Karma

“Alice.”

Alice Harding spun around, looking around the haunted house to see who had said her name.

“What’s wrong?” Sammy asked as she came up beside the other girl, a touch of concern creeping into her thick tone of boredom.

“I thought I heard my name,” Alice replied warily, still looking around as another group of bored, rowdy teenagers passed them.

“Dude, come on, this place blows,” Adrian moaned, leaning against a wall in an attempted posture of superiority and boredom, as if everything in the admittedly cheesy haunted house was beneath him.

“Yeah, it’s not exactly sending shivers down my spine,” Jasmine agreed, standing beside Adrian and actually managing to pull off the cocky look, her arms crossed over her chest in a devil-may-care pose, her head high, eyes derisively gliding over the cheesy animatronics that didn’t actually work well.

“Yeah, let’s just get out of here,” Sammy agreed apathetically, looking at the other two before turning back to Alice. “I’m sure it was nothing. People hear things all the time.”

“But, I know I heard something,” Alice insisted with a slight panic.

“Dude, is this gonna be one of those horror movie things where you hear something that we don’t and then a ghost kills you?” Adrian asked with a certain degree of enthusiasm.

“Please don’t,” Jasmine said in a long-suffering tone, inspecting the black-painted nails of one hand.

“But that would be so cool,” Adrian insisted enthusiastically.

“Or not.” Jasmine continued looking at her nails, her face a mask of depression, exhaustion, and boredom.

“Come on,” Sammy said to Alice, nodding her head to the hallway that led out of the building. “Let’s just go and get food. It’s late and you haven’t eaten all day. That could be it.”

“You haven’t eaten all day?” Jasmine asked with a slight incredulity. “I thought we told you to stop doing that.”

“I’ve been busy with school,” Alice said defensively.

“Another cause of stress and another reason why you could be misinterpreting things,” Sammy reasoned, holding her hand out to the taller girl. “Now come on. Let’s get out of here.”

Alice smiled at Sammy and took her friend’s hand, following the other three out of the haunted house, a little seed of unease still residing in her mind.

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“So are we gonna try to find any actual haunted houses?” Jasmine asked, sipping her coffee and leaning with her elbows on the sticky table top.

“I heard that the Asylum of the Dead is supposed to be good,” Sammy suggested after swallowing a bite of pancake.

“You heard that this one was supposed to be good too,” Jasmine replied blandly, her expression gloomy and pissy at the same time.

“Maybe we should just, like, get high and/or drunk before going to the next one,” Adrian suggested as he devoured his pancakes, eggs, and sausage. “Then it’ll definitely be freaky.”

“Yeah, we’ll get drunk, pass out, get raped, and have our pictures posted on the Internet,” Jasmine said bitingly, finishing her coffee.

“Why do you always have to be so pessimistic?” Sammy questioned with a slight irritation.

“’Cause reasons.”

“Hey, Alice, you okay?” Adrian asked his friend, breaking her out of her reverie.

She blinked a couple of times and looked back from the window to the table.

“Hmm?” she said in confusion, her chin in her palm.

“Are you okay?” Adrian repeated worriedly.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine,” Alice replied, rubbing an eye with her fingers. “Yeah, sorry, I’m just kinda tired.”

“But it’s only nine,” Sammy said with a forced chuckle of concern.

“And you’ve barely eaten anything,” Jasmine added, nodding to Alice’s half-full plate.

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Alice said, yawning. “I think I’m just gonna head home.”

“Why are you so tired so early?” Sammy asked in unease.

“I don’t know,” Alice admitted through another yawn. “I guess… I guess just school and stuff. Yeah, I’m just gonna go.” She looked pointedly at Sammy, wanting the other girl to move.

“You want me to walk you home?” Sammy asked as she got up and let Alice pass.

“No, no, I’m good,” Alice said tiredly, exiting the booth and turning to say good-bye to the others. “My house is just ten minutes from here. I’ll be fine.”

She left the IHOP, stumbling slightly, and leaned heavily against the wall of the building. She realized that she was shaking and sweating through the night chill, her legs almost spasming, her vision swimming. Her throat felt constricted, her breath forcing itself out before being dragged back in. Why hadn’t she let Sammy come with her? She should go back.

She was walking, but away from the restaurant. She tried to tell her feet to turn around, but they seemed to be under the control of someone else. She couldn’t even look at her feet because her eyes were facing in front of her. Her vision was blurred and she felt as if she was gliding, yet somehow she didn’t trip and fall.

Was she going home? She didn’t think so. What was wrong with her? She felt drunk, but she’d only had coffee. Why wasn’t anyone asking if she was okay? They probably thought she was high.

She felt trapped. She could see and hear, but everything was muffled and blurry as if a hood had been placed over her senses. She was a passenger—no, a prisoner—in her own mind, no control over her own body. She felt exhausted, yet wide awake, colors swirled in front of her eyes as she walked, objects turning to sounds, sounds to objects.

Where was she going? She couldn’t tell. She tried to call out to someone to help her, but the connection from her mind to her mouth was broken and all that came out was a thin, croaking sound. Her heart pounded with fear as she turned a corner into an alley. Her feet approached a steel door and her trembling hand reached toward the handle. She screamed at her hand to stopped, at her feet to run away, but her screams were silent.

She entered the building and was instantly enveloped in pitch black as the door closed behind her. She stood there for what seemed like hours, her harsh breathing the only sound, until a door across from her opened and the room became awash with light. A small, thin man walked towards her, the door closing behind him. He stopped a foot in front of her and just stood there, examining her.

He wore a blue, Westwood suit and hid black hair was gelled flat, his black eyes piercing into Alice and she would have squirmed and looked away if she’d had any control over her body.

“Well, you certainly are a pretty one, aren’t you?” he mused, cocking his head to the side, his eyes gliding up and down her body before settling on her eyes. “Nicholas chose well.”

Alice tried to make a sound—any sound—but even though she screamed as loud as she could, she remained perfectly silent.

“Oh, I suppose you want some explanation,” the man continued, beginning to pace back and forth. “Well, my name is Julius Craven and this…” He paused to face Alice and hold up a glass tube of some reddish liquid. “This is my masterpiece.”

Julius Craven. That name rang a bell and Alice wildly wracked her brain, scrabbling through her memories for some mention of Julius Craven. He merely watched her while she thought and her eyes went wide as she remembered.

Julius Craven. He had been a chemistry professor at Harvard before he was kicked out for doing ethically immoral experiments or something. It had been on the news and everything. She remembered seeing his picture and thinking that he was attractive for a professor. Somehow she wasn’t thinking that now.

“Good, you remember,” Julius said approvingly. “Now, where was I? Oh, yes.” He returned to his pacing, his arrogance and superiority creating a palpable air around him. “How did I get you here? I have people planted all over the city, some in restaurants, some in hotels, some in cafés. One of my people, Nicholas Zanther, works in the IHOP. All of them find a person a year, just one person they consider lucky enough to be chosen, and they administer a drug via food or drink called Styra, which is Swedish for control, and yes, I invented this drug. But what does it do? Simply put, it controls you, though I’m sure you’ve already figured that one out by now. But why do I do this? Mostly for fun. And because I get bored.

And the final question, what will I do with you? To answer that question…Well, let’s just say that you’ll still live for quite a while, but you’ll never see the light of day again.”

Alice tried desperately to scream and managed to open her mouth, but was only able to voice a croaking noise. The fog in her mind was dispersing, the bonds on her senses loosening, and she felt the control of her body returning to her.

“Oh, the drug’s wearing off,” Julius observed exasperatedly, rolling his eyes. “Oh well, doesn’t really matter right now.”

He snapped and Alice felt a needle jab into her skin. She cried out a bit before a fog quickly encompassed her mind, thicker than the last, and she saw nothing.

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Alice slowly awoke in a tight, dark room. She had to make sure that her eyes were open, it was so dark. The fog slowly receded from her mind and she began to panic. Small, dark space that was just long enough for her body, lying on her back, oh god, she was in a coffin!

She tried with all her might to scream and struggle, but all she could do was blink her eyes. She noticed a stinging feeling in the crook of her arm and struggled to see through the darkness.

Panic and terror constricted her heart and mind, squeezing tears from her eyes and mewls from her throat. She was going to die here—wherever here was—and no one would know. She thought of her family and her friends and how there were so many things she hadn’t told them. She didn’t even know if she believed in god, but she prayed with everything she had that someone would rescue her.

Suddenly, the coffin moved. It sat up as if on hydraulics and two small circles of light pierced the suffocating darkness. She looked out of the screened circles in desperate hope and saw people walk by. Her heart filled with joy as one of the teenagers turned to look at her.

“Wow, that is really lame,” the girl said, voice and expression redolent with boredom.

“Yeah, these animatronics suck,” a guy agreed, coming up beside her and looking at Alice.

The couple walked away and Alice realized that the walls were those of the haunted house she and her friends had ridiculed earlier that night.