That was why they were pursuing this line of questioning.
Megan suddenly felt cold. As if on cue, the lights flickered, and all four of them jumped. Zoe, Kate and Julie tried to laugh it off, but Megan wasn’t laughing. And neither were her friends. Not really. They were anxious, frightened. Megan looked around. The room seemed darker than it had a few moments prior, the corners filled with a gathering gloom. It was probably nothing, she told herself, but even as she did so, the darkness in the far corner seemed to become less amorphous, more of a … shape.
Zoe saw it, too. “Look,” she whispered, pointing.
There was a figure in the corner now, a tall, thin form with the nebulous, wavy contours of a plume of smoke, and it twisted and turned until its vaguely humanoid shape was facing them full-on.
It moved toward them.
The girls screamed. All of them. Spontaneously. Their simultaneous cries of terror melded into a single earsplitting screech, and the figure promptly disappeared.
“Keep it down up there!” her mom ordered, calling from the foot of the stairs.
Instantly, the real world reasserted itself. Gone was the gloom in the corners, the dimness of the light. Everything reverted back to normal, and, more grateful than she had ever been for anything in her life, Megan called down, “Sorry, Mom! We will!”
She looked about the room, saw nothing out of the ordinary, nothing suspicious or unusual, only her furniture and possessions and the luggage and sleeping bags of her friends. She walked over to her bed, not wanting to meet anyone’s eyes. No one said a word, and when she suggested that they go to sleep, there were no objections, only murmured agreement.
Everyone got under their covers or into their sleeping bags. Without asking any of her friends, Megan left her desk lamp on, and none of them asked her to turn it off, although, immediately, she wished she’d left all of the lights on. The lamp was dim, its glow yellowish and weak, the feeble illumination throwing the corners of the room into a too-familiar darkness. But she watched and waited, and the darkness never resolved itself into anything more, and after a few minutes, she allowed herself to relax and settle back, satisfied that, whatever had happened, it was all over now.
Haunted.
It was the first time she’d said the word aloud, the first time she’d even thought about it that directly, but she believed it. So did her friends. She heard surreptitious whispering from down on the floor and wondered what they were saying to one another. Probably that they were never going to come over to her house again.
She couldn’t blame them. She didn’t want to be here—and this was her home.
Why in the world had they moved?
James.
As usual, that little pansy was at the root of all her problems.
Megan stared up at the ceiling, wondering what, if anything, she should tell her parents about tonight. Would they believe any of it? Maybe they would if all of them described what had happened, although she wasn’t sure her friends would be willing to admit to anything in the morning. Daylight somehow had the effect of making night fears seem less real.
The whispering had stopped. She wanted to ask Zoe whether she was asleep yet—Zoe was the one person who might not run away from all this—but didn’t want to wake Kate or Julie, didn’t want them to hear what she had to say. So she remained silent, trying not to think about what had happened but unable to think of anything else.
Haunted.
From downstairs came the sounds of her parents getting ready for bed. The television was shut off, doors were closed, a toilet flushed.
Gradually, the house grew silent.
Too silent.
Lying there, she began to think that she was the only living person in the house. The idea was absurd, but all attempts to convince herself of that failed, and the thought soon hardened into a conviction. Finally, she could no longer restrain herself and leaned over the side of the bed to make sure her friends were still alive. To her great relief, they were. Julie was snoring slightly, and Zoe stirred on the feather mattress. Kate coughed.
Happy to have her fears dispelled, Megan leaned back on her pillow—
And glimpsed movement out of the corner of her eye.
Her heart leaped in her chest.
Slowly, she turned her head to the right.
The monster emerged from the wall where it had been hiding, retaining some of the color and shading of not only the wall but the dresser and door. She was the only one who saw it, the only one awake, and she remained perfectly still, afraid to move, watching through squinting eyes that she hoped made it look as though she were asleep.
The creature was as wide as it was tall, and its head nearly brushed the ceiling. If that was its head. For the parts of its form seemed to have no correlation in the human or animal world. Indeed, its form was constantly shifting, what had seemed an arm retracting into a torso, the torso twisting and turning, becoming a head and then a foot.
The only constant was that there was a face. It might change position, but it was there, and it was a terrible thing to see, a raging chaos of unblinking eyes and ferociously fanged maw.
The monster hovered over her friends on the floor before gently lifting the sheet that covered Zoe. It pulled up her oversize T-shirt, but she did not awaken, and a long tentacle—for that was what it looked like—reached out and slipped beneath the material. Megan wanted to scream—
Didn’t that work last time?
—but she was paralyzed with fear, and she watched, holding her breath, unmoving, as the tentacle withdrew and the face, now in the center of the ill-defined body, turned toward her. The mouth, with teeth the color of the objects in her room, smiled slyly.
Take off your pants.
It wanted her. She was the one it had come for, and she opened her mouth to scream for her parents.
And then it was gone.
It didn’t fade again into the background, didn’t fly out the window or walk through the door. It simply disappeared, winking out like a projection that had been shut off.
Megan didn’t scream. She remained unmoving, ready to scream, for several moments longer, afraid it might return, afraid it might come for her. But it did not return, and she could see no trace of it in any area of her room, although Zoe’s sheet remained pulled down and her T-shirt pulled up. Megan thought about fixing that—the assault to her friend’s dignity made her sick to her stomach—but she was afraid to leave her bed, and instead she pulled the covers over her head, fingers curled tightly around the edges of the blanket, holding it down.
She waited for morning.
Ten
“Look what I found.”
James stared admiringly at the traffic cone in Robbie’s closet, more impressed than he was willing to admit. They had both been trying to find furnishings and decorations for their headquarters—which was what they’d agreed to call the upstairs room in James’s garage—but so far James had not really come up with anything. Oh, he’d scrounged up a couple of folding chairs, and his dad had given him a junky bookcase, but he hadn’t found anything cool.
Like the traffic cone.
“That’s not all,” Robbie said. “Check it out.” He went over to his bed, crouched down and from underneath pulled out a life-size cardboard cutout of the stick-figure Greg Heffley from Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
James couldn’t hide his excitement this time. “Where’d you get it?”