Somehow, in an overnight period from 11 pm to 5 am, our house had grown a tower on its left side.

We woke up one sunny Saturday morning, looked out our windows, and noticed that there, over my room and some 40 feet high, was a large, black tower, like something out of a “dark and stormy night” novel. Dark rain clouds and formed over the peak, and if you stood against the wall under the tower (and consequently, under my window) the air would be cool, wet, and gray.

“no idea,” said the contractor, a man in his middle ages with a nametag that read “Antonio”, which contradicted the name on the band of his underwear, peeking over the belt band of his gray suit pants, which read “Charlie”, “are ya sure this wasn’t here yesterday?”

“Positive,” my dad informed him with an arm around my mother’s waist, “I think we would have noticed that thing before now.” We were all standing outside our house, in the front yard, staring quite uselessly up at our tower. The sun hadn’t been blocked out by the clouds from this angle; it was floating off to the side as if as surprised and curious as us. My little sister, Pill, raised a hand to her eyes and commented,

“It’s ugly.” Pill was two years old, and at that age, a large black tower suddenly appearing over our house didn’t seem too far fetched.

“We can get rid of it,” Mother said distantly. Antonio ran his grubby, olive colored finger through his greasy hair (showering his shoulder with a flurry of dandruff), then wiped his hand on his shirt.

“That would take a lotta work,” he commented. He took a ham and cheese sandwich out of his pocket and munched noisily while Mother and Father considered their options.

By now, the neighbors had shuffled out of their house and were forming a curious herd on our street, most still in fluffy pink bath robes, five o’clock shadows, and coffee mugs in their hands. They were murmuring behind their hands, and the combined voices created the sound of a small breeze wafting through a church.

“I wanna see what’s up there,” Pill stated, gripping my hand with her own, her shiny green fingernails digging into the fleshy part of my palm.

“I wouldn’ recommend that,” Antonio said thickly, still chewing a piece of cheese, “ya don’t know what’s up there. Might fall right through the floors.” he sniffed, than spat into our grass.

“What do you recommend?” Father asked a little stiffly. Being a fairly domineering individual, the fact that he couldn’t do much about the tower was obviously bothering him. Also, he had planned to sow the garden today, but the shadow from our tower was blocking the plot he had set aside for the pansies.

“I’ll make us a nice cup of coffee,” Mother said dreamily, pulling away from Father and walked slowly back into the house.

The tower look so ridiculous sitting atop a prim little home with its rotting shingles, missing in patches on the roof, and its rusted iron shutters that we could see even so far up, that I almost laughed.

That night I slept on the couch.

“Better not use tha’ room,” Antonio had said, “the whole side of the house might collapse, or something’. I should call this in to my supervisor. I’ll give you a call if I find anythin’ out. You folks have a fine day.”

So Mother had made a bed for me on our old yellow and orange couch, and a cup of hot tea. A hot beverage was my mother’s way of helping out in these stressful situations. I sipped my tea and munched on popcorn until midnight, when Pill, in her baby pink pj’s and carrying her stuffed animal cat, whom she affectionately named “Tuesday”, crept silently into the living room and informed me that she wanted to go into our tower for a look-see.

“Robert said it’s dangerous,” I told her, wrapped in my hand-sown quilt. “Robert” was our father, whom I called by his first name. Gloria was our mother.

“But I wanna see a ghost.” Pill seemed to never be scared by normal scary things; she would be the first to want to see a ghost inhabiting our tower. She looked hopefully at me with her bright blue eyes. When she put on that face, she can get you to do anything. And that’s how I found myself, 5 minutes later, holding her hot little hand and standing in front of the mysterious stairs that also had cut a hole in the wall across from my bed.

Pill went first, her bare feet making dull ‘plunk” noises when they hit the rotting planks. Her dirty blond hair was wafting out behind her. Tuesday was dragging on the stairs under her by his tail, staring blankly at me. “why me?” he was asking. I shrugged my shoulders at him.

The stairs curled around, making a full spiral by the time both me and Pill were standing at the top, scouting the room.

It was small and round.

“I want my room to be up here.” Pill stated. I pulled out the yellow flashlight I had grabbed from downstairs and switched it on. The light bounced back to me.

“it’s a mirror,” I told Pill, who had gripped my pant leg at the sight of our reflections.

“I knew that.”

Crossing the room was nerve-wracking. The floor creaking and sputtered and protested my weight. It was silent under Pill’s, but she was very light. I tried to step where she did to avoid an especially rotted out portion, but my foot nearly when through the planks nonetheless.

“Who do you think lives up here?” Pill questioned, rubbing the mirror surface with her sleeve. My mind already supplied a dead body dragging itself across the floor, the kind without eyes, just black holes, and large, gasping mouths draining black, rotted bodily fluids.

“Probably nothing.” I told her.

I swung the light around. Other than the mirror, which was now clean enough to show our faces clearly, it was empty.

“Aw, it broke,” Pill whimpered as her hand pressed too hard against the glass, and a large crack spread from the center, “Great, now I have bad luck!”

The mirror too seemed to protest. It started to vibrate so violently that the floor under it shook too. Pill was nearly knocked off her feet. I grabbed the back of her nightgown and dragged her down the stairs, nearly tripping down them myself. Pill screamed all the way down that she had left Tuesday behind.

~*~

“We’ll have to go back today,” Pill said the next morning. Her normally pale face was flushed pink from both excitement and that fact that she had been crying over the loss of Tuseday, “we have to save Tuseday!”

I swallowed my bite of French toast. “I guess its okay to go in the daylight,” I figured we could open the windows. “S’long as I don’t fall through the floor.”

“What floor, sweetie?” Mother asked, sashaying around the kitchen in order to get a Sunday breakfast ready for her three members of the family.

“On the deck,” I said automatically, not looking up from my orange juice. Pill didn’t say anything.

“Ok.” Asking for no further details, she stuck another plate of toast in front of me.

~*~

“This time,” I said pulling on my sneakers, “we go just to get Tuesday, but then we leave, right?”

“Right,” Pill agreed. She was holding the heavy flashlight. Its weight was just about knocking her over, being almost half her size. Grinding the back of my shoes into the floor to adjust the pressure, I motioned for her to follow me.

No sunlight was creeping through the shutters. Not even a sliver. I didn’t trust touching the rusted metal, so I just swung the light around the room. The mirror was still on the wall, the cracked having fixed itself myteriously, but Tuesday was missing.

“Where is he?” Pill asked in wonder. She walked around the room in a full circle, but Tuesday was no where to be seen.

“There!” Pill said suddenly, pointing with her now blue fingernails at the mirror. Tuesday’s reflection was showing quite clearly that he should be lying in the middle of the room, even though Tuesday himself wasn’t there.

The both us stared silently at the spot on the floor that he should have been lying. Normally, I would have blamed something like this on a trick of the light, or too much dust or something, but it was quite clear that while the cat’s reflection showed him to be lying on his back in the middle of the floor, both eyes staring glassily back at us, the room was empty.

“How did he get in there?” Pill wanted to know, fearlessly crossing the room. She pressed her face against the glass, but her own reflection was blocking the image of Tuesday.

“Maybe we should leave,” I told her.

And then we heard footsteps. Pill backed away from the mirror just in time to see that a figured had walked up to mirror-image Tuesday, and stopped. Me and Pill held our breath.

The figure bent over, picked up the stuffed cat, and began to walk towards us. I swung the flashlight around, but the room was empty. Swinging it back, I saw the figure had gotten quite close to the glass, as if he himself was pressing his face against it.

It looked like a man, though his age was impossible to tell. He was glaring at us from maniacal gray eyes, an angry forehead with no eyebrows, and a mouth crowded with yellowing teeth. His black, straggly hair fell around his gray, ashy face in strands. He was wearing a yellow, stained straightjacket.

He reached out a hand, the one with Tuesday, gripped in black, chipped nails and gray skin, through the mirror, in Pill’s face.

She broke the silence by emitting a shriek that every dog in town must have heard, followed by a sickening sob/gurgle, and, grabbing Tuesday so fast I missed it, she turned and flew, literally her feet kicking in midair, across the room and down the stairs. The face in the mirror looked startled, but didn’t flee. I followed Pill all the way down. The shutters opened themselves as I was running by, banging into the wall so violently, one of them became unhinged, and swung back and forth. Of course, by this time, I was already at the bottom of the stairs, and out the door, where both me and Pill collapsed gasping into the grass in our front yard.

“Hi girls,” Father said, holding a watering hose in one hand and watering his new garden on opposite side of the original plot, and the other hand in his pocket, “what’s all the commotion?”

~*~

“We should go back,” Pill said the next day. I was in the middle of a homework assignment for Algebra class; something about complex numbers and imaginary numbers…I didn’t understand any of it, so I was glad when Pill came in to distract me.

“Back where?” I asked stupidly, tapping my pencil against my notebook.

“The tower. I think the ghost was trying to be nice.”

“Nice?” I asked dumbfounded. I had not been able to get his face out of my mind for the last 24 hours, and seeing him again was the last thing I wanted to do.

We didn’t tell Mother or Father about him. They had been talking about knocking down our tower, but so far hadn’t done anything. It might even have slipped their mind. Once in while, Mother would look out her kitchen window in the midst of doing the dishes, turning her head to the side and standing on her tip-toes, staring out at the shadow our tower caused.

Father also once in a while stopped his outdoor work, whether it was watering the plants or de-weeding the garden or mowing our lawn, and stare distantly at it. Pill and I had seen him stare for a full 5 minutes, then jerk back to reality and to whatever he had been doing. The neighbors glanced out their windows, the children would stand in the street, not quite as discrete in hiding their curiosity, but never daring to come knock on our door to ask for a tour.

Otherwise, life was normal. The mailman came around to deliver mail the same as he always had, perhaps a little more dazed and confused than normal if anything. The neighborhood strays, while also staying away from our house, howled and barked all night like always. The sun went back to its regular route, disappearing behind the clouds of our tower once a day, but otherwise shining brightly.

“I thin we ought to leave him alone,” I told Pill, erasing the pin-marks I had created on my homework by tapping the lead of my pencil against the paper, “I think he likes it up there.”

“But I wanna go back!” she said, knitting her eyebrows together, her eyes already shining with tears yet to be shed. I felt a tornado coming on. The winds were picking up behind her eyes, and rain clouds to rival the tower’s where brewing between those eyebrows. Feeling it best to avoid a storm that could potentially develop into a natural disaster, I shut my notebook.

“Sure.”

~*~

“Ok, this time, no screaming. We might scare him off.” Pill told me seriously on the stairs. I nodded bravely.

The door was shut. I don’t remember shutting it, but then again it wasn’t me who did it in the first place. I pushed it open with one hand and stepped in.

Our ghost was waiting for us. He was inside his mirror, sitting on an old wooden crate that had mysteriously appeared since we last were in here. The shutters were open, and bright sunlight was streaming through the windows facing it.

Pill wrapped her tiny arms around my leg and pressed her face against my thigh. She was so small, she barely reached my hip.

The ghost, whatever he was, was resting his elbows on his knees, and his chin on his hands, fingers interlocked in a prayer position.

I stepped forward, my left hand holding the back of Pill’s shirt in case I need to make a quick break for it.

“H-Hello?” I stammered, quietly.

The ghost, lifting his head off his hands, opened his mouth, and uttered “hello” in response. I was quite taken aback by his greeting. His voice sounded more like a grunt, as if his vocal cords weren’t quite working properly. It echoed ominously the tiny room.

Pill tightened her death-grip on my leg.

“You…can t-talk?” I asked a little louder. The ghost stood. Me and Pill backed up slowly. He leaned both hands on the inner rim of the mirror and leaned his face forward, lowering his head until he was staring at the both of us from under his eye lashes. His eyebrows were still pulled together as if he was raging mad, and his hair fell over his eyes. I noticed they were yellowed and rimmed with purple so heavily, it seemed he was sporting matching black eyes. When he caught me staring, his face broke into a maniacal grin, his blacken, shrunken lips pulling back from his overabundance of yellow broken teeth. His horrible grin seemed to stretch outside the boundaries of his skull.

“Yes,” he said in low growl, the sound so grating and raspy that I felt my knees nearly give out, “I can talk.” I jerked my gaze away from his face and focused on his hands, which had slid out the mirror again, holding the outside rim now as if he planned to launch himself across the room at us.

“Its alright,” he assured me, “I wont come near you. Or your sister.” he paused, lowing his eyes to Pill, who was still attached to my leg, but staring back into his face with a terrified sort of curiosity, “Pill, is it?”

Pill jerked her head up and down.

“Its alright, Pill,” said the ghost again, sliding his hands further out of the mirror. I noticed that along with black broken nails, a few slivers of metacarpals, finger bones, were showing through the tears on his knuckles. “Its okay,” he purred, lowing his voice so that it was hardly audible, “I’ll stay right here.”

Pill swallowed.

“Uh…” she was searching for something to say, “um…what-what’s your name?”

The ghost seemed to consider her question, pulling his hands back to his side of mirror, and dropping them along the tattered remains of the straightjacket. Some of the buckles were hanging like strips of bandages along the sides.

“I don’t have one,” he said in the same soft tone of voice, but it sounded like the vocals of a heavy metal song nonetheless.

“C-can I give you one?” asked Pill, releasing her hold on my leg a little. I was still griping the back of her shirt.

The ghost nodded slowly, sending ripples along his tangled mess of hair.

Pill actually let go of my leg and might have gone closer had I not pulled her back. The ghost noted this by glancing up at me with those wild eyes.

“How about ‘Spooky’?”

He broke into another grin, then slid down until he was crouching at Pill’s level.

“Ok,” he said, keeping his teeth clenched as he talked, “then call me Spooky”. He teased the word ‘spooky’, drawing out the ‘oo’ for a fraction of a second longer than normal. Spooky was a ridiculous name for him, and a gross understatement, but I wasn’t going to argue.

“Ok,” I said a little shakily, “lets leave Spooky to his own quiet activities, and go down to dinner. Um…I think I just heard Gloria call us.” I pulled Pill back. Tearing her still curious gaze from Spooky’s face, she descended the stairs with me, the door slamming shut behind us.

~*~

“Look!”

I got a nose-ful of hot cookie dough air as Pill shoved a dish of chocolate chip goodness in my face. I made a face and waved my hand.

“Wonderful, Pill. Really wonderful.” She didn’t sense my sarcasm, and smiled happily.

“Mommy helped me bake them. I made them for Spooky.” She set down the dish and took a top cookie off. “See? This one is for you. And this one, “ she pulled another cookie from the middle of the pile and held that up too, “is for Spooky.”

I set down the book I had been reading.

“I don’t think he likes cookies,” I told her gently. She furrowed her eyebrows at me.

“Yeah-huh he does. Lets go up and see.” She hid both cookies in her pocket.

Spooky was gone when we walked in. His mirror was still hanging up, and the reflection was more or less correct, but Spooky himself wasn’t there.

“Hello?” Pill called out, her tiny voice echoing around the room, “Spooky? I brought you a cookie! Spoo-oo-oo-ooky!”

I let her walk up to the glass and glace around the mirror-image room, while I examined the rest of the actual room. The pointed roof from outside forced the inside of the room to also be pointed upwards. The sun was shining, but I couldn’t see all the way up. The walls were wooden boards, dark and moldy. I noticed, curiously, that they had long scratch marks, usually 3 or 4 parallel lines close together. They covered the walls in a way that looked like a strange kind of wallpaper. Then I remembered Spooky’s hands and the exposed bones in his fingers, then quickly turned away, feeling more than a little sick.

“There you are!” Pill cried as Spooky emerged from his hiding place in some invisible corner of the mirror-room (it was a circular room, but the mirror, though full length, didn’t catch all the room. He may have been hiding just off to the side and we wouldn’t have been able to see him). He looked more or less the same as before, though slightly more tired, the rims on his eyes darker, if that was possible. But he retained his psycho, axe-murderer grin.

“Pill,” he said in a tone that sounded almost light hearted, but growled nonetheless, “and Annette.” Upon hearing my own name, I flinched. I hadn’t recalled telling him my name at all, even if he had asked. Pill didn’t seem to notice. But I saw his eyes narrow at me, and the way he said “Annette” had made me shiver.

“Look,” Pill said, taking out her cookies from the breast pockets of her dress and holding it out to Spooky, “I baked cookies.” Spooky paused, staring at his treat as if it had suddenly grow a mouth and was cursing him. He slowly reached out a hand, his bony fingers extending towards the cookie, and pulled it gently out of Pill’s hands. His whole hand had passed through the glass.

“Thank you,” he said politely. Pill sat back on her knees and pulled out the cookie she claimed was for me and nibbled at it.

“Thank you,” she said, “for saving Tuesday.” She shoved the rest of the cookie into her mouth.

“Tuesday,” Spooky repeated, still holding the cookie. His eyes narrowed slightly, his upper lip raising in a light sneer.

“Mah kiffy,” Pill explained over a mouth full of cookie.

“Ah.” He had been kneeling when Pill offered him the cookie; now, he sat back and leaned against the mirror-crate, leaving his cookie off to the side.

“Well,” Pill stated, getting up and clapping her hands together to shake off the layer of dust, “we have to go now, but I’ll come back tomorrow and then we can play a game.”

Spooky nodded again. He watched us go, and I felt his eyes on my back the entire way down the stairs.

“Pill,” I said firmly when we reached the bottom, “you haven’t been up there alone have you?” I pulled her close and kneeled, gripping the sides of her fragile arms. She widened her eyes and shook her head violently, her hair whipping her face in a wave.

“Nu-uh. I know you don’t like Spooky, so I never go up alone. “ I sighed and let her go. She stayed where she was, staring up at me curiously.

“Then maybe,” I told her, “we should leave Spooky alone for a while. “ She started at me with eyes turning red and watery again. “I mean it,” I told her firmly, “we’ll come back in three days. Okay?”

She nodded miserably.

Spooky couldn’t wait that long. In fact, it was the first night the day she promised to come back when he began calling for her.

Spooky had never made any noise before; he didn’t act at all like the poltergeists you see in the movies. He had never given anyone a clue that he was in fact residing in our mysterious tower.

But that night, while me and Pill were busy enjoying a coloring book I had unearthed from an old pile of books in our basement, we heard noise. It was soft as first, just a rhythmic tapping just over our heads. Father glanced up from his newspaper on the third knock.

“The house is settling,” he explained to Pill, who had turned her head towards the ceiling with wide eyes. She didn’t buy that theory at all.

After a few moments of this, it stopped. Father glanced up again, seeming triumphant.

“See? Nothing to worry about.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when they started again, this time harder and faster. It sounded as though someone was stomping around in a rage upstairs. The walls shook slightly.

“I’ll have to get that checked out,” Father said idly, this time not even looking up from the sports section. Pill looked at me, her blue eyes frighteningly wide and vacant.

“Its Spooky,” she said slowly, “he’s calling me!”

“He is not,” I told her in what I hoped was a firm voice, “it’s the pipes. The house is settling, like Robert said.”

I went back to my page. The bangs stopped. Pill hesitated for a few seconds, then continued to color, though slower and absent mindedly, as though she was thinking of other things. Or straining to hear something.

The floor shook under our feet quite suddenly. My colored pencil slipped and the kitten I had been coloring received a turquoise mustache. Pill jumped to her feet.

“It settling!” Father cried over the noise, holding onto the arm rests of the chair he had been sitting in to avoid being spilled onto the floor. The house continued to bang and thrash.

Mother, who had been working on a pair of red socks on the sofa, dropped her needles and stared at the ceiling with glassy eyes.

The bang melted into a dull roar, like a lion, which rattled our windows and nearly blew out the fire we had set in the fireplace. It sounded like an inhuman shriek, like some mutant animal screaming incoherently.

Words formed from the sounds.

PIIIIIIIIIILLLL!!!

I pulled Pill down, as she had suddenly gone into a stance witch suggested she had been ready to launch herself across the room and towards my room.

“He’s calling! Spooky’s calling!! Do you hear him?? He’s calling my name!” Pill was pulling herself out of my grasp. Father and Mother were both looking up at the ceiling curiously, not at all concerned over the fact that some plaster pieces were beginning to rain.

PIIILLL! WHERE ARE YOU PIIIIILL!?!

The voice sounded to be almost sobbing, but I recognized the raspy quality of it. Pill wretched herself out of my grasp and bounded across the room upon hearing this fresh slew of questioning. I ran after her.

“Pill!” I cried, knowing full well my voice didn’t match the phantom voice for volume, but crying for her just the same.

We raced across the house madly, while Spooky continued to throw a tantrum. Pictures fell as I passed by, tables over turned, glass shattered, mirrors broke, and the walls were vibrating as if someone was banging them from the inside with a sledgehammer. Pill didn’t slow down, even as a chair fell on her, even as a vase of roses over turned and spilled foul smelling water onto her red jumper.

She reached the room before me. When I ran in, I saw my room totally thrashed; the windows shattered and glass lay all over my carpet. My bed was messy, my pillows and sheet throw about, perfume bottles smashed to pieces, but the door with the stairs was gone.

I leaped over a pile of books, torn apart by unseen hands, and threw myself into the now blank wall as if I meant to burst right through it.

The banging stopped. Pill was no where to be seen. Raising my own fists, I began my own symphony of desperate knocking and wailing and crying out for my little sister, but the wall didn’t budge. I had lost Pill forever that night.

~*~*~

Our tower disappeared that night. We awoke in the morning (“where’s Pill?” Mother had asked, but when I shrugged and stared into my bowl of Frosted Flakes, she turned back around to fix Father’s omelet) and the shadow we had been used to seeing over the side of the yard was gone. The sun was shining again.

“Good riddance.” Father announced later that day. We stood in our front yard, just the three of us, again surrounded by curious neighbors.

I still heard Pill, late at night, when staring blankly up at the swirl patterns on my ceiling in bed. I heard her sobbing, sometimes so close as though she was standing by my bed. Sometimes though, she would be laughing, her footsteps running up and down invisible stairs. Sometimes, she would be doing both, crying and laughing, that echoed through the house. No one noticed this but me. No one noticed how when I looked into a mirror, I would see her blond hair, her pink, round face and large eyes, no one noticed how the laughter of a 2 year old girl still lingered through the hall and inside the closets.

I heard.