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glad u made it! sry for late response. call me tonight if u want or im home all day tomorrow <3
I’d give her a call tomorrow, and I flipped back and forth in my head about whether I should clue her in on all the unusual things I’d already experienced or leave it be. Blair was usually pretty skeptical about this sort of stuff, and I didn’t want her to think I was crazy, but she was so easy to talk to that I knew it would likely fall out of my mouth whether I wanted to talk about it or not.
After placing my phone back on its resting space, I settled into the twin-sized bed I’d chosen for my own and gazed up through the skylight at the stars that shone with a brightness I’d never seen before. The lack of light pollution way out here did a wonderful job of allowing the night sky to show off. My breathing steadied as my body relaxed, and before I knew it, my eyes were closed, and I was welcoming sleep.
I felt something slide up my leg so gently I could have sworn I was imagining it. A quick rub of one leg against the other caused whatever it was to stop. Must have just been a strange itch. Soon after, something else ran down my side, over my ribs and under my shirt like a delicate fingertip tickle. I was immediately covered in goosebumps as I swatted away the feeling. For a third time, I felt the same sort of tickle run down my sternum and between my breasts, and I shot my eyes open in surprise. The skylight overhead was entirely black, and I couldn’t see the sliver of light from the hallway under the door. It was like the entire room was encased in shadow so dark it felt like I had been blinded.
“Shh…” I heard a voice hiss. It felt like it was inside my own head, but it also seemed to echo all around me. The sound was somehow reassuring, calming, and even though the light of the stars had been robbed from me and there was something snakelike lightly slithering all up and down my body, I felt at peace. The sensation was at odds with the rhythm of my heart pounding like a drum in my chest. The feeling of the touches all over my body was addictive, and I shivered every time they would slide too close to the center between my legs or the peaks of my breasts under my clothes. I had to be dreaming. There was no other explanation for… whatever this was. I wanted to speak, to ask whatever was running all over my skin to touch me harder, touch me with intention, but my voice caught in my throat, and I couldn’t force words out.
I heard the voice again, humming musically all around me, as if trying to calm me with a lullaby. The soft touch ran down my sternum once more and helped itself under my waistband. It was like my body was working separately from my mind as my hips raised to meet the tantalizing caress that hovered just above my point of no return. My brain kept repeating that this was all a dream while my body struggled between the pulsing desire to enjoy every single second of this and the panic that struck me rigid.
I could come up with a single word, forced from my lips with all the power and concentration I could muster.
“Please…” I said in barely a whisper.
The snakelike touches refused to give in and continued to maneuver just barely around my most sensitive areas. My body began to shake—never had I felt this incredibly turned on. Every part of me was so keenly focused on the touch that I didn’t even realize there was a thunderous sound exploding from outside my bedroom until the touch halted entirely, taking the blinding darkness along with it.
It sounded like someone had pissed off a horse and set it loose in the hallway. Mighty stomps boomed out, running up and down the wing, and the walls shook. There was no way it was human, and I pulled the blanket up over my head like a child, fully awake and pulled from my dreamy, erotic reverie. My heart pounded in my chest, and I cradled myself in a fetal position, doing my best to ignore the dampness between my legs as I began to make sense of what exactly I had signed up for.
None of this was a dream, and this mansion wasn’t just haunted. There was something—or somethings—already here before me. The monster from the diary couldn’t be the only suspect. I closed my eyes hard and willed for my witch bells to make good in their use, and for the beast outside my room to settle.
* * *
I didn’t know how it was possible, but I slept, and I slept hard. The sun was blaring down on me through the skylight, and I had thrown one leg over the comforter in search of cool air in the night. The sound of Ted’s weed wacker roared in the distance. I snagged my phone off the side table to check the time. It was just past ten in the morning, meaning I had slept for almost a full twelve hours. A dull ache behind my eyes told me I was on the verge of a migraine that I needed to nurse now or else I’d be in trouble later.
I rolled out of bed, grabbed my robe, and stumbled to the shower drunk with morning grogginess. I pulled off my pajamas and tossed them lazily into a pile against the door before cranking the water on as hot as I thought I could stand and crawling in. The feeling of the hot water on my skin was one of my favorite things in the world, and it always helped me to relax, until I glanced down at my naked body and saw marks all over my chest and arms. Gasping, I looked down at my legs, and they were also covered in marks.
The marks all over my body looked exactly like the trail a snake would leave behind as it slithered through sand. Light pink trails of where I’d been touched were on full display, made even brighter by the hot water. So much of me had hoped I’d been wrong the night before, and I was fully prepared to dismiss the events as being falsified by my own mind, but I was wearing the evidence all over like a medal after a race. I ran my hands over the marks. They didn’t hurt, didn’t burn at all. If I wasn’t seeing them with my own eyes, I’d have never known they were there.
“What the hell did you do?” I asked out loud, knowing full well that I wouldn’t get an answer in return. What I did get was my phone ringing from where I’d set it on the back of the toilet, so I quickly got out of the shower and into my robe to answer the call.
I smiled and exhaled a happy sigh to see Blair’s goofy face lighting up on my home screen. She was video calling me, which I definitely didn’t expect from her at this time of day.
“Gooooooood morning!” she said in a chipper voice when I accepted the call. “Look at you all squeaky clean!”
“Good morning back,” I said as I wandered back down the hall to my bedroom. “I truly wasn’t expecting to hear from you so early. It’s not even noon yet.”
“Yeah, well, this guy I had over last night apparently needed to ‘hit the gym,’ so he just left and I didn’t feel like trying to fall back asleep, so here I am,” Blair explained as she tried to wipe old makeup away from her eyes using her image in the phone as a mirror. “How was your first day in the sticks?”
“I want to tell you for real, but you have to promise not to laugh,” I said, throwing her a look that said I was being serious as I paced around the circular room.
My friend sat up and quit messing with her face in the video. “I promise totrynot to laugh, but I make no guarantees.”
I let out a heavy sigh, knowing that the response was the best I was going to get when it came to Blair, and decided to spill my guts about everything, starting with the “RIP ASHLEY” graffiti and ending with the weird marks all over my body.
“Holy effing spit,” Blair said with a straight face. She only used that odd phrasing when she was genuinely surprised at something, so I knew she wasn’t just playing it up for my sake. “Okay, I have to ask because I wouldn’t be a good friend if I didn’t ask.” She took a deep breath and looked at me directly. “Are you okay? Like, truly, are you okay? You’ve never really been out in the middle of nowhere like that before… Are youabsolutely sureit’s not just the eerie creepy quiet getting to you?”
“Yeah, dude, I’m sure,” I responded. “Check it out.”
I propped the phone up on my bedside table so she could get a level view of my legs and carefully lifted my robe exposing the weird pink trails etched into my skin. Now that I wasn’t under the damp heat of the shower, the intensity had gone down, but you could still see them. They almost resembled a light sunburn in color and texture, but they weren’t painful at all.
I watched the color run out of Blair’s cheeks as I picked the phone back up and continued pacing.
“Whoa,” she muttered. “That’s pretty wild. Have you told your dad about any of this? The old man will lose his mind.”
“I know,” I said with an eye roll. “I would too, if I were him. Imagine your future kid telling you all about how they’re being harassed by some unknown paranormal presence, but like, it’s no big deal, they’ve got it under control. So no, dude… Iwon’tbe telling him about being felt up by some unknown entity.”
Suddenly, Blair’s face was blocked by another alert. My dad was calling.
