Careful What You Wish For

Chapter One

It's full dark by the time they stumble upon the body. It's been there for hours, collecting leaves and insects and the attention of something that rustles about in the long grass as they draw near.

There is a long moment of confusion. Then someone screams behind her. The noise is so loud it echoes through her body like a shot and shocks her senses awake, generating a suddenly bubbling hysteria that threatens to unleash all over the small clearing behind the residence.

The skin is so white. There is dried blood around the nose. The hair is matted to the pale forehead and the clothes are torn.

She feels a reassuring hand on her arm, placed with just the right amount of pressure to offer her strength rather than contribute to the chaos about to erupt. His presence beside her calms her mind. Then the girl starts to scream again, and everyone is talking at once.

~

ONE MONTH EARLIER

Horror movies after dark. Never a good idea when you are home alone.

Sophie Smith runs a forcibly calm hand through her hair, abstractedly wondering what possessed her to watch a scary movie alone with nothing but an excitable imagination for company. She isn't usually the person to overreact or see things in the dark. But tonight, for no discernible reason, she is on edge.

With her housemate, Jenna, away visiting her parents, Sophie is feeling her absence acutely at night.

Night makes her feel more alone, less rational. You can't see what's going on in the dark. You can't see into the dark corners, or see out into the yard, you can't even see out the windows through your own reflection. Maybe someone is skulking around outside? Maybe someone is trying to slip in the backdoor? Maybe that noise in the upstairs bathroom is not nothing at all...

What the hell is that noise in the upstairs bathroom?

Sophie takes a deep, forced breath. "It's okay Sophie, you lunatic, you've just seen too many horror movies. What a stupid thing to do." Talking aloud to herself perhaps wasn't helping. Her voice sounded too loud in the silence.

She sighs and settles back into the couch. She reaches for a book, glancing distrustfully at the cover before opening it. Reading about the misadventures of a crazy man haunted by Satan is probably not the best way for her to throw off the tingling unease nestled under her skin.

There is a second noise upstairs in the bathroom, and Sophie's heart skips a beat. Shivers race up the back of her neck, and the hairs on her arms stand abruptly on end. She forces a nervous giggle. "It's nothing." She mutters to herself. She flicks the television back on. It is too quiet in the house. In the neighbourhood even. She can't hear anything from the street outside at all tonight.

Deftly ignoring the sensation across her shoulders that someone is standing right behind her, she focuses all of her attention on the screen before her. Too many horror stories in her head does not mean that she happens to live in one too. Reality and fiction blur completely when you're irrational. There's some zombie show on television.

"Don't know that this is going to help so much..." A stray branch scratches at the window. Sophie's heart is starting to beat a little too fast.

Fear-induced and befuddled her mind abruptly dredges up a memory of her ex-boyfriend. It is the night he scared her under the oaks in the avenue by the cemetery. Strangely this memory calms her. Sophie sees red every time she thinks of Evan DeSanto, so much red and so much anger that for a moment she forgets she is even afraid.

She wonders distractedly if the red she associates with Evan's cocky face doesn't have something to do with the cherry-coloured roses he sent to her by accident with another girl's name stamped across the card. Another flush of anger makes her chest tighten painfully.

Yes, the fear is fading fast.

Another memory surfaces. This one is of Evan's best friend, sent to tell Sophie that Evan was seeing someone else. How truly mortifying and heart-breaking that had been, how... oh good lord Sophie is suddenly furious. She takes an unsteady breath. Jonas. That was his friend's name. How truly uncomfortable it had been for them both.

The night is now flooded with images of Evan. Sophie throws her book down in disgust. She will never be able to focus now. Even the images on the screen are slipping by unnoticed – handsome zombie hunter and all.

Evan had never sent her flowers, not once, nor did he ever call and leave sweet messages, not like the one she had received, again by accident, on her phone and addressed to someone else. It was a different girl than the first one too. He was incredibly cute, Evan, and ridiculously stupid as it turned out.

Sophie resolutely picks up her book and forces herself to open it. She tries desperately to sink into the story. She does find it oddly fascinating reading about the absolute ruin of a susceptible man, and is that because of the correlation to Evan by chance? No. Evan is too self-obsessed to take advice from the devil.

She doesn't know how long it is before she notices that the room, the house, has slipped back into that ominous silence. Slowly Sophie lets her book drop into her lap. She looks around. Everything is so still. She suddenly feels scared for no reason at all.

Her heart thumps in her chest. "Wow Sophie, get a damn grip." She takes a deep breath. "Stupid scary movie."

She glances at the show flashing across the television screen. It's doing little to alleviate her sense of isolation. She can't seem to shake this awful nervous feeling. She just keeps thinking about that irrelevant noise from the upstairs bathroom.

She tries again to think about Evan and how much she hates him. It is no longer helping. It's like there is tension in the air all around her, all around the house, as though something terrible is about to happen...

Sophie gets up so quickly she startles herself, and her heart starts to really pound in her chest. She does a double take on her own reflection in the living room windows, and she stifles a scream. Sophie groans loudly, she's scaring herself to death.

She wanders cautiously around the house, checking cupboards, checking closets and empty rooms. She feels stupid, but she can't stop doing it. The doors are locked, of course. The windows are all closed. There is nothing here, everything looks as it should. But she can't seem to shake the feeling that something is different.

Upstairs she stops outside the bathroom door. She takes a deep breath. Of course there's nothing in here, she shakes her head at her silliness. The noises were indistinct, nothing, just exaggerated figments. Even so, the uncertainty refuses to abate and her heart is fluttering erratically in her chest. She swings open the door quickly. Fast is less painful. She takes in the bathroom. Perhaps not.

Her heart stops.

Blood red rose petals.

That's all she can see. Carefully plucked petals scattered and strewn across her bathroom floor, across the top of the bathtub, and all through the floor of the shower. Sophie can't quite grasp the reality of a scene so foreign. What...the...hell?

The coincidence doesn't escape her that she was only just minutes ago thinking of red roses... and Evan... could Evan have done this? She shakes her head. No. She hasn't seen him in months. And why would he?

Her scrambled thoughts take their time with the realisation that she was right, that she did hear something in the bathroom earlier... Panic whips up on her like a cyclone. Sophie spins around. Dear god, someone was in her house! She is suddenly wishing frantically that it was Evan. She stands facing up the hallway, rigid and still, her back to the red-petalled bathroom.

Is there someone in her house?