Chapter one

If Diana is the Greek goddess of the moon, then Tammy Ray is the American goddess of fear and all things frightful. No, she doesn’t frighten other people. She doesn’t wear black and white makeup and ceramic horns in her dyed-black hair. She is afraid of everything and anything.

She is afraid of germs, of fast rides, of the solar radiation in the sky, the pollution in the atmosphere. She is afraid of bugs and animals with sharp teeth. She is afraid of the creepy old house that had once been a bookstore across the street from where her schoolgroup stays in a hotel, but she was more afraid of what her friends might say if she didn’t show up.

So she ignored the rules, snuck out of bed, helped carry a six-pack, and helped clear the glass when they smashed a window and broke in.

I am such an idiot. I should be curled up in the hotel room with a book, nervously fretting over the plane ride home tomorrow. Why did I come, anyway? I’m afraid of heights. I hate planes. And I’m sitting in a room where people died mysteriously or went nuts.

I suppose I should clarify. I, Tammy Ray Beauregard, am afraid of reality. Germs, falling, cancer, muggers, Jack the Ripper copycats. Not stories. Stories can’t hurt you. The monster on the television can’t climb out and attack you. The Nameless Thing in Samantha’s story can’t crawl out of her mouth and strangle me.

But this house has been boarded up for a good twenty or thirty years. It smells. The air is stale. God knows what mold is growing in the corners. And I am surrounded by teenagers, beer, and an ouija board.

This cannot be a good omen.

Samantha asked me to set up the ouija board. She thinks I know how to do stuff like that because I’m into ghost stories. I am not about to start my own TV show about me carrying a camera through a house and trying to find ghosts, but I like a good ghost story or movie. Germs kill you, urban legends don’t.

I don’t have the heart to tell her that I don’t. Of all the things I’ve seen on TV about ghosts—not that I’ve studied them, just that I enjoy the stories—I know that an ouija board is nothing but doom. I know not to invite the ghost to into the house, not to ask it to show itself, but that’s it.

Still, if I don’t she’ll say I’m scared. My hands are shaking, but that’s beside the point. I just don’t want her to say it, you know?

This particular board is the box. The top is divided in half and hinged on either side, so you open it up and it forms a level surface with the numbers and letters, the yes and no, drawn on it in Old English-style letters. There is a hollow compartment under it with the classic, rounded-off triangle indicator with the magnifying glass set inside. Someone lost the instructions, though.

I don’t know whose it is. It looks new, so they probably bought it here. Samantha, I guess.

I open it and pull out the indicator. When Samantha sees this, she asks me to tell them how it works. I don’t want to, they're all staring at me and I can feel my pale skin turning red, but if I don’t they’ll think I’m a dork. So I have to.

I spread out my pale pink blanket and sit on it, clinging my gray sweater to me, and say, “Don’t ask the spirits to manifest themselves in any way. That’s inviting them in and it isn’t good. If you ask their name and they don’t give it to you, stop talking to them, there must be a reason. You probably also don’t want to bother asking if the entity is evil or not, because if they are, they’ll only lie.”

“And don’t worry, Ray,” one of the boys from my English lit (the reason we’re here) class says. “We brought you some smelling salts!”

The others collapse into laughter. I look down and blush. I really don’t want to be here. I can feel the germs crawling on my skin, the smell of the beer alone making my liver rot. Not to mention the stories were right, this room does have an ominous feel. Very creepy. And I can see the bullet hole Samantha talked about.

She told the story about the nobleman who heard the stories and tried to stay here the night, with a pistol and a bell. Downstairs, his accomplices heard the bell ring softly, and then frantically. When they went upstairs to help him, he was dead from fright.

There was a man who stayed here once his friends heard a gunshot and came running. They found him convulsing from fright, the smoking gun still in his hand and a bullet hole in the wall.

There were two sailors who stayed here. One saw the Nameless Thing come creeping, slimy and wet and horrible, up the stairs and attack his friend, wrapping its tentacles around the young man’s face. The other sailor ran for help and they found his friend in the basement, dead from fright but with a broken neck.

The girl that slept upstairs for several nights and saw a male ghost at the foot of her bed. The man who shot apparently said male ghost when it tried to attack him, its open mouth as “black as pitch”, and when the bullets rang out, the ghost collapsed and disappeared.

Not a room I feel like staying in. The Thing could be a slug for all I know, and the trail it leaves behind is probably packed with toxic germs.

“What if we get the ghost of that Moaning Lisa person?” someone asks. “You know, the girl in the museum we went to last week. That babe’s got to be dead, right? If we summon her, can we invite her into our hotel room?”

There are a lot of snickers and laughter, high-fives and giggles. Samantha looks at me and sends me a sympathetic, but confident look.

“For your information,” she hisses at the boy. “No one knows who Mona Lisa is. In fact, the theory is that the Leonardo painted himself as a woman.”

I smile quietly. The whole room collapses in laughter at the blushing boy, who looks up and says, “Well…I didn’t think she looked like she was moaning, anyway.”

You know that girl in school who has everything? The looks, the money, the clothes, and the boys? That’s Samantha. She’s not inherently mean like the other Everything Girls, but she does have this superior way of carrying herself. I been sitting here trying to figure out if I was brought along out of honest pity or for a good time. With a girl like Samantha, it could go either way.

After a few flirting remarks, a few jeers at me, a few kisses from Samantha to about three beer-breathed boys, they are ready to start, so all hands go to the indicator. My hand is shaking, so I’m the first one accused of moving.

“It’s not even moving yet, dimwit!” Samantha shouts, getting into an argument with three people.

Finally she rolls her eyes and sighs, ignoring them.

“Okay,” she says. “Is there a spirit in the room?”

I feel the object move beneath my fingers. It traces its way across the board. I hold my breath, my heart beating and the fingers of my right hand twitching.

N…o…

We all look at each other. Someone hands me a soda in a can, so I take a sip and almost choke on it. Samantha looks around and asks what she should ask next.

Someone else rolls their eyes and jumps in with, “If you aren’t a spirit, then what are you?”

B…a…k…i…

“The heck’s a baki?” Samantha mouths, looking around. Everyone shrugs, no one knows.

My heart is thumping in my chest. It seems like I heard that word before, but I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s a good thing, if I did hear it.

I feel the indicator moving under my fingers again, everyone jumps and gasps, staring down at it.

C…r…e…a…t…u…r…e…f…e…a…r…d…e…a…t…h…i…n…s…a…n…i…t…y…

Everyone stares at each other with pale, frightened faces. I can hear my heart beating, I can see the thumping in my loose-fitting black shirt. We shouldn’t be doing this. This is not a good thing we’re talking to and we’re all about to get killed, not to mention in trouble and probably catch some horrible nasal infection.

Samantha looks down at the board again and she whispers, “What’s your name?”

N…o…n…a…m…e…

“W-we should put this up,” I say. “We don’t know what we’re doing and I know I heard the word ‘baki’ before…”

“Scared?” one of the boys coos. The others start laughing, but there’s a distinctly nervous tone.

H…u…n…g…r…y…

Samantha makes a face of surprise and takes her hand off the indicator.

“I can’t take this,” she says. “I’m going to the bathroom for a minute.”

“Watch it,” the boy who was kissing her says. “This nameless baki thing might eat you!”

She laughs and steps out of the room. Leaving me here. Alone. With a bunch of teenagers drinking that I don’t know. In a haunted house. That has been boarded up for thirty years.

“So,” the boy smirks. “Can you do anything to show us you're here?”

Three people shout at him and call him a moron. Someone throws the bowl of popcorn at him, but no one takes their hands off the indicator.

I…m…c…o…m…i…n…g…t…o…g…e…t…y…o…u…

“That’s not funny,” one of the girls says. “Who’s moving it?”

No one admits, obviously. Everyone looks just as scared as me. my heart is pounding so hard I might just give myself a heart attack, and I’m more afraid of that then what they think of me, so I jump up and declare myself finished. A few people laugh and poke fun at me for being scared, but I walk to the door and open it.

Sharp fangs, horns, white straggles of hair, bloodstains…and then nothing.

Screams, sloppy, slurping noises, cussing, screams, my head hurts at the back. Why are they screaming? Has one of them gotten sick from breathing the bacteria already?

I open my eyes and the first thing I see is smooth, pale, slimy-looking skin. Metallic silver eyes with sideways disc-shaped pupils outlined in gold, waving tentacles with suction cups.

“The heck is that?!” someone shouts.

“I think it’s the baki, who cares?! Kill it!”

I can’t move. The creature is inching toward me, a small octopus-like creature without the warts sliding to me on its many suction cupped tentacles, making slurping noises when they release. Oddly, my heart isn’t beating so fast. I am perfectly calm and relaxed, staring into its eyes.

Those eyes are so strange. I know octopi are intelligent, but you don’t really see it in their eyes. There is just a placid animal looking back at you. This thing…its eyes are sharp, focused, and intelligent…but off. There is something wrong with this creature, definitely.

But I don’t care. I can’t move, I can’t breathe. I am perfectly relaxed, perfectly calm, comfortably numb, watching it slide toward me. Inch by inch, watching it slither in my direction, intent on its prey and completely ignoring the others.

Its cold, damp tentacle touches my neck, just above my collar bone. Another wraps over my chest, just below my collar bone. It climbs onto my face and, frightenedly whimpering, I look up at it. Four more tentacles unwrap from its head as it slides closer, waving them in the air as it crawls up my face.

BAM!

“You had a gun? Where the f did that come from and how did you get it on the plane?!”

The creature flies off, rolling over and over and landing in a bloody, spineless heap by the door. It twitches slightly, makes a noise like a groan, but lies still. Someone grabs my hands and they pull me up, dragging me out through the night, screaming and yelling and leaving the beer, the ouija board, and everything else behind.

I beg for them to tell me what just happened, but they tell me to shut up and keep yelling at each other, cussing each other out, demanding to know what the f that thing was. Samantha has my right wrist, her boy has my left, and I can’t slow down.

I keep trying to process the sight, that creature almost on top of my face, the feel of its cold tentacles and the way it touched me so gently, without using its suckers. The predatory look to its eyes.

Its battered, bloody, gunshot body lying in a heap when we ran past, and nobody called a vet.

A/N:

I never played a ouija board and I hope I never will. I was trying to imply that no one here knew what they were doing, so since I don’t, I just wrote what it seemed like a bunch of horny, half-drunk teenagers would do.

My reasons for not playing a ouija are simple: just because I don’t think Milton Bradley sells portals to the spirit world doesn’t mean that I am ready to tempt fate. I have read the stories and heard the warnings and I’m not willing to test it.

Perhaps someone should have told that lot!