Chapter 5 Clarke #2
“We better start testing those keys, then,” Leith said. His voice startled me. He was too close—again.
I fumbled with the key ring, trying not to think about the fact that Leith was practically breathing down my neck. I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck, and not in the haunting sort of way. “Can you step back, please?” I said. “I’m working here.”
“This is my robbery,” Leith responded. I could smell him too. Underneath the horsehair and grass, there was that clove scent again.
“Technically, you said this wasn’t a robbery, and if it was, I think it would be our robbery,” I muttered.
“Are you flirting with me, Clarke?”
I dropped the keys, and Leith laughed. Spending time with him was truly my own personal hell. I stepped aside, folded my arms, and said, “You do it, then.”
“Fine,” Leith said. “Want to pick up those keys?”
I shook my head. “Asking me to bend over is absolutely not going to help in the ‘me being nice to you’ department.”
Leith’s eyes widened—shocked and amused. They blinked slowly a few times before he bent down and grabbed the keys himself. He started sticking the keys in the door one by one, or he would’ve if he didn’t unlock the door on the second try.
“Aha!” he exclaimed. “I’m good at this.”
“It’s just luck of the draw,” I grumbled.
“Then I guess I’m lucky.” Some guys really did have all the luck, and from where I stood, Leith was and always had been one of those guys. Everything just seemed…easy for him. The golden boy. He glided through life on charm and his last name.
The door fell open with a long, loud creak that would’ve woken the dead if they weren’t already up and at ’em.
My spine felt like an icicle, and I avoided turning around because I knew that there were at least three of them behind me.
Sensing spirits around me is kind of like being in the woods in the dark—when you know that animals are around you, but you can’t quite see them.
The difference is that if I focus on the sensation of being watched or seen, I can kind of just…
tell how many things I’m being watched or seen by.
Sometimes I’m wrong, but most of the time, I’m dead-on.
I visualized pushing them away—trying to get rid of the buzzing their closeness brought with them.
Leith turned back and flashed me one of those smiles that would turn my icicle spine into a puddle on the floor if he wasn’t so fucking irksome.
I took a few steps forward and looked through the doorway. It was no stairway to heaven, but it might’ve been the stairway to hell. I could see only about half the steps before they were consumed by the darkness.
“Do you have a lantern?” I asked.
“What year is it, 1850? No, I don’t have a lantern.” Leith pulled his phone out of his pocket and turned the flashlight on. I almost opened my mouth to tell him that ghosts don’t like harsh, artificial light like that, and sometimes they react…poorly to it, but I stopped myself.
Sure enough, I looked behind me and the girl with the chewing gum, a teenager in a Metallica T-shirt, and an older woman wearing an apron were all shielding their eyes from Leith’s phone flashlight. Ghosts could be very dramatic.
Sorry, I mouthed—giving the Coop’s ghosts their first ever acknowledgment from me. But the last thing I needed was the three of them moving shit around or banging doors or bringing down the temperature enough to freeze Leith and me out of here.
Leith started down the stairs first. “God, it’s like The Conjuring in here,” he said. “Maybe we should’ve done this in the light of day.”
“Scaredy-cat,” I said—even though I wasn’t a big fan of this creepy staircase either. But there was nothing a little bravado couldn’t fix. In situations like this, I found it best to channel Collins. Fake it till you make it and all that shit.
When we got to the bottom, there was another door. Leith went to work on testing if any of the keys unlocked it, and I stood a couple of steps away. Unlike him, I understood personal space.
Suddenly, a whoosh of air knocked me forward, and I lost my balance. I let out a yelp, which caused Leith to turn around right before I landed face-first in his chest. Then, as if this series of events couldn’t get any worse, the door opened with a rasp, and we both went down.
One of Leith’s arms wrapped around my waist before we hit the floor with a resounding thud. I didn’t even realize that I instinctively put my hand behind his head until my knuckles scraped the hardwood floor.
Leith groaned. “Shit,” he said. “You okay?”
“Sorry,” I replied. “I lost my balance somehow.” There was a haunting giggle behind me, and I had a feeling that “somehow” was a “someone.” My money was on Chewing Gum, probably punishment for Leith’s flashlight.
I felt his arm tighten on my waist, and then all I could hear was my heartbeat in my ears.
Leith gently grabbed the hand that I’d put behind his head and brought it to his sight line. I could feel that my knuckles were scraped up, but I couldn’t really see anything in the dark. I was very aware, however, of every point of contact between our bodies.
“I don’t think I can see this without accidentally shining the phone flashlight right in your face,” Leith said—referring to my hand.
“No need,” I said, pulling it away. I needed to snap out of it, so I rolled off Leith and quickly got to my feet. He lay on the floor a little bit longer. “You good?”
“Yeah,” he said. He wiped a hand down his face. “Just got the wind knocked out of me a little bit.”
“Sorry,” I said again, still a little breathless.
“Stop apologizing, Clarke,” Leith said. “Those stairs are older than both of us and are, like, four inches wide. I’m surprised I didn’t go down first.” Leith took a deep breath and reached his arm toward me. “Help me up?”
I grabbed his hand and pulled. It took more strength than I expected to get him on his feet and upright.
“Okay,” I said, looking around, following where Leith was shining his phone light.
We had made it to the bait and fly shop next door to Toades, but it was only open in the summer, so it looked rightly abandoned. “Where to?”
“Door on the other side goes to the hallway.” I looked at the other side of the wall and saw the door Leith was talking about slightly ajar.
“At this point, these people are literally asking to be robbed,” I mumbled. Leith laughed lightly, and the hardwood floor groaned under our feet as we walked through the door and were met with another long hallway.
“Surprised that creepy nun isn’t standing at the end of it,” Leith commented.
“Maybe we cool it with the horror movie references while we’re in an old, dark, croaking building, yeah?” I spent years of watching horror movies out of one eye with my sister.
“Who’s the scaredy-cat now?” Leith smiled. I ignored him.
“Which door is Ron’s?” I asked.
“The one at the very end,” Leith said.
When Leith reached the door, he put his hand on the knob and took a deep breath before trying to turn it. I watched his face fall. “Locked,” he said.
“Were you expecting all of them to be open?”
“Kind of, actually,” he said. “Should’ve bought that lockpicking kit off Kendi in the bar parking lot last week.” Kendi sold a lot of useless shit out of the trunk of his car. He was also Sweetwater Peak’s best bowler—went to a national championship and everything. A man of many talents and trades.
“And you started off so prepared.” I rolled my eyes. “Guess we better head back.” What a bummer.
Leith dragged his hand down his face. “Don’t you have, like, one of those hairpins or something?”
“I think that only works in the movies and on Pretty Little Liars,” I said.
“You’re supposed to be my Spencer Hastings in this situation.”
“How do you—”
“Lainey.” Leith smiled. Lainey was Leith’s cousin. She was sixteen and had lived with Leith’s family since she was little as far as I knew.
“I would think that that show was before her time.”
“PLL transcends generations, apparently.” I felt the temperature drop again, which seemed to be the most popular signature for the ghosts in this building. It was way better than smells and moving objects—those were harder to explain away.