CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER THREE
She dashed through the foyer and back out onto the porch, leaping down the stairs. She stopped, panting for breath, realizing that she had not been that scared in a very long time. It was embarrassing but also refreshing in a way she almost appreciated. She then looked all around, at the night falling along the edges of a porch where, sometime in the past, a man may or may not have hung himself.
Slowly, and with much embarrassment, Marie walked back toward the house. Fear still paraded in her heart, but she was aware of what could be at stake here. Twenty grand. A reputation…of sorts. In other words, too much. And for the first time this evening, she was actually
glad
that neither Mrs. Grace nor Brendan were there.
When she went back into the living room, Boo was there to greet her. He stayed by her side as she walked through the living room and into the kitchen. She didn’t have to scan the room for very long to see what had caused the noise. There was a crystal saltshaker in the middle of the kitchen floor. It had most definitely
not
been there when she and Boo had made their initial circuit of the house. The little shaker had not broken, but the lid had popped off. Salt had spilled out onto the floor. Boo slowly walked over to the salt, sniffed it, and then turned his head in disgust.
“Think it might have just fallen?” Marie asked.
This was more wishful thinking, as the pepper shaker that was its twin was on the side of the stove, at least four feet away.
Boo sniffed at the spilled salt again. He then looked up to his master and let out a little whine.
Marie shuddered and thought:
My sentiments exactly, boy.
Night settled in around Bloom Gardens and Rest like a dark sheet over a mattress, though there was nothing as comforting about it. Marie wasn’t exactly sure what she should be doing, as this was really Boo’s show. She was having a hard enough time convincing herself to stay in the house after having heard the stories from Mrs. Grace.
And the little scene with the saltshaker hadn’t helped, either.
Oh my God, what am I even doing here?
She saw a pie graph in her head that she tried to ignore, but it provided the answer. Ninety-eight percent of the pie chart was covered in green, pointing at the hefty payday. The other two percent was colored yellow and was labeled:
To impress Brendan.
Thinking of him, Marie took out her phone while standing in the kitchen and typed a much briefer text than she had planned. It read:
So…Mrs. Grace isn’t staying here. You knew this????
She figured he was busy with the convention and would not answer for a while, but she sent it anyway.
Or, rather, she tried to. She got the little dots, letting her know it was
trying
to send. But the message stayed there. She had a good signal and—
But as she watched, the signal was depleted from almost full to absolutely dead. The same thing happened to her battery indicator. As she held the phone, she watched the battery not just trickle away, but go from forty-five percent battery life to in the red within five seconds. And then the phone died altogether.
“What the hell?”
She’d never had a single problem with her phone. It was less than a year old and had always worked perfectly. It made her mind instantly jump to the next (not so) logical conclusion: it was the house. Somehow, the house or the supposed forces in it were manipulating her phone.
She left the kitchen, wondering if there was some sort of “dead spot” in the room. But the phone remained just as dead in the living room, the den, and the hallway.
As she slowly walked around the house with Boo by her side, she could instantly feel a shift to the place; it had become more noticeable after her phone went dead. She wasn’t necessarily getting those little cold chills anymore, but was instead experiencing a sluggishness. As she made her way down the hallways, checking each of the bedrooms, she almost started to feel as if the floor was made of hot rubber, making it harder for her to walk.
She kept thinking of what Brendan had told her—that he would not willingly send her into a situation where he thought there was a chance she might be hurt. She believed him, but also knew that their tolerances for frightening things were quite different.
She made two laps of the house, not sure what she was looking for. She was scared out of her mind with every step she took, but the part of her that remained an astute skeptic was determined to figure out what seemed so
off
about this house. During the time she spent walking around the house, it occurred to Marie that she could very well be wasting her time. After all…
she
did not have the supernatural powers here. It was Boo. And for all she knew, the act he’d let loose upon the forces at June Manor could have been a fluke. So, realizing just how useless she was in this scenario, Marie went back to the living room. She figured it might be best not to watch TV; she didn’t want to disrupt whatever ghosts or other forces were in the house. But at the same time, she couldn’t quite handle the silence of the house, either.
In the end, she opted to turn the TV on and keep the volume low. She noticed right away that Boo seemed restless. He would sit with her for a while and then get down to take a lap around the house. He did this for an hour, as Marie started watching another episode of
The Good Place.
It was one of her favorite shows but because she was scared and uncertain, she wasn’t finding it very comforting or funny.
It was already inching up to midnight and because she doubted she would be able to sleep, she figured she needed to try to keep her mind as focused as possible. With no phone and the drone of the TV not the best of mental exercises, she thought she might see what sort of books Mrs. Grace had lying around. She nearly got up to do this when she noticed that Boo was coming back into the room from one of his solo ventures.
He walked in a circle a few times and then settled at her feet. Apparently, he was done for the night and ready to sleep.
Good idea.
Marie felt her eyes drifting, drifting…and then she was out.
She jerked awake sometime later, having heard a noise from elsewhere in the house. She was shocked to find that she had drifted off—and even more shocked to find that the clock on the side table now read 3:07 AM.
She sat up, rubbing at her eyes and looking to the left, where she thought the sound had come from. As she looked out toward the hallway, she heard it again. She was right in that it was coming from that direction, but it also appeared to be coming from upstairs.
Boo walked toward the hallway and then looked back to her, as if to say:
Okay, lady, let’s do this.
Marie got up and silently thanked the dog for going first. She turned the lights on for the stairway and walked up behind Boo. As she saw the darkened upstairs hallway approaching, she was overcome with an old childhood fear of the dark. There was no telling what horrors waited up there, slobbering beasts ready to tear her apart, ghouls and goblins from under the earth, or—
Or nothing. She turned the light on and found an empty upstairs hallway. However, she did still hear the noise. It was a shifting sort of noise, like someone moving or sitting down on something soft.
It was coming from the first bedroom along the hallway, the one closest to her and Boo. The door was open and for the briefest of moments, Marie thought she could see
something
inside. The noise had been the creaking of bed springs and the ruffling of sheets—almost as if someone had been jumping on the bed. As she stood in the doorway, the wrinkled sheets, which had been perfectly straight when she’d come into the room the first time, made it quite clear that something had indeed been jumping on the bed.
“I guess that’s the friendly one,” Marie said.
Boo squeezed into the room between Marie’s legs and the doorframe. He looked around curiously, cocked his head, and started wagging his tail.
At that same moment, there was a soft sound from elsewhere in the house—the kitchen, it seemed. Two sounds, then three, close behind one another. It was an easy enough sound to identify; in fact, Marie had heard the exact same sound in June Manor on her first full day there. It was footsteps…a sound that was a bit menacing, as the only person in the house right now was currently standing in the upstairs hallway.
“And I suppose that would be the other one,” Marie said.
But then, as she was sure the footsteps had come from downstairs, they suddenly seemed to be in the hallway—just a few feet ahead of them. The hallway had grown cold and Marie was overcome with the sensation that they were definitely not alone.
Boo stood at her side, as solid and as rigid as a statue. His entire black body went rigid, his nose pointed outward as if he were some sort of well-trained hunting dog. His tail was slightly drooped between his legs, just as rigid as the rest of his body. A low growl started to come out of his throat, growing in volume with the passing of each second. He was facing the hallway, sniffing and slowly cocking his head back and forth.
Boo stood like that for about ten seconds before he took a few tentative steps further into the hallway. He glanced forward and then, as if someone had slapped him on the backside to go after something, he turned and leaped into the bedroom. His growl became something more menacing as he moved. Marie had never heard him make such a sound, and it chilled her.
Boo’s claws clicked furiously against the hardwood floor as he moved farther into the bedroom. As he went, Marie tried to tell herself that the cold gust of wind that swept across her body was only her imagination—but she knew it was not true.
Boo started to bark. There was no playfulness or joy in the barks. They were purely threatening, sounds of warning and danger. Marie stepped toward the doorway but paused, making sure to keep her distance and not interfere with whatever Boo was up to. While she did not like the idea of chasing after a dog that seemed to be on the hunt of a mean ghost, she also did not like the idea of missing out on the spooky excitement.
Boo’s barks were now more like a series of violent yelps. Marie thought it might be the canine equivalent of cursing someone out. He was currently standing very close to the rear wall. He was barking loudly into the corner, as if he had cornered some unfortunate prey. Of course, there was no one or nothing in that corner—just empty space.
Boo repositioned himself, this time facing the bed, and continued barking and yelping. Marie strained her eyes, trying to see what he might be barking at, but it did no good. For the slightest of moments, Marie thought she could see the sheets on the bed move, as if someone had slid across the bed. But it could have also been a trick of the eyes, deceived by Boo’s sudden and frantic motions.
At about that same time, Marie felt something cold pressing into her chest. It was startling, like being dropped into a frigid pool, but it was gone just as soon as it came. She took a single stumbling step backward and let out a gasp. Her breath was frozen in her lungs, but she was finally able to let it out when Boo went racing by her, back into the hall and down the stairs.
Marie followed him and by the time she reached the bottom of the stairs, Boo had stopped barking. He stared down the downstairs hall, back toward the living room. Slowly, his rigid posture relaxed. A small, thin whine came out of his throat, not one of sadness or pain, but something more like confusion.
Boo made a few steps toward the front of the house and then finally relaxed completely. He whined a bit, came trotting back to Marie, and rubbed against her leg. She leaned down to pet him, staring down the hallway.
“That’s a good boy, Boo. You okay, bud?”
He wagged his tail to indicate that yes, he was okay. They walked down the hallway together, passed slowly through the kitchen, and then into the living room. Marie then walked back to the stairway and looked up.
“You feel that, boy?” she asked.
Boo sat down, also looking up the stairs. He was almost back to his normal self. Apparently, he did feel it.
Though, honestly, it wasn’t necessarily feeling
something…
it was feeling
nothing.
She realized that the thick feeling she’d felt within the house—the oppressiveness that seemed to have made it harder to walk than usual—was no longer in the air.
“I think you did it,” Marie told Boo. “I think they’re gone.”
She did indeed feel that this was the case. But at the same time, something within her could still not rest easy. Her mind raced with trying to make sense of what she had just witnessed. It wasn’t just convincing her mind it had really happened; it was the sort of thing that could potentially skew a life view—a belief that there are things outside of the natural world that humans cannot see or control.
When her phone dinged twice in her pocket, she let out a little shout of surprise. She took it out at once and saw that Brendan had texted her twice while her phone had been dead. One text had come through at 10:30, the other at 12:12. Both were simple and to the point, simply checking on her.
Yo, you still alive?
the first one read.
The second one read:
Won’t lie. Starting to get a little scared for you. That dog of yours better keep you safe.
She decided not to return the texts, as it was nearly 3:30 in the morning. But she looked at her phone, now working as if nothing had happened to it before, and then she slowly glanced around the house.
She’d seen Boo’s little trick. And now her phone was working mere moments later.
The house felt different—
lighter
somehow. And as she let this sensation wash over her, she watched as Boo went into the living room, curled up on the rug, and fell into a well-deserved sleep.