Fifteen

FIFTEEN

I wake up, gasping and shaking. My hands immediately fly to the nightstand for my inhaler and then stop as I realize it's not my lungs causing the problem. I catch my breath while I sit up, head dropped into my hands, my heart pounding as if I'm back in that clearing, watching Patrice walk out, hearing her words from earlier that evening.

Roddy gets up and walks into the forest. He doesn't say a word. He just stands up and walks into the darkness.

Heather and I had gone after Patrice that night. It'd seemed simple enough to catch up, but in our haste, we hadn't grabbed our flashlights, so we were staggering through pitch-dark forest. The obvious answer would have been to return for a light. At the very least, we should have stopped to listen for her. We were too panicked for that, too certain she had to be right there.

While it probably only took ten minutes to find Patrice, it felt like hours, stumbling and smacking into trees and calling her name. Then there'd been a whistle, and we'd run toward it and found Patrice still marching through the forest.

When we caught up with her and shook her, she…

I can't say she snapped out of it. That would imply she woke abruptly. Instead, she half surfaced from whatever world she'd been in, just enough to acknowledge us.

Confused and docile, she'd wordlessly followed us to the car. We all had our licenses—you could get them at fifteen in Alberta—but only Heather really drove. She dropped me off at my place first.

I should have insisted on helping her take Patrice home. But I'd only been relieved that I didn't need to explain anything to Patrice's parents.

I was racked by guilt for letting Patrice take those mushrooms. I'd been sure the drugs had put her in that state. All those antidrug lessons left me with one message: Drugs bad. Drugs could mess you up permanently. Just one dose, and if things went wrong, you'd never come back from that trip.

I know better now, but at the time, I'd been convinced the mushrooms did that to Patrice. As for those voices and footfalls in the forest? No one was talking about that.

It was a week before I saw Patrice again. A week where she'd been kept home from school, and we weren't allowed to visit, and I overheard my parents whispering about "psychiatric issues," but when I asked, they only said Patrice was unwell and I could see her as soon as her parents allowed it.

Then she appeared at school, standing on the edge of those damn woods.

At first, I thought I was imagining her or, worse, seeing her ghost.

She certainly looked like a ghost, pale and dressed in oversized sweats. I grabbed Heather, and we hurried over to see her. The closer we drew, the worse Patrice looked, her white skin nearly translucent, her eyes fever bright, the brown nearly black.

"We need to go back," she says, her voice a croak.

"Hey," I say. "Are you okay? We've been worried—"

She grabs my arm, ragged fingernails digging in and making me wince. "We need to go back. Undo it."

"Undo what?"

"It… got into me." She claws at her throat. "Need to get it out. Send it back."

"Send it back?"

At the time, I'd felt weirdly calm, as if this were a normal conversation. Now, looking back after twenty-two years, I don't see a calm and collected teenage Janica. I see a girl in shock, fixated on how sick her friend looks, unable to comprehend what she's saying.

In that moment, I would have done anything to help. Whatever happened in that forest was my fault. I didn't stop my friends from taking the drugs, and now something had happened to Patrice.

"Please," she says, tears spilling over her cheeks. "Help me get rid of it."

Get rid of what? That was the obvious question, and I've always wondered why I never asked. Now I realize I didn't want to ask because I suspected the answer. Patrice thought we'd raised something in that forest. Like the kids at that bonfire twenty years before us. We'd raised whatever had possessed Roddy to murder his girlfriend.

I knew Patrice was wrong. The only thing that got into her was those drugs. Drugs and the power of suggestion, and if we'd heard something that night, something that sounded like Roddy calling Samantha, it was a shared hallucination.

A shared auditory hallucination.

"What do you need us to do?" I ask.

"Come back to the forest with me. Tonight. Help me get rid of it."

I look at Heather, silent until now. She nods mutely, her eyes dark with worry.

I don't want to go back into that forest. Forget the fact that I had neatly explained away what happened. My brain might say Patrice was suffering the aftereffects of a bad trip, but my gut told me never to step in there again.

I didn't have a choice, though. Not if I wanted to help Patrice.

"Okay," I say. "We'll do it."

Later, I wake again, this time to a creaking noise. Not a creaking floorboard or door, but what sounds like a pulley in need of greasing.

The sound of a dumbwaiter, creaking up on its rope.

I groan and bury my head in my pillow. Isn't that exactly what Jin joked about? The ghostly dumbwaiter creaking upward in the night?

I pull the pillow away. Silence. There. See? I roll my eyes at myself and flip onto my back.

Creak. Creak.

With another groan, I lift my head. What is it with nights in this house, my imagination going into overdrive?

Because I'm not well. Mentally not well.

I grit my teeth. No, I'm emotionally and psychologically not well. I lost my husband, not my mind.

Creak. Creak.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," I mutter, and roll out of bed.

I know I'm imagining this because there is no dumbwaiter in that damn shaft, but apparently, I'm going to need to prove that to myself before I can sleep.

"Feels a lot like déjà vu," I mutter as I cinch my wrapper and stomp into the hall.

Where does that dumbwaiter come out up here? I heard the sound somewhere behind my headboard and…

And that's where I see the panel inset in the wall.

Which proves nothing because I've passed it dozens of times and subconsciously registered that it was there, putting the shaft right behind my headboard.

I march over and peer at the panel. The one on the main level opens easily, but with this one it takes me a moment to find the latch. Finally, I do, and I swing the hatch open… to see a pitch-black shaft.

Damn it, I'm going to need my phone's light.

Stomp back into my room, heading for the nightstand where I plugged it…

My phone isn't there. For a split second, paranoia washes through me. Someone took—

No, I don't remember plugging it in last night. So where did I leave it?

Forget that. There's a penlight in the drawer for power outages. I snatch it out, check that it works, and stride back into the hall.

At the dumbwaiter, I need to duck my head in to get a look upward. I expect the shaft to stop right above this spot, but it continues up to the attic, and I can see the pulley is there, but there's very clearly nothing attached to it—not a dumbwaiter and not even a rope for the pulley.

With a growl at my treacherous imagination, I start back out. As I do, the weak penlight shines down and…

There's something down there. Way down there, past the main floor. Something pale.

Thoughts of Brodie Kilmer flash, and my heart jams into my throat. We'd said the shaft was too small for him to climb, but what if he tried? What if he got wedged in there?

I shine the light straight down, and what I see isn't a person.

It's a piece of paper. No, it's a newspaper, an old one, seeming to float in the shaft. The front page of a newspaper with two photos on it. Photos of girls. One blond and one brunette.

Jin's ghost story bubbles up in my brain. The photograph of the two victims. I stretch my arm down for a better look and—

My breath catches, and my heart seems to stop.

It's not the newspaper article from Jin's story. It's the one from mine. School photos of Patrice and Heather smile up at me, under a headline half lost in the shadows, the remaining words seeming to leap from the page.

Teen Girls

Satanic Ritual

Horrific Murder

I yank back, heart racing. I squeeze my eyes shut. I'm imagining this. I must be.

Plink. Plink.

The sound of drips hitting distant paper. I brace myself and lean into the shaft again. Spots of red bleed into the newspaper below. Crimson red.

Blood splashed through a forest clearing.

I start to back out, but a drop from above hits me and I drop the penlight and stumble backward into the opposite wall. My hand flies to my face and finds a damp spot, but when I pull back my fingers, nothing's there.

I run my hands over my face, as if I've missed the spot, and then I stare down at them.

Nothing.

I run into my room and into the bathroom, flicking on the light. Then I stare at my face in the mirror. There's a damp spot on my cheek, but it's clear, like water, with no trace of red. All I see is my own wild-eyed face, drooping and drawn with exhaustion, giving me a preview of what I'll look like in five years.

The haggardness reminds me of Keith… and I remember where I left my phone. Downstairs after texting him.

I turn around and—

My foot flies out, the bathroom rug yanked from under it, and I crack down to one knee, my hand braced on porcelain.

I grit my teeth, pain blocking everything for a second. Then I look to see my hand on the freestanding tub and realize if I hadn't caught the edge, I'd have smashed my head on it.

Bathroom falls. One of the leading causes of accidental death at home. The other one being falls down the stairs… which I'd almost done last night.

I shake my head. I need to be more careful. Obviously, in my haste, I'd slipped on…

I see the bathroom mat, wrinkled and lying against the wall. Then I remember what I felt. One foot touching down, the other rising, the mat yanked sideways. And that's where it lies—to the side, not behind me, where it would have gone if I slipped. To the side, as if yanked from under me.

I stay on one knee, catching my breath as paranoia seizes my brain in icy claws. I thought someone grabbed my shirt on the stairs last night. I just felt the rug yanked from under my feet.

And the dumbwaiter. That old newspaper article in the dumbwaiter shaft.

I need a photo of it. I have to prove it's there.

Who am I going to show it to? Jin, Shania, Cirillo… three people who know nothing of my past?

I'm going to show it to myself. Just prove I saw it… and then figure out who the hell put it there. Because no one in this house is supposed to know my past, but someone obviously does.