Intrinsical - Lani Woodland [37]
“It’s amazing.” I gave her arm a squeeze.
“Come and sit here, you two,” she said, motioning toward the two empty seats.
I exchanged hellos with Steve, Travis, and Audrey, all dressed in their formal wear, too. I tucked my purse under my chair before Brent took my hand and we slid into our seats. Brent’s cool fingers tickled my palm and I watched him trace circles along my wrist. His hand looked different and it only took a second to find the change.
“Hey, your nails have grown out. Did you finally stop biting them?”
Brent held his hands out wiggling his fingers, before lacing them together and cracking his knuckles. “I think I broke the habit only to pick up a new one.”
Cherie turned down the music and stood excitedly at the head of the table. “Thank you for coming. I’m sorry I don’t have better food but it’s all I could find from the cafeteria.” She motioned toward the manicotti and the simple salad, before striking a match to light the candles.
As Cherie served herself and passed the dish along to Steve, something scurried across a corner of the room above our heads causing Audrey to jump. She swallowed hard as she craned her neck trying to peek over the edge of the pool.
“Why are we having your party here?” Travis asked grabbing onto Audrey’s hand.
“It’s the most haunted place around and I wanted to help Yara grow more comfortable being around the ghosts trying to communicate with her.”
I kicked her under the table but her smile didn’t dim.
Brent jerked slightly as he leaned over and whispered, “You’ve had a ghost trying to talk to you? For how long?”
“All year,” I confessed spooning salad onto my plate. “Well there have been weird things happening all year but it’s only been the last few days that one has actually been trying to talk to me.”
Brent grabbed a bread roll and slammed it onto his plate. “I see.”
“This place is haunted?” Audrey asked, the pupils in her eyes widening.
“Yes,” Cherie said at the same time Brent answered, “No.”
Their gazes locked in a sort of battle until Cherie turned toward Audrey. “You haven’t heard the story about what happened here?” Audrey’s face had gone white and she shook her head. Cherie leaned forward and her voice lowered. “About sixty years ago, a group of students snuck in here after hours. It was a night like this— the moon was full and the air chilly. They snuck into the pool house to have some harmless fun. They had no idea that what awaited them was death.” Cherie had always been an excellent storyteller and her words were weaving an eerie magic, enthralling us all. Between breathing out and breathing in a now familiar musky scent became heavy in the air. The second ghost was here. The mp3 player skipped, cutting the current song off halfway through and a new one began, ”Can’t Stop Dreaming of You.”
A cold wind rushed around the room and the candles on the table flickered in response. From the bottom of the floor, a blanket of icy dark fog began rising as it rippled out, reeking of chlorine. The mist was here, too. A loud sound like a footstep echoed through the pool, followed by a long banging noise that sounded like an old wooden rollercoaster going up the track. When it stopped my stomach felt like it was at the top of the ride about to plunge to my toes. Audrey screamed. Another loud thud came from the pool floor and my stomach plunged. My mouth went dry and I tried unsuccessfully to swallow. We waited for a second, no one breathing. When everything remained silent, we let out a collective sigh.
“What . . . what was that?” Travis asked as Audrey dove into his arms.
A deep chill settled inside me, crackling with a wintry intensity, raising every hair on my arms and neck in an electrified static. A cold sweat broke out across my forehead and I lifted my hand, still entwined with Brent’s, to wipe it away, his fingers were like ice. A blinding white light exploded in the center of the table.
Its brightness was impossible to look at directly and I had to turn my head to peer into it, squinting my eyes. The intensity of the light dimmed slightly, leaving