Chapter 1

There I was again, walking down another dirt track with the four people who always chased the high of the next adventure. I tagged along because what else was I going to do: sit alone in my apartment binge-watching the next stupid drama series on Netflix, or go out, get exercise, and experience something new?
	Jenna, being my best and, let’s admit, only friend, invited me along. They were there to find the next new abandoned something in the creepy somewhere. Keith, Jenna’s boyfriend and leader of all of this, said he had found a bottle that came from the early 1900s that was supposedly filled with medicine that was used to fight the Spanish Flu. He said he had researched the label, which to my eyes was too faded to read, and gotten all of his answers. He collected things, researched them, and found the history hidden inside. It was actually the only thing about him that I got.
	This time, we were walking down some road in the middle of the Maine woods on a freezing autumn afternoon. The chill was so bad it was making me feel like there were bugs crawling up my pant legs. Keith had said there was this house out there. This house wasn’t in any records or on any map that he could find, which was only making the itch worse. So there I was traipsing through the woods. FUN!
	Lost in my own thoughts, I looked up to see Tanner with his camera in my face trying to get my attention. “Hello! Katie, Earth to Katie. Anyone home?”
	I looked at him and rolled my eyes. “What can I do for you, Tanner?”
Smirking behind his camera, he said again in his best news anchor voice, “Katie Jones, do you think we are actually going to find this old house? What do you think we will find there?”
	I put on my best smile, flipped my long blond hair behind my shoulder, and brought my hand up to my face like I had a microphone. “Well, Tanner, all I can tell you is that if we don’t find something good by the end of this long, cold walk, the people at home will be mighty disappointed.”
	Tanner jogged ahead, laughing, and pointed the camera at Keith and Jenna. They were walking with their heads down, talking about something, and waved him off. He scoffed and moved on to Sarah, who was busy studying some special map she had downloaded onto her phone and wasn’t paying any attention to him either. “Guys,” she said, “I really think we should have taken that right turn when the trail veered off. This map is acting weird. I can’t get a clear signal.”
	“No, I swear, when we looked at the map, it was a straight shot three miles from the entrance with no turns from the trailhead,” Jenna called out. “Remember when Katie was sooooo glad this was going to be an easy climb for once?”
	“Ha ha,” I said as we kept walking. “I definitely feel like we should have been there by now, especially since it is getting colder.”
	“Oh, come on, Katie,” Keith said. “We will get there when we get there. The climb is just the start of the adventure.”
	I lowered my head and picked up my pace. I didn't want to bring down the mood. I knew that Keith didn’t like that Jenna always dragged me along, and I didn’t want to prove him right by complaining. They were adventurers. I was the tagalong.
	As I was walking, the gloom set in. The sun hadn't even set yet. Wrapping my coat around me a little tighter, I noticed this huge apple tree that was perfectly lit from behind by the setting sun. I pulled out my phone to snap a picture when I saw it. There was a house just beyond the tree. I shouted over my shoulder to the group, “I think we are here, guys.”
	Tanner raced up with his camera and whooped, “There she blows!”
	Tanner’s excited attitude was contagious; he had always been the life of the group, keeping everyone pumped up and in good spirits. Sarah put away her phone and met me up by the tree. “That is weird. I didn’t see any marker on my map that this was here. So much for the latest satellite download. I knew I shouldn’t have wasted my money on that one.”
	I bumped her shoulder with mine. “Don’t sweat it. If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t have even made it to the trailhead.”
	She shrugged and started walking down the rest of the path to what looked like the entrance to an old rutted driveway. We walked up, and as soon as my toes touched the walk, I felt the chill run deeper into my bones. Way off in the distance, I could see rows and rows of old unkempt trees. A feeling that I couldn’t describe crept into me, and it just got worse as I walked closer to the old rundown farmhouse. Along the driveway were rotten apples that I noticed after one squished under my boot.
	Using the gravel to clean the goo from the apple off my shoe, I ignored the feeling and followed the group. Getting closer to the house, I saw that it was huge, three stories from what I could tell. The porch wrapped all the way around, and the timbers looked like they were falling off. Every single window had at least one hole through the windowpane, and the overgrowth kept rubbing the side of the house like fingers scratching the wood to be let in. Everyone else didn't seem to feel it, but something about this place just felt off.
	I looked around and noticed I was the only one not already standing on the porch. I placed my boot on the bottom step, and it groaned under my weight. The sound was deafening to me. I looked up as Keith and Tanner were pulling crowbars out of their bags to pry the 2x4s off the door, and I cleared my throat. “Um, guys, this place doesn’t look safe. What if we fall through the floor?”
	Keith looked at me over his shoulder as he raised the crowbar to pry the first board off. “It is perfectly safe. I’ve been in hundreds of old houses like this. They always look worse than they actually are.”
	“Yeah, don’t worry about it, Katie. I’m sure it’s fine, and if it is too sketchy, then we can leave. Right, Keith?” Jenna said. 
	In a tone that was less than believable, he said, “Sure thing.”
	Breaking in was a calculated move on Keith’s part. He must have heard something interesting about this place to go to those lengths, even if he wouldn’t tell anyone what that was. In a moment of defiance, I glared at him while gesturing to the crowbars and said, “I thought we were exploring the house, not breaking into it.”
	“I was a Boy Scout, you know. Always be prepared.” He gestured to the abandoned property. “The owners are long gone. I don’t think anyone is going to call the cops.”
	Taking one last look around at the broken windows and graying wood frame, I shrugged and walked through the door. The inside wasn’t much better. There was this huge staircase that ran off the left side of the entryway and led upstairs, while a narrow hallway appeared to lead toward the living room. It was dark and smelled like dust and rotten apples. It looked like the only ones who had made their home there for the longest time were the spiders and maybe an animal or two.
	Everyone pulled out their flashlights since the setting sun wasn’t helping with the lighting situation at all. A dark haze seemed to hang over everything. The dark-blue wallpaper that was peeling from the walls did nothing to reflect the little light we had either. Walking along, I noticed that bits of plaster were falling away, revealing the bones of the house, and the water damage added to the musty smell.
	The guys took off down the hallway with Jenna and Sarah close on their heels. I placed my hand on the staircase banister and swore I could feel the house give a little sigh, like it was happy that we were there.
Keith swung his flashlight from side to side, trying and failing to find anything interesting, while Tanner documented everything on his camera. We made our way down the hall to the living room, where broken pieces of furniture covered the floor. Their dust covers had long since fallen aside, leaving them exposed to the elements coming through the broken windows. A thick layer of dust coated every surface, and the cold grew worse the farther we went into the house.
	I stepped into the room to the left of the living room and found myself in a turn-of-the-century kitchen. The cast-iron stove was in the corner, and that thing was massive. I called Keith in the other room, “Too bad we don’t have equipment to move these. You could sell these appliances as antiques.”
	Keith walked into the room and looked around. “Yeah, not a good idea. Things on the floor are okay, small items, you know, but we don’t wanna disturb the actual house. But you are right; these old things are really cool. We should make sure that we let someone know that this is here for sure. Tanner, you are getting everything on camera, right? How's the charge?”
	“Still at eighty-five percent, but I always have two spares. We’re good.”
	After exploring around the first floor for maybe fifteen minutes, Keith suggested we go upstairs. I took one look at the stairs and cringed. They looked like they were going to collapse if you sneezed on them. So again, still not saying anything, I took my first step onto the stairs. It was probably just my imagination, but I felt like it got darker the further we climbed. My skin crawled with every creak of the stairs under our feet, but they held.
	Suddenly, I nearly ran into Sarah, who was bent over and pulling on a chain stuck under the edge of the thick stair runner. I asked her as she wiped dust off something I could not see, “What did you find there?”
	Everyone stopped and looked at her. Sarah held up a gold locket. As Jenna shone her light on it, I could tell that it was tarnished and old. I placed my hand on Sarah's shoulder, wondering if she had heard me, and she kind of shook her head as if coming out of a deep thought and looked up at me. “What did you say?”
	“I asked what you found,” I said, giving her a concerned look.
Still a little hesitant, she said, “My flashlight caught something metal, so I stopped to pull it free. Sorry, I should have said something so you didn’t run into me.”
	Jenna held her flashlight on the locket as we all took turns taking a closer look. The picture inside was faded; however, you could see two people standing close to each other in front of a house but not much more. Sarah examined it closely and noticed that there was an inscription on it.  “Look at this. It says, ‘with love from Daniel.’ That is sweet. Someone probably gave this to their sweetheart.”
	Jenna grabbed the locket dangling from the chain in Sarah’s hand and examined it, and suddenly Sarah snatched it back and put it in the side pocket of her backpack. Jenna looked at her funny. “I was just reading the inscription.” She seemed confused but just shrugged it off.
	She must have had some kind of finders-keepers mentality. I didn’t really know much about Sarah. She was quiet and never really said much. I noticed her reach back to check the pocket, as if making sure the locket was still there. Then we followed her up to the second floor.
	Looking down the long hall, we noticed four doors, two on each side. We opened each one and found three bedrooms and what looked like it had once been a bathroom. Each room was empty of any furniture except for one that had a bare mattress on the floor and a chair by the door. The mattress was so old that the springs were poking through.
	I could hear the wind and the trees that were scraping along the house. It was even louder up there. They made the weirdest tapping noise. TAP TAP TAP … TAP. Three quick taps, a short pause, and then one more. It didn’t sound natural. But I was sure that the creepy feeling I had was turning every noise and shadow into the boogeyman coming to get me.
	The beam from Tanner's camera light caught the biggest rat I’d ever seen as it crawled out of the mattress and disappeared into a hole in the wall. Jenna screamed, and then they all kind of laughed that funny nervous laugh that people make when they are scared. Everyone but me, that is. I wasn't laughing at all.
	“Let’s go up to the third floor. There isn’t anything here,” Keith said.
We made our way to the stairs leading to the third and final floor. As I went to place my foot on the first step, Tanner called out, “Oh, no way. Look at this, guys!”
	We followed the light from his camera and found what looked to be scratch marks, like someone had dragged something heavy across the floor and up the stairs. “Well, that is something,” Keith said as he bolted up the stairs to see where the marks led.
	The other four of us started to feel a little hesitant to go any further, but Keith called down, “Are you guys coming or not?”
	We all made our way up to the third floor, where a short hallway ended at a single door. The marks stopped right at the doorway. Keith was standing at the door trying to work it loose and said over his shoulder, “Hey, Tanner, come help me with this. It’s stuck on something.”
	Tanner made his way over to the door, and together they managed to push it open. The door opened to a huge room with a large window that took up most of the far wall. Sarah moved her flashlight beam over the other walls, which were filled with shelves of decaying books. Jenna walked over to the shelves and took down one of the books. “These are really old. Too bad they are in such rough shape. They might have been worth something.”
	She placed the book back on the shelf and continued to look around. This place looked like you had stepped back in time. There were old knickknacks on the shelves, broken tools, and a table with a missing leg. It was so different from the rest of the house, which just looked empty and forgotten. It felt like this was where whoever had lived there spent most of their time.
	Sarah was running her finger along the bookshelves when she stopped and yelled, “WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?”
	We all turned toward what she was looking at and saw an entire shelf filled with old jars. Most were broken, their contents discarded or lost long ago, but a few still contained animal remains; a snake was in one, and the head of a raven was in another. Some of the jars were so dusty you couldn’t tell what was in them, and I, for one, had no desire to investigate any further. I thought Jenna felt the same way because, before I got the chance to say anything, she said, “Keith, this place is weird. I think it is time to get out of here.”
	“Oh, you're scared of some weird stuff in jars now? We could take them and sell them, I bet. Tanner! Help me collect the jars that aren’t broken. Some weirdo on eBay would pay through the nose for some creepy shit like this.”
	“I don't think so, man. This place is sketchy as hell. I swear, as soon as we walked through this door, the temperature dropped like 10 degrees. Doesn’t anyone else feel how cold it is here?”
	Not wanting to say how much I agreed with him, I just turned and made my way back to the door. I was almost halfway there when I heard that weird tapping again: TAP TAP TAP … TAP. Four taps—three close together, a pause, then another quick one.
	“Guys, is anyone else hearing that weird tapping?” I asked.
	Tanner and Keith were too busy arguing over whether to take the jars to hear me, but I was not going to hang around any longer. “Guys, we need to leave. Jenna, are you coming?”
	Jenna looked between me and the guys, then to Sarah, and said, “You guys take what you want. Katie and I are going to head downstairs. Sarah, are you coming with?”
	“Yeah, I think I’ve had enough of this place,” she said.
	I thanked her with a smile and a nod and turned to go. After I took two more steps, the tapping got louder: TAP TAP TAP … TAP. “Oh, come on, guys. I know you are hearing that. Keith, I swear to God, if you wired this place up to scare us, I am going to kill you.”
	“What are you talking about? It is just the trees outside,” he said.
	“No, man. I heard it that time too. It doesn’t sound right,” Tanner agreed.
	“Oh, come on, guys, don't be such chickenshits. Let's just grab some of this stuff, and then we can go,” Keith said, obviously getting more fed up with us.
	“I’m not waiting for you. I'll meet you guys outside,” I said as I made it the last few steps toward the door. I almost had my hand around the knob when it slammed shut. I jumped back with a scream and gave Jenna a look. She grabbed the knob and twisted and pulled. Sarah walked over and tried. I looked at Tanner and asked, “Did you guys set this up? This shit isn’t funny.”
	“I swear we didn’t do that,” Tanner said as he shook his head.
As Sarah and Jenna tried to get the door open, I heard it again, even louder: TAP TAP TAP … TAP. It was coming from the ceiling, then from the wall behind the bookshelves, then from the window. “Just the trees, huh, Keith? Where the hell is that sound coming from? It is coming from everywhere.”
	“I don’t know, but it’s time to go,” he said.
	I was glad to see him finally come to his senses. He walked over to the door and pulled with all his strength. “This thing isn’t budging.”
	Tanner came over to help him as the sound of the tapping continued. Three quick taps, then a short pause, then the fourth. It sounded like it was coming from all around us. They weren’t loud, just persistent, like whoever or whatever was doing it couldn’t stop. It went on and on. TAP TAP TAP … TAP. TAP TAP TAP … TAP. The sound felt like it was echoing in my head. I just covered my ears and felt my heart pounding in my chest.
	I knew that we shouldn’t have come up there. Why did I always have to follow these guys everywhere? I knew it wasn’t safe. What the heck was I doing there? The sound was here, then there—on the floor, in the walls, in my brain. I couldn’t make it stop. The guys were pulling on the door, trying to get it open. Then, as if my body had a mind of its own, my feet carried me over to them. My closed fist pressed against the door, and my knuckles rapped against it. TAP TAP TAP … TAP. The noise stopped, the room went still, and everyone turned to look at me. Just as Jenna opened her mouth to say something, the doorknob turned, and then the dry creak of the door as it opened filled the room.


Chapter 2

I took a moment, my hand still hovering in midair, and after taking a shuddering breath, I opened my eyes to see everyone staring at me. Sarah was the first to look away but not without comment. “How did you know to do that?”
	“I, um, I…” I stammered.
	How did I know to do that? I was just as confused as the rest of them. I had no idea why I did that or what possessed me to walk to the door. Tanner looked at me and smiled.  “Who cares why she did it? I'm just glad she did!”
	Keith looked like he wanted to get into it and ask more questions, but Jenna just stood a little taller and nodded at Tanner as she walked through the door. We all followed in silence as we made our way to the top of the stairs. Tanner then stopped. Since we were all walking with our heads down, those of us behind him walked into the back of the person in front of us. It would have been funny if everyone wasn’t still questioning what the heck had just happened.
	“What the hell, Tanner!” Keith yelled.
	“Do you guys smell that?” he said quietly as he took a couple sniffs in the air.
	“Smell what?” Jenna said, taking a step closer to him.
	“Apples,” Sarah said, stepping around Tanner to the top step of the stairs.
	She was right. The smell of apples was all around us. It wasn’t quite the same as it was on the main floor. The smell was weird, almost like a barrel of apples that was left out too long and now had a slight vinegar smell to it. With each step down, the smell got a little stronger. The air shifted with it as we made our way to the main floor.
	Jenna was the first to reach the door, and as she reached out to grab the knob, Keith grabbed her wrist and led her down the hall back towards the living room. “What are you doing?” Jenna asked. “I think we have all had enough of this place. I want to go home.”
	“Take a look outside, Jenna,” he said, pointing to the window. “It is pitch black out there. We can’t leave yet. I say we stay till the morning and get a fresh start when the sun comes up.”
	“Are you insane?!” she screamed as she pulled her arm out of his grasp.
	“Dude, I’m not staying here. We all have flashlights. It won't be that bad of a walk to get us back to the car,” Tanner said.
	“Don’t you remember how we didn’t really find this place on purpose? The goddamn special map that Sarah downloaded couldn’t even find this place,” he said, pointing an accusing finger back at Sarah.
	Sarah, not rising to the bait of Keith’s accusation, rolled her eyes at him and walked to the door. “Keith, my so-called map will get me home, and that is where I am going. If you want to stay here, more power to ya, but I am leaving and my map is going with me.”
	She grabbed the doorknob and pulled. She gasped and pulled again. Nothing happened. Tanner slid her out of the way and grabbed the door, and with a great tug he twisted and pulled at the knob. It wasn’t budging. Slowly I backed up towards the bottom step and sat down. This wasn’t happening again. “Katie! Try your knocking trick again,” Jenna said to me over her shoulder.
	“It isn’t going to work,” I whispered.
	“What?” she said.
	“It isn’t going to work,” I said louder.
	“What do you mean it isn’t going to work?” she asked. “It worked upstairs. Why wouldn’t it work here?”
	I just shook my head and looked at her. I got up and knocked half-heartedly on the door. TAP TAP TAP … TAP. “See?” I turned and looked at all of them. “The house doesn’t want us to leave.”
	I didn’t know how I knew this, but I felt it with every fiber of my being. The house was keeping us locked in. Sarah slid down the wall next to the door and sat on the floor. Jenna wrapped her arms around herself and walked back down the hall towards Keith. Tanner was banging on the door with his fist like he could hulk his way through, and I just stood there.
	Sarah pulled out her cell phone and waved it in the air looking for a signal. I guess she had no luck because she asked, “Does anyone have a phone signal? I can’t get one.”
	We all checked our phones with no luck: zero bars. “Should we try calling 911?” Jenna asked.
	She tried calling and got a call-failed tone. Then she tried again with the same result: the phone wouldn’t connect. Jenna ran from the room. She went to check the windows and doors in the living room and kitchen. Nothing would open. “Tanner, get the crowbar. Maybe we can break the glass or pry it open.”
	“Shit, I left mine outside so I could carry my equipment,” he said back.
	Turning to Keith, he said, “Do you know where yours is?”
Keith ran back to the front door and yelled back, “I left mine here by the door. Did someone move it?”
	We all shook our heads and started looking all over the first floor. No one found it, and that made the pit in my stomach drop all the way to my toes. Sarah sat on the floor rocking herself, and Keith was just staring off into space. Finally he collected himself and gave a sharp whistle to get everyone’s attention. “Okay, now that we know we are stuck here, we need to make a plan,” he said as he paced the floor in the living room.
	“What do you mean a plan, man? What can we do?” Tanner asked.
	“Well, do we have food? Do we have water? These are the kinds of things we need to know. We need to see if we can figure out any way to get out of here.”
	Everyone started digging through their packs. We produced ten granola bars and a half-full bag of trail mix minus the M&Ms courtesy of Tanner, and everyone had a water bottle. We placed all of our stuff on the coffee table in the living room, and we took stock of our batteries, of which we only had six.
	I looked at my watch and noticed it was only 7:30, which meant we had been in the house a little over an hour at this point. I was sitting on the musty-smelling couch when I ran my fingers through my hair and took a look around the room. “Keith, you were the one that told us about this place, right?” I asked. “I am assuming you did some research. What did you find?”
	Keith was standing by the old broken grandfather clock in the corner of the room. He kind of jumped like I startled him. “There really wasn’t much to learn. I just heard about it online in a forum.”
	“What do you mean? You told us that you looked it up,” Tanner said to him.
	“No, I told you there wasn’t much about it when I did look it up,” he spat back.
	“That doesn’t really matter right now, Tanner.” Looking back at Keith, I said, “I am asking what you did hear about this place.”
	“I don’t know,” he said, looking away from everyone. “There really wasn’t much to learn. I just heard a crazy story about a house out here.”
	“What do you mean, crazy story?” Sarah asked.
	Keith crossed the room to sit on the overstuffed armchair and took a long steadying breath while he started telling us the story.
	“So I was scrolling Reddit looking for cool places to explore, and I found a subreddit about this house. No one knew where it was exactly, but there was a guy who posted about it. He said that if you went looking for it and found it, then you would find something totally unique. He said that supposedly the house was haunted by a serial killer who had a killing spree back in the late ’90s. He had three known victims in the area, and then the fourth victim got away somehow, and then he just disappeared. No one knows where he went, and no one knows who the fourth victim was, but they say if you go looking for the house and find it, then you may never leave.”
	We all sat there taking in the information that Keith had just told us. If it weren’t for how our night was playing out already, I would have told him he was full of it. I started walking over to the window when I noticed that I wasn’t cold anymore. In fact, most of us had discarded our coats in a pile near the kitchen. “Guys, shouldn’t it be colder here than it was before? The house was freezing when we first got here, and now that the sun is down, it should be even colder,” I said.
	No one seemed to acknowledge my question, and I made my way over to the window. There had been cracks and broken pieces in every window, hadn’t there?  Maybe I could break it or pry the glass out. I couldn’t just sit here. I looked up at the pane. That was when I first noticed the change. I got a little closer, and it was not in my imagination. I placed my hand on the glass in the tall window and found that it was not broken at all. I looked around the room and noticed that the debris and leaves that were all over the room were gone as well.
	“Guys, we have a problem,” I said with my hand still on the glass.
	“Like being stuck in this creepy house? Yeah, we already know,” Jenna said sarcastically.
	“No, a different problem. The glass was broken before. I am sure that it was. But look at it now,” I said, pointing to the glass.
	Tanner got up and looked closer at the windowpane. “You know, I think she is right, and there was all this crap all over the floor,” he said.
	Sarah got up and looked. “That can’t be right. That isn’t possible.”
	“Sure, like we needed another thing. This house just has to kick us while we’re down,” Jenna remarked.
	I was sure I was right. “Tanner, go get your camera. You were filming while we were making our way through the house. I'm sure you have some video of the windows broken before,” I said.
	He walked over to his bag and pulled out his camera and started the video. We were all huddled around him as his big mug was plastered on the screen and all you could see was up his nose. “Fast-forward to when we got into the house. I don’t want to know how long it’s been since you got your nose plucked, dude,” Keith said as he slapped Tanner on the arm.
	Tanner shrugged him off and moved the video forward to when we were entering the living room, and there it was. I yelled for him to pause the video, and then we all saw the broken glass. There were spider web cracks all the way at the top. The glass was clearly broken in the video. Jenna stood up and grabbed fistfuls of her hair. “This can’t be happening,” she said.
	She looked around the room and found some big figurine sitting on a broken table. She tested the weight in her hand and then ran towards the window and slammed it against the glass again and again. The glass stayed as it was, in one piece. Jenna stood with her back to us just looking at the unbroken window. She took several deep breaths and let the figurine drop from her hand. Keith walked over to her and led her back to the couch.  “Tanner, keep playing it. Maybe there is something else we missed,” said Keith.
	Tanner pressed the play button. We watched as Sarah found the locket on the stairs. Then we saw the hall with all the doors, and as we watched ourselves enter the bedroom with the bare mattress, Jenna gasped. “There! It looks like the window in that room is open,” she exclaimed.
	“Let's go check it out,” Tanner said, placing his camera back in his bag.
	“I don’t think we should go back up there,” I said.
	“No, Katie, we have to go back up there. We have to see if that window is still open. Maybe we can get out that way,” said Keith.
	“Katie, it’ll be quick. We will go to that room to check if the window is open and see if we can get out that way. We won’t go any further than that,” Jenna said, rubbing my shoulder.
	I took a deep calming breath and grabbed my backpack as Tanner, Jenna, and Keith made their way down the narrow hall. I placed a few of the food items and my water bottle in the bag. Sarah looked at me and said, “Why are you grabbing that stuff? We are coming right back.”
	“Just in case,” I said back.
	I hoisted the backpack on my shoulders and looked at her. She was standing in front of me with a weird expression like she didn’t understand. Then I noticed a flash of light from her hand and saw that she had the locket. She was rubbing it between her fingers and then turned and followed the rest of the group down the hall.
	As I made it to the bottom of the stairs, I saw them all standing there. None of us really wanted to go up. You could feel it. Sarah was the first to start the climb, and we all followed her. I kept my head on a swivel taking in everything like I needed to commit every rip in the wallpaper to memory. The house, creepy as it was, really must have been beautiful.  I noticed lighter patches on the walls where pictures might once have hung. Noticing I was lagging behind, I made my way up to the top of the stairs and found them all in the bedroom with the mattress.
	Keith had made his way over to the window, and I noticed he had his head stuck out of it. I rushed over when he pulled his head back through. “So I have good news and bad news. There is a way down, but no one is going to like it. The roof of the porch under this window has collapsed, and there is a big hole.”
	Everyone groaned at this, and Keith raised his hands before anyone could say anything. “The good news is that there is a support beam that goes to the end of the roof and is close enough to an apple tree in the yard that I think we could get down.”
	“You think?” Jenna asked.
	Keith made a gesture that told us all we had to work with what we had. Tanner stuck his head out of the window to take a closer look. “What if we fold this mattress in half, shove it out the window and have that cover the hole? That way we can use it to cross the roof to the tree.”
	“There’s thinking with your head, Tanner. Let's see if we can’t get this thing out the window,” Keith said to him as they made their way over to the mattress.
	I knew this was a desperate attempt. The mattress was thin, but I didn’t think they were going to get it out of the window. The mattress alone wasn’t going to be enough to make the trip across safe. I looked out of the window and saw that there was a large piece of wood that looked like it might have once been a storm shutter, which made more sense to me. The only issue was that it was pretty far away, and I wasn’t sure if I could reach it.
	I heard the mattress fall to the floor behind me, and I pulled myself back in from the window. Tanner and Keith were slightly out of breath from their attempt to fold the mattress and looked like they understood that the idea wasn’t going to work. I pointed out the window and said, “There is a shutter door that might work to patch at least some of the hole. It looks like it might reach across the broken part, and then we could step off to the frame of the porch and then grab that big tree branch. I just don’t think I can reach the shutter.”
	Keith stuck his head back out the window and reached for the shutter, but his fingers just missed it. He came back in and rubbed his hand across his stubbled chin. “Let me think for a second. That idea is good. We just need to get to it,” he said.
	He stood there in thought for a second and then snapped his fingers. “One of you girls will need to let Tanner and me hold your legs while you reach for the shutter and place it on the hole. Tanner and I can hold you up while one of you gets the job done.”
	“That is a long time for one of us to be dangling from the open window, Keith,” I mentioned questioningly.
	“Then let’s at least grab it, get it closer and see about making a plan for the rest,” Tanner suggested.
	We all agreed, and I volunteered to be the one that they dangled out of the window. I placed my bag on the floor and braced my hands on the windowsill. The guys grabbed a hold of a leg each, and I then slid out till my hips were balanced on the bottom of the window, keeping my hands wrapped around the frame. I called up to them, “If you drop me, I will haunt you forever.”
	“Get in line. It looks like whoever is haunting this house beat you to it,” Tanner yelled back.
	After he said that, we all kind of took a silent second. He had said the one thing out loud that none of us had wanted to think about or come to terms with. I shook it off. I slowly let go of the windowsill and grabbed for the shutter. The thing was heavier than it looked, and it took me a second to grab a hold of it. I inched it closer to me until I could grab it with both hands. I lifted it up and started to place it against the wall of the house outside of the window when one of the guys adjusted my legs and the shutter slipped from my grip. It slid down the remaining roof near the edge of the hole. I slapped my hand against the side of the house. “Shit!” I yelled.
	“What happened?” Jenna asked.
	“The thing fell, and now I can’t reach it,” I said back. “Pull me back in.”
	They helped me get back into the room, and I slouched down the wall near the window. I was so close. How were we going to get it now? I looked at all my friends thinking I had just ruined our one chance to get out of this house when I saw Sarah looking at something on the wall, and I noticed how tall she was. She had to be at least a head taller than me, and it occurred to me that she might be able to reach farther. “Sarah, you could try. You are much taller than I am, and you might be able to reach the shutter,” I said to her.
	She didn’t turn around when I said that so I called out to her again, “Sarah, come see if you can reach it.”
	Again she didn’t turn around. Jenna walked over to her and tapped her shoulder. She jumped and turned around to look at us. The color had drained from her face and she kind of looked like she was going to be sick. “Sorry, what did you say?” Sarah asked.
	“Are you okay?” Jenna asked back.
	“Sarah, you look like you are going to blow chunks,” Tanner added.
	I rolled my eyes at him and his unneeded comment and walked over to Sarah. I placed my hand on her cheek. She didn’t feel warm, just clammy. “Sarah, come sit down. You really don’t look good. Here, let me get you some water,” I said as I led her to the chair.
	I walked back over to my bag to get the water bottle. As I went to hand it to her, I noticed she had stood back up and was walking back to the picture on the wall. She waved away the water bottle and instead said to us, “This is the same picture from the locket I found.”


Chapter 3

Jenna went over to where Sarah was standing, and I guess she was trying not to sound annoyed, but it really came off that way. “Sarah, that is super interesting, but we are trying to get out of this house, not check out the artwork.”
	Sarah wasn’t budging; she pulled out the locket and her flashlight to see better. She examined the locket, then the photo, then the locket again. “See,” she said, holding up the locket so Jenna could see.
	Jenna moved closer to take a look and noticed what Sarah had and said, “Yeah, it looks to be the same. Is this going to help us get out of here though?”
	“Maybe not, but didn’t we come here to find out things about this house? Tell me you aren’t curious,” she said, getting more excited.
	Keith came over to look and examined the photo and nodded at Sarah to let her know that he saw what she was saying. She looked at me and Jenna and said, “I’ve been looking at this photo for the last couple minutes. I noticed that they were the same so I looked closer. The reason I am so interested is because the woman in the photo kind of looks like me.”
	Jenna’s interest must have come up a little because she took a closer look. She glanced at the woman in the photo and then looked at Sarah. “Yeah, that is kind of weird. She does kind of  look like you. You guys look like you have the same eyes.”
	Jenna looked closer at the photo and noticed something else too. “This is a photo taken outside of this house. But there is someone in the background. It looks like there is a man hiding behind the apple tree. Do you see that?”
	You couldn’t really make out too many of the details of the man in the photo but there was definitely a figure standing in the shadows behind an apple tree. It made the sweet photo of two people on their wedding day into something creepy. The way the man was just watching them with what looked like a grin on his face seemed like he was not supposed to be there.
	This last comment caught Tanner’s interest because he finally came over and took a look for himself. We were all staring at the photo when I noticed him quickly glance over his shoulder. I gave him a look to silently ask him what was up, but he shook his head and just stood there. The rest of the group was talking about the picture trying to see if they could notice anything else wrong with it. Tanner spun around to face the wall and it was noticeable that he had heard something. “Tanner, what’s wrong?” I asked him.
	“I thought I heard that chair move. I heard it before; then I just heard it again. The chair was right up against that wall by the door; now it is almost to the center of the room,” he said while pointing at the chair.
	We all turned to look and just as we did the chair slid all by itself to the center of the room. We were frozen in fear. We couldn't move. I could feel my heart pounding in my ears as I heard creaking sounds coming from the chair as if someone had sat on it. Then right before our eyes it tipped onto its back legs and I swear I could hear quiet sobbing.
	We watched as the chair wobbled and then there were a few seconds of just silence. Then there was this ear-piercing scream that was suddenly cut off right as the chair flew sideways a few feet from where it was standing like it had been kicked. There was a loud bang as it hit the floor, and that broke whatever trance we were all in as we ran out of the room as quickly as we could. Standing in the hallway I turned when I heard Jenna call out to Sarah, “Leave the damn picture, Sarah. Just get out of there.”
	Sarah was trying to pry the picture off the wall. She finally managed to pry it off, and just as she reached the door, it slammed in all of our faces. We heard her yell out as she thudded against it. We watched the knob turn from the other side as Sarah slammed her hand against the door screaming for us to get her out. The moment erupted in panic. Keith was trying to open the door and Tanner was running from room to room trying to find something, anything we could use to get to Sarah. She kept crying over and over again, “Get me out! Please get me out!”
	Jenna was crying and it looked like she was on the verge of hyperventilating when Tanner came out of the room next to the one Sarah was trapped in carrying a large piece of broken wood. He handed it to Keith. “Here, use this! We could use it to pry the door open.”
	Keith tried to stick it between the door and the jamb on the side where it opened but the broken piece was too thick. It wouldn’t fit in the space. Sarah was banging what sounded like the chair against the door when I heard it. TAP TAP TAP … TAP. I seemed to be the only one who heard the tapping. I only heard it one time. Then Sarah went quiet. I thought maybe this time, and I knocked on the door, TAP TAP TAP … TAP. We all stopped and listened. When nothing happened, Keith leaned his head against the door and called out to Sarah, “Sarah, what is going on in there?”
	You could hear Sarah whispering something unintelligible. No one answered her, and she didn’t answer Keith’s question either. Tanner got impatient with Keith. He yelled at him, “KEITH! Why aren’t you trying to open the door, man?”
	“The door won’t open. We are going to have to find another way in,” he said back.
	Jenna called out to Sarah, “Hang on, sweetie. We are going to find a way to get you out.”
	Sarah didn’t answer Jenna either. She just continued to whisper quietly to herself. The three of them split up to look in the other rooms for anything we could use to get the door open. Jenna and Keith took one of the empty rooms while Tanner went to look in the other one. I stayed by the door to keep watch. I placed my ear next to the door again trying with all my might to hear what she was saying. “My name is Sarah. I am not Michelle.”
	Then there was silence. Then Sarah spoke again, “No, that’s not right. I am not her. Leave me alone.”
	More silence. I continued to listen while the others searched for some way to get Sarah out. Something was happening in that room, and I heard Sarah walking. It sounded like she was pacing the floor. Then the voice - it was so quiet that I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but there was someone else in that room. Something was sliding across the floor. Maybe a few thuds. Sarah could be heard breathing heavily while the unintelligible whispers kept going.
	I sat back terrified. What could I do? I needed to do something to help. “Sarah, who is in there with you? What is going on?” I asked through the door.
	Sarah again didn’t answer. I tried to peek through the keyhole in the door, and I could see the light from Sarah’s flashlight barely illuminating the window. I could make out Sarah’s profile next to the window, and it looked like she was holding the picture. There was a glint of gold, and I noticed the locket hanging from her hand while it swayed slightly.
	I kept watching as Sarah stood there, her shoulders slightly shaking, and I could hear quiet sobs. Sarah was crying. Then I saw a shadow emerge from somewhere behind Sarah that I couldn’t see. A dark figure seemed to reach out a hand to touch Sarah. I lost it. I jumped up to find the others. We needed to get her out of that room.
	I listened and heard them. There were bangs and scraping noises coming from the bathroom next door. Keith and Tanner were using broken pieces of wood, and it looked like they were trying to break through the wall. Jenna was standing behind them next to the broken tub chewing on her thumbnail. They were trying to make their way through the wall between the two rooms.
	The guys were out of breath, but you could tell they were determined to get through to Sarah. Since the house was so old, there were boards behind the plaster that seemed to be causing them the most issues. The pieces of wood they were using weren’t quite cutting it. Tanner paused his hammering to wipe sweat from his brow when Keith stopped and said, “This isn’t working. We need something heavier to get through these boards.”
	Jenna and I quickly scanned the room, and when we couldn’t find anything, she left to see if she could find something in the other rooms. I turned to the sink and noticed it was hanging on the wall without a cabinet, leaving the pipes below exposed. I walked over to examine it to see if I could pry one out and use it as a hammer. I knelt down on the floor and stopped. Coming from the pipe was TAP TAP TAP … TAP. Over and over again. I turned around to see if the guys had heard it, but they were preoccupied with getting through the wall. I wrapped my hands around the pipe and yanked as hard as I could, pulling over and over to try to get it to come out of the wall. All the while the tapping continued.
	Tanner was trying to pull the boards out of the wall with his bare hands when I heard him say, “Who is she talking to in there? I can hear her whispering to someone.”
	Keith stopped what he was doing and listened. The hammering and scraping stopped while we struggled to hear what was going on in the other room. They had managed to thin the wall, so the noise was a little clearer. We heard Sarah crying deep mournful sobs and what sounded like something being dragged across the floor. Sarah, through her tears, said, “I don’t want to. Don’t make me.”
	Then we heard a whisper that we couldn’t make out and a creaking noise. Sarah whispered, “No.”
	Just after she said that, the tapping from the sink stopped, and I heard a gravelly voice coming from the sink say, “Too late.”
	I gasped and covered my mouth with my hands. Then we heard the same sharp cut-off scream that we had heard in the room before. It was ear-splitting. Then nothing. We all moved closer to the wall to see if we could hear anything else, but there was nothing. Keith and Tanner began frantically trying to break through the wall again when we heard another scream from the hallway. We all ran out to see Jenna standing in the hall crying and pointing at something in the other room. Tanner ran to her and looked to see what had happened and yelled, “Oh shit!”
	Keith and I followed, and I stopped right outside the doorway that was now wide open and I just froze and stared into the room. Swinging from a rope hanging from the beam on the ceiling was Sarah. Her eyes were open, and she just swayed back and forth. Her neck was bent at a horrifying angle. Keith had Sarah’s legs wrapped in his arms trying to get the weight off the rope while Tanner was up on the chair trying to untie the rope that was wrapped around Sarah’s neck. I just stood there frozen. I couldn’t move. I couldn't think. I just stared at Sarah hanging from the ceiling.
	The guys had managed to get Sarah down and had laid her on the floor. Keith was attempting CPR while Tanner knelt beside them, his hands on his knees and tears streaming down his face. Jenna and I entered the room, and we stood there just watching as everything was unfolding. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This definitely couldn’t be happening. I closed my eyes and said a little prayer that when I opened them I would be back in my apartment in bed having just woken up from a nightmare. I opened my eyes to see the exact same image. Sarah was on the floor, her face pale and lifeless, while Keith was counting out the chest compressions and giving her rescue breaths. Tanner had turned away from them and was now sitting on the floor with his arms wrapped around his waist. Jenna was crying, standing behind Keith, and I was there standing in the middle of the room.
	Keith stopped compressions and stood up from the floor. He started pacing across the room pulling at his hair. He was muttering to himself, “What the fuck, what the fuck.”
	Jenna looked at him and asked, “Why did you stop?”
	Tanner gave her a look like she was the stupidest person in the whole world and yelled, “Can’t you see, Jenna? She is dead! No one could be alive with their neck like that. Look at her. Are you serious? How stupid could you be?”
	Jenna and I looked at him, a little taken aback by how abruptly he had said that to her. His eyes were wild; I could tell he was terrified, so I put it down to shock, but Jenna must have taken it personally because she yelled back at him, “No, Tanner. I have never seen a dead body before so excuse the hell out of me when I can’t seem to wrap my mind around my friend being dead.”
	Tanner threw up his arms in exasperation at her and walked over to the window. Jenna just stared at the back of his head in disbelief. Keith had stopped his pacing and was now just leaning his forehead against the wall. Everyone was just in a state of confusion. There was no way that Sarah had just done that to herself. She was the happiest person. She had the brightest outlook toward almost everything. We were making a plan to get out. This just didn’t make sense.
	Then I remembered the hand reaching for her, Sarah telling whoever was in here with her that she didn’t want to, and the voice I heard coming from the drain. This wasn’t an accident. Someone had made her do it, but who? I looked from one friend to the other in a state of shock and said, “She didn’t do that to herself.”
	Jenna looked at me and said, “How could she not have? She was in here by herself.”
	Tanner laughed at her and she shot him a nasty look. He ignored the look and said, “There is something or someone here keeping us in the house and not letting us leave. She was trapped in this room and we couldn't get to her no matter how hard we tried. Then she was talking to someone in here. All of us were in the other room when we heard it, Jenna. Seriously, you haven’t figured it out yet?”
	“Tanner, what is the matter with you?” I asked him.
	“What’s the matter with me? What’s the matter with you, Katie? You seem to have this whole place figured out. You were the one that got us out of the attic. You were the one who said that the house doesn’t want us to leave. Explain that.”
	I opened my mouth, but I didn’t have an answer to that. I didn’t even know how I knew those things. All I could do was close my mouth, and then the tears came. One at first. Then more slid silently down my cheeks. I looked at Tanner and said, “I don’t know how I know this stuff, but I do. The house or something in this house is showing or telling me what to do when it wants to. I don't have a single freaking answer for you.”
	Tanner looked at me, and then his face noticeably relaxed, and I could see some of the fight had left him. His shoulders dropped, and he dropped down to the mattress with a thud. He looked up at Jenna and me and said, “I’m sorry. I was a dick to both of you. I just really, really want to get out of here.”
	With that I looked up at the window and sighed. It was closed. I knew without even trying that it wouldn’t open again and just went over and sat next to him on the mattress and laid my head on his shoulder. We were all quiet for a long time when Keith, still with his head resting against the wall, said, “We need to cover her up.”
	We all glanced at Sarah and looked away. He was right. None of us wanted to see her like that. Jenna was the first to react. “I’ll go look for a blanket or something we can use.”
	She walked out of the room, and Tanner, Keith, and I followed her. We went from room to room, and Jenna found an old musty blanket tucked into one of the closets and looked at me as if to ask if this was okay to use. I nodded, and we all walked out of the room and down the hallway to where we knew Sarah was still lying on the floor. We walked slowly, none of us really wanting to go back in the room but knowing that we had to. Keith took a deep breath and held his hand out to Jenna and said, “I’ll do it.”
	She handed him the blanket, and we walked into the room. We walked over to her, and just as Keith was about to unfold the blanket, Jenna looked up at him and said, “We should put her on the mattress. The floor is too hard and…”
	She couldn’t finish her statement and just covered her mouth with her hands and started crying. I understood what she meant. I wrapped her in a big hug, and Tanner wept as he knelt down and picked Sarah up off the floor. Being careful not to look directly at her, he laid her gently on the mattress. I walked over and placed her hands on her chest and closed her eyes. We all stood around the mattress not knowing what to say but all taking a moment to silently say good-bye to her. Keith raised his eyes to us, and then with a nod from Tanner he unfolded the blanket and spread it slowly across Sarah’s body.


Chapter 4

Back downstairs we sat in the living room. We were all very quiet, none of us really knowing what to say or do. No one had touched Sarah’s pack; it was still lying on the floor where she had left it. The absence of Sarah was something that everyone was feeling. Tanner kept taking sips from his water bottle. He was sitting as far away from the group as he could. Keith and Jenna were sitting snuggled up on the couch comforting each other, and I sat there, my mind racing.
	I couldn’t figure out what to do next. Things were looking bad from every angle. We were stuck in this house, and we had lost someone. Not just lost her. She died. Sarah was dead. There was no way to wrap my head around that. I felt so numb. I took out my phone to check what time it was. Just past nine. The adrenaline was leaking out of my body, and I felt exhausted. I looked up at Keith and Jenna and asked, “Does anyone have any ideas on what to do next?”
	“I have no idea,” Jenna said. “I am so tired I can’t think straight.”
	“We have to get out of here. There is no way I am staying the night in this house,” Tanner said.
	“Did anyone notice if there were any other windows in the other bedrooms upstairs that were open?” Keith asked.
	“It isn’t going to be that easy, Keith,” I said, rubbing my hands across my face.
	“Okay, then you come up with an idea, Katie. You are the one the house is talking to,” he said sarcastically.
	“It’s just past nine now. We can look to see if there is another way out, but I don’t think we are going to be that lucky. It feels like whatever is in this house is playing with us. We need to figure out the rules and figure out how to beat it.”
	Quietly from the corner where he sat, Tanner said, “And how do you expect us to do that?”
	“The chair,” I blurted without knowing why.
	They all looked at me, waiting for me to continue. I thought about it, and it was true. The chair had moved all by itself. We didn’t move it, but it moved like someone had dragged it to the center of the room to use it for the same reason Sarah, or the thing with Sarah, had used it. To kill. I told them as much and realized that the image of the chair came to my mind before I had the thought. That information I kept to myself. I didn’t understand why the house chose me, and I knew they weren’t going to understand either.
	“We need to do something here. Sitting around isn’t going to get us out of this house,” I said.
	“Katie is right. If we want to leave, then we need to make a plan,” Jenna replied.
	"I say we do a complete search of the downstairs and see if there is anything that we missed. I will check the kitchen. Maybe there is something we can use as a tool to get out of here or at the very least a weapon," I said to the group, standing up from the couch. 
	Keith followed suit, taking instant control of the situation. "Tanner, you go with her. Jenna and I will look in here. I say we do fifteen minutes and then come back here and regroup. No one gets left alone," Keith said. 
		"I agree. We need to keep the buddy system from now on. No one gets left in a room by themselves," I said back to him. 
		He glanced my way and for a second I thought I saw anger in his face. It was quickly replaced with a determined look. I waited for Tanner to stand and we made our way into the kitchen.
		 Things were pretty much exactly the same as they were the first time I had gone in there. There was the standard kitchen stuff: countertops, a stove, a place where there was once a fridge.  I started opening cupboards, finding nothing but dust and cobwebs. The sink had a dirty old rag in it and there was a barrel between the   wall and the stove that had a sign that said 'APPLES' on it. I looked in there and saw nothing but the bottom of the barrel. "Hey, Tanner, have you found anything yet?" I asked him. 
		 "Nothing yet. Did we ever look inside this pantry?" he asked back. 
		 "I didn't see a pantry before," I said, walking back to him.
		 He pointed out a small door that was tucked into the corner. It had broken glass panes that you could see shelves through, and there was stuff inside. We both walked over and he opened the door. Inside were old jars of preserves and some canned vegetables. I made the mental note that if the seals weren't broken, then we could possibly add those to the supplies we already had. 
		 "There it is," Tanner whispered almost too quietly for me to have heard him. 
		 I looked at him as he was stretching up to reach the top shelf. He pulled down a bottle of some kind and he walked over to the sink and grabbed the old rag out of it and wiped the bottle to clean off the dust. He held it up to the light that he had placed on the counter and he had a slight smile on his face. "What is that?" I asked him.
		 "Hollow Brook Sweet Apple Wine," he said matter-of-factly.  
		 I looked at the bottle and it just said Hollow Brook Wine and the bottle date of 1992. "Did you see that up there before?" I asked.
		 He looked at me and smiled and just said, "That's where my mom always kept it."
		 He went back to wiping the bottle down. I looked at him for another few seconds  trying to decide if he was acting weird or not and  finally decided to not go there. We were all tired and this house was playing with my head. I kept looking. I went as far as getting down on my hands and knees to see if there was anything on the floor or under the stove. I swept my flashlight under the stove and saw a dark shape wedged behind it. I got up and walked over there to get a closer look and took a sharp intake of breath, and Tanner asked, "What is it?"
		 I reached behind the stove and pulled out Keith's crowbar. Tanner rushed over to see what was in my hand. I held out the crowbar. "How the hell did that get there?" he asked.
		 I shrugged because there was no explanation for it. The house was definitely playing with us and this was just another example of that. I turned to walk back into the living room to show Keith and Jenna what we found when Tanner walked back to the counter and grabbed the bottle of wine. Entering the living room, I saw that Keith and Jenna were back on the couch, their heads bent over, looking at something. I called out to Keith, "Look what we found," holding up the crowbar. 
		 Keith jumped up from the couch and snatched it away from me. I was a little taken aback by how forcefully he grabbed it. He snatched it like I was the one who stole it from him in the first place. "You're welcome," I said to him.
		 "Where did you find it?" he asked, not even acknowledging what he had just done. 
		 "Katie found it behind the stove," Tanner told him.
		 Keith put it down on the couch next to where he was sitting and sat next to it with his hand on it like he was afraid that it was going to walk away again. Jenna picked up what they had been looking at before and handed it to me. "This is what we found. It was tucked in the bookshelf over there. It looks to be some kind of work log," she said as I looked at the cover. 
		 Hollow Brook Orchard was engraved in the leather that made up the cover of the book. Tanner walked over and looked over my shoulder. "You know, between the crowbar and the book thing, I say our find was better. Katie and Tanner one, Jenna and Keith zero," he said holding his hand up to me to give him a high-five. 
		 With a smile on my face, I did just that. Slapping palms together was a simple gesture but one that lifted the tension, just a little, but it was enough. He took the book from my hand and gently placed it on the table. It might have just been my imagination, but it looked like he stroked the book, letting his fingers linger a second too long. Then he looked away and sat on the couch, placing the bottle of wine next to the ledger. Jenna noticed it and picked it up. "What is this?" she asked.
		 "Hollow Brook Orchard sweet apple wine," I said, repeating Tanner's words from earlier. 
		 I glanced at him to see if he noticed, but he just sat there looking up at Jenna as she read the label. "1992, huh? That was over 20 years ago. It probably isn't any good anymore," she said, placing it back on the table. 
		 Tanner snatched it up, popping the cork with his thumbs like he had done it a thousand times, and then he took a big whiff of it. "Nah, wine only gets better with age," he said. 
		 He took another long sniff and swirled the liquid in the bottle. "You know what we should do. We should toast in memory of Sarah."
		 He brought up her name and the room fell silent. Had we really forgotten about our friend dead upstairs? I dismissed that thought with the explanation that we just didn't want to think about it so we were distracting ourselves with tasks to do. Jenna went over and sat next to Tanner. "That is a great idea as long as you're sure that the wine is still good." 
		 Tanner took a small taste of it and closed his eyes like it was the best-tasting stuff in the world. "Delish," he said. 
		 We all stood up. Tanner handed the bottle to Jenna and she raised it and said, "To Sarah." 
		 Then she took a small sip and grimaced a little, then handed the bottle to Keith. He raised it and took a swig. As he passed the bottle to me, I hesitated just a second, grabbed the bottle, and raised it almost to my lips. For some reason I didn't want to drink it. The hesitation ended with me telling myself it would be rude to not drink to a dead friend, so I lifted the bottle and let a few drops land on my tongue. The wine was more bitter than sweet but it didn't taste off so I pulled just a little more into my mouth and let a swallow of the wine go down my throat. I turned to Tanner and handed him the bottle. He smiled at me and winked, then raised the bottle and with a "for Sarah" he  tipped the bottle back so it was almost pouring down his throat. He took four or five big pulls from the bottle before he finally stopped and put the bottle back on the table. 
		With the moment over, Keith walked over to where he placed his crowbar and picked it up. He held it in his hands like a baseball bat and said, "I'm going to go see if I can pry the door open." 
		Then he just left the room. We all looked at each other and hurried after him. Jenna caught up to him first in the hall and grabbed his shoulder. He spun around and glared at her. "What!" he said, a little too firmly. 
		She pulled her arm back and raised her hand in defense and said to him, "We need to stick together, remember. We can't go wandering off by ourselves. Those were your words. No one gets left alone."
		He looked at her and said, "Then come along if you're coming."
		She looked hurt by this and just looked at his back as he walked away. His sudden outburst was weird but I could understand his needing to do something to get out. I myself was just about to suggest the same thing, so I gave Jenna an encouraging look and then followed after Keith. We all came together in the front entranceway, Jenna and I staying back by the stairs while Keith tried to jam the crowbar into the door jamb above the doorknob. He got it wedged in and then pulled. There was a slight groan from the wood with the force he was putting on it but it didn't move. Tanner walked over and they both pulled on the crowbar. There was another loud groan but again no movement from the door. 
		They dropped the crowbar and Keith went off. He slammed his fists on the door and kicked it. Tanner backed away from him, not wanting any of this emotional outburst directed at him. Keith grabbed at the doorknob and twisted and pulled on it, cursing the door with every foul thing he could think of. The sudden outburst from him slowly lost steam as his kicks became less powerful and the fists against the door quieted. He turned and leaned his back against the door and slid to the floor. Defeat was written all over his face and none of us really knew what to do next. 
		I slowly walked over from where I was standing by the stairs and knelt down next to him. "Keith," I said quietly.
		He looked up at me with a look that said to me that he was about to lose it. The exhaustion and pure hopelessness on his face were almost a physical punch to the gut. His face fell and his forehead hit his knees. "This is all my fault," he said, his words muffled, but we heard him. 
		Jenna rushed over and wrapped her arms around him. He laid his head on her chest and she rocked him saying, "This is not your fault. None of this is your fault."
		He let her comfort him for just a moment before he lifted his head again and looked at us. He had unspilled tears in the corners of his red-rimmed eyes. He took a deep breath and leaned his head against the door. He blinked his eyes a few times to keep the tears at bay and said, "This is my fault. I brought us here. I am the one who didn't tell anyone the story of this place. I just thought it was fake and it would be a fun time, maybe get a few scares out of you girls. Now we are trapped in this place and Sarah is fucking dead."
		None of us knew what to say. It wasn't his fault. Like he said, he thought it was just a story. Who in their right mind would believe this crazy story was real? I wouldn't have. We were in an unbelievable situation. But Keith must have taken our silence to mean that we agreed with him. His face fell back into his lap and the tears he tried to force back came through with force. His shoulder shook with his sobs. Jenna kept rubbing his back and trying to comfort him the best she could. After a moment of this I stood up and said loudly, "Keith!" 
		He looked up at me suddenly, the force of my words seeming to shock him out of it a little. He at least had stopped crying and I took that as a cue to keep going. "Keith," I said a little quieter, "we are all exhausted. Today has been such a roller coaster of emotions. With everything that happened, there is no wonder we are all a little fried. I say we all get some sleep and we can figure things out tomorrow when we have rested and have a clear head."
		"Katie is right, Keith. We should get some rest and figure things out in the morning," Jenna said. 
		I gave her a look of thanks. She was always the calm one and ready to be the voice of reason. Jenna stood up and held her hand out to Keith. He looked from her to me and sighed. He grabbed the crowbar then her hand and slowly stood up from the floor. I looked at his knuckles; they were raw and bloody from where he had taken his anger out on the door. Jenna must have noticed too because she grabbed his other hand and inspected them closer. "We need to clean these," she said as she led Keith back down the hall to the living room. 
		Tanner and I followed and we found Jenna looking down at Sarah's bag while Keith sat on the couch. She looked up when we entered and said, "Sarah always was the one to carry the first aid kit." 
		I glanced at her then at Sarah's bag and realized what she meant. The first aid kit was in Sarah's bag. She knelt down and hesitantly grabbed at the bag, but when her fingers brushed it, the emotions of the day must have hit her too because she froze and started crying. She went from kneeling on the floor to sitting in a crumpled mess on the floor like a weight was crushing her down and she couldn't get back up. I looked at her and picked up the bag. "I'll get it," I said to her. 
		She gave me a weak smile and I took the bag to the couch while Tanner helped her off the floor. I placed Sarah's bag on the table in front of me and went for the zipper. My hand hesitated. I didn't think this was going to be this hard. The group was the four of them. I was the outsider. Why was I scared to open Sarah's bag? I shook my emotions off and unzipped the bag. I rummaged around in the bag and realized Sarah had been holding out on us. There was a full jar of peanut butter, a Tupperware full of sliced bread, five bananas, and a full bag of pretzels. I pulled those out first to show everyone. Jenna just snickered; Keith gave a half-hearted smile, and Tanner dug in. He grabbed up all of the supplies and started whipping up peanut butter and banana sandwiches. I pulled out the red first aid kit from the bottom of the bag. I put the now empty bag on the floor and placed the first aid kit on my lap and opened it up. I grabbed up some antibiotic wipes and opened one and started cleaning off Keith's hands. The cuts weren't bad but they were red and angry. His hands were definitely going to be bruised tomorrow.  
		I grabbed some of the antibiotic ointment and put a small amount on each knuckle so they wouldn't dry out and crack. He asked me not to wrap them and just rubbed the lotion into his skin. Tanner handed each of us a sandwich and we passed the bag of pretzels around. Once our little dinner was done, we reevaluated our supplies. Tanner's water was almost gone, but the rest of us had almost full bottles. The granola bars and trail mix hadn't been touched so we still had that, and now we added half a jar of peanut butter and three bananas to the stash. Keith held onto the crowbar, I'm sure, to make sure that it didn't disappear again. But we had food and we had water so at least that part of our survival was covered for now.
		I yawned and went for the coats. I laid mine out on the floor in a makeshift bed and gave the cushions from the couch a good sniff test. They were musty and smelled of dirt but they would work. I placed one under the hood of my coat to create a barrier between me and the smell and I stretched out on my little DIY sleeping pad. It wasn't comfortable but it would do. Slowly everyone made up their own sleeping spot , not saying a word. Without discussing it beforehand we all spread out our beds close to each other. We were all feeling the need to stay close and be together. "Someone needs to keep watch. Should we play rock, paper, scissors to see who stays up? Or do we have any volunteers?" I asked, looking at each of them.
		Keith and Jenna both raised their fists to start a round when Tanner piped up, "I'll go first." 
		I looked at him and said, "Are you sure? You haven't even seen my trick shot while playing RPS." 
		He smiled at my joke and nodded his head. "I'm sure. For some reason I'm not very tired. I will make a suggestion, though. Each of you turn your phones off to conserve the battery. I'll keep mine on and wake one of you in two hours. The surprise will be who I will decide got enough beauty sleep."
		  He gave a suggestive smile and eyebrow wag at Keith, who rolled his eyes and lay down on his coat. Jenna and I both thanked him and lay down, and he turned off the flashlight with a quiet, "Goodnight."
		  Then we all lay down to get what rest we could.


Chapter 5

I woke to someone gently shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes to see Jenna leaning over me and she whispered, "I need to go to the bathroom. Will you go with me?"
	I looked at her and tried to see if she was joking or not. I was still half asleep when the events from the day rushed back to me. "Of course. Now that I'm up I have to pee too," I said back to her. 
	I got up off the floor and we made our way to the stairs. We each gave Tanner a quick wave before we exited the room. We made our way up to the second floor and we both stopped. The hallway was pitch black. Not even the light from her flashlight could fully penetrate it. We gave each other a nervous glance and slowly made our way down the hall. As we passed the room where we had left Sarah, we were both very thankful to see that one of the guys must have closed the door before we had gone downstairs. We made our way to the bathroom and Jenna decided to brave the broken toilet first.  I turned around to give her some privacy. I cleared my throat and tried to think of something to say, but she beat me to it by saying, "Do you think the guys are acting weird?"
	I quickly responded back to her, “What do you mean?” 
	“I don’t know, but they seem off to me. I understand that we are in this totally messed up situation, but the way they have just been acting seems extra weird.”
	I really wanted her to elaborate but I didn’t know how to ask without coming off too pushy. I did think that the guys were acting weird but I didn’t know if she was picking up on the same things that I was. She couldn’t have known about Tanner’s weird reaction to the wine in the kitchen. But she had been there for his crazy outburst upstairs, and everyone was there for Keith’s display with the front door. I just took the gamble and said, “Yeah, they have been weird. They seem way more angry about what is going on than feels necessary. I don’t know. Maybe it’s because they are guys and feel like they need to protect us and can’t.” 		
	“Maybe,” she said, “but it feels like more than that. I guess the house is just getting to me. I see shadows in every corner and it nearly makes me jump out of my skin. I guess we are all pretty out of it.”
	I didn’t think that was it at all but I kind of just shrugged it off when Jenna pulled up her pants and tapped me on the shoulder. “You’re going to have to drip dry. There isn’t any toilet paper.”
	I gave her a silly smile and we switched places. "Tanner has been weird to me. Keith just seems like he is upset at the world right now. But I can see where that anger is coming from," I said to her.
	"Yeah, I know what you mean. What was that in the other room? Tanner was completely out of line the way he spoke to me after we found … Sarah," she said back to me.
	"Totally, he acted like we weren't all in shock and completely broken afterwards and then downstairs he starts being his normal self. If I can get off this emotional rollercoaster they have us on, I would appreciate it. It's not like we aren't dealing with enough crap right now," I said, feeling myself get more annoyed the more I spoke. 
	I finished and we made our way back to the hallway. We both paused behind the closed door to the room that held Sarah. I had the very negative intrusive thought of needing to get out of here soon or she was going to start to stink. Then I mentally slapped myself for thinking such a horrible thing and physically shook it off. Jenna wrapped a hand around my waist and laid her head on my shoulder. "I can't believe that we are in this situation. How could she be gone?" Jenna said quietly. 
	I didn't have an answer for that so I just laid my head on hers and we stood there for a moment. Jenna looked up at me and asked, "We are going to get out of this, right?"
	I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile and said back, "Of course we are."
	I could've just lied to my best friend or I could have been telling the truth. One thing I knew was that I needed to figure out the game this house or thing or demon, whatever this was, was playing so I could beat it. I just knew deep in my gut that it was speaking to me. I wished with all my being that it had chosen someone else but it had chosen me. Call me selfish all you want, but I was almost certain anyone else in my position would feel the same. 
	We made our way down the stairs, through the too-tight hallway, and back into the living room. We got to our beds before I noticed that Tanner was nowhere in sight. Keith was still asleep on his coat, but the armchair Tanner was sitting in when we went upstairs was empty. His flashlight was there and his water bottle but no Tanner. Jenna looked at me and pointed at the chair and gave me a what the heck gesture. Silently asking me where Tanner was. I shook my head like I didn't know and we looked all round the room. I heard a noise like something shuffling coming from the space between the wall and the bookshelf. There was a space maybe two feet wide there, and I saw him. Tanner was standing there. He was facing the wall and in one hand he held his phone and the other held that old ledger. "What are you doing?" I whispered to him. 
	He slowly turned around to face me, but the person looking back at me wasn't Tanner. For just a second his face looked like someone else. I blinked, and then the image was gone. It was Tanner again. I rubbed at my eyes and looked at him again. Still Tanner. Man, this house was really getting to me. I was seeing the boogeyman everywhere. 
	He hadn't answered my question yet, so I repeated it when Jenna came up and stood beside me. "Tanner, what are you doing?"
	"Just making sure the entry from yesterday was right," he said blankly, not really looking at either of us. 
	"Yesterday?" Jenna asked. "Are you putting something about Sarah in there?"
	He looked at her and looked confused. He shook his head and asked, "Sarah?"
	I went to pull the ledger out of his hand to see if he had written anything, and he looked at me like what are you doing and he wouldn't let go. I pulled my hands back and took a step back. He stepped out of the small space and then he seemed to shake himself out of his fog and looked at me, then Jenna, and then back at me. Then he asked, "Where did you guys go?" 
	Jenna looked at me and then back at Tanner. "We went to the bathroom. You knew that," she said. 
	He looked at me and said back, "Oh right."
	He still looked kind of confused when he went to sit down on his DIY bed. I went over to him and said, "You get some sleep. You look exhausted. I'll take the next watch." 
	He just nodded, lay down, and closed his eyes. I did notice that he still had the ledger tucked in his arm as he fell asleep. 
	"Do you want me to stay up with you?" Jenna asked through a big yawn.
	Taking my eyes off of Tanner to look up at her, I smiled and said, "You don't look like you could last ten minutes. I got it. Go back to sleep."
	I took Tanner's place on the armchair and tucked my feet under myself and watched as Jenna tucked herself back into bed. I took this opportunity to watch Tanner, who seemed to be in the deep rhythmic breathing stage of sleep. I watched as the ledger he had tucked under his arm rose and fell with each breath. Now it was clear. He was acting weird. I would have to watch him better now that I understood the clues more. The locket had been the first clue for Sarah; I just didn't know what it meant yet. For some reason the ledger was doing something to Tanner. He was starting to not act like himself at times, not all the time, but there were moments where it almost seemed like someone else was peeking through. 
	I sat there in the armchair watching my friends as they slept. We needed to get out of this house, all of us, and I needed to figure out how to do that, even if it took me the rest of the night. I needed to plan. I drummed my fingers on the padded arm of the armchair. TAP TAP TAP … TAP.  TAP TAP TAP … TAP. TAP TAP TAP … TAP.


Chapter 6

I woke up with my head buried in my chest and the worst kink in my neck that I've ever had. The armchair did not do me any favors. Then I remembered I was supposed to be on watch. I stood up real quick and checked the room. Everyone was where they were supposed to be. They were asleep on the floor and nothing seemed out of place. With my heart going a million miles a minute I sat back down with a thud. I took a few deep calming breaths and I grabbed my water bottle and took a couple sips to soothe my dry mouth. 
	A few minutes later, Keith started to stir, followed by Jenna and Tanner. Tanner still held on to the ledger but as he woke up fully, he placed it on the table like it didn't mean anything. I gave him a look and he smiled at me. "Oh, my, mighty watcher." 
	"Hey, Tanner, how did you sleep?" I asked him.
	"Like a baby but someone kept tickling my feet," he said with a straight face.
	With everything that was going on in the house, everyone turned to look at him. He laughed and held up his hands. "I was just kidding." 
	Keith wasn't amused. He gave Tanner a small punch on the arm. "Not funny, dude," he said.
	Tanner shrugged and said back to him, "I thought it was funny."
	I went over to where our food was and cut two of the bananas in half and then passed around the trail mix. Each of us took a banana half and a handful of trail mix and sat down on the couch. Munching on our breakfast, I debated bringing up Tanner's late-night book reading to the group to keep everyone up to speed on my thoughts and fears that the house was trying to give us more clues that something bad was going to happen. I looked from Tanner to Jenna and then to Keith. How do I bring that kind of thing up? Oh by the way the locket that Sarah found and the chair sliding across the room were signs that she was in danger but none of us picked up on it. Oh and now the same thing is happening to Tanner. I wasn't sure that was going to go over well so I decided to keep it to myself for now and just watch. 
	We all looked from one of us to the next not knowing what to do or say at this point. Keith cleared his throat and sat up a little straighter. "We need to figure out a way to get out of here. Anyone have any bright ideas on how we do that?"
	Taking a deep breath, I said, "We need to find the flaw. The house keeps finding ways to keep us here, but we found the open window. Maybe there is something else that we can use. Or something else we haven't tried yet."
	"Ok, we hear you but how do we do that?" Jenna asked me. 
	"Well, we did a really deep search of the downstairs and we found the crowbar. Maybe we go back upstairs and do a really thorough search of the second floor and if we don't find anything there, go up to the third floor and check that," I said to them all. 
	"We already checked the 2nd floor; there really isn't a reason to check that floor again. I say we go straight to the 3rd floor and look up there better. We can prop the door open with something so it doesn't close on us again," Keith replied. 
	Tanner shook his head at Keith. "No, Katie is right. We should check the second floor one more time. We weren't really looking for a way out then; we were too distracted by Sarah to think of anything else."
	Keith gave him a hurt glance like what he had said offended him. Jenna also agreed with me that we needed to take a longer, deeper look at the second floor to see if there was anything else we missed. As we got up, Tanner went for his camera bag and checked his equipment, taking out his camera and putting in a fresh battery for the trip upstairs. He looked around as if to check if anyone was watching him and I noticed him slip the ledger in his bag too. He must have not noticed that I had seen because he hoisted his bag on his shoulder and turned his camera on. Jenna was grabbing up some supplies in her bag when she stopped and stood straight up, her face to the open kitchen door. She looked back at us and said, "Do you guys hear that?"
	We stopped what we were doing and stood holding our breath so we could hear what she was talking about. Drip Drip Drip. There was a faint dripping noise coming from the kitchen. Keith started that way and we slowly followed him. The early morning light was streaming through the window and the dripping was a constant noise. We all gathered there in the kitchen staring at the sink in disbelief. The faucet was dripping water. Tanner walked over to the sink and turned the handle of the faucet and before our eyes there was a nice flow of water coming from the tap. Keith walked over and ran his hand under the flow. He brought his hand up to his nose and gave it a sniff test. "Smells like fresh water," he said. 
	Jenna and I walked over and looked at it. The water was clear, with no tint to it, and there was no obvious smell. Which was weird not only because the water must have been turned off to this place for at least two decades, but also because, since the water hadn't been used in so long, the pipes should have been full of rust. "Who needs to fill up their water bottle?" Tanner asked.
	"You couldn't pay me to drink that water," Jenna replied. 
	"Well it looks and smells fine to me," he said back.
	He grabbed his water bottle from the side pocket of his camera bag and filled it up. I had a bad feeling about that, but before I could speak my opinion, Tanner took a long gulp from his water bottle. I had held up my finger to tell him to wait but I was too late. He brought the water bottle back down and wiped his other hand across his mouth and said, "Ahhh, refreshing."
	"How did it taste?" Keith asked. 
	"Tasted like cold well water. There was a mineral taste to it but it tasted fine," Tanner said back to him.
	He replaced his bottle back into the side pocket of his bag and gave Jenna and  me a thumbs-up. He turned to me and said, "After you." 
	I looked at Keith, who was getting ready to lead the group upstairs, and he glared at me. I quickly said to him, "We can all follow Keith up there and then we can split up in groups of two again so we aren't looking alone." 
	"Yeah, that was what I was going to suggest," Keith said as he shouldered his way to the head of the group. He again gave me a nasty look as he left the kitchen and we all followed him up the stairs. 
	When we got up there, we decided to split into groups of two again. I volunteered to go with Keith while suggesting that Tanner and Jenna search the other room. None of us wanted to go into what we were calling Sarah’s room so each group took one of the other rooms on the other side of the hall. I walked into the room that Keith was already in and asked him, “Keith, can we talk?”
	He looked at me and asked, “What would we need to talk about?”
	I just stared at him like are you serious but continued, “I know you don’t really like me very much,” I began. 
	I wasn’t sure where this bravado was coming from, but since I started, I couldn’t stop now. Keith was still looking around and I was getting a little heated now because it didn’t even seem like he was listening to me. I got in front of him and said, a little louder than I intended to, “Keith, will you stop and listen to me please?”
	He stopped and looked at me and said, “What, Katie? This was what you wanted. We are up here searching an area that we had already searched and for some reason everyone is following what you say like good little soldiers.” 
	“Good little soldiers?" I sarcastically said back to him. 
	He turned and took the crowbar that was still in his hands and swung it like a baseball bat with all his might at the window that was in that room. It hit the glass but acted like it had hit a solid wall and bounced off. 
	I jumped a little at his sudden outburst but I was not surprised when the glass didn't shatter into a million pieces. "The house is keeping us here, Katie. How do we even begin to compete with that?" he asked.
	 I said, “What the hell is wrong with you? You were acting like if everyone wasn’t following your lead then they must be doing it wrong. What makes you king of the haunted house, huh? Do you know something that you aren’t telling us?” 
	“Yes, Katie, I am keeping the key to the front door hidden because this is so fun for me. Do you not get that this is all my fault?! If I hadn’t suggested that we come here, we wouldn’t be here. Sarah would be alive and we would probably be planning our next exploring trip and all would be fine. I know you all said that you don’t think that it’s my fault and that no one blames me but I can’t stop blaming myself,” he said and the admission looked like it hurt to say. 
	“Keith, we are all scared but I know that if we work together then we can figure this out and get the hell out of here. I don’t know why the other two are listening to me either. I haven’t the foggiest idea why they think I know what I’m doing but I don’t. I guess I can just see things differently and the house is showing me things. I like it less than you do.”
	He looked at me for the first time without anger in what felt like forever. His shoulders relaxed when he said, “I get that you are scared. I knew from the first time that you came out with us that this wasn’t really your thing.”
	I laughed. Was I that obvious? He went on. “I just want the rest of us to get out of here. I have always been the leader of this group. I’ve been doing this a long time and I know how to keep people safe. Or at least I try my best to keep people safe. This is a whole new ball game here and I feel like I’m losing control, and without control I feel lost.”
	“Okay,” I said to him, “let’s make a deal. We will talk and work this out together. I will defer to your experience because you’re right: you have been doing this a long time and I have always just been along for the ride. But in this situation I feel it is best if we work together.”
	He nodded and asked me, “Do me a favor and don’t tell the others. I don’t want them freaking out any more than they are and they need us to keep our cool.” 
	I nodded at him; we shook on it, and with that we went back to searching the room. The room was small with nothing really going on; Keith peeked his head into the closet and reached up onto the top shelf, but from where I was standing it looked empty. I walked over to the window and peeked out; this room looked out onto the rows and rows of trees from the orchard. I was sure back in the day it was beautiful. Now it just looked dead. I turned when I heard Keith say, "There isn't anything here." 
	 He turned to leave and we went back out to the hall to wait for Jenna and Tanner to see if they had found anything. We walked into the hall but Tanner and Jenna were not there yet, so we peeked our heads into the room that they were searching and found Jenna with her hands crossed over her chest and glaring at Tanner. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor with the ledger open in his lap and the bottle of Apple Wine open next to him. His camera was placed carelessly on top of his camera bag like it wasn't important at all. 
	I looked from one to the other. Jenna looked either pissed off or extremely confused; I couldn't tell which. She noticed that we had walked in and said, "He has been sitting on this floor almost the entire time we were in here reading that book. Not to mention he won't stop drinking that stupid wine."
	"Jenna, calm down. I'm looking at something important. Don't interrupt me while I'm working,” Tanner said back to her. 
	"You see. We are all trying to find a way out of this house and he is sitting here drinking and won't look up from the ledger that we found yesterday." 
	Keith walked over to Tanner and snatched the ledger from his hands. Tanner jumped up and went to grab it back but Keith held it away from him. Tanner's face went red and he yelled at Keith, "Give that back, asshole!" 
	"Tanner, get a hold of yourself. You are being crazy!" he yelled back at him. 
	Tanner took a step back and then I got a good look at him. He seemed to be out of breath and what I took before as his face turning red with anger now looked like his skin was blotchy with red marks creeping up his neck. There was a slight sheen of sweat on his upper lip and forehead too. I grabbed his arm and took a good look at his face. His eyes were huge and his breath stunk of wine. "Tanner, how much of that wine did you drink? You look like you are about to fall over," I asked him.
	He looked at me and it seemed like it took him a second to really concentrate on my face. I could see red rimming his pupils and he was definitely swaying a little. He needed to sit down so I could assess him. I looked around but didn't see anything he could sit on. Then I remembered the chair. The one and only chair that we found on this second floor was in Sarah's room. I took a deep breath. This wasn't about me or my fear of seeing Sarah. Tanner needed help. I looked at Keith who was in the closet for some reason. "Keith," I said,
	He jumped and turned when I said his name. He had been on his hands and knees and threw what looked like a dirty blanket on the floor before he got up and left the closet. He walked over and I said to him, "You watch him."
	 I took Tanner's arm and threw it over Keith's shoulders and Tanner kind of plopped onto him. "I'm fine. This is ridiculous. I need to go back to work," Tanner said as he tried to pry himself unsuccessfully from Keith. 
	I turned my back on them and told Jenna, "I am going to go real quick into the other room and get the chair. Please make sure that they are okay while I'm gone." I thumbed my finger over at Keith and Tanner. 
	Tanner kept insisting he was fine. I could hear him arguing with Keith and Jenna as I walked out the door. I knew I probably shouldn't go alone but my friends were in danger and the house had chosen me for some reason. I took that as my sign that I needed to go and there was no second-guessing it now. I slowly made my way to the room that Sarah was in. I had my eyes closed and was taking deep calming breaths. 'Just go in, grab the chair, and get out,' I told myself. I opened my eyes and started down the hall. I was about halfway to the door to the room when I noticed something: there was a light coming from the bottom of the door. It didn't seem normal at first because the light didn't quite fit the light you would see coming from outside. Not to mention that room faced west so in the morning the sun should not be shining through the window at all. 
	I got closer and as soon as I got a few steps away the light went out. I started a little but kept creeping forward. I would take a step and the light would turn on; another step and the light would turn off. It kept that pattern of on and off with each step. Almost like it was counting the steps till I got to the door. When I got directly in front of the door, the light clicked off  and on in the pattern that I noticed and hated. I could hear the clicking of the switch on, off, on, off in the TAP TAP TAP … TAP pattern.


Chapter 7

I placed my hand on the doorknob and as soon as I did the tapping got louder, and that just pissed me off. I felt like this thing was summoning me or telling me that I needed to go into that room. Well, I flipped two middle fingers at the door and started to walk away. This thing was not going to tell me what to do. I was done being that thing’s puppet. I got maybe five steps away from the door when I heard something whisper to me, "Katie."
	I stopped and listened. Again someone whispered, "Katie."
	It was a female voice and it was coming from inside that room. Walking back over, I leaned my ear against the door to see if I could hear better. I heard a dragging noise and then a little louder, "Katie, help me."
	Sarah, I thought to myself. I didn't even have time to think; I opened the door and burst into the room. The lights were on now, no flickering, but there was something wrong too. Sarah was gone. I ran over to the mattress where we had laid Sarah yesterday and there was nothing on it. Even the blanket we had wrapped her in was gone. I couldn't understand this; there was no way that she was gone. She was dead; we checked that her neck had been broken and there was no pulse. How did she disappear? Who could have taken her? I ran to every corner of the room. I looked in the closet and behind the door. I was going crazy. Sarah's body was just gone. I ran back into the hallway and fell to my knees. I was screaming for the others to come. They found me in the hall on all fours just sobbing, "She's gone! She's gone!" 
	I pointed at the room when I looked up to see both Jenna and Keith staring at me like they couldn't understand what I was saying. Jenna peeked into the room and gasped and ran in. Keith followed close behind her and they both did the same thing I had: they looked everywhere thinking that she was hiding somewhere that I hadn't checked. I got unsteadily back to my feet and slowly walked back into the room. I saw Keith standing by the empty mattress, both his hands grabbing at his hair. 
	Then I noticed Jenna; she was looking up at the ceiling with a very confused look on her face. I walked over to her and she glanced down at me and she asked, "How are the lights on?"
	As soon as she said that, there was an almost electric buzz in the air and I heard clicks coming from the hall and what had to be the other rooms. Then there was light coming from the hall. I peeked my head out of the door and all of the lights in every room that I could see were on. I went back into the room. Keith was standing by the window. Jenna was still standing in the center of the room looking up at the light. She wasn't doing anything, just looking at the light like it had her in some kind of trance. I had the horrible suspicion that this house was breaking her. I walked over and rubbed her arm. Then to both of them I said, "All of the lights are on. The hall and all the other rooms too - all of them are on." 
	I glanced around the room and spotted the chair, and it hit me like a ton of bricks to the face. I quickly looked up at the others and yelled, "Tanner!"
	I ran from the room with both of them on my heels. After hearing me yell from the hallway they must have left him in the room thinking that he had followed them. I ran back into the room where we had left him and he was there stumbling around muttering to himself. He had the ledger in his hand and he didn't even look up when I entered the room. I walked over to him, and he was walking around barely staying on his own two feet. As I got closer to him I heard him mumbling under his breath. Something about it being wrong and that it didn't make sense. I got a little closer and quietly said, "Tanner, are you alright?" 
	He slowly looked up at me and he looked pale and sick. There were deep bags under his eyes and they were red-rimmed like he hadn't slept in days. There was a yellow tint to his skin; it was slight but it was definitely there and you could see the perspiration built up on his brow and upper lip. His knees looked like they were shaking, hardly keeping him upright. Jenna and Keith had followed me into the room and when Jenna saw Tanner she gasped and rushed over to him. He looked from her to me and said, "This is all wrong," pointing his finger at a page in the ledger.
	As soon as the words left his mouth his knees gave and Jenna and I barely had time to catch him to slow his fall to the floor. Jenna and I did our best to lay him down gently. Jenna had maneuvered herself so his head was resting in her lap. He was looking around frantically reaching for something. I looked at what he was reaching for and of course it was the ledger. I picked it up and looked at him. He reached for it again and I placed it on his chest. He opened the book and pointed at a page and said, "This isn't right. This is all wrong." 
	I looked to where he was pointing. The pages were filled with faded writing about time logs and apple production with the signature of someone named Adam Macleod. But the page next to it was line after line of Tanner's name over and over again. I looked at him and asked, "Did you write this?"
	He looked at me, confused, and he said, "I needed to record the day's work."
	"What are you talking about?" I asked him.
	He opened his mouth to reply but all that came out was a very dry cough that made his whole body shake. The coughing went on for almost a full minute. I looked around for his bag to find his water bottle. I walked over to where he had left it and grabbed his water bottle and as I was carrying it over to him, I stopped and looked at it. The water looked fine but I remembered where he had gotten it. I walked back over where the others were sat on the floor and held out the water bottle. Jenna went to grab for it but I drew my hand back. "No, this is what is making him sick," I said holding it back out of reach. 
	She looked at me confused and then clarification was all over her face. "The faucet," she said.
	"Exactly, none of us are feeling sick, right?" I asked.
	Both Keith and Jenna shook their heads. I continued, "Tanner was the only one who drank the water from the sink. Now he is sick. The house must be trying to poison him." 
	Tanner let out another long dry fit of coughing. Keith looked up at me and said, "He needs water." 
	I looked around and found the backpack that Jenna had brought upstairs leaning against the wall near the door. I opened it and found the first aid kit, a brown banana, and the bag of trail mix but no water. I looked at Keith and asked, "Did you bring up your water?"
	He shook his head no and I stood up. "Where are you going?" Jenna asked.
	"Tanner needs water and all the clean water we have must be downstairs. I am going to go get him some. I'll be right back," I said to her.
	"Oh, the hell you are. This would be the second time you tried to go off by yourself, Katie," Keith said as he stood up too. "The last time you went off on your own Sarah's body disappeared and we left Tanner alone and now he is sick. No one leaves anywhere by themselves. I will go with you."
	I opened my mouth to protest but he was right. I looked at Jenna. "Are you going to be alright staying here with Tanner?"
	"I will if you hurry. I'll keep an eye on him and you guys go get him some water. Might as well bring up everyone's pack; we might need the rest of the food down there too," she said wiping the sleeve of her shirt across Tanner's brow to wipe off some of the sweat. 
	I nodded at her, looked at Keith and we walked out the door. We didn't make it halfway down the hall before Keith grabbed my arm to get me to quit walking, looked me dead in the eye and said, "I thought we agreed to work together? Why are you trying to rush off by yourself and get us all into trouble?"
	I looked at him and just said, "I want to keep us all safe just as badly as you do. But you are right. I shouldn't be running off by myself from now on. The buddy system is law, agreed?"
	I looked at him, and he frowned at me but nodded and we continued down the hall. We got to the top of the stairs and I was about to walk down when Keith grabbed my arm again. "What, do you want to go first?" I asked, looking back at him. 
	All he did was point down the stairs. I took one look at his face and didn't want to turn around but I did just slowly. Down the stairs was almost pitch black. No light coming from the windows like a film had been smeared over them and it looked like the newly found electrical circulation was limited to upstairs. The lights that were on in every room up here wouldn't even penetrate halfway down the stairs. I took a deep breath and took one step down. Keith, however, did not let go of my arm. I glared up at him and asked, "What are you doing? We need to go down and get the stuff."
	"You want to go down there? Into that?" he asked, pointing down the stairs. 
	"Want is a strong word. Tanner needs water that isn't from the haunted pipes in this house. Not to mention all of our stuff is down there too. We will go down, grab all of our crap and come right back upstairs," I said back pulling my arm out of his grip. 
	He looked at me like I was crazy and said, "That is a terrible idea, Katie. We need to come up with another plan. Something doesn't feel right?" 
	He looked genuinely concerned, which made what I needed to do feel that much harder to do. But I said back to him, "If you are too scared to go down, walk me halfway and I'll run over really fast, grab what I can and run back upstairs. I will be out of your sight for less than a minute if I can conjure up my old college track skills." 
	"You ran track in college?" he asked me.
	"Looks like there is a lot about me that you don't know there, Keith," I said back.
	I started back down and he was about to protest again. I looked back up at him and gave him a shut-the-hell-up look and continued down the stairs. I heard him take a few steps down but noticed when he stopped he was about five steps from the top and had actually sat down. I turned around and to myself I said so much for the buddy system being law. I took another step, and this sudden, hopeless feeling started in the back of my mind; it was small but grew bigger with every step I took down into the darkness, like the darkness was filling me with dread, and all I wanted to do was go back up to the light. 
	I glanced back up at Keith, and his face looked so smug like he was baiting me, daring me to go further down. I could feel his doubt like a physical blow. He was thinking that I wasn't going to do it. Well I was going to show him. I took the last step off the bottom of the stairs and the darkness was so thick down here that I could almost taste it. I kept my hand on the banister while I rounded the corner. I looked down the empty hallway and in the gloom it looked like it would go forever. I was never going to make it down that. I should just go back upstairs; this wasn't worth it. I almost took a step back when I had a brief vision of Keith's face in my mind. I gritted my teeth, took a deep breath and the coughing I heard from upstairs was the fuel I needed. I pulled out my phone to use it as a flashlight and took off down the hall. I ran into the living room and looked everywhere. The bottles were gone. I was never going to find them. This was hopeless. 
	The walls felt like they were closing in on me and it was getting harder to breathe. My footsteps seemed to slow and my feet were dragging on the carpet. Walking felt like something I needed to concentrate on doing and I had to force each step to move my body forward.  I kept hearing low coughing and Tanner's face popped into my mind. He needed me. I needed to get at least one water bottle. Just one. I'll get that and go back upstairs, back to the light. The couch was less than two feet away now. Wasn't that where our bags were? I couldn't see them anywhere. The light from my phone was barely making a dent in the dense darkness that filled the room. 
	I made it to the couch and looked, but they weren't there. I took another couple steps to check beside the couch. Everything felt like it was going in slow motion. But then from what felt like a mile away I heard Jenna say, "Are you guys getting it?" That was it, the motivation I needed to look around the couch. I saw my bag lying there; I remembered putting most of the supplies in there. I leaned down and wrapped one hand around the strap of my bag to lift it off the floor. It felt like it weighed two hundred pounds.
	I turned to leave the living room but I felt what I thought was a hand grab mine. I looked back slowly too tired to be scared and saw a black shadow wrapped around my hand. I could still see my hand but the darkness seemed thicker there. I pulled my hand away and tried to take a step forward and felt like I was sinking shin deep into mud. The darkness was now wrapping around my feet. The walls weren't closing in on me; the darkness was. I was going to get swallowed by the darkness if I didn't move my ass. 
	I flung the bag over my shoulder not having the energy to actually put it on my back and looked forward down the hall. I could see a faint light coming from the end so I knew where I was going. I tried to start running but the effort of picking up my feet was too much already, so I walked. But I was moving forward; that was the goal. I had the bag which I really, really hoped contained at least one water bottle. However, for the life of me I couldn't remember putting my water back in there. 
	I made my way to the hall. I had one hand around my phone to shine a light that was doing little to help me move forward and one hand on the wall to help guide me. I could feel movement like mist encircling my body trying to slow me down. I felt it with every breath as a little seeped into my lungs. I saw the faint light at the end of the hall and knew I just needed to get there. I kept moving forward getting closer to the light at the end of the hall. I could hear Tanner coughing upstairs. The sound was getting louder. The light was getting brighter. I saw the banister for the stairway up ahead. My hand hit the rails and I knew I was almost there. I wrapped my hand around the final rung of the banister and turned to see Keith still sitting on the stair right where I had left him. 
	He gave me a stupid grin and said to me, "So much for track in college; you must have been terrible. That took forever." 
	I couldn't believe what I was hearing come from his mouth. The same guy who was too scared to even come down was giving me shit for being slow. I could have punched him in the face but I was too tired. I tried to lift my foot on the bottom stair but I felt a hand grab around my foot and not let it go. I looked down and nothing was there but I couldn't move my foot. I looked back up at Keith. The fear must have been all over my face because he took a couple steps down to me. I reached out my hand and the bag almost slipped off my back. I tossed it to the bottom of the stairs and it landed on the second-to-bottom step. Keith was four steps from the bottom of the stairs; his ankles were encircled with the darkness like he was wading into a shallow pool.  I still felt the grip on my foot and it wouldn't budge from the floor. The smoky darkness looked like it was trying to snake its way up my body and hold me forever. 
	I reached again for Keith to help me. He took a single step down, bent down with his hand extended. I reached further and he went past my hand and reached for the backpack. He wrapped his hand around the strap and pulled it onto his back. I was shocked; he was going to leave me there to just get swallowed by the darkness. I looked down at my foot. The fog was just above my knee when I felt a hand wrap around my wrist. On instinct I wrapped my hand around the other wrist and looked up to see Keith pulling me up the stairs.


Chapter 8

I landed with a thud halfway up the stairs with Keith right next to me, and he didn't take even a second to ask me what happened or to even check to see if I was alright. He just grabbed the bag that had fallen when we fell, threw it back on his back ,and walked up the stairs. I was in shock. The dark feelings I was having downstairs were gone; now I was just confused. Did he really not care, or did the darkness affect him too? Maybe he was just taking longer for the effects to wear off. But that really didn't make sense either because I was in it; he didn't go down with me. 
	At this point I couldn't wonder about it any more; he was walking up the stairs and was almost out of sight. I stood up and followed after him. He walked into the room and didn't waste any time digging through it to find the water bottle. Luckily there weren't just one but two of them in there. Jenna hugged him like he was a knight in shining armor and held the bottle up to Tanner's lips so he could take a sip of water. Well, if he wasn't going to mention what was going on downstairs I would. I looked at Jenna; she was still giving Tanner water, having him take small sips. It seemed to relieve at least his coughing. I cleared my throat and asked her, "Jenna, can you come out to the hall with me for a second? I'm sure Keith won't mind sitting with Tanner for a second." 
	"I will, but I'm not cradling his head in my lap," he said back to me. 
	Jenna stood up and took off the sweater she was wearing and placed it under Tanner's head so he didn't have to lie on the floor, and she followed me out. I waved her over to the top of the stairs. We walked over and I gestured for her to look down. She did and gave a little yell. "Do you see it?" I asked her.
	She nodded her head and asked, "What is that?"
	"I don't know but it isn't good. When I went down there it was like every bad part of me was amplified. I felt a crushing sadness and despair like nothing I've ever felt before," I said. 
	She looked at me confused. "When you went down there? Didn't Keith go down there with you?" she asked.
	"That's the thing: he got so mad when I 'went off on my own' and then he had me go down there alone. He wouldn't go down past halfway. Then when I finally did make it back to the stairs something grabbed me and wouldn't let me go. He, I don't know, for a second I didn't think he was going to help me. He reached down like he was going to grab my hand and pull me up but he reached for the bag instead. He grabbed my hand like it was an afterthought," I said to her quietly so  he wouldn't hear me. 
	She shook her head like she didn't believe me. She looked back down the hall to the room they were in and whispered to me, "I know he has been acting weird; they both have, but he would never leave you down there if it really wasn’t safe. If he didn't go down there with you then he didn't know how dangerous it was."
	I looked at her like it was the first time I really had. I mean, did she not hear me when I said that he wouldn't even go down the stairs because he was too scared but was ok that I went by myself? I guess he really could have not understood that I was stuck and couldn't move. But I was sure that the look on my face was one of fear; there was no way it couldn't have been. She could make all the excuses in the world for him but I wasn't going to.
	 Even if the house was messing with him he deliberately didn't reach for me. He made the choice to let me go down there by myself to the living room. Then I realized something. It was the house. I saw the change in Sarah; it was small but it was there. Tanner was changing too and now Keith. I mean he was a jerk but he was never this big of a jerk and he would never deliberately put anyone in danger. It wasn’t in his boy scout code. The house was affecting us; I could feel it in me too. For some reason the house was communicating with me in ways it wasn't with anyone else. I just didn't understand what it meant yet but I was going to figure it out. 
	 I watched as Jenna walked back to the room where the guys were and followed. I saw her stop at the door and look back at me with a look of pure fear and she bolted into the room. My body froze right on the spot. It must have been only a second but it felt like a lifetime. Her face showed what was wrong and for a second I hesitated; I didn’t want to know. There had been so much already. It was just a second then. I burst into action. 
	 I ran from the hall into the room just in time to see Tanner slide across the floor. The scene made no sense. Tanner wasn’t sliding; he was being dragged. One of his legs was in the air and his whole body was moving towards the closet. The only thing was no one was dragging him. You could see where his pants were bunched in the ankle like someone had a hold of it but that was it. No hand, no arm, no body. There wasn’t anyone there. Jenna was holding on to Tanner’s hand trying to pull him back and I walked in just in time to see Keith grab the other hand and try to pull. I looked at Tanner but he looked like he was unconscious. I sprinted as fast as I could to where they were and grabbed onto Tanner’s belt and pulled back. 
	 It felt like pulling against a moving train. The force was slow but unrelenting. He was sliding across the floor and it felt like nothing we could do was going to stop him. He made it to the closet and I braced my feet against the frame to get a better hold on his belt. I pushed back with my legs and pulled with my arms. It seemed to slow him down a little but he didn’t stop. I could feel him slipping out of my fingers. I looked back at Jenna and Keith and I could see how hard they were struggling to keep a hold of Tanner’s hands. 
	 I looked back towards the closet. Tanner’s lower body was inside, moving toward the left side. When the movement forward stopped his leg fell, and we all kind of fell forward as our momentum shifted. I took that opportunity to get a better hold on his belt and readjust my feet on the wall. He had stopped but we still couldn’t move him; it was like he weighed ten tons. 
	 I looked into the closet and watched as a blanket that was bunched on the floor moved away like a gust of wind blew it away. Then a small square door lifted in the floor. It was some kind of trap door or something. The small rusty hinges made the horror movie creaking noise like that door hadn’t been opened in years and then I could hear what sounded like someone climbing into the hole. I looked back at Jenna and Keith to see if they had noticed. Keith was pulling on Tanner’s arm trying to get a good hold on the floor but couldn’t. Jenna’s face was red with the effort she was putting into trying to pull Tanner back into the room. If they had noticed then neither showed it. 
	 I looked back to the closet and then I saw as two dirty hands shot out of the trap door, grabbed ahold of both of Tanner’s shoes and with a final mighty yank pulled him into the hole. The force had pulled him from our grasp and I watched Tanner as he was pulled roughly through the hole. His head whacked the edge with an awful cracking sound. Then the trap door slammed shut so hard the sound echoed through the room. 
	 I jumped into action following Tanner into the closet. I threw away the blanket to examine the trap door fully. There was no handle, just a cutout in the floor with two rusty hinges. I ran my fingers along the cutout trying to determine how to open it. I tried prying my fingernails into the grooves but they wouldn't fit. "Keith!" I yelled. "Get your crowbar. There isn't a handle; we need to pry this door open."
	 I glanced over my shoulder and saw Jenna and Keith just sitting there; both just had blank expressions on their faces. "GUYS, you need to snap out of it and we need to get Tanner!" I screamed at them.
	 This seemed to at least wake up Jenna and she started to move and look for the crowbar. She ran over to where it was lying on the floor and handed it to me. I jammed it into the space between the floor and the trap door and pushed with all I had to get the thing to open. The door wouldn't budge. "Keith, I can't get it open; you need to come try," I said to him.
	 He got up off the floor and I moved aside so he could get a good grip on the crowbar and try to get the door open. He leaned his shoulder against the bar and placed his foot on the back wall of the closet to get more leverage to push on it. Keith was grunting through the effort and through that I heard a sound like wood cracking and groaning. I got down on my hands and knees and saw that a crack had formed where the crowbar was wedged in but the door wasn't opening. "Keith, it's working; keep going," I said.
	 He seemed to push a little harder but then the crowbar fell away when its grip on the wood loosened and Keith flew into the other side of the closet and slammed his face against the wall. He rolled away cursing, holding his face as he slid out of the closet. Jenna grabbed Keith to examine his face and I went back over to the trap door. Keith had knocked a small hole into the trap door, big enough for you to almost stick your hand through. I peeked in and saw Tanner. He was still lying down not moving. I saw his face; his eyes were closed but what worried me the most was the small pool of blood that was forming under his head, I assumed, from when his head hit the side of the hole. There was a small amount of light that seemed to be coming from somewhere deeper in the wall and then I saw a shadow pass over Tanner's face. I yelled down to him, "Tanner! Tanner! You need to wake up! Tanner!"
	 His eyelids fluttered a little and then he started moving; his arms were still up above his head from when Keith and Jenna had been trying to pull him back from going into the hole. He brought them down to his side and tried to sit up. He then brought his hand to the back of his head. He pulled it back and it was covered in blood. He then seemed to understand what was happening. He looked up at me with a look of pain and horror on his face. 
	 Just when we made eye contact, something drew his glance down towards his legs. He looked back up at me and his eyes were open so wide they were pleading with me, and then he was gone from my line of view. Something had pulled him away deeper into the wall. I heard him scream as he was dragged. I jumped up out of the closet and followed the sound out of the room and then down the hall. Jenna and Keith were right behind me. We ran down the hall towards the stairs leading up to the third floor. Tanner was yelling; it was muffled but I could hear him yelling at whatever was holding onto him. "Let go of me! Guys, help! Get off of me!"
	 There was a disgusting gurgle noise then nothing. The noise stopped right at the bottom of the stairs. I just stopped there. I looked back at Keith and Jenna. Keith had a big knot on his head right above his right eye and a cut on his eyebrow that had dripped blood down his cheek. Jenna had her ear leaned against the wall trying to listen for any sign of Tanner. Her eyes were closed but I could see streaks down her dirty face where tears had fallen clearing a path through the grime.


Chapter 9

We waited in the hall for a while to see if we could hear anything, but nothing happened. Jenna was now sitting with her back against the wall and Keith was sitting next to her. We had gone back in the room to get the first aid kit and he was now dabbing his cut eyebrow with a piece of gauze. I was standing by the closet looking in. I had tried and tried to get the trap door to open even at one point smashing it over and over with the crowbar. All that did was leave dents in the hard wood.
	 The hole was dark and I shined my flashlight into the hole to see if I could see anything. 
All there was was the floor where Tanner had been lying. I tried to ignore the smeared blood trail from his head that was evident directly below the hole. I looked as far as I could down the path that he had been dragged, but I couldn't see much. The hole had given me a front-row seat to his disappearance but wouldn't give me any other clues about how to get to him. 
	I threw away the crowbar, fed up with the lack of progress. I sat down on the floor and hid my face in my knees. I tried not to but the tears came all on their own. I was so mad at myself. How could I let this happen? Sarah was dead, Tanner was somewhere hopefully still alive but no one knew, and I was up here out of ideas on how to fix any of this. 
	I was just about to let myself go into this moment of complete helplessness when the room was filled with a gut-wrenching scream of pain. We all jumped up and looked at each other. There was no way to tell where the sound was coming from. Like it had upstairs, it seemed to be coming from the whole house. It was the most terrifying sound I had ever heard. The screaming went on for maybe a minute. Jenna was holding her hands over her ears to try to silence it but it stopped almost as suddenly as it started. Keith, however, took a different approach. He walked over to where I had thrown the crowbar, picked it up and stormed into the hall. Jenna and I followed him out there and watched as he swung the bar into the wall over and over, walking towards the stairs as he did. He made several holes in the wall and I took advantage of this. I ran back to the room and grabbed the flashlight. His holes weren't big but maybe they would give me a better line of sight to where Tanner was. I shined the light into the first hole and saw that there was a passage there behind the plaster. 
	I moved to the second hole; still nothing, the third nothing. I looked up the hall at Keith, wondering if I should ask for him to make the holes bigger or leave it be. He seemed to have only one goal in mind and I wasn't about to guess what that was. Jenna, however, beat me to it. She walked up behind him and laid her hand on his shoulder. "Babe," Jenna whispered. 
	He turned to her, his face red, and he was out of breath. He looked defeated. She pointed at the holes in the wall and said to him, "You are actually making holes with the crowbar. Maybe if you work on one then we will have a hole big enough that we can get in." 
	I guess I didn't realize the significance of that fact. Before, we weren't able to do much damage to the house, but now he was breaking through. She was right.  He looked back down the hall at all the holes he had made then back at the last one he had done. He looked back at Jenna and said, "Stand back."
	She took several steps back as Keith took a batter's stance and swung at the wall, hitting the same spot several times and making a decent-sized hole in the wall. He went on like that for a few swings till we had a hole big enough that we could probably fit a head through. He paused to catch his breath and I walked over with my light. I took a deep breath and stuck my hand in followed by my head. I glanced down the passage towards the room then the other way. It went all along the length of the wall. I didn't see Tanner but this felt like a win. I pulled myself from the wall and turned to Keith and raised my hand for the crowbar. He handed it to me and I placed the end of it in the hole. He had luckily made the hole close to a stud beam and I braced the sharp end of the crowbar between the stud and the plaster and pulled a big chunk away. 
	I did the same thing over and over moving my way down the wall till there was a slit in the wall next to the stud. There was enough room for me to get a good grip on the wall. I pulled. I felt the wall give a little and I looked back and said, "If we all pull I think we can get it."
	Keith took position at the top, I was in the middle, and Jenna was below me. Keith counted out, "One, two, three."
	On three we all pulled with everything we had, and the wall buckled and shifted, then a large portion bent and snapped. We all stood back and looked, but there was nothing there but the other wall. I stared at it so confused. There was a passage I just saw it. How did Tanner get dragged into the wall if there was no tunnel or passage for him to have been dragged through? I turned to Keith, who also had a shocked look on his face. I opened my mouth and shut it. What was there to say right now? I bent down, grabbed the crowbar and walked back to the room. I walked into the closet and bent down to look at the trapdoor again. I leaned in close and shined my light into the small hole Keith had made. I saw the drag marks from when Tanner was taken. I saw the pool of blood that was there. How could it exist here but not out in the hall? 
	I heard Jenna and Keith come in the room but I didn't turn around. My mind was racing with the impossibility of it all. There was no way that that tunnel existed, but it was there. But just then I realized something and I turned to look at Keith. "Didn't you look in this closet earlier?" I asked him.
	"Yeah, why?" he asked back.
	"Why didn't you mention the trap door?" I confronted him.
	"I didn't see any trap door," he said quickly. 
	"You had to have seen it I saw you crawling on the floor in this closet before I left. to go get a chair for Tanner." I said back. 
	Jenna walked over and stood by Keith. "What does that matter right now?" she asked.
	"It matters because if we had known that there was a trap door there before we could have looked in it. It could have been way out." I said 
	"Yeah. But like I said I didn't see it before," Keith said back. 
	"How could you have not seen it? I saw you literally crawling on the floor, and you threw the blanket on the floor too. What were you trying to cover it?" I yelled at him.
	I was getting mad now I got in his face and yelled, "I saw you throw that blanket on the floor in there. Were you hiding it from us?" 
	He threw up his hands and took a few steps backwards away from me. He turned his back on us and walked over to the door. "You want to know the truth?" he asked. "I did see it. I covered it because it was dangerous and I knew that you would want to charge head first into it and explore it, and seeing how, that thing dragged Tanner down there I was right about it being dangerous. He is down there." 
	At this point I didn't know if he was referring to Tanner or the thing in this house. I turned to Jenna and she looked just as mad as I did. She looked at him and quietly asked, "How could you do that?"
	He looked hurt by her question. "I was trying to keep us safe. How do you guys not see that?"
	"You didn't even mention it to us. We are supposed to be doing this together, we make these decisions together. Not you, you make a decision for the whole group and decide that it is how it is going to go!" Jenna yelled at him. 
	“The fact of the matter, Keith, is that you had no idea if that trap door was our way out or not and now we will never know. Then on top of everything else now Tanner is gone and we can’t get to him,” I said.
	His face went red and he took a step towards me, his hands were clenched into fists. I took a step back but there was nowhere to go; I was baked into the wall and he was coming up on me like he was going to hit me. I put my hands up to protect my face and just when he was getting closer to me we heard another scream; this one was quieter but it sounded like it was coming from above us. We all looked up at the same time. The scream stopped and I looked back at Keith. 
	He was still staring at the ceiling and I took this chance to get out of arm’s reach of him and I moved closer to Jenna. At this moment I was scared of him. He was loosing it and becoming unpredictable and in the situation we were in that wasn’t a good combination. 
	I saw the crowbar lying on the floor at my feet, so I bent down and picked it up. I felt better having something I could use to protect myself. Keith lowered his head and looked down at the floor. Hearing Tanner’s scream seemed to take away his anger. He turned and looked at us, and he held his hands out in a calming gesture and said, “You both heard that one was coming from above us. There is only one space above us; we need to go up there and check.”
	I was already shaking my head no. I felt going up to that room was a bad idea. It felt so wrong. Tanner had been pulled through a hole in the floor but now the screaming was coming from above us. Before it was coming from everywhere. It felt like the thing in the house was trying to make us go up there. "What do you mean no?" he asked, "we need to see if he is up there."
	"Keith," I said, taking a small step back, "we don't know where the sound is coming from. Before it was below us. The second time it was anyone's guess. Now it is coming from above. We can't go running off unless we have a plan at least. The last time we went up there we got trapped."
	"Yeah, and you got us out. We can wedge the door open with something. We need to see if he is up there." he said. 
	Jenna walked over to him. "Honey, she is right; we need to have a plan." 
	He again looked at her with pure hurt on his face. She held up her hand, getting him to wait, "We aren't saying that we won't go but we need to make sure that we do it right. We have already lost two people we can't lose anyone else. I can't lose you," she said through tears. 
	He took a few deep breaths and looked at me, "Okay, what do you think we should do? What plan can we actually come up with to keep us safe?"
	I had no idea. I never wanted to be the leader of making plans; this was not supposed to be my place in this group. I looked up at him; he was the guy, the one who always knew what to do when we went out exploring. Now I looked at him like he was a completely different person. He was taking our protection too far; we weren't little kids that he needed to guide around; we were both adult women who needed to be part of the conversation. So I squared my shoulders and looked at him and said, "We can't go up there without knowing for sure that that is where he is."
	Keith started towards the door. Jenna yelled at him, "Where are you going?" 
	"I'm going up there to see if he is there. If you two don't want to come then don't but I am going to go save him. Just stay here and stay together." 
	He walked out the door before Jenna and I could say anything. Jenna started to follow him out when I grabbed her wrist. I looked her in the eye and said, "There isn't going to be anything up there. It doesn't feel right whatever is in this house wants us....."
	I stopped and turned around. I had a feeling that someone was standing right behind me. I turned and looked towards the closet. There was a soft pink light coming from inside the closet just out of sight. "Do you see that?" I asked Jenna.
	She nodded and we carefully walked towards the closet. Whatever was in there didn't feel negative - whatever it was there was a comfortable warmth to it. I couldn't put my finger on it but I wasn't scared of it. I walked into the closet and saw two balls of light; one was a deep blue and the other was a soft pink. They were hovering about the trap door but as soon as I tried to get closer they disappeared into the floor. Jenna was right behind me and we stood there not moving for a minute. Jenna looked up at me and started to speak but just then we heard the creaking of wood. I spun around and saw that the balls of light were back and they were holding open the trap door. 
	I knew right then that they were here to help us, and I jumped into action. I grabbed the flashlight that was thankfully close. I had a feeling that whatever I was going to do needed to be done quickly. I looked at Jenna and nodded at her then stuck my head into the hole. I looked directly down the passageway that the blood trail was leading and shined my light down. I saw another pool of blood this one was much bigger than the one I saw directly below the hole in the trap door. This was too much blood. 
	I came out of the hole and looked at Jenna and said, "I need to go down there. I need to make sure of something. I am going to be completely honest with you: there is a lot of blood down there but I didn't see Tanner. I need to go deeper in and see if I can't find out more. Maybe this is the evidence we need to convince Keith that Tanner isn't up stairs."
	She nodded and then she grabbed the other flashlight. "If you're going then I'm going too but we need to hurry whatever these two are I don't know how long they can keep this door open and I am not getting trapped down here." 
	I looked down at the crowbar that was still in my hand and wedged it between the open door and the floor. Hopefully that would keep it open long enough for us to get out. I sat on the edge of the hole and silently slid down into the opening. Jenna was right behind me and we had to crawl on our hands and knees because the passage was too short but we followed the passage down to where I had seen the bigger pool of blood. Luckily it wasn't that far down from the opening but then the passage just ended. There was no turn off or anywhere else to go. Then I felt the drip. 
	It was on my hand that held the flashlight: a small amount of moisture that wasn't there before, but when I looked at it in the light it wasn't water. It was deep red then another drip landed in the puddle of blood that was already on the floor. Jenna noticed what I was looking at on my hand and raised her eyes slightly upwards. I didn't want to look up. Nothing that was up there was something that I wanted to see. Jenna started breathing a little heavier and I closed my eyes and took a deep breath as well. I slowly shined my light up the wall that didn't end at the ceiling that was just over our head; it was a very small tunnel that was way too small for anyone to get through. I saw a metal grate above my head that was maybe a foot around and right above the grate was a hand. 
	The blood I had felt before was dripping off the fingers. I knew it was him but I needed to be sure. I stood as tall as I could get and got a little closer to the opening and shined my light up a little farther. There was an arm that was still wearing Tanner's hoodie, the same college hoodie he had had on this whole time. There was a head of hair that looked just like Tanner's deep chocolate brown mop he had. Then I saw his face; he looked like he was leaning down reaching towards me but his face was blank. His skin was white as paper and his eyes were glazed over. Between the look on his face and the amount of blood on the floor below us I knew he was gone. I looked away and Jenna snatched the light from my hand and looked up, and she cried out and covered her mouth like she was covering a scream. There was no way to get to him we couldn't reach him through that grate. 
	I grabbed Jenna's shoulder and said, "We need to get out of here and get Keith he needs to see this so he doesn't go wandering off by himself.""
	She nodded through more tears. I myself was all cried out, and I was angry. Angry that this house trapped us and her and angry at whatever was here taking my friends. We crawled our way back down the passage and through the hole. I climbed out and held my hand down for Jenna and helped pull her out after me. I bent down to pick up the flashlight, and just as we were about to leave to go chase after Keith, I heard the trap door slam. I turned around just as the two balls of light dimmed and then went out completely.


Chapter 10