I close my eyes, but every breath sounds so loud in the quiet of the car. Every noise outside sends a stab of adrenaline through me. This is ridiculous. I’m going to drive myself insane.
Minutes drag into hours as I force my eyes to stay closed, doing a breathing exercise Mom taught me. Bob’s warm weight against my ribs helps. His breathing evens out into tiny snores, and I focus on matching my rhythm to his.
My body finally surrenders to exhaustion around two in the morning.
I wake to scratching on my stomach.
My eyes snap open to darkness. I can only see shadows, but something’s scratching at my stomach through my T-shirt.
“Buddy?” I peel open my sleeping bag. Bob snaps his head up from where he was just asleep with his head on my shoulder, the cone tilting.
Something glimmers farther down in the bag, like my phone screen is on and buried deep in the fabric. But my phone’s on the dashboard.
I yank the bag up all the way.
A translucent hand reaches up between my legs through the bottom of my sleeping bag, one finger tracing along my stomach.
Ohfuck?—
I reach for the skillet under my seat, but I’m not fast enough. The arm reaches upward, each inch revealing more dense smoke that glows white in the darkness. Its fingers spread wide.
The hand plunges down.
Intomy stomach.
Agony explodes through me like someone just reached inside and grabbed my organs with frozen claws. I canfeelfingers wrapping around my intestines, cold seeping into organs that should never know cold. I try to scream, try to get any sound outat all, but the pain crushes the air from my lungs and all I can manage is a pathetic rasp.
The hand grips.
Andpulls.
Using my organs as leverage, the ghost hauls itself up through the bottom of the car. The pain hits, and nothing else exists outside of it. I’m gasping, choking, trying to pull in air. The thing forces its way through inch by agonizing inch, using its grip on my insides to drag itself into the car.
It slithers over my body until it hovers above me. A man’s face peers down at me, his features shifting and reforming from wisps of luminescent smoke. He has gaunt cheeks. Skin like paper stretched over bone. His eyes are milky voids, and his mouth hangs open so wide I can see his back teeth.
He slides his fingers out of my body with a wet, sucking sound.
I can finally scream, a guttural sound ripping out of my damaged throat. But the ghost’s eyes lock onto mine, and my scream cuts off into a whimper.
I try reaching for the skillet again, but my arm won’t move. Why won’t my fucking arm move?
I beg my arms to swing, try to get my legs to kick, but nothing responds. It’s like someone cut the wires between my thoughts and my limbs. I’m trapped inside my body, conscious but unable to move.
“Pretty girl,” he says. The ghost in the library was barely intelligible, but this voice rings clear inside my head, bypassing my ears. “Let’s see how long you stay that way.”
Bob is going ballistic, but he might as well be miles away for all the good it does me. The ghost touches a long finger to my cheek, then pushes deeper through my skin.
Intomy face.
He adds another finger. Then another, until his entire hand disappears into my mouth and then travels down to my throat until I can feel him blocking my esophagus.
Salt. I need to reach the salt, but how am I supposed to reach it when I can’t move my fingers?
I try as hard as I can to curl my fingers, but it’s like trying to lift a bag of concrete mix with my pinky. The ghost’s eyes bore into mine. Something cold and wrong spreads through my skull like liquid nitrogen. I push against whatever invisible force is holding me down. My pinky twitches.
I pour every ounce of willpower I have into my right hand. My fingers brush the plastic of the salt bag lying open in the cupholder. The ghost’s mouth widens, and drool drips from the corners and evaporates before it reaches me.
Comeon.
