Chapter 13 #2
Ellory infused her voice with the confidence she needed to feel.
“I cross-referenced the most common details of the Graves Ghost legend with news articles about dead young adults from the last century, and I think I found a match.” She placed the printed pages between them.
“Malcolm Mayhew. He was a junior crushed between two fallen shelves during finals week in 1983. They found him at dawn, dead from blunt force trauma and internal bleeding. The earliest mention of the Graves Ghost that I could find is from 1987, so the timeline fits.”
There was a loaded silence.
“You know, I spent fall break at my family’s lake house,” Tai murmured. “Some people do that.”
“Some people don’t have a family lake house.”
“I wish that were your problem.”
Ellory elected to ignore this, rolling up the sleeves of her forest-green hoodie instead.
From her bag she pulled a used video game, a pack of Twizzlers, and a bottle of C?roc Snap Frost Vodka—offerings to Malcolm Mayhew, based on her research of things he’d liked while alive.
This was followed by a vial of graveyard dirt to form a circle to contain his spirit.
Finally, there was a candle to be placed in the center of this makeshift altar, to light the Graves Ghost’s way to the realm of the living.
All she needed now was magic.
The hair on the back of Ellory’s neck prickled with warning.
She ran a hand over the still-smooth, still-bare skin, and let her next breath out slowly in a futile effort to slow the thaDUM thaDUM of her telltale heart.
Ignoring the two sets of eyes on her, she constructed an altar as best she could.
Her circle was lopsided. The candle was off-center.
Every horror movie she had ever watched about summoning ghosts flipped through her mind like the world’s worst silent film, monochrome reminders that she was going to die.
“All right,” she said, too loud, too earnest. “We have to stand at the points of the circle.”
“A circle doesn’t have points,” Tai whispered.
“Shut up,” Cody whispered back.
Ellory stood with her back to the door as Cody and Tai took their positions.
Together, the three of them formed an invisible right triangle outside the graveyard dirt.
At her instruction, they closed their eyes, and Ellory took one last deep breath before joining them.
Darkness pressed upon darkness, blocking out everything but their breathing and the occasional crackle of the candle.
Sometimes the answers for the living rested with the dead. Part of her had always known that. Now she was ready to stop running.
With her eyes closed, Ellory stared into the abyss and waited for something to stare back.
A low buzzing overtook the silence—not bees, like she’d thought before, but the trill of a hummingbird’s wings.
Her skin warmed despite the cold that made her hands tremble.
Images flashed across her lids, like flipping through a deck of playing cards: memories from her childhood, from high school, from the last few months.
They began to slow from a blur of color and feeling, and the closer she came to focusing on one, the more fear tightened her chest, warning her about what she was about to see…
Then something hit the floor.
Ellory’s eyes shot open, her body unmoving in that absolute silence between two heartbeats.
Across the circle, Tai’s hands twitched over an upturned chair, like she might still be able to catch it if she tried hard enough.
Cody had covered their mouth with a hand, which lowered when they realized the only danger in the library was Tai’s ill-timed clumsiness.
Ellory stared at her friends, and they stared back, and the candlelight made shadows dance across hollows of their faces but did little to summon anyone or anything from the void.
Her shoulders slumped. “Maybe I did something wrong.”
“I don’t know that there’s a right way to talk to spirits,” Tai said, bending to fix the chair. Its sharp wooden legs dug into the carpet, leaving divots when she pushed it back toward the table behind her. “Do you want to try again?”
From the corner of her eye, Ellory saw Cody smother a yawn. Seconds ticked by. Ellory dragged a hand over her clammy face. “No. The longer we stay, the more we risk getting caught.”
She made quick work of cleaning up the altar, shoving everything into her bag with frustrated force.
A pinch of graveyard dirt spilled over her torn blue jeans, but she dispersed it over the carpet until it almost looked like dust. Cody relieved her of the vodka, shoving it down the side of their shorts for later.
Ellory checked one more time that there were no noticeable signs of their presence, and then she checked a second time to be safe.
Tai threw an arm around Ellory’s shoulders, steering her toward the elevator. “I never have a dull moment with you, Lor.”
Ellory managed a smile. “The whole reason I came to Warren was to entertain you.”
The elevator dinged open. Cody entered first, and Tai stepped in after them.
Her arm passed through Ellory as if she were a ghost. Ellory blinked several times, but the image before her didn’t change.
The elevator framed the forms of three people: Cody, Tai, and Ellory’s body gazing pensively at the ground between them.
She stared at herself, at her pineapple-shaped updo, her toothpaste-white high-tops, her dark brown knee peering through the frayed edges of the holes in her jeans. That was her, but if that was her, then what was she? And how had she gotten that way?
She remembered the warmth of her skin, and the terror that had gripped her. The flashes in the dark and the sense that if she focused hard enough, then she could see beyond this world on purpose this time. Even so, she stumbled backward as a frightening truth dawned on her.
Her séance had worked.
But she hadn’t summoned a ghost.
Somehow, she had become one.