Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

“I got one!” I raised my voice.

“Where’d you find her?” Holly was the first to reach me, everyone crowding around.

I pointed. Holly lifted her phone, but her screen only showed only asphalt and painted lines.

“Spawn must have timed-out.” Adam shrugged. Holly looked annoyed.

“She was talking,” Gen said.

A small line dented the skin in-between his eyebrows, his math problem look again.

“If you download the EVP add-on, you can play that back. Sometimes you can make out words,” Adam said. “Here. Listen.”

He tapped a button and held out his phone out. A garbled sound emerged.

“What’s that?” Heather’s eyes widened.

“Ghost voices.” Adam played it again.

“It’s just noise.” Holly’s mouth crimped, and Adam’s shoulders slumped.

“I’m going to keep looking.” Holly followed the border to some trees to the left, Heather trailing after her.

“Why was she dressed like that?” Gen asked.

Adam was still close enough to hear and answered.

“There used to be a swimming pool here. Maybe she drowned.”

“Seriously?” I couldn’t tell if Adam was messing with us, but he didn’t have that look.

“I took swimming lessons here when I was really little. They filled it in right before Luke was born. I’m sure hundreds of kids drowned here.”

Gen made a small noise, and I leaned down to whisper in his ear. “It’s okay, we don’t have to play anymore today.”

I straightened, pitching my voice louder so Holly and Heather would hear, too. “We have to go home now. Our aunt is coming over for dinner.”

I put my hand on Gen’s shoulder, squeezing so he wouldn’t give away my lie. I was a proud of myself, not for the lie, but for keeping at least part of my promise to Gen.

Later that night, I downloaded the EVP add-on, and pulled up the picture of the ghost girl in the bathing suit. Green lines scrolled across the screen, jittering up and down with the volume. I didn’t have the add-on installed when the ghost girl’s lips moved, so there was no way I could have captured real sound.

Even though I knew it was just a trick to make the game feel more real, I couldn’t help the tightness in my chest as I listened. The noise on Adam’s phone sounded like someone talking with marbles in their mouth, or a recording slowed way down so you couldn’t make sense of the words. The sound on my phone was nothing like that at all.

It reminded me of how when we visited our grandparents, Gen and I would sink to the bottom of their pool and take turns saying words and trying to guess what the other was saying. Gen was always better at it than me. The sound on my phone was like that, a wet sound. I listened five times in a row, and after the fifth, I crept down the hall. Gen’s door was open a crack; he lay on top of the covers with his back to me, the lights off.

“Hey. I downloaded the EVP mode. Will you help me figure out what the girl is saying?”

His shoulders might have twitched, but it might also have been a trick of the shadows as a car passed by outside. I waited, listening to his breathing, but I couldn’t tell if he was really asleep or faking.

“Gen?” I tried one more time. No answer.

Before I could decide whether to barge into his room anyway, the screen lit up on Gen’s phone. Wavy green lines scrolling, just the way they had on mine, the wet sound, but louder so I could almost make out a word.

I stepped back. Gen hunched his shoulders. I couldn’t hear his breathing at all now, but I couldn’t make myself move. Was he holding his breath, waiting for me to go away? Trying to pretend I hadn’t seen anything at all, I retreated to my own room, closing the door behind me.

I woke to the sound of Gen’s screams. Disoriented, my legs tangled in my covers and I hit the floor with a crash trying to get up. I made it into the hall at the same time as my parents.

Gen stood at the top of the stairs, his heels hanging over the top step like he was about to do a back flip off a diving board. His eyes were blank, his mouth a perfect circle of darkness. He looked like one of the ghost pictures on Adam’s phone.

No one moved. Up until he turned five, Gen had suffered night terrors. The sleep specialist my parents took him to said to let Gen wake up on his own, no matter how bad it seemed. I never understood that, and my mom looked doubtful now, too.

“Gen, honey?” She took a cautious step, one hand out like she was trying to catch a nervous dog. “It’s okay. You’re safe.”

Her fingers sketched the air near his arm, but she didn’t touch him.

“Gen?”

He turned toward her, his mouth widening impossibly, and let out another shriek. He leaned back, like he was trying to get away from her, and his arms pin-wheeled as gravity snatched him. My mother threw her arms around him, yanking him back. They hit the floor together, Gen’s limbs flailing in panic and hitting my mother in the nose.

“Get his inhaler.” My father spoke without turning around.

I found it in his bedside drawer. My father still didn’t look at me as I handed it over, concentrating on Gen. When Gen’s eyes finally focused, he reached toward my mother’s face.

“Mommy, you’re bleeding.”

“It’s okay. Just a nosebleed.” She smiled, her eyes bright with more relief than pain, but it still made Gen cry.

He buried his face against her shoulder, exhaustion and fear coming out in a rush. She held him, rubbing his back and reminding him to breathe. My dad stayed nearby, watching them. There was nothing else I could do, and everyone seemed to have forgotten about me.

I crept back to my room and opened Ghost Hunt! thinking of the green wavy lines scrolling across Gen’s screen. I hadn’t seen him download the EVP app, or take a picture of a ghost. As far as I knew, he hadn’t caught any at all. I pulled up the ghost girl again. Nothing had changed. Some part of me expected to see Gen’s picture instead, his mouth open like a circle of darkness, bruised eyes staring at me from the screen.

The next morning, I looked up the swimming pool before I went down to breakfast. Adam hadn’t lied, but he’d exaggerated. Hundreds of kids hadn’t drowned, just one. Her name was Jenny Holbrook, and she lived right behind the pool so she could get there by cutting through her backyard. I read through the stories about her, piecing together a narrative. Gruesome as it was, I had a vague idea in my head that the next time we all gathered in the clubhouse, that would be the ghost story I would tell.

Jenny used to sleepwalk when she was little. She hadn’t done it in years, but one night when she was almost twelve, she got up, put on her swimsuit, and went outside. She cut through the yard and somehow got inside the fence around the pool even though the gate should have been locked. A lifeguard found her floating in the deep end the next day. Jenny had climbed the high dive board, jumped, and hit her head on the way down. She might not have even woken up before she drowned.

Another story published a few months after Jenny died said how she’d been planning to try out for the diving team. She’d been practicing for days. In the follow up report, the coroner revealed Ambien had been found in her system during the autopsy. Jenny must have been so nervous that she wouldn’t sleep before the tryouts, she’d taken a pill.

The scent of my dad making banana pancakes wafted up from the kitchen, Gen’s favorite, but it made me feel sick. I abandoned the idea of telling the story in the clubhouse, imagining the hungry expression on Holly’s face if I did. Jenny Holbrook had been a real girl, and she’d died in Dieu-le-Sauveur. Why would the makers of the Ghost Hunt! who had probably never even heard of our town, have put her in the game?