“LOOK DOWN”
by Robin Talley
WE WERE ALL OBSESSED with ghost stories that summer.
It was the August before sixth grade. My mom wanted to get rid of me—my mom always wanted to get rid of me for one reason or another—so I was stuck going to the same dumb all-girls mountain camp I’d gone to the August before and the August before that.
But this time I didn’t really mind. In fact, that summer, camp actually turned out to be pretty awesome.
Up until all the creepy stuff started happening, anyway.
The awesome parts were mostly because of Hailey. She was my best friend that summer, and she told the freakiest ghost stories of anyone.
The others thought so too. Hailey and I shared a tiny wooden cabin that year with six other girls. Every night, as soon as we were tucked into our bunk beds, someone would turn out the overhead lights and put a flashlight in the middle of the floor, pointing at the ceiling so the room would get all shadowy. Then we’d take turns trying to outscare each other.
Most of the stories the girls told weren’t all that creepy, really. They were the kind you hear everywhere. Guys with hooks for hands who hide in the backseat of your car and try to kill you as soon as it gets dark. Babysitters who get creepy phone calls that turn out to be coming from inside the house. Med students who drug you at a party, then cut out your kidneys and leave you in a bathtub full of ice with a note to call 9-1-1 if you want to live. You know, that kind of thing.
In our cabin on the mountain, with the lights out, though, the stories still felt scary, even if you’d heard them before. The camp was basically in the middle of nowhere, and—actually, that camp looked a lot like where we are right now, come to think of it. Weird. I hadn’t noticed that before.
But anyway, it can get really, really dark up on the mountain at night, and when there’s no one else around . . . Well, it’s easy to get caught up in that kind of stuff. You know how it is—you hear a story, and even though you know it can’t possibly be true, it still sticks in your head. And then later, when you’re out in the dark, and a breeze goes by and you feel that sudden chill on the back of your neck . . . At times like that, even the stuff that you know can’t be true still feels like it could be, somehow.
I never let on when I got freaked out, though. Everyone at camp thought I was impossible to scare, and that was how I wanted it.
I told the goat-man story on our first night there. The goat-man was always my favorite. It was supposed to be a true story—I’d heard it from a counselor a couple of years earlier—but it was obviously impossible. But like all the best ghost stories, it felt real when you thought about it later. Even though you knew better.
Back in the 1920s, the story went, the mountain where our camp was built had been cleared for farmland, and there was this one weird farmer who owned the biggest chunk of it. All the other farmers who lived on the mountain hated him because he was more successful than they were. His harvests were always huge, even when the weather sucked and no one else could grow a thing.
He was getting rich from the land, and the other farmers wanted to know his secret. So one Saturday, two of the neighbors snuck up onto his land and hid all day to watch him work.
They figured they’d see him doing something illegal they could report him for, or at least using some secret farming techniques they could copy. They watched him from sunrise to sundown, but they didn’t see anything unusual. He was just planting and harvesting, the same way the rest of them did.
By the time it got dark, the farmer had stopped working for the day, and the two neighbors were ready to give up and go home. As they were creeping back over the property line, though, they heard a strange sound, like someone screaming. It was coming from the barn.
They rushed back across the farm and into the building, thinking someone must be in terrible danger—and saw the farmer holding a bloody ax, with a decapitated goat lying on the ground in front of him. On the wall of the barn, in huge red letters, the words “HAIL SATAN” were written in thick, dark blood.
Well, the two neighbors turned and ran as fast as they could. They made it home safely, and the next day they told everyone in town to watch out for the creepy, Satan-worshipping farmer.
After that the farmer couldn’t sell his crops to anyone. His harvests were just as big as they’d ever been, but the whole town knew it was because he’d cut a deal with the devil, and they didn’t want to eat food the devil had paid for.
No one really saw the farmer after that. He stopped leaving his land after a while, and then at some point, so much time had passed that everyone assumed he’d died.
He didn’t have any children, so there was no one to inherit the farm. Years later, it was turned into a camp. Workers tore down the farmer’s house and barn and built new lodges and cabins, and in between them, the scrub and trees grew back until the mountain was covered in forests again. You couldn’t tell it had ever been a farm at all.
But every Saturday night, if you wandered deep enough into the woods, you could hear a long, loud scraping sound out where the barn used to be. And if the moon were high enough, you’d see a half man, half goat walking down the trail, dragging a bloody ax behind him.
That was how the story ended. After I was done telling it, I’d pause for a second, so the room was totally silent. Then I made a high-pitched goat-bleating sound. You could tell who was cool and who was a wuss by whether they laughed or shrieked.
Up until that August, the girls I’d shared a cabin with had always said my goat-man story was the scariest they’d ever heard. But everything changed that summer. All because of Hailey.
Hailey loved telling ghost stories too. But the stories she told weren’t ridiculous like the ones about hook-hands and babysitters, or bizarre like my story about the goat-man. That was because Hailey’s stories really were true. She’d heard them from her grandmother, and they were nothing like our stupid made-up kids’ stories.
Plus, it was impossible not to believe what Hailey said. She was one of those people. You could tell just from how she talked—she was so warm, so open, so friendly—that she’d never lied about anything in her entire life.
From the moment we met, I trusted her completely. I looked right into her eyes, and she looked into mine, and— Do you know what it’s like when you meet someone and you just get each other right away? When they always know what you’re thinking, without you having to say a word? When you know it’s safe to tell them all your secrets because they’re going to tell you all of theirs, too?
That’s how things were with Hailey, from the very beginning. I’d never felt it that strongly with anyone before.
That summer, the two of us were together pretty much all the time. We didn’t really hang out with anyone else, at least not during the day. The other girls in our cabin were nice and everything, but they were a little, well . . . They just weren’t as mature as Hailey and me.
Her grandmother’s stories, though. I’m not easy to scare, but the stories Hailey told . . . Well, they made me nervous sometimes.
Because Hailey’s stories were about ghosts. Real ghosts. The kind that hid in dark places and made the whole room turn ice cold. Who could get inside your head and make you see stuff that wasn’t really there.
Hailey’s stories weren’t the kind that made you jump and squeal. They were the kind that clung to your mind all night, even after the flashlight had gone out and you were shivering in your sleeping bag in the quiet darkness.
Her stories didn’t let go of you, not even when you fell asleep. They slipped into your dreams instead. The night after one of Hailey’s stories, you always knew there would be at least one girl crying in her bunk after she thought the rest of us had gone to sleep.
She never got scared herself, though. Not Hailey. She told them all in this low, even voice. You could just tell there was nothing in the whole world that could ever scare her.
Naturally, I didn’t want her to know any of them ever scared me. Everyone at camp knew I was impossible to scare. Plus, I guess I just liked her a lot. I wanted her to think I was cool and sophisticated and all that.
You know how it is when you’re in middle school. All I could think about was making sure Hailey never found out I’d gotten scared. One night, hours after we’d finally finished telling stories, I woke up while it was still dark out because I had to pee. The bathrooms were up on a hill overlooking the campsite, and to get there, you had to leave the cabins and follow a path down through the woods, past the main lodge house, and up the hill where the trees were super old and thick.
The rule was that if you left the cabin at night, you had to take someone with you. So I woke up Hailey, and we put on our shoes and got our flashlights.
Everything was totally normal at first. Usually, we would’ve joked around while we walked, giggling about the other girls in our cabin who’d gotten scared listening to that night’s stories. But Hailey was still really sleepy and didn’t seem to feel like talking, so we were quiet as we followed the path past the lodge house and up the hill. We could hear crickets and birds and stuff. Nothing unusual.
It was pretty out, and I remember looking around that night more than I had before. The path to the bathrooms had basically been cut into the side of the mountain, so the drop-off was steep—that’s why we weren’t allowed to go up there alone in the dark. Sometimes it could be hard to tell where the path ended and the drop-off began, but that night there was a little moonlight, so we could see down past the edge of the path and into the ravine below.
The little valley was thick with leaves. I remember thinking that it didn’t look like it would even hurt that much if you fell. The leaves would cushion you. It might actually be kind of fun. Tumbling down with a nice, soft landing.
But Hailey wasn’t paying attention to the scenery the way I was. Instead, she just trudged along half asleep next to me in her frilly pink pajamas and sneakers, yawning the whole way. Once, when we were almost at the top, I even had to grab her arm to keep her from tripping over a tree root in the dark. She was that out of it. I must have been out of it too because I forgot to let go of her arm until we reached the bathroom door.
There was nothing out of the ordinary about that night, is what I’m saying. Even the story Hailey had told before we’d gone to sleep hadn’t been as scary as usual. It hadn’t even really been a story—just something her grandmother used to talk about from time to time.
Hailey’s grandmother, it turned out, always said that on the day you were born, the Spirit of Death wrote a line in its book. It marked down the date of your birth, and the date of your death, too. Apparently, the Spirit already knew when you’d die, how you’d die—all of it.
When your deathday came around, you could try to outrun the Spirit. You could try to hide from it. You could even try to trick it if you wanted to.
But none of that would matter in the end. Because you were already in the book. The most you could do was make the Spirit of Death angry. And if you made it angry enough, it might decide to take vengeance on you. You could wind up suffering more, and the Spirit might even decide to take someone you cared about ahead of their time.
The moral of the story was: you shouldn’t try to cheat the Spirit of Death. Unless you were superdumb. Because the Spirit could be anywhere—it was invisible, obviously—and it didn’t care about you, not even a little bit. All it cared about was getting its due.
Like I said—not a particularly scary story. It was hard to get worked up about a spirit you couldn’t even see. The satanic goat-man was totally fake, but even he was freakier than some invisible Spirit of Death.
But anyway, that night, we finished in the bathroom and then turned around to come back down the hill. Everything still seemed totally ordinary, until we were halfway to the bottom. That was when the sounds started coming.
I stopped walking.
“Did you hear that?” I asked Hailey.
“Hear what?” Her eyes were alert suddenly. She’d stopped yawning.
The mountain around us was completely silent. Until the sound came again.
It was a voice. A whisper. But it didn’t sound like a person talking.
It was what you might’ve expected to hear if the wind could whisper, or the trees could. As if the whole forest was whispering.
I couldn’t make out the words. Just a low, uneven sound. An empty hiss.
It was coming from just beyond my right shoulder. Even though there was no one on the hill but me and Hailey.
“Who’s doing that?” I spun around. Suddenly, Hailey’s story flashed through my mind. The Spirit of Death.
“Georgia, what’s going on?” Hailey shone her flashlight behind me, down the side of the hill, but there was nothing but trees and dirt and darkness. She stepped closer to the edge, pointing her light down at the fallen leaves. “What is it?”
The whispers came again, right up against my ear. Finally, I could make out two words in all the hissing.
“Go. Away.”
I screamed, jerked Hailey back by her shoulder, and grabbed her hand, dragging her after me down the hill. She resisted, and I pulled again, tugging so hard she squealed in pain. She wrenched her arm away, but she came with me, and that was what mattered.
“What’s going on?” Hailey’s breath was coming fast, her voice pitched higher than I’d ever heard it. “Georgia, what’s happening?”
“We have to get away from the hill.” I didn’t even know what I was saying.
“What is it?” We’d made it to the bottom of the slope. Hailey stopped running. She was holding her arm out of my reach. “Did you get scared?”
“What?” That was when I remembered Hailey thought I was as cool as she was. As far as she knew, I didn’t get scared easily, like those crying girls in our cabin. “I mean, no. It was just—”
“Who is that?” A flashlight beam shone in my face. I wanted to cry out, but I resisted, blocking the light with my hand instead. “Georgia? And Hailey? Are you hurt? What are you doing out of your cabin?”
It was Jenn and Vicky, our counselors. They were both in high school, and they slept in the lodge house at the bottom of the hill. My screaming must’ve woken them up.
“No, we’re not hurt.” Hailey stepped away from me. Now that the counselors were there, she’d stopped looking anxious. She flipped her hair back over her shoulder and pointed at me. “We were coming back from the bathroom, but then Georgia got scared of the dark.”
“I did not!” I couldn’t believe she’d said that. Hadn’t she heard the same sounds I did?
“Was that you screaming, Georgia?” Jenn lowered the flashlight beam, but she frowned and crossed her arms over her chest.
“No.”
“Yeah it was.” Hailey jerked her chin toward me.
By then I couldn’t hear the whispering anymore, and I was starting to feel kind of dumb. I didn’t want to admit to these older girls that I’d heard something in the woods. And I hated the idea that Hailey thought I’d been scared of something stupid. So when Jenn and Vicky tried to ask me more about what had happened, I just shrugged and said I didn’t know.
They gave us a lecture, because it was against the rules to be noisy at night. We tried to tell them we hadn’t been doing anything wrong, but they didn’t believe us. Hailey threatened to call her mom—her mom always got her out of punishments at school—but our phones had been collected the first day of camp and locked away, only to be used if there was a real emergency.
So Vicky said Hailey and I would have to do clean-up duty the next day for lunch and dinner. No one ever wanted clean-up duty because you had to scrub out all the pots and pans. The water in the sinks was smelly, and it made you all smelly, too. And we were only allowed to take showers first thing in the morning.
Hailey was pretty mad at me for that. Even though I tried to tell her it wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t made anything up. I really did hear that . . . whatever it was.
The next day was miserable.
I’d thought maybe Hailey and I would talk and joke around during clean-up duty. That maybe it would even be fun to have some time to hang out, just the two of us.
Instead, she wouldn’t even look at me. And of course we got all gross, just like we’d known we would.
By the time we got back to our cabin that night, I just wanted to sleep. But everyone else, Hailey included, wanted to stay up late telling ghost stories again. I wasn’t in the mood to tell one that night, not after what had happened, so I said I was too tired.
After everyone else had told theirs—the usual stuff about disappearing hitchhikers and escaped prisoners who stalked couples making out in parked cars and whatnot—Hailey started talking in that hushed, steady voice of hers.
“I realized I forgot to tell you all the most important part of my last story,” she began.
“Your grandmother’s story, you mean?” asked Anna. She slept in the bottom bunk under Hailey’s, and she was one of the youngest in our cabin. She was also one of the girls who tended to fall asleep crying after Hailey told her stories. “About the Spirit of Death?”
“Yeah.” Hailey shifted on her bunk. “Right. My grandmother. I forgot to tell you everything last night.”
“What did you leave out?” Sydney asked from the bunk under mine. Hailey and I had both claimed the top bunks near the door on move-in day. They were the two best spots in the whole cabin. Plus, this way we could roll our eyes at each other when one of the other girls was being annoying.
“I already told you it’s impossible to see the Spirit of Death.” Hailey’s voice had lowered all the way into its spooky storytelling mode. “But I forgot the end of the story. I should’ve mentioned that, thanks to the Spirit, there are some people—but only a very few—who do see things sometimes, or hear them. When they’re about to die.”
The skin on the back of my neck prickled.
“It’s very, very rare,” Hailey went on, speaking into the silence that had fallen over the rest of us. “It’s only people the Spirit has specially marked. You see, most people’s deaths are straightforward—they die of old age or illness or car crashes or whatever. But there are also a few people the Spirit has selected to die of a different cause. They’re the people who die of madness.”
It’s just a story, I told myself. No different from the one about the stupid goat-man.
But as Hailey kept talking, her voice felt like icy fingers creeping down my spine.
“Even the mad—or the soon to be mad—can’t see, or hear, the Spirit itself,” she went on. “But the Spirit is tricky. It can make you hear things no one else can. Things that aren’t really there. That’s the first step. Once a person has heard the phantom sounds, their death is only days away, at most. In fact, they might only have hours left to live.”
How many hours had passed since I’d heard the whispers? Twenty, maybe? Twenty-one?
“For the rest of their time on Earth, the Spirit will torment them.” Hailey’s voice had sunk so low we all had to strain to hear. “That’s how the madness grows. The Spirit attacks their senses, one by one, until finally, they’re eager for death. For anything to put an end to their misery.”
Her voice faded into silence.
No one else seemed to have anything more to say after that. We didn’t even dare to shuffle in our sleeping bags.
Quiet filled the room after that.
I lost track of time in the hushed cabin. My eyelids had begun to grow heavy.
How long had it been since Hailey had stopped talking? Ten minutes? An hour?
Had she gone to sleep? Had the others?
It didn’t matter how many times I told myself not to worry. Those icy fingers on my back never loosened their grip, even as my consciousness faded into sleep.
Then I heard something.
It wasn’t words, not at first. Just a low, murmuring sound. Then a voice.
“Do you hear it?”
But it didn’t sound like the voice that had hissed at me the night before on the hill. This voice was fuller. Human.
A girl shrieked. Laughter erupted somewhere in the cabin.
A flashlight beam darted around the room like a laser, coming from Hailey’s bunk. Then she pointed it underneath her to show Anna sitting up in her sleeping bag, her hand over her face. She was the one who’d shrieked.
Hailey was laughing. I forced myself to join in. A few others did too.
“You seriously bought that, Anna?” Hailey cleared her throat, then whispered, in the exact voice she’d used before. “Do you hear it now?”
After that, we were all laughing. Everyone except Anna. She buried her face in her sleeping bag while the rest of us howled.
Laughing felt wonderful. Laughing made the icy fingers release their grip on my spine.
It really was just a story.
I exhaled slowly between giggles. Hailey didn’t know I’d been scared. Everything was going to be all right.
Soon, she and I would be back to normal. Best friends again.
I’d missed her so much that day. It hadn’t been until then that I realized just how much I needed Hailey.
I’d never really needed anyone before. Not like that.
But I had trouble falling asleep after everything that had happened. I kept starting to drift off, then startling awake, thinking I heard the whispers again. The ones I’d heard on the hill mixed in with my memory of Hailey’s lilting, mocking voice until I couldn’t remember which was which anymore.
Then there was a hand on my shoulder, shaking me.
I struggled to pry my eyes open. The cabin was completely dark. Every flashlight was out.
It took me a minute to make sense of what I was seeing. Then I realized it was Hailey’s face, her features blurry in the dark.
“I have to pee,” she whispered. It sounded just like when she’d whispered before.
Do you hear it?
I tried to twist my shoulder out of her grip, but she wouldn’t let go.
“You have to come with me.” She squeezed harder. “It’s only fair, Georgia.”
The last thing I wanted to do was leave that cabin and go out into the darkness. But I didn’t want Hailey to know I was scared, either.
So I nodded and sat up. Hailey slipped down the ladder, and I grabbed my flashlight from the foot of my bunk and followed her down.
We put on our sneakers and crept outside to the path, where the moon shone bright above us. By the time we’d made it to the lodge house, I was starting to feel dumb.
There was no reason to be scared. Everything outside was totally normal.
I probably hadn’t even heard anything the night before on the hill. I’d just let all those stupid ghost stories get to me. What a loser.
We got up to the bathroom, and everything was still perfectly ordinary. When we were coming back down the hill afterward, we passed the place where I’d thought I heard whispering the night before. This time, of course, nothing happened.
By that point I was feeling really dumb.
When we were halfway to the bottom, near the little shelter with the outdoor sinks, I was trying to think of how to apologize to Hailey for getting us in trouble over nothing when I saw something move behind the trees.
At first I thought it was Jenn and Vicky coming to yell at us again, even though we really weren’t breaking any rules. But I didn’t see either of the counselors. Just their shadows, moving in the middle of a grove of trees at the bottom of the ravine.
Or . . . they looked like shadows. At first, anyway.
They were these tall dark shapes, with sharp edges. The closer we got, the larger they loomed in the trees. Until they were far over our heads—way too tall to be a person’s shadow.
I stopped walking. So did Hailey. She was staring into the trees too.
“Do you see that?” I whispered.
Hailey didn’t answer. Her face had gone still and pale.
That’s when I remembered the Spirit of Death.
It would make you hear, or see, things that weren’t there. Things that would drive you mad.
I shivered, but then I shook my shoulders back. The Spirit of Death was just a story. This was real life.
I fought past my fear and called out. “Jenn? Vicky?”
No one answered. But the shadows moved.
That’s when I knew.
I wasn’t making it up in my head this time. Something—something big—was moving in the dark, right behind the trees.
I was so scared I forgot to be embarrassed.
I couldn’t even scream. All I could do was step backward and grab Hailey’s arm.
Then, suddenly, I felt cold. I was trembling all over, despite the sweltering August heat.
“What is that?” Hailey whispered. I didn’t know if she meant the temperature drop or the dark thing behind the trees. But then it didn’t matter because the shadow moved again.
It was coming toward us. I stepped forward, in front of Hailey, to get a better look.
The shadow was growing taller. So tall it almost reached the tops of the trees.
Then the whispers returned.
Move. Go. Go!
I screamed then. I screamed louder than I’d ever screamed in my life.
“What is it? Georgia, Georgia, what is it?” Hailey was practically shrieking.
Then Jenn and Vicky were running up to us again. And when I looked back, the shadow was gone.
This time I didn’t hold back. I told them exactly what I’d seen. Jenn and Vicky stared at me like I had three heads.
Then Hailey rolled her eyes. And suddenly, I wanted to cry.
I’d been sure she’d seen the shapes moving too. But she was acting like I was just as dumb and boring as the other girls in our cabin. The ones who cried over a stupid story.
What if I’d imagined her reaction up on the hill? What if I’d imagined everything?
What if I really was going mad?
It was clear that Jenn and Vicky didn’t believe me. Even so, they got their flashlights and searched the place in the trees where I’d seen the shadow. Of course, nothing was there. I tried to explain that the thing had gone away before they’d found us, but they only sighed.
“Look,” Jenn said, “for tonight, just go back to bed. But we can’t have this keep happening, so starting tomorrow, both of you will have to sleep down here in the lodge house where we can keep an eye on you.”
Hailey basically wanted to kill me after that. The whole point of camp was having fun in the cabins with your friends at night. Sleeping in the lodge house with the counselors was like being grounded.
Hailey didn’t speak to me for the rest of the night. Or all through the next day, either.
I had no choice but to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the corner of a table by myself while Hailey sat with Anna and Sydney and the other girls from our cabin. They spent every meal leaning in close together, whispering and laughing. Every so often one of them would look up at me, then look away with a muffled giggle.
It was the worst day of camp so far. Maybe the worst day of my entire life.
Hailey had been everything to me. It had been the two of us, together, against the whole world. Now she was treating me like I was no better than any of the others.
But we were still stuck sleeping in the lodge together that night. Somehow, I thought, this had to get better. Maybe, before we went to sleep, I could explain what had happened, and Hailey would understand. Maybe things between us could go back to the way they’d been.
“This is so stupid,” Hailey whispered when we were setting up our sleeping bags. The lodge house was where our whole group of campers gathered to do crafts and stuff, but at nighttime it was just a big, open room lined with tables and benches. Jenn and Vicky slept on the floor near the back door, so Hailey and I had put our stuff as far from them as we could get, near the front. “If either of us has to go to the bathroom tonight, we should just pee in our sleeping bags. It’d be better than going out there again.”
I agreed. I’d already made sure to go to the bathroom before bed that night, and Hailey had too. Going before lights-out was fine—there were always tons of other girls going up and down the hill at the same time—but there was no way I was going up there again before dawn.
It turned out we couldn’t really talk after that, though. Not without Jenn and Vicky hearing. So I climbed silently into my sleeping bag, trying not to let my disappointment show.
It took me forever to fall asleep that night. In our cabin you could always hear people rustling in their sleeping bags, or talking in the other cabins near ours. Down in the lodge, though, it was totally quiet. There wasn’t a single sound except the crickets outside and Hailey breathing softly next to me. I couldn’t even hear Jenn and Vicky.
“Are you awake?” Hailey whispered all at once. Her lips were so close to my ear I nearly jumped.
“Yes,” I squeaked.
She laughed softly. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t scare me.”
She laughed again. “I just wanted to see if you’d like to hear the rest of the story. There’s only a little more.”
I rolled over to muffle my voice. The only way we could talk without Jenn and Vicky hearing us was to put our faces right next to each other, our lips practically touching. “You said the story was over.”
“I thought it was, but then I remembered there was something more. The other girls in the cabin don’t need to hear this part, though. Just you.”
I looked away. I refused to let her see me shiver. “Whatever.”
“What? You don’t want to know?”
I shrugged. She laughed again, then started to turn her back to me.
“Wait.” I gave up. Tears pricked at my eyes. “What is it?”
She laughed again and rolled her face back to mine. “Last night, when we were coming down that hill, for one second I really did think I saw something there in the trees. But then I realized it was just moonlight. You were so scared you almost made me get nervous too! But the thing is”—Hailey lowered her voice, her tone growing serious—“it made me realize something else, too. I’m sorry, Georgia. Because I could tell, from the way you were looking down, that you really did see something. Or you thought you did, at least. The Spirit, Georgia—the Spirit’s marked you. You’re destined to die of madness.”
I blinked, trying to keep back the tears, but they fell anyway.
Hailey shrugged in her sleeping bag. She didn’t look away, even though she must’ve seen me crying.
“I mean, it’s not like there’s anything you can do about it,” she whispered. “I just wanted to tell you so you knew what to expect. Sorry. Maybe you’ll live long enough to go home and see your family one last time after camp.”
She rolled back over. She didn’t seem especially sorry.
After that, there was no way I was going to sleep.
I didn’t believe Hailey, exactly. The whole story about the Spirit of Death . . . It all sounded like something out of a cheesy horror movie.
But what I’d heard—and seen—on the hill wasn’t cheesy at all.
Plus, even though I knew better . . . I couldn’t shake the idea that I’d been marked.
The whispering voice had kept telling me to go. To leave that hill. What if something bad really was going to happen to me there?
And if there hadn’t really been a voice—if I really had imagined everything, two nights in a row—did that mean I was going mad? With or without help from any spirits?
All I remember from the first part of that night was staring at the dark ceiling of the lodge house, freaking out and crying. I definitely don’t remember falling asleep. But I guess I did. Because the next thing I remember, I groggily opened my eyes to a pitch-black room and realized I couldn’t hear Hailey’s soft breathing anymore. She must’ve gone to the bathroom after all.
The lodge house was probably two stories high with the way the roof sloped, but there was only one light in the whole place, and it was out. Being in there in the middle of the night, with no one around, was like being in a huge, empty cave.
But there wasn’t no one around. Jenn and Vicky were in their sleeping bags down on the far end of the room.
I felt stupid for being afraid, but I wanted to see the counselors. Just so I’d know I wasn’t all alone. So I got out of my sleeping bag and made my way to the back of the room, feeling my way along by gripping the edges of the long tables. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the light, but the pure black emptiness in that room never faded.
“Jenn?” I whispered as I got closer. “Vicky?” But I was so quiet they probably couldn’t hear me.
Finally, I felt my toe hit the edge of a sleeping bag, and I relaxed. I bent down to shake the counselor’s shoulder.
But when I reached down into the darkness there was nothing under my hand but a flat, empty sleeping bag, and the hard floor below.
I reached over to the next sleeping bag. It was empty too.
“Vicky?” I spoke out loud this time. No one answered. “Jenn? Hailey?”
There was no sound at all. Even the crickets had shut up.
By then I was so scared I could barely think. I knew the back door was nearby, and all I wanted was to get outside, where at least there would be light from the moon. I felt around for the door and started to panic when all I felt was empty air. Finally, I reached the wall and ran my hands along the rough wood until at last I reached the door. I yanked on the handle and swung it wide open.
A rush of air hit my face, and I started to relax. But there was only more blackness. If the moon was out, it was hidden behind the thick trees.
I knew the cabins were nearby, but I couldn’t seem them. Just the rough wood of the wall behind me, the dim outlines of tree trunks, and the dirt path that wound away from the lodge house and up the hill toward the cabins. I was desperate to see someone, anyone, so I started creeping slowly down the path.
“Hey!” a voice shouted.
I jumped so hard I almost screamed. Then a hand clapped over my mouth, and I really did scream—but no sound came out.
“Relax, weirdo.” It was Hailey. She took her hand off my mouth. I tried to breathe, but my throat felt frozen. “Where are Jenn and Vicky?”
I shook my head. My vocal cords were starting to function again. “I don’t know. Did you come out to look for them?”
“Yeah.” Hailey shifted, like maybe that hadn’t really been what she was doing out here, but the truth was, I didn’t care. I was just so happy to see her. “Do you think they went up to the bathrooms?”
“Probably.” I didn’t want to go that way again. I kept following the path to the cabins. Hailey walked with me. “What if they—”
That was when the whispering started again.
It was so close this time. It was inside my ears. Inside my head. And this time I could hear it more clearly than ever.
Go away! You don’t belong here!
I swallowed my scream.
“Did you just—” Hailey started to say as we turned past the grove of trees.
And saw Jenn and Vicky.
They were on the ground near the woodpile, with Jenn lying on top of Vicky. They were kissing. Vicky had her hand up Jenn’s shirt.
I screamed for real that time.
Hailey saw them too, but she didn’t scream. At first she just stared while Jenn and Vicky leaped up and straightened out their clothes. Then she turned and ran back into the lodge house.
Jenn and Vicky were both talking at once, tripping over their words, trying to ask me what I’d seen and if I was going to tell anyone. I didn’t really care about that, though. I was just glad that now, I knew what all those strange whispers had been, and the shadows in the trees.
I guess we forgot about Hailey in the awkwardness of the moment, until a couple of minutes later when she came out of the lodge house with her phone. Our phones were all supposed to be hidden somewhere, but Hailey must’ve figured out where they were because she was already talking to her dad. Telling him he needed to come get her, because two of our counselors were sinners, and Hailey wasn’t about to have sinners taking care of her.
Well, that was the end for Jenn and Vicky. Hailey’s dad must’ve called someone else right away because it couldn’t have been more than half an hour before the camp director rolled up in her car with a couple of other leaders.
They brought Jenn into the lodge house first. Vicky had to wait outside with Hailey and me. Vicky was crying by then, and I felt kind of bad for her, but Hailey stood as far away from us as she could, doing something on her phone.
“You should’ve just said for us to go away in your normal voice,” I told Vicky because it was embarrassing just standing there, watching her cry. “We would’ve left you alone. It’s not like we wanted to catch you.”
“Yeah, right.” Vicky sniffed and glared down the path at Hailey.
“Well, either way, you didn’t have to whisper all creepily like that. You scared me. That’s why I screamed that first night, you know. I didn’t even see you guys then.”
“What are you talking about?” Vicky scrubbed at her eyes. “All I knew was you two kept showing up, screaming like weirdos, every time we—”
“Vicky?” The camp director was on the back steps. One of the other leaders was getting into the car with Jenn. “Come inside. We’re ready for you.”
The other leader told Hailey and me to go to our regular cabin for the rest of the night, so I don’t know exactly what happened to Jenn and Vicky after that. I only know they were both gone before we came down to brush our teeth that morning. Instead, there were two new counselors at the lodge, grown-ups who told us Jenn and Vicky had gotten sick and needed to go home early.
Well, Hailey wasn’t about to let that story stand. Over breakfast, she told everyone what had really happened. She’d decided not to leave camp, since Jenn and Vicky were gone, but all through the day, she took every opportunity to tell the other girls how revolting it had been finding them the way we did.
Every time she told the story, it got worse. By the time dinner rolled around, I heard her whispering to someone that Jenn and Vicky had been totally naked when we caught them. And that they didn’t stop, even after they saw us, until Hailey called the camp director. She even said Vicky had tried to grab her. Everyone was shocked, and they all kept saying how sorry they felt for Hailey and talking about how gross the whole story was.
That night, in our cabin, I tried to tell the other girls what Hailey said wasn’t true, but that only made Hailey mad. So instead of telling ghost stories, she told everyone about how I’d been going outside and screaming every night because I was that scared of the stupid Spirit of Death, which she’d only made up in the first place.
Then she told them the reason I was defending Jenn and Vicky was because I was a lesbian too.
Which was just totally absurd. But that didn’t matter. Now everyone in the cabin thought I was a big paranoid lesbian weirdo. They all kept whispering things I couldn’t quite hear, then giggling when I looked their way.
It really sucked, to be honest. And the way Hailey looked at me after that sucked most of all. As if I was nothing. As if I’d been a complete waste of her time.
I didn’t think I’d ever fall asleep that night. But I’d barely slept the night before, so I guess I nodded off eventually.
When I woke up it was still dark, and the girls were whispering at me again. That’s what I remember the clearest now. Whispers and giggles. Then footsteps. A door opening and closing.
I was only half awake, but I’d already figured out what was happening. I’d been coming to camp for years.
The girls were playing a prank on me. They’d waited for me to fall asleep, and when I opened my eyes, they were going to jump out and try to scare me, or something dumb like that.
Well, I’d show them. I started to get up, ready to tell them they couldn’t scare me.
But when I sat up and opened my eyes, the whispers and giggles were gone.
The cabin was empty. It was dark—not a single flashlight was on—but I could see the bunks around me.
No one was there. All the other sleeping bags were empty. It was totally silent, too.
I reached toward the foot of my bunk for my flashlight. It felt too light in my hand, though, and sure enough, nothing happened when I turned the switch. My cabinmates must have stolen the batteries on their way out.
What a boring prank this was. When I’d played tricks with my friends in other years, we’d always stayed in the cabin. That was the whole point of pranks—to laugh at the girl when she woke up and saw that we’d put her hand in a glass of water, or written on her forehead with markers, or whatever.
I climbed down from my bunk and reached for the light switch by the door. But when I flipped it on, it was still just as dark in the cabin as ever.
That was weird. The light had worked the night before. The girls couldn’t have climbed all the way up to the ceiling to mess with the lightbulb. It must have burned out by coincidence.
Whatever. Hailey and the other girls were probably hiding right outside the cabin, waiting to jump out at me when I went outside.
I opened the door and shouted, “You guys can cut it out! I’m not scared!”
But there was no sound in response.
There were no lights, either. No flashlight beams bouncing around. No lights from the other cabins or from the lodge house up the hill.
And there was no moon. Everything looked just as it had the night before. Dim and gray and empty.
“Hailey?” I shouted. No response. “Anna? Sydney?”
Still nothing.
But I’d just heard them leaving the cabin. They couldn’t have gone far.
The hair on the back of my neck prickled. But that was stupid. There was nothing out here except girls playing a mean trick. The only scary things that had ever been at this camp were the lesbians by the woodpile, and they were long gone.
A breeze picked up and blew against my cheek. A warm summer breeze. At first.
But it kept blowing, and after a minute or two, I realized the air around me was growing cooler. Soon I was shivering again.
I didn’t see how Hailey and the girls in the cabin could’ve done that.
“Hailey?” I said again. But I couldn’t shout anymore. I could barely even get the word out.
That was when the whispering came back.
This time, there were no giggles. No furtive shushing.
This whisper sounded exactly as it had that first night. On the path down from the hill.
But this time, it didn’t tell me to go away.
Georgia, the voice whispered. Look down. Look down. Look down.
The repetition went on and on and on. I shook my head and held my hands over my ears, but the whispering never stopped.
Look down. Look down. Look down.
It wasn’t coming from just one side, the way it had before. These whispers were coming from all around me.
Look down. Look down. Look down.
I wanted to scream, but my throat was frozen. My whole body was immobile. I could only move my eyelids.
So I shut them. Maybe shutting my eyes would shut out everything else, too.
And it worked. It actually worked. With my eyes closed, I couldn’t hear the whispers anymore.
The breeze had stopped, too. The cold had begun to let up. The goose bumps that had formed on my arms were fading.
It was over.
I tried to relax, to shake it off. I still couldn’t move, but I was sure that when I could see again, the world would have gone back to normal.
I opened my eyes.
The first thing I saw was Hailey. She was standing right in front of me. So close our noses were almost touching.
I tried to gasp, to back up. But I couldn’t.
She lifted her hands toward me. For a second I actually thought she was going to kiss me.
I didn’t know what to think. My heart was racing. I was scared, but I was also . . . not.
Then she reached for me. And wrapped her hands around my throat.
She squeezed her fingers, closing in, choking me.
I couldn’t breathe. I tried to claw at her hands, but I couldn’t lift my arms.
I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t even close my eyes. But the world was turning black, anyway.
Hailey tipped her head backward, her eyes rolling up, her mouth opening wide. The blackness down her gaping throat was coming forward to swallow me whole.
She began to laugh. Huge, bellowing laughs, the sound rocking the earth under my feet. I was falling, falling—
My eyes flew open. It was still dark, but awareness flooded into my limbs.
I was gasping, reaching for my throat.
The hands were gone. I could breathe.
I didn’t see Hailey anymore.
“She’s awake!” someone hissed.
Something felt sticky on my fingers and my neck.
I was in my bunk bed, down inside my sleeping bag. That was why I couldn’t see. I reached up, but I couldn’t find the opening at the top of the sleeping bag.
A flashlight beam shone bright behind the dark fabric covering me. I reached up again to pull the bag down off my face, but I still couldn’t get to the top. In the process, whatever was making my hands sticky got on my cheeks, and then my face was sticky too.
And all around me, everyone was laughing.
It had been a dream. The girls tiptoeing out, Hailey choking me in the dark . . . It was nothing but a stupid, pathetic nightmare. God, even my dreams were embarrassing now.
I reached up again. I still couldn’t find the opening at the top of the sleeping bag.
Was there an opening at the top? Maybe I’d somehow flipped myself around backward. I tried to wriggle around so I was facing the other direction, but the bag was too narrow.
The laughs in the bunks around me grew louder. Bolder.
“Look at her!” someone whispered.
“Has she figured it out yet?”
“Shhh!”
My heart was racing even faster than it had in my dream. What the hell was going on? I reached up, yanking on the fabric of the bag, but it just came down harder on my head. The bag was hot and stuffy. It felt like I was running out of air.
The laughter in the room around me got louder, then louder still, as my breath started to come out in pants. I was trapped in here, in this dark, sticky place, and everyone else was just laughing, as if—
“Shhh!” one of the girls whispered, but she was still laughing. “The new counselors will come in here if we’re too loud.”
“Those old ladies? They wouldn’t come out of the lodge even if we were down here killing her.”
“Shhh!”
Then I understood what had happened. They’d tied my sleeping bag shut.
I reached up again, forcing myself to inhale the stale air, and found where fabric was bunched up. That was where the opening was supposed to be.
The girls must’ve waited for me to fall asleep and then tied it shut from the outside, with . . . what? A lanyard or something? It couldn’t be very tight. I tried to work my hand up into the opening, but my fingers were sticky and slimy, and even smelled kind of minty. . . .
Toothpaste.
They’d filled up my sleeping bag with toothpaste. Then they’d pulled it up over my head and tied it shut.
My hands, my neck, my face. Everything was covered. The girls must have emptied out every tube they’d brought with them.
Gross. And stupid. So, so stupid.
I choked back a sob.
“I think she’s trying to get out of it,” one of the other girls whispered through the laughter.
“Shhh!”
My fingers finally squeezed through. A moment later I pushed my whole hand out. Then my other hand, until I could wrench it all the way open. The trickle of fresh air made the sticky wetness on my face itch.
But it was still air, glorious air. I jerked the fabric of the sleeping bag down until my head and shoulders were out.
All at once the flashlight beam was bright in my face, and the laughter in the cabin had crescendoed into howls. I reached up and realized the toothpaste was covering my hair too.
“Oh my God!” someone squealed. “It’s like a scene out of a horror movie.”
I turned my back on them, focusing every ounce of energy I had on not crying as their peals of laughter filled the room.
I’d been wrong about Hailey.
I’d thought she was the only one who really understood me. I’d thought I understood her, too. But she’d been lying to me the whole time.
Well, I couldn’t let her think she’d gotten to me now.
“Shut up, Hailey,” I yelled, still facing the wall.
“Hailey’s not here,” someone said with a giggle. The light was still shining right on me. I could see it out of the corner of my eye. “She went to get water.”
“And missed the fun part,” someone else said. More giggles.
I had to get out of there.
I unzipped my sleeping bag the rest of the way, smearing toothpaste over every inch of it that wasn’t already covered. The others kept barking out laughter.
I reached for my flashlight, but it turned out someone really had taken my batteries. I pretended not to notice, left the flashlight where it was, and climbed down the ladder to the floor. My pajamas were so sticky I’d have to throw them out.
My hands shook as I pulled on my sneakers. I’d have to go to the sinks to clean up. Then maybe I could ask the new counselors to let me sleep in the lodge house for the rest of the night. Anything would be better than staying in here.
“Where’s she going?” someone whispered, still giggling. I ignored them and opened the door.
Outside, it was warm. The moon shone overhead. Crickets chirped all around me.
Nightmares, kid pranks, random lesbians—it was time I grew up and stopped letting every little thing freak me out. The girls in my cabin were losers. I didn’t care about any of them. Or what they thought of me.
Hailey, though. It was different with Hailey.
She wasn’t just a loser. I hated her. I hated everything about her.
We’d been having the perfect summer. And then she’d ruined everything.
I trudged up the hill. The sinks were partway up the path to the bathroom just past the trees where I’d seen Jenn’s and Vicky’s enormous shadows the other night. As I passed the lodge house the moon must’ve gone behind a cloud or something because it got dimmer all of a sudden, and the crickets started getting quieter, too.
I ignored it all and kept walking. I was through worrying about dumb stuff like moonlight and weird sounds in the darkness.
I was almost at the sinks when I heard the whisper.
Look down, Georgia.
Great. The girls from my cabin had followed me outside. I must’ve heard them during my dream, too. Telling me to look down at my stupid toothpaste-covered sleeping bag.
“Quit it, you guys!” I turned around to look for them.
I didn’t see any of the other girls, but I wasn’t about to wait for them to jump out from wherever they were hiding. I bypassed the sinks and started up the only path that led away from there—the path up to the bathrooms.
Look down, Georgia! The voice was louder now. Not really a whisper anymore. This time, you’re too late.
Too late? For what?
I whirled around. The girls had gotten so loud there was no way they could be hiding anymore.
But I didn’t see them. I didn’t see anyone.
The air around me was completely still. There wasn’t even a breeze.
There was no moonlight above, either. Just a few pinpricks of stars.
What had the voice been talking about? What was I too late for?
And what did it mean, “this time”?
I’d climbed that hill night after night. And I’d heard something, or seen something, every time.
But I hadn’t done anything. I’d only screamed and run, dragging Hailey with me.
Then the voice came back. Just like in my dream, it was coming from all around me, even though there was no one else on the hill.
Look down. Look down. Look down.
“For real!” I shouted. “Stop it! I’m not scared this time!”
Look down look down look down—
“Stop it!”
But I gave in. I looked down, into the ravine.
At first all I saw were tree trunks. And the big piles of fallen leaves that were always at the bottom.
Then I noticed something else. A strange shape in the leaves. It was a lighter color than the other piles.
I squinted in the faint starlight until I could tell the shape was pink.
The same shade of pink as Hailey’s pajamas.
I tried to step back but stumbled, my sneaker catching on a rock. I fell backward, catching myself with my hands before my head could hit the ground.
I didn’t want to look again. But the whispers were still coming.
You were too late this time, Georgia.
That first night. I’d pulled Hailey back from the edge of the ravine. She’d been sleepy, and not watching where she was going, and—
Georgia. Look down.
The voice wasn’t coming from all around me anymore. It was coming from the ravine. Maybe it always had been.
It was so dark I could barely see anything.
I had to go down there. I had to look.
I scrambled down the slope. I wasn’t being as careful as I should’ve, but my feet landed squarely on solid ground with every step.
It wasn’t my time yet. The Spirit hadn’t been coming for me after all.
It had been Hailey all along.
Look down, Georgia.
I reached the bottom of the hill and tore through the heaped piles of rotting leaves. Now that I was closer, there was no way to pretend it was only a trick of the light. There was definitely something on the ground.
Suddenly, it was right in front me. She was right in front of me.
It felt as if the earth was falling out from under my feet. As if I were sliding down the slope, too. As if I’d broken into a hundred pieces, and now I didn’t know where they were supposed to go.
It was Hailey. It was definitely Hailey. But it wasn’t the Hailey I knew.
This Hailey’s eyes were black and empty. Her neck was bent at an angle like something out of a scary movie. Her body was limp, frozen in the leaves. I didn’t have to check her pulse to know that the blood had stopped flowing through her veins.
She was dead. But I could’ve sworn her lips were moving.
She was whispering, still. Somehow. I could even hear the sound they formed.
Look down, Georgia. Look down. Look down. Look down.