Haunted

Chapter 6:

Ashley

Give it back.

Goosebumps pebbled my still-wet skin as I stared incredulously at the message scrawled across my bathroom mirror. Tiny drops of water beaded around the edges of the letters, and as they coursed down toward the sink it created jagged lines, making the words look even scarier.

Lightning chose that exact moment to slash across the sky, followed almost immediately by a crash of thunder so loud and close that the house shook on its foundation. Letting out a scream that ranked right up there with the best of the horror movie scream-queens I tore out of the bathroom.

Oh my god, there was a ghost in my house! I had asked for confirmation and now I had it. I wasn't going crazy. I wasn't just tired. Wasn't seeing things. There was a ghost. An actual, real-life ghost. And what was worse, was apparently, I had something that belonged to it.

But what?

"Give what back?" I tentatively asked the open air once I had collected myself enough to breathe again. "Was Margaret right? Are you a previous owner who's mad because I've made changes to the house? I-I've tried to keep the original style in mind," I stammered. "What I'm doing now is better than it was, isn't it? Why haven't you haunted the people that did the all the remodeling before me? They're the ones that installed all the ugly—"

I stopped myself. Not only was I starting to whine, but I was trying to justify my actions to a ghost. And I didn't even know if that was really the reason for its sudden appearance. I shook my head. Thank God no one else was here to witness me conversing with thin air like some kind of an idiot.

The insidious tendrils of a headache were starting to creep across my forehead. I could feel the muscles at the base of my neck start to tighten back up, and a small, dull throb pounded behind my left eye.

I finished getting dressed, pulling on my pajamas with a fervency I'd never experienced before, suddenly self-conscious that someone else might be in the room watching me. Then I crawled into bed, yanked the covers up to my chin, and willed myself to go to sleep. Things would be better in the morning. They had to be.

I don't know whether it was due to sheer exhaustion, or if the ghost had decided to take pity on my recent sleep patterns, but I slept through the night without further incident. Nothing was out of place when I woke up the following morning, and I was able to complete my normal morning routine in peace. Part of me wondered whether or not I had imagined the whole thing.

My drive to work was equally uneventful. The rainstorm outside had calmed somewhat. The wind had died down just after midnight, and the penetrating rain tapered off to a steady drizzle sometime before dawn. Heavy black clouds still covered the sky, effectively blocking out the early morning sunlight and making the surroundings appear drab and dreary for the second day in a row. Occasionally, a flash of lightning would flicker in the distance, followed by a low growl of thunder, the sights and sounds grower more muted as the storm continued to move east.

As I drove out of the neighborhood I took in the damage the squall had left in its wake. Small trees limbs were scattered throughout everyone's yards, and leaves and other debris littered the grass, sidewalks, and streets. My yard was no exception; I definitely had my work cut out for me when I got home. I only hoped the rain stopped before then.

Despite my best attempts at keeping myself distracted during the day, my thoughts inevitably turned back to my experiences within the house. For the life of me, I couldn't think of anything that I had recently acquired that might have once belonged to someone who was now dead, and I couldn't come with any other examples of when a strange phenomenon might have been attributed to a ghost in the past. As far as I could tell, the manifestations had only started happening recently and I was at a complete loss as to what I had done to anger the ghost who now haunted my house.