers. Dan hands me off to one of the paramedics and runs back downstairs.

They check my leg and then tell me I’ll need to go the hospital to make sure nothing’s broken. Oh, great. It’s not often they get calls to check out crushing injuries due to a snake, they say. Well, it’s not often I’m near enough to a snake for a crushing injury, so we’re even. Plus, they want to make sure I don’t have a concussion. The paramedics load me up on the gurney and start hauling me out when I hear the other police officers start to question Dan as to why we were here in the first place. I can’t let him get in trouble for helping me.

“Excuse me, Officer?”  I make my voice as soft as I can. My face is streaked with tears and I know I have to be white as a ghost, no pun intended. “It’s not Dan’s fault. It’s mine.”

“Yours?” The officer who turns to me could be about his mom’s age. She looks concerned, but there is a slight frostiness to her eyes. Yup, Officer Dan is in big trouble.

“Yes, ma’am,” I nod. I close my eyes and concentrate for a moment and when I look up, there are tears in my eyes. “Ever since my foster sister went missing, I have been out just walking, hoping that if she did run away, that I can find her.”

The officer’s face softens. She can hear the pain in my voice. 

“I was walking by here and saw the door open. I thought someone might be trying to rob the place since Mrs. Roberts passed away. Dan was driving by and saw me looking in. He recognized me from the night my sister went missing. He stopped to ask what was going on and I told him that I thought someone had broken in. He TOLD me to stay put, not to go inside, but I didn’t listen to him. I went in and saw the basement door open. I wasn’t thinking clearly, I guess with Sally’s disappearance and all. I thought for just a second, maybe it was Sally. Maybe she broke in and just wanted a warm place to stay. I went downstairs and I heard Dan yelling at me to stop, but by then it was too late. I saw the snake and tripped. I barely made it to the bathroom.”

“You poor thing,” the officer says soothingly.

“I didn’t mean any harm,” I sniffle.  “I just wanted to find my sister.”

“Of course you did.”

“Dan told me to stay in the bathroom, that he’d get me out, but I just freaked out, you know? I couldn’t take it another minute. I had to get out. If I had listened to him in the first place none of this would have happened. I’m so sorry. None of this is his fault. It’s all mine. He didn’t do anything wrong.”

“It’s okay, honey,” she tells me.  “Let’s get you to the hospital and get you checked out, okay?”

I nod, satisfied that I’ve managed to thwart the worst of it. Dan is eyeing me with a new-found respect and just a hint of fear. I keep telling him I’m a really good liar. I wink at him as I go by. Now, how am I gonna explain all this to my boyfriend?

Chapter Fifteen

The cold is what wakes me. It’s dark so I don’t immediately recognize where I am, but the antiseptic smell reminds me that I’m in the hospital. No lights glimmer. It’s completely and utterly black. This can’t be good.

I try to sit up, but I can’t. It feels like there is some terrible weight pressing down on me and I remember Oliver. I open my mouth to shout for help, but no sounds come out. I struggle but soon wear myself out. Whatever holds me down is too strong. Panic sets in. I feel helpless and it’s not a feeling I’m used to nor is it one I enjoy.

There’s a light. I squint and can just make out the outline of the door. The light is a soft hazy blue. Instead of feeling relief, I’m scared. There is no brightness in that light. It feels like death, like a dark blanket covering everything, draining the life out the things around it. A dark and depressing weight seems to be in that light and I want to hide from it, pull the covers up over my head and pretend I don’t see it. I can’t though. I’m frozen.

The cold intensifies and the glow gets brighter and stronger the longer it pulses outside my door. It’s not going away and I can’t move, but I try. I am shouting even though the words don’t pass through my lips.

“Be quiet,” someone hisses. “It’ll see us.”

My head whips around, but I can’t see anyone. I try to speak again, but I can’t. What will see us?

“The reaper.”

Reaper? As in the Grim Reaper? The Angel of Death kind of reaper? Wait. I didn’t speak aloud. I was thinking. Who could hear my thoughts?

My door slowly opens and that light floods my room. I blink at the harshness of it. When I
can
see I look up. Standing in the doorway to my room is a figure wearing a black hooded robe. It points to me and whispers. I shake my head. I can’t understand a single word. Is that the Reaper?