“Huh. That’s funny.”
I looked over at Todd with a raised eyebrow. “What’s funny?”
He showed me the listing he had pulled up. It was for a small house out in one of the suburbs—maybe not the best location for a lot of businesses, but we really just needed collaborative workspace and good internet, and office parks and houses out in the boonies were way closer to being in our price range. Still, at first I didn’t know what he was trying to show me. I flicked through several of the snapshots of the property—distant exterior shot, inside dark shot of the living room, shot of a kitchen that actually looked better than mine, then…I glanced back up at him.
“Okay, this seems nice enough and all, but isn’t this bigger than what we need?”
He rolled his eyes. “No, not for us to rent or something. Keep flipping til you get back outside.”
I was slightly irritated now. He had all the focus of a puppy on crack sometimes, and we were taking our lunch break to do research when we could be getting actual lunch, but fine, whatever. It would be quicker just to play along than argue with him and have him sulk for two hours. Flipping through the pictures faster, I caught glimpses of a bedroom, a bathroom, another bedroom, and then finally another picture outside. This one showed the back of the house, and in one of the windows, a young girl was staring out at the camera. She had long, dark hair framing a thin face set in what looked like the beginning of a petulant scowl. Frowning slightly, I gave a shrug.
“Yeah? So it’s like a bratty-looking kid in the window? So what?”
Todd took his phone back with a chuckle. “Just wait.” He turned the screen back toward me and scrolled to the top of the page. “So you see the address, right? This is 2849 Maple Cross Road in Durham.”
I nodded. “I do. And I think we already decided that Durham is too far out for Perry to drive every week.”
Todd snorted. “Perry is a whiner. And you know he’s still going to do remote work half the time anyway.” He waved his hand. “But you’re getting me off-topic.” He tapped the screen, shifting over to a different tab in his phone’s browser. “Okay, look at the address here.”
“All right. 310 Bassett Avenue. At least this one is in Chesterton. Come on, man. What am I looking for here? I’m not in the mood for Where’s Waldo.”
He snickered. “Sure, sure. Just scroll through the pictures.”
Taking the phone back, I started flipping past the various rooms, my mind already back to weighing the size and layout of the place. We really only needed three small rooms for private offices and one central space for collaborative stuff. Bathroom, small kitchen, and anything else was ext…I paused, flipping back to the last picture.
“What the fuck?”
Todd laughed beside me. “I know, right?”
It was an exterior shot, the first in this house’s sequence of pictures, and a bit closer up than any I’d seen of the other house. The angle was still wide enough to show most of the front of the building, and it was clear this was a smaller, older place than the place in Durham. There was one thing that was the same, however.
The dark-haired girl staring out from one of the windows at me.
I zoomed in to the point of graininess and then back out. It really did look like the same girl, but it had to be a coincidence. I was probably just seeing two girls with dark hair in similar circumstances and making them the same in my head. Tabbing back to the first set of pictures, I zoomed in more there too. Beside me, Todd was practically bouncing in his seat.
“Yeah, I did that too. It’s the same girl. It has to be. How weird is that?”
After flipping back and forth a couple of times, I nodded and handed him back his phone. “Yeah, it is. But maybe it’s like some kind of weird inside joke. Like a realtor that always puts her kid in one of the pictures for houses she’s selling.”
He frowned slightly, turning to poke at his phone for a moment. “Nope. I don’t think so. Different realty companies and different agents on both.”
I shrugged. “Maybe it’s the same people selling or renting out both. People do have multiple rentals sometimes, and they’re only…what, like twenty miles apart maybe?”
He didn’t respond right away, instead tapping again on his phone. I went back to actually looking for us an office on mine. Ten more minutes and I’d have to head back inside, and I’d really like to have some good options to show Perry on Saturday. He was a bit of a whiner, but he was also going to be fronting the deposit and first month for whatever rental we found, and I wanted to get one locked in before he changed his mind.
“Ha!”
Sighing, I turned back to Todd. “What?”
“I checked the tax information on the two houses. It wasn’t hard, there were links to it on the houses’ profiles. Different owners going back as far as the records go. No connection between the two that I could find.”
“Well…I mean, okay. Yeah, that’s weird. But we don’t have any idea of what it means, right?” I grinned at him. “It was cool though. Look, I need to head back in. Text me if you find any more good rental options this afternoon, all right?”
Looking a bit glum, Todd nodded. “Sure thing, captain.”
My phone buzzed at 2:43. Seeing it was a text from Todd, I opened my phone and went to it. It was a link for the website we’d been browsing. This property had a city address, but it was way out at the edge, and the rent wasn’t terrible. Which meant it was either in a really bad part of town or the house itself was in shambles. Probably some partially restored meth den.
I clicked on the thumbnail carousel and felt mild surprise. It wasn’t bad at first glance. Older yeah, but the yard looked nice and the exterior paint looked fairly well-maintained too. The exterior pictures slowly went around the side of the house to a tidy, fenced in back yard and then…Goddamnit.
There was a picture of the back of the house, and in one of the windows was the same sullen little girl.
Grimacing, I called Todd’s number.
“Did you see it? Did you see that shit?”
“You’re doing this. Admit it.”
“Bullshit I am.”
“Bullshit you’re not. Did Perry help you with this? You know, I find it funny that we’re two weeks late on the Munsen job but you two have time to waste on…”
“Keri, I’m telling you. We didn’t do this. I don’t even know how we could do this. This is a big, encrypted website. We do web ads and social media promotions. Not exactly pro hackers over here.”
I puffed out a breath. He wasn’t wrong. “So what? You just happened to find that girl in another house?”
“No, I didn’t just ‘happen’ to find her. I spent the last two hours looking through houses for her. It was getting boring, but then she popped up. And that’s not all.” My phone buzzed again. “Check your texts. I found another one.”
I felt my pulse quicken as I looked at my phone and clicked the link. It was a house three counties over, and I had to flip to the last picture, but there she was, staring at me. Accusing me.
Swallowing, I put the phone back up to my ear. “I’m back.”
“Did you see her?”
“Yeah…Yeah, I saw her. Listen, what do you think about us going and checking out the one before that. It looked good for the location and the price.”
There was a pause and then. “Wait, you’re serious?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“Awesome! I’ll call now and see when we can get in to check it out.”
“All the fixtures are original. The wiring was all replaced back in 2008, so no problems there. I had one of our inspectors look over the plumbing, check for termites, that kind of thing, and he gave it a clean bill of health. Did you say you were looking to rent or buy?”
Todd had wandered off, probably to look for the girl in the window, and I was left actually looking at the place and dealing the desperate realtor. “Um, rent. The listing said that was an option, right?”
She nodded, her lips thinning. “It is, yes. Though I’ll tell you, at this kind of price, it’d make a great starter home for you two.”
My eyes widened slightly as I looked in the direction Todd had gone. “Us? No, um, we’re just friends. Business partners too.” When she frowned, I kept rambling. “We want this for work space with another friend of ours. Not a zoning issue, we’re not opening a store or anything. We do web development, and we’ve reached a point we need an actual place to work instead of just doing it out of our bedrooms, you know? Trying to make it our main job instead of a hobby.”
She nodded, seemingly unconvinced. “Well, I’m sure that’s very rewarding. If you do decide to rent it, then it’ll be first…” Her words faded into the background as I saw something move behind her in the shadows. It was the little girl, Moira. She…she remembered what I’d done. Hearing a question, I pulled my gaze back to the agent.
“I’m sorry, what?”
She forced a smile. “I asked if you had any more questions or just wanted some more time to look around.”
I shook my head. “I’ve seen enough. We want it.”
“Look, I didn’t want to say anything in there, but Keri, are you sure about this? Perry is going to be pissed we signed for a place without asking him, and this neighborhood isn’t exactly great.”
Putting the car in drive, I shook my head. “I’ll deal with Perry. Just…just trust me on this. It had to be this place, okay?”
I felt as he gently touched my arm, his voice soft and uncertain. “Did something happen in there? Did…” He gave a short laugh and then forced himself to finish the sentence. “Did you see her in there?”
I almost told him then, told him about my best friend growing up, about the choking, the well, everything. But something stopped me. Instead, I just gave him a smile. “All I saw in there was a good deal. Don’t worry. Captain’s got this.”
Perry was pissed for a week, but he got over it, and by the end of the next week we were moving in office furniture and scheduling fiber to be installed in a couple of days. And though I don’t think I showed it, I felt like I was split in two all the time—on the surface I was calm and upbeat and focused on getting our fledgling business off the ground. We’d all just given our notice at our old jobs, and had enough work and savings to sustain us for at least the first two months as we worked on getting more clients. Surface me was in her element and doing well.
But underneath me…I kept remembering more. Hating myself more. Feeling guilty and scared every time I caught a glimpse of the girl from the window—of Moira. Perry and Todd didn’t seem to be holding up much better than I was—maybe it was just the hectic schedule and the stress, but by the start of the third week, they both looked haggard and weary. And when I told them they should head home and get some rest, I meant it, but it wasn’t my only reason for saying it.
I’d gotten the idea that if I was there alone, the girl would visit me. Talk to me. Tell me what I had to do to earn her forgiveness.
They agreed, reluctantly, and I promised them I was heading out in just a few minutes, though I had no intention of going anywhere. Instead I walked through the house, talking to the walls, calling out to Moira, asking her to come and talk to me. When I got an answer, it wasn’t a young girl’s voice I heard. It was Todd’s.
“Keri, what’re you doing?” His voice was high and strange, and my first thought was that he was worried I’d gone crazy, wandering this house talking to myself or some made-up ghost girl we’d seen in the pictures. When I turned to look at him, his expression was equally worried. I almost faked a laugh and tried to play it off, but I changed my mind. He wouldn’t believe me. He knew me too well, and besides, he deserved the truth, as ashamed as I was to admit it.
“I…I was talking to Moira. The…she’s the little girl in the windows.”
He stepped closer, frowning. “You’re calling her Moira now?” He had a large brown sack clutched in one hand, but he sat it down as he reached out to me and gripped my arm firmly. Eyes watering, he caught my gaze and held it. “Are you saying you know who she is?”
Nodding, I patted his hand and began to tell him.
When I was ten, a girl moved into the house down from mine. We were the only two kids our age in the neighborhood, and it didn’t take long before we were best friends. She was home schooled, but every day when I got off the bus, I’d run to her house instead of my own. We’d go out playing and roaming around until we’d hear our parents yelling for us to get inside before it got dark. Even then, sometimes we pretended we didn’t hear and kept doing whatever it was we were doing.
For awhile it was the happiest I’ve ever been. I never felt like I belonged with my family—not that they didn’t love me, but I just didn’t fit in. With Moira, it felt like we were always in sync. We never argued, and it always felt like she had some new adventure planned for us. Even when she started talking about finding starlight, I didn’t think it was that weird.
Sorry, you don’t know what that is. It’s what she called it. Finding starlight. The idea is we would take turns choking each other until we blacked out. When one woke up, then it would be the other one’s turn. It didn’t work at first, but over time we got where we were doing it, and doing it for longer periods of time. I…I don’t know why we did it. It always hurt and I was always scared, but it seemed to make her happy, so I kept doing it. I kept doing it until one time when…one time when Moira didn’t wake up.
I…I tried everything. The most either of us had ever been out was a few minutes, and I always see her breathing and listen to her heartbeat. This time was different. She was too still. I couldn’t see her breathe, couldn’t hear her heart. She was…Todd, she was dead.
I panicked. Of course I panicked. I started screaming and crying, trying mouth to mouth, pushing on her chest, things I’d seen on T.V. but I didn’t really know how to do. Nothing worked…I had to have tried at least three or four minutes before I gave up and laid down next to her. I wanted to die too.
That’s when she sat up, screaming this awful scream I’d never heard before. At first I was scared and happy, hugging her so tight that, well, I think that’s what kept her from running off then. She went from screaming to crying, and after awhile, she started to talk—fast, stuttering sentences that I wasn’t even sure was meant for me. She had held onto me once she started weeping, but I still wasn’t sure she even really knew I was there. She just kept talking, spitting out the words faster and faster, talking about where she had been.
She told me about waking up at the edge of a cold and terrible forest, the space between the trees unnaturally dark. She was scared of that dark, so she turned the other way—toward a rolling hill of brown grass and bright green trees with leaves that shuddered at her approach. The branches of those trees reached out toward her and she saw the too-green leaves weren’t leaves at all, but mouths. She started to run then, up and over that hill and to the next one—the trees were fewer here, and ahead she saw a house on the next rise. It was painted blue and white, and she kept calling it the gingerbread house, though I don’t know what that means.
What I do know is that she climbed the hill toward it, and as she did, the hill began to move under her. Looking down, she saw thousands of black legs milling below her, shaking off dust and leaves and dirt as the thing she was on moved off of a bed made of bones picked clean and skulls cracked and crushed beneath its weight. She said the sound was the worst part—the sound of its endless legs stepping through countless layers of old bone as it crawled forward toward some unknown destination. She saw a broad flat head a hundred yards away, and though she couldn’t see its eyes, she felt like it saw her. Knew she was there and might shake her off to get at her any moment.
So she ran to the house. She understood it was part of this thing, but it still looked like safety, and at least there maybe she wouldn’t fall free so easily. She ran up the steps to the door, and the knob turned easily, and when she went inside…
She said time was a lie and that Hell is a very truthful place. That she spent forever in that house, inside that thing, and that…well, she shoved me down then. Stood up and started kicking me, hard. It took the breath out of me, and when she ran off laughing, I didn’t follow. I waited there for an hour, terrified, and when it started getting dark, I went home and told my parents that Moira had gotten lost in the woods.
They started searching for her right away, and it only took a couple of hours for them to find her. She was drowned, face down in a creek less than a foot deep, her hands wrapped around tree roots like she was pulling herself into the water instead of trying to get out of it. They ask…
“Keri, stop.”
I blinked—I had been deep in those memories, and being pulled out of them so abruptly, I felt disoriented. Todd was staring at me, his face a mask of confusion and concern. “What?”
“Keri, none of that is true.”
I frowned at him. “What’re you talking about. Of course it is. If you don’t belie-“
He shook his head as he cut in. “No, it’s not about me not believing you or trusting you. It’s that literally none of that could have happened to you.”
Feeling anger building in my chest, I tried to keep my voice calm. “Oh really? Why do you say that?”
Rubbing his mouth, he started shaking his head. “A couple of reasons. First off, I grew up with you, remember? We were best friends since like third grade. You never lived in a neighborhood without kids. You never had some creepy girl move in nearby that you became friends with.” Sucking in a breath, he continued, his voice trembling. “And no kid we knew ever died while we were growing up.” Todd gave a humorless smile. “Well, other than hearing about that guy that killed his little girl by drowning her in a creek when we were teenagers.”
“But I…”
He met my eyes as he grasped my hand and went on. “Second, because for the last few days, I’ve been thinking about my sister, Samara. How I loved her, but she was bad, and I wound up helping my parents trick her into falling down a well.” When I just stared at him, he gripped my hand tighter. “I’ve been all torn up about it. Can’t sleep, full of guilt, and terrified, because once I started remembering it, I realized this little girl we’ve been seeing is my little sis-“
“No, no. That’s not possible. It’s Moira. And…and…” I raised my finger, pointing it at him like I was making the winning argument of a debate. “And you don’t have a sister! You’re an only child! I remember that. I used to pester you about being an only child because you wanted a brother like I had and I was jealous of how much your parents…well, how much they loved you. I’d call you…”
“Todd the lonely pony.”
I was starting to cry now, my head spinning as I tried to sort out the conflicting memories warring in my head. “Yeah! I…” I shook my head. “But no sister.” I squeezed his hand and looked up at him. “Right?”
He nodded, his own eyes shimmering with tears. “No. I didn’t realize it until I heard you talking about your stuff with that Moira girl. I think it took parts of your real memories and mixed in other stuff to trick you. Control you. It did the same thing to me.” He gave a watery laugh. “Shit, I think a lot of that stuff about my sister came from the movie The Ring.”
I laughed too, in spite of my sadness and confusion and growing fear. I lowered my voice to a whisper. “We have to get out of here. Now.”
Nodding slowly, Todd glanced around, his face paling with fear. “Do you hear that?”
“What?”
“It sounds like water is run
Todd was yanked away then, his expression shocked and scared as he flew backward, cracking his head against the corner wall as he was drug by invisible hands down the hall. I started to scream, staring as his body banged against the doorframe of the bathroom before floating limply inside.
Getting to my feet, I ran after him, heart pounding as I tried to understand what was happening, how I could get Todd and get out before it was too late.
But it was already too late. He was face down in the full tub, arms penwheeling as the dark-haired girl held him down. As I started into the room, she turned and smiled at me, a wall of air slamming me back out into the hall before the door swung closed and locked. I yelled and beat on it, but it didn’t budge, and before long, the sound of struggle on the other side were replaced by dead silence.
That’s when my phone buzzed. It was Perry’s wife, Trudi. The text just said:
Perry drowned in the pool. He must have come home and gone right in. Was in his werk clothes. Don’t understand. Did he seem strange today?
Shuddering, I started crawling away from the bathroom door. I had to get out. I had to get away before it was too late.
A hand on my head stopped me. I looked up, trembling, into the face of the dark-haired woman that was smiling down at me.
“D-don’t kill me. Please.”
Her voice was soft and musical when she spoke. “I won’t.”
“I-I’ll do whatever you want.”
Her smile widened. “You will.”
I glanced back toward the bathroom. “Why did you have to kill them?” When she didn’t answer, I puffed out the rest like it was the last air in my body, the weight of its passing dragging my head down toward the floor. “I…I’m all alone now.”
A long finger cupped my chin and raised my eyes to her again. She was wearing something black and amorphous…a dress maybe? Or was it just a shadow? It didn’t matter, because it parted as she grew, showing me an inner dark full of silken strands and whirls of distant storm woven together like the night-time tapestry of a spider’s dreams. She chuckled, and as she did so, I could feel her invisible hooks pushing into my brain again. She was Moira, wasn’t she? A little ghost girl all grown up, or was that right? Hadn’t something just happened? To someone I loved? Yes! Yes, Todd. Oh God, Todd and Perry were dead.
Eyes streaming, I wanted to curse her or say I was sorry or just beg for her to let me go. Instead, all I managed was a weak whisper, an echo of what I’d said before, the mournful truth that resounded in my heart.
“I’m all alone now.”
She laughed again, her face looking younger for a second. Younger, and more cruel.