Haunted

Chapter 5:

Ashley

I don't know whether it was because I was still freaked out by the noise earlier in the afternoon, or if it was due to lingering memories of the previous night, but sleep was hard to come by that night. I had assumed, perhaps a bit naively, that I'd be out as soon as my head hit the pillow, and while that was true in the beginning, it didn't last very long.

The house itself seemed particularly active tonight. I'd long since grown accustomed to the soft groaning and creaking of it settling on its foundation, but tonight the sounds were louder, and there was decidedly more thumping and bumping than I was used to. At one point I got up and parted the blinds, looking out into the backyard. The leaves on the trees and shrubs were still; not even a breeze rustled through them. I frowned. Obviously I couldn't blame it on the wind.

I fell into a fitful sleep after that, once again plagued with strange dreams of people moaning. Teetering on the edge between sleep and wakefulness, I heard a loud crashand sat straight up in bed.

That sounded real. Most of the time I could differentiate between what was real and what I had dreamed, but that noise sounded like it came from downstairs, and it instantly brought chills to my skin despite the warm night air.

I flew out of bed and was halfway down the stairs before I had even considered the source of the sound and the potential consequences associated with it. I stopped at the base of the stairs, my eyes riveted on the kitchen doorway.

I hadn't left a light on. I was sure of it. I had turned everything off right before I went to bed. Surely I would have noticed if I left the kitchen light on. Wouldn't I?

Sinking my teeth into my lower lip, I tiptoed through the front room and peeked around the door frame into the kitchen. Nothing seemed out of place.

I breathed a sigh of relief. It was just a dream.

Just to put any lingering doubts to rest—because I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep unless I did—I did a lap around the kitchen to make sure that everything was all right. As I moved around the table, I caught sight of a pile of broken tile on the floor.

So the crash I heard was real. I must have set the tile too close to the edge and it slipped off. It didn't make a lot of sense how the tile would have moved in the first place, but I was more than ready to accept it as a logical explanation and be done with it anyway.

I'd clean up the mess tomorrow when I got home from work, I thought wearily. Turning on my heel, I flipped off the light and headed back to bed. But when I got to the front room I stopped, my feet frozen in place.

There was light coming from my bedroom. It glowed cheerily from the open doorway, illuminating the hallway and the staircase. Such a seemingly innocent, normal light, and yet the sight of it struck an unexplainable fear in my heart.

Now I knew for an absolute fact that I hadn't turned on the bedroom light. I was up and out of bed way too fast to even consider reaching over and switching on the lamp. A cold sweat beaded on my forehead and I swallowed, fighting off the sudden urge to panic. Deep down, my stomach twisted with that sickening gut feeling that whispered that something was very, very wrong.

"Calm down, Christine," I said out loud. "You're reading too much into this. You're stressed. Stress makes you forget things."

Just then, a cool breeze whispered past, brushing against my neck as gently as the air from a moth's wing, and following behind on the tails of its gossamer tendrils I could have sworn I heard my name.

"Ashley."

"God!" I squealed.

The clamps on my carefully maintained self-control ruptured, and once the dam had broken, full-blown panic rushed over me. Scrambling as fast as I could into the front room, I switched on all the lamps, followed by every single light in the kitchen, the upstairs hallway, and in my bedroom.