Only … the alarm was on, so that ruled out a human.
It’s not a ghost, I told myself, because I am done with ghosts.
But even as I thought the words, I felt my so-called “normal” life slipping out of existence. I’d been fooling myself. Ignorance may be bliss, but at the end of the day it’s still ignorance.
And my ghost had decided it didn’t want to be ignored any longer.
I made myself step one foot out of bed. Then the other foot. And I forced my legs, one in front of the other, to walk to the door just as the sound came again:
Knock. Knock. Knock.
As quietly as I could, I dropped to the floor, pressed my cheek against the polished wood, and peered through the narrow opening.
I was fully prepared to see a pair of ghastly, rotted feet. Maybe even shriveled undead fingers worming their way under the door toward me …
But what I saw was red. Not blood — it was solid; it had form. But I couldn’t tell what it was. Maybe a red carpet? I thought of walking the red carpet the night before with Marnie. Maybe this was a dream.
I sat back and stared at the door until almost a minute had passed since the last set of knocks.
Okay, Willa. Listen up.
You are a reasonably intelligent human. You have some emotional issues to work through, sure, but you’ll probably be okay eventually. You’ll finish high school, go to a decent college, get a degree in something, and then enter the world as an adult. You have many choices and opportunities ahead of you. You can do anything you want to do with your life.
Except for one thing …
You are NOT opening that door.
Go back to bed. Go back to bed this instant.
In slow motion, I rose to my feet and turned away from the door, away from the foolish temptation to prove to myself that I wasn’t going crazy. Everything I’d done so far to prove to myself that I wasn’t crazy just ended up making me feel even crazier.
I began to walk back to the bed, taking care not to make the merest hint of a sound as I went.
Behind me, the door opened by itself.
Don’t turn around. Don’t turn around.
How exactly, I wondered, does a corpse stand? Would she be leaning on the wall? Would she be held up, dangling in midair, by some supernatural energy? Maybe she lacked the strength to stand, and had dragged herself down the hall … so when I turned to look at her, she’d be lying on the floor, reaching her arms toward me hungrily.
Maybe she was already following me into the room.
Maybe she was right behind me.
At last, the horror of not knowing became greater than the horror of knowing, and I turned around.
But the room was empty.
The door was open.
There was no one there.
Only a trail of rose petals, red and plush. A solid blanket of them, a foot wide, leading away down the hall and disappearing in the inky darkness.
I could go wake up Mom and Jonathan, but I knew from the bathtub incident that there was a very decent chance the hall would be perfectly clean when I brought them back upstairs. I could take a photo, or scoop an armful of flowers, but what would that prove? The obvious assumption would be that I had done this myself. For attention, or as a weird prank, or whatever. Face it — “crazy ghost” is never going to be people’s go-to explanation. Not when there’s a teenager in the house to take the blame.
Leyta’s advice ran through my head:
You just have to work through it.
I walked alongside the trail of roses, keeping one hand on the wall, because I needed to feel connected to something solid, something I could be sure actually existed.
I decided that if the trail led to Jonathan’s office, I wouldn’t follow it inside.
But it didn’t lead there. It led to the third bedroom, the one directly across from the top of the stairs.
I stopped about a foot from the door.
Then I took a step back.
From the other side of that door came a soft:
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Before I could take another step back, it came again — a little faster, a little harder:
Knock-knock-knock!
I hardly had time to catch my breath before the sound turned furious:
KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK!!!
Every corner of my consciousness was scared — scared of whatever was doing this, scared that Mom and Jonathan would wake up — and absolutely terrified of what was waiting for me, beckoning me inside.
But if I turned back, I would never get up the nerve to come this far again.
Get through it. That’s all you can do. There are no shortcuts in the flow.
This is your journey.
I opened the door.
This room was a mirror image of my own. The bed was to my right, and the bathroom was to my left. I got the feeling that I’d warped into an alternate universe.
The trail of petals stopped just inside the door.
As I crossed the threshold, a headache pierced cleanly through my temples, as if I’d been shot with a poisoned arrow. I pressed my fingers against my eyes, trying to ward it off.
Then I heard:
Drip … drip … drip …
I flipped the light switch and the overhead light came to life — but only after hesitating for a second. Like some force was deciding whether I got to have a light on or not, and it finally took mercy on me.
I followed the dripping sound to the bathroom, knowing what I would find: the bathtub full to overflowing. A serene surface. And reflected in that surface, the face of the ghost that had wrapped its fate around mine like a boa constrictor.
So I went in, mainly because I was beginning to realize that I had no choice.
The light in the bathroom wouldn’t turn on. But all right, no big deal. The window over the bathtub let in pale moonlight, and the light from the bedroom spilled through the door. It wasn’t ideal, but I could still see — enough to glance around and be sure that there wasn’t a corpse, or a murderer.
Just a ghost.
I walked over to the tub and looked down at the surface of the water.
Perfectly smooth and serene, like I’d known it would be.
“I would really appreciate, at this point,” I said out loud, “some guidance as to why you’ve brought me here.”
Drip.
“Awesome,” I said. “Wow, thank you, that is so incredibly useful.”
Now that I’d found my voice, I couldn’t stop talking. Getting the words out slowed the chaotic whirring in my brain.
“What we have before us is a bathtub full of water. And I can only imagine that you intend to do another abracadabra thing where I look away and the water’s gone or overflowing or … I don’t know, turned to vanilla pudding, maybe?” I closed my eyes and turned around. “So why don’t you do your little trick and we can get on with things?”
I counted to five, then spun around.
The bathtub was not dry.
But it wasn’t just full of water anymore.
The water was thick with rose petals. Thousands of them. In fact, it was more like someone had filled the tub with rose petals first and then filled the tiny spaces between them with water.
“This … sucks,” I whispered. Then I raised my voice slightly. “Hey, newsflash: I am not putting any part of my body into that water.”
There was, unsurprisingly, no answer. I stayed a good four feet away, staring at the water in a state of highly uneasy expectancy.