A Ghost Story

Chapter 11

"So since you're the one who tried to kill me with a stick, you go first," I said. Caroline and I were sipping hot peppermint tea at a long, wooden dinner table in her kitchen. She seemed to have parents as oblivious to the nocturnal world as mine were, but she never mentioned them. Still, she never turned the lights on, and only the lightning allowed me to catch brief glimpses of her mud-stained but still beautiful face. She had given me a towel, but I had only bothered to dry off my hair. The rest of my clothes remained damp, reminding me that I was still in real life, that I'd just been attacked by a random girl I'd only met a week before, that I'd been out in a thunderstorm looking for a tree struck down by lightning, and that I'd heard a ghost play the piano. Still though, it was a difficult series of events to swallow, especially the part about the paranormal world manifesting itself. I admittedly still reserved a handful of doubts and I wasn't sure if she had been totally honest with me either, but I wasn't about to say that out loud to a person that had apparently put a lacrosse player in the hospital during broad daylight. I could only imagine what she might do in the darkness if I angered her...

Caroline took a breath. In a hushed voice she said "So I haven't stopped thinking about our conversation last week."

"To be honest I forgot about it completely."

"It would probably have been better if it had stayed that way..." she trailed off, but the silence was filled with a rumble of thunder. "Anyways, I couldn't stop thinking about how ridiculous it sounded. Like, you're the first person I've told the whole story to. And I couldn't really tell whether you truly believed me or if you were just being nice to me because either a) you were trying to get in my pants or something or b) you were scared of me."

I nodded, though she probably couldn't see me. "Yes, I was scared of you. Definitely scared. And I never ended up giving much thought as to whether or not I actually believed you."

"Okay well I just kept thinking about how ridiculous I must have sounded to you. Like I was really just saying stuff that must have made me sound insane. So I started to not believe myself. I started to think maybe I was just imagining everything or maybe someone was playing an epic prank on me... which I legitimately suspected might be you."

"Well. You know I'm not it now right?" I said, still at least a little bit afraid of her.

"If this is some kind of a prank and I find out that you were just making fun of me this whole time, then I swear I'm going to injure you and expose you so bad you're going to wish you were a ghost." Her voice had a deadly sharp edge in it.

I shivered, maybe from fright and maybe from the chill brought on by my damp clothes. "Uh yeah. Even if I was that kind of person, I wouldn't show my face around you. There are rumors..."

"What, about how I knocked out a b**** during a lacrosse game? Oh please, she only had to get 7 stitches, it wasn't a big deal."

"Oh..." I said, now deciding that I was more afraid of her than I was of the ghost. "Yes, mostly."

"As I was saying, I needed to see for myself who—or what—was playing the piano every night at 12:53 A.M.. So tonight, I went down at 12:50 and as soon as I got down, I heard this shuffling noise so I turned the lights on and I swear there was like some guy climbing out the window. Except he wasn't climbing, it was more like he was flying! I yelled at him to stop and of course he didn't. So I ran out my door into the freezing rain and saw a person in some kind of a cloak walking slowly by the side of my house and so I grabbed a stick and... well you know the rest."