Ghost Stories

Joan stood there with the air of a doe straining her ears for bullets. The old Marley Schoolhouse loomed over us, its cutesy, antiquated postcard visage not only forlorn in the dark, but bitter, sinister. It decomposed year after year behind the courthouse on Main Street, abandoned for thirty years but still not condemned—not in the legal sense of the word anyhow.

"It's just a stupid dare," Joan reasoned with herself, her voice low. "A silly, stupid dare."

"Joan." I tried not to startle her as I laid a hand on her shoulder—she still jumped. "There's nothing in there. We'll get in, we'll get out."

Joan pursed her lips, not quite pouting. "A silly, stupid dare."

Her jaggedly cropped hair trembled slightly in the breeze and her hand flew violently to swat away her bangs, as if for a moment she hadn't realized it was her own hair that had startled her. Just two days ago, while we sat on her bed agonizing over our biology papers, she'd sheared her blonde flow of hair helter-skelter with a pair of kitchen scissors. Since then I couldn't help but wonder if her parents had taken her off her meds again. When I asked, she wouldn't give a straight answer.

Focusing, I scrutinized the face of the schoolhouse, hunting for a safe and seamless way in—and out. Mortar crumbled between the gray bricks and the windows were blackened from age and vintage fire damage, all broken and shuttered, the shutters all broken and shuttered themselves.

The shutters. Of course.

"Come on." It took a few hard pulls before the plank of wood careened out of my grip and into the dead grass. I had found a reinforced shutter on ground level, which meant the windowpane beneath was completely gone.

"The sooner we go in, the sooner we come out. Walk around the whole place once, that's our lot in life right now. All we have to do."

Joan climbed through the window frame behind me, careful of her hands and feet as she gripped the frame and descended to the ground. I smacked my flashlight until it flickered on, and I breathed as slowly as I could manage, my heart strangely swollen, pulsing in my throat.

Stillness and stifling mildew were the only greeting we received from Marley Schoolhouse. Cobwebs draped the rafters of the hallway where we stood. Exposed pipes coughed occasionally, sometimes spitting fluid as if rainwater had built up somewhere in the building. Locker doors dangled open by hinges, rusted and charred. Choking, noiseless darkness sprawled in each direction.

I started walking.

The quiet was so dense and unending that I couldn't breathe, nearly started screaming just to spare myself the blaring silence rattling in my skull.

"Joan," I said softly to try and settle my own nerves, "Remind me never to play Truth or Dare with those crazies we call friends ever again."

"Those 'crazies' are the only people who know where we are right now." Joan whispered back so faintly that even her voice made my hair stand on end. "They said they'd wait for us to come out, so I guess that counts for something. Do you think we'll find—anything?"

"You mean anyone?" I stopped and turned to look her in the face, but her ballooning black eyes startled me so sharply I thought for a second that she was a ghost.

I didn't even believe in ghosts. But that's what they always say.

I scoffed, collecting myself. "We're not going to stumble across the skeleton of that guy who—"

"No, no," Joan shook her head. Even in the inky black throbbing around us, I could see she was wringing her hands. "The—the book. Do you think we'll find the book?"

"What book?"

Joan swallowed. It struck me that she looked hungry. "The book that drove that girl nuts. They say she read it until she lost her mind, and then she went to sleep and wouldn't wake up."

"Joan," I said sternly, "That story isn't real. It's a dumb urban legend, one out of like, fifty. People say all kinds of crazy things about this old place, which makes sense because it's scary as shit—"

With a grandiose gesture I swung my flashlight hand out, as if presenting the rotting schoolhouse to a tourist.

"—but scary or not, there's nothing in here to be afraid of. Other than lead-based paint, probably."

Joan just stood there, pleading with wide, unblinking eyes. "You're sure there's nothing here?"

"Sure? Joan, of course I'm sure. There's no old, vulture-looking woman who haunts the music room and screeches in people's dreams forever once they've seen her. There are no alien spores eating the building and seeping into the core of the earth to form a black hole. There's no mysterious book that makes you go crazy and fall into a coma when you read it. No ghosts, no vampires, no monsters, so satanists sacrificing Build-A-Bears, no chupacabra, no turtle doves and no partridge in a pear tree—nothing."

Joan's lip quavered. "There's nothing here," she repeated.

I was short of breath but didn't notice. "There's nothing here."

And in the darkness, with the wind suddenly wailing outside, Joan murmured as if trying not to cry, "I was afraid you'd say that."

I didn't know what to say.

"Wh—what do you mean?"

"I wish something would happen. I wish something would be real." Joan started talking and she didn't stop. The words gushed from her mouth, hoarse and fervent, a sob of passion hiding behind each one.

"I'm so tired. I'm tired of everything. Do you think people tell ghost stories because it makes them feel alive? Do you think life is maybe the thing that doesn't make them feel alive enough? Like this isn't the realest thing, like this life isn't the realest thing?"

She sped ahead of me, power-walking forward without the flashlight to guide her, without it to make her way safer.

"Joan, what are you talking about—"

She spun on her heel and started wrenching locker doors open, yanking each one with such force that they swung open and clanged back into place when she let go. My heart thundered in my chest, the sound of it rivaled only by the squealing and slamming of the locker doors Joan bashed open and closed as she stumbled down the hallway.

"What the hell are you doing, Joan?" I ran after Joan, my skin crawling at the sight of her, blood pounding in my ears.

"There has to be something!" she cried. "There has to be something, this can't be it! This can't be all there is—"

I felt my fingers grabbing her shoulders, spinning her to face me. "You were the one nervous about coming in here! Out there—" I pointed to a boarded up window with my flashlight and sent the beam of light dancing over the dingy glass, "—out there, when you kept telling yourself how stupid and silly this is—"

When I pointed my flashlight back at Joan, there was someone standing behind her.

The flashlight clattered on the floor.

I collapsed backward against the moldy wall, my hands grasping for something, anything, to grip. I couldn't breathe. Someone had shrieked, and as the echo died out, I realized it was me.

"J-Joan—"

Couldn't breathe. Couldn't catch my breath. I reached for her in the dark.

"Joan—Joan—!"

Someone had the flashlight now. I heard their footsteps, soft, steady, coming nearer and nearer.

Icy fingers gripped my hand and heaved me to my feet.

Joan plopped the flashlight into my clammy palm. She looked at me with those wide dark eyes. Curious. Cold, I thought.

"I'm right here. Why did you scream?"

My lips parted, clamped shut, opened again. No one stood behind her. No one stood nearby.

No one I could see.

"Why did you scream?" she shook me very, very slightly. "What is it?"

"W-We have t-to go." I rasped. "Now. Go. N-now. Go—now."

She watched me so intensely I thought I could see the gears of her brain turning through her pupils. Her hair looked white, I noticed.

"What about the dare?"

"Forget it—forget the dare," I breathed.

Her calm chilled me to the marrow. "I want to find the book."

With a dull sense of horror, it occurred to me that I was the one pleading now. "Joan. There's no book."

"That teacher's journal. That's what the book was, that's the story. They say it's full of little fables and things she wrote, things she imagined. A whole world she invented. The teacher who was trapped here during the fire. I want to find it."

"That story was made up by the high school seniors on the swim team when our older brothers were trying out like eight years ago, Joan," I moaned. I felt myself getting light-headed.

Joan didn't even look like she heard me. "They say she started the fire."

"The fire was an accident, it was in the papers, the news, everyone in town knows the story!" I wondered abruptly whether I was just in a bad dream, fighting to wake up. "It was a gas leak, Joan. Just a gas leak, just a thing that happens, just a normal thing that sometimes normally happens, Joan, just a—"

"They say she wasn't—wasn't right in the head." Joan's voice faltered and I bargained my soul for the opportunity to dissuade her.

"Joanie. Listen to me." I took Joan's shoulders in my hands again, speaking just as much to myself as I was to her. "Those are just stories. Stories, Joanie. There was no sad, troubled, misunderstood teacher trapped here or choosing to be trapped here during the fire with her imaginary world preserved in a book. That would be sad, Joan, don't you understand? It's better that it isn't real. It's better that it isn't real."

I paused, licked my lips, thought incredulously that I tasted honey. "And we need to go now because—because this place is freaking me out, okay? Panic attack status, freaking me out."

A door creaked open, disturbingly softly, and closed again somewhere down the hall.

My lungs shriveled up inside my chest cavity.

Joan's gaze had turned in the direction of the sound, beads of sweat forming on her forehead beneath her bangs. Slowly, slowly her face turned to me again.

"Run," she exhaled.

We ran.

It wasn't until later that I discovered my shoes had loosened around my ankles, spun off my feet, and disappeared somewhere in the hallway, never to be retrieved. Even when the cracked bits of glass, still fastened in the edges of the window frame, sliced through my socks as I climbed out of Marley Schoolhouse and fell into the grass outside, I didn't feel any pain. All I knew was that Joan wasn't next to me when I looked up, panting, gulping air and breathing out with jagged cries.

I hauled myself up, rigid from the defensive stiffening of my body and woozy from adrenaline. I turned back to face the school, its monstrous, molding shadow hovering over me. "Joan."

I heard movement behind me but couldn't comprehend until later that our friends had seen me tumble through the half-broken window and came running to help me. I barely sensed their hands as they brushed my skin, clasped my arms to hold me up; I fought them, trying to get back to the window I'd just come from.

"Joan's still inside—there's someone—there's something else inside—"

I placed my shaking, scratched hand on the window ledge.

White fingers reached out from the darkness inside and rested on top of mine.

When I yanked my hand away with a tremor of horror, the white fingers held on.

It was Joan.

We both fell, I backward and she somersaulting face-first out of the window.

Vaguely, as if through water, I heard our friends speaking to us. But we just laid there and looked at each other, inhaling, exhaling, not saying a word.

She was clutching a book to her chest.

---

I didn't go to school the next morning. My mom dropped off my biology paper at my school's front office, told them I was stuck in bed with a migraine.

I hadn't slept, of course. I'd snuck up to my room, turned on every light, and washed the crusty blood off my feet in the shower. I didn't doze off until after my mother checked on me in the morning, when I told her my head was killing me and I couldn't so much as open my eyes.

The afternoon sun woke me up around noon, well after she had gone to work. Soreness screamed down my arms and legs as I showered again, climbed into clean clothes. Absently, I plucked the t-shirt and shorts I'd worn the night before off the floor and dropped them in the trash can as I walked out of my room.

And with my feet wrapped with gauze inside my ugliest-but-cushiest sneakers, I walked the three blocks to Joan's house.

The sun bathed everything in warmth, but it felt foreign to me. Maybe I didn't feel it at all. A strange clarity forced the events of last night out of focus, and I recalled them with only numbness. Joan was all I could think about.

Joan. And the book.

I knocked on her front door and let myself in, and I walked straight into her mother.

"S-Sorry," I spluttered.

"Oh, dear, hello—it's you." Joan's mother sounded weary, which wasn't unusual. She also sounded less than pleased to see me, which was unusual.

"Sorry, I—well, I was home with a migraine today and . . ." I fumbled, searching for an excuse to be there in the middle of a school day. "I'm feeling better so I thought I'd stop by for Joan's biology paper."

I caught myself and concluded, "Since, uh, she called me earlier and said she was . . . not going to school today? I thought I would take it and turn it in for her."

I was fishing, and her mother definitely looked skeptical. But all she said was, "You know Joan. She has her . . . her hard days. Maybe you can bring her around, talk her out of one of her moods."

Biting my tongue only got harder and harder where Joan's parents were concerned, but I didn't have time to challenge her mother's perspective of her own daughter at the moment. I nodded, climbed the stairs, and slipped into Joan's room.

It was the same as always, not a thing out of place. The tapestries along the two adjacent walls; the Tim Burton plushies crammed together on top of her bureau by the curtained window; the silky canopy that fell over and around her bed; the globe-shaped pillow with a map of the world next to her where she slept. The only thing missing was the stout little orange bottle for her meds, which usually sat on her bedside table.

A floppy, dilapidated book lay in its place.

Before I could stop myself I had it in my hands and opened the cover.

"The story isn't real," I heard myself say. "A stupid urban legend—there was no teacher."

The pages were full of faded writing. It was a journal after all, but it was just a journal. And it could have been anything, could have been anyone's.

No dark magic blossomed in my veins when I held it. No voices crescendoed in my head. It was just a book.

"It's just a book," I murmured. Relief washed over me and I felt exhausted all over again. I sat next to Joan on the bed, reached across her back, and nudged her shoulder.

"Joan? Joanie. Hey."

She shifted, turned over slightly, peered at me through one crinkled eye. "Mm?"

"Joan, hey. It's okay. We're okay."

She didn't move or speak. Something twisted in my gut.

"Are—are you okay?"

"You—woke me up . . . ?" Her voice sounded far-off, wispy, wandering away into some dark place. She yawned deeply, a silent howl shaping the cavern of her mouth. I could see dry white bumps at the back of her tongue, could hear the pop of her stretching jaw.

"I want to go back to sleep. It was interesting . . . my dream . . . it was all so much more interesting than anything here . . . nothing here is as interesting . . . ."

And she looked up at me with eyes glazing over, a film of unseeing between us. Her eyelids fluttered shut again. Her chest rose and fell with slow and sleepy breathing. I watched her movement and her stillness, the two of us at once together and alone in the dark, one of us waiting for what might turn out to be nothing at all.