Specter

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

It turned out all the books and movies had gotten ghosts dead wrong. Still, I knew what I was dealing with from that very first glimpse. Just like you can tell a cat from a dog, some instinct thrummed through me, real deep and low in my gut, and I knew. The dead aren’t the living, and it was the dead I saw that day.

Day, not night—see? Granted it was October, but the way early bit of October, too early for even me to be getting excited about America’s best holiday. Plus it was sunny, plus it was a Tuesday. If the days of the week were people, Tuesday would be bumbling, adorable, and absolutely average—perhaps the younger cousin of trendy and aloof Thursday. Nothing notable is supposed to happen on Tuesdays, let alone anything supernatural.

I was in bed, wrapped up burrito-style in my blankets, shivering from a fever and halfway to miserable—only halfway because it was just about the time Mrs. Morrie would be handing out the math test I was supposed to be taking. It’s funny how things work out; the night before I’d considered faking sick to dodge the test, and now here I was, sick for real.

I was just sinking into a nap when the door creaked open, followed by the light pad of footsteps. I snaked an arm out from under the warmth of my comforter, my hand meeting soft fur.

“Hey, Mustard,” I croaked. The virus hadn’t spared my throat. I patted the bed, and my golden retriever jumped up and began snuffling my face, all whiskers and dog breath.

“Gross!” And as I pushed him away, I saw a flash of blue-tinged skin in the corner of the room.

That was the next thing that wasn’t right. It—she—had none of the silvery translucence from the stories. In fact, she wasn’t see-through at all, her figure cast in slow-moving blue shadows, like the sun making mottled patterns on the seafloor.

There was a ghost in my room—a ghost my age, her hair a big mess of feathery curls straight out of an eighties movie, her clinging black leotard and jeans vintage to match. And she was looking right at me.

I jerked back, yelping as my head collided with the headboard. The ghost’s eyes widened. In my peripheral vision, Mustard was making circles at the end of the bed, preparing for his thrice-daily nap. Didn’t he notice? Weren’t dogs supposed to have a sixth sense for the paranormal? They could predict earthquakes and sniff out cancer, after all. In the movies, dogs always gave early warnings about evil spirits…

And that’s why all the smarter ghosts in those same movies always found some sinister way to get rid of the dog. I scrambled forward and gathered Mustard up into an unhappy, squirming ball, then tried to leap out of bed, only to get caught in the blanket. I tumbled to the ground, and Mustard wriggled free from my arms. Shooting me a wounded look, he trotted from the room.

The bed skirt was blocking my view of the ghost. I sucked in a steadying breath and willed myself to get up. Surely she’d be gone when I stood up again, going for the jump-scare-then-leave kind of haunting. What a great story this would make, narrated by upturned flashlight around a clichéd campfire. I was lying sick in bed, then…

I pushed up from the floor with a groan.

“f**k!” There she was, blue and muted, though she stood directly in the sunlight beaming through the window. A vague, familiar feeling quivered at the back of my mind…

The ghost was tracking me with her eyes. After a long, silent moment, her lips twitched up into some horrid semblance of a smile. She took a step forward.

“M-Mom?!” But my call was useless reflex only; she’d deemed my fever just low enough to go into work for a few hours, rather than shuttling me to the doctor. I was alone in the house—well, no one else alive was in the house.

You’re hallucinating. Call Mom so she can take you to the hospital. For that must be it—my fever had climbed too high. Yet the ghost looked so real, and I couldn’t help but scan my room for something, anything, to use to fight back. I didn’t keep my room stocked with weaponry, so I settled for the bedside table lamp, yanking the cord from the wall and clutching it baseball bat-style.

Time for the first and likely final showdown between Lanie Adams and Ghost Girl.

But she took another step forward—her sneakers were also some retro style, I noticed—and icy fear rooted me in place. Just a hallucination—a hallucination of a ghost who shops at Goodwill. I drew together my fleeing scraps of courage and poked the lamp toward Ghost Girl’s stomach.

It passed straight through, without even a ripple at the edges. I lurched back, gripping the lamp to my chest like a safety blanket. “Not real,” I whispered, and the ghost frowned at me, as if to say, I beg to differ.

“What do you want?” I managed. My voice was a trembling wreck. Didn’t ghosts usually have some sort of purpose, some wrong to be righted or atrocity to be avenged? She opened her mouth to answer…

The words erupted as a garbled stream of syllables.

Fine, she could have the room; I was willing to vacate. I threw down the lamp and vaulted over the bed, hurtling towards the door—

—Where I leaped straight through another bluish ghost, this one a teenage boy standing right on the threshold.

That was when my hopes that this was all just a hallucination evaporated away. Have you ever taken a bath in a ghost? Suffice it to say that the experience is not pleasant—an aching kind of cold that seeps to the bone in the space of a heartbeat, banishing all memories of warmth.

But I didn’t have to endure it for long. White sparks clouded my vision, then the world wavered and contracted to a pinhole.