Wade awoke in the night with the distinct feeling that someone was in the broken down cottage with him.

He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to disappear into the bedding, but it was no use. The whispers of fear were already bubbling through his veins like gin and tonic.

For once, there wasn’t a single sound in the rotting cabin.

He opened his eyes and spotted his phone on the bedside table.

He reached for it.

And it was gone.

Horrified, Wade pulled his hand back and cradled it against his chest.

He hadn’t knocked the phone over. It was gone.

Downstairs, the front door creaked open and banged shut again.

Footsteps thumped across the wooden floor.

Someone was in the cabin with him. But why?

And why hadn’t he brought some kind of weapon?

Maybe it was Jim. He didn’t remember asking his friend to bring anything, but Wade had gotten pretty far into that last bottle. It was possible he’d sent a message when his head was too foggy to recall.

He opened his mouth to call out, but somehow his voice wouldn’t come.

Downstairs, footsteps moved away from the dining room.

Shit.

Wade hopped up.

He was naked, he always slept naked. He tried to grab his jeans but his hands were shaking too much to get them over his legs.

He improvised by wrapping his sheet around himself like a toga.

It was quiet again downstairs. He held his breath, listening for any sound that might tell him that his midnight guest was leaving.

He heard a strange sound, like someone pouring out water…

The ghost story flashed through his head. The older sister had poured out the tea when the husband left the room.

He was pretty sure that tea didn’t have a very distinctive sound, but now that he’d thought about the story, he was one-hundred-percent positive that’s what he was hearing.

Impossible. The place couldn’t be haunted. He’d already been there for days. He would have noticed.

Downstairs, he heard something hit the trash can.

The biscuit.

The footsteps returned to the dining room.

“Why don’t you go to bed,” someone whispered downstairs. “I’ll be there in a moment.”

Wade’s skin went all goosebumpy at the sound of the voice.

The floorboards creaked as the older sister went into the downstairs bedroom. The downstairs bedroom door closed, and the frame of the dusty old bed creaked as the older sister lay on it to wait for her husband.

Wade heard the front door close quietly.

Wade stood frozen in place in the center of the second floor bedroom. His heart was pounding so hard that he was surprised it didn’t knock his makeshift toga off his body.

That ghost woman was going to murder her husband and throw herself into the lake.

Maybe she would stick around and murder Wade too…

Either way, he had to get out of here.

Outside his window he could hear quiet talk, it sounded like a woman and a man.

Shit. The little sister was already here. She and the husband were going to do it on the front porch. He had no way out.

The woman on the porch giggled, then sighed. The man groaned softly.

Fuck.

Wade ran a hand through his hair, wishing he had any escape route that wouldn’t mean running into the ghosts.

Then he remembered.

There was a root cellar. A trap door in the living room floor went down there.

And there was an access panel that led outside.

The idea of crawling under the house to get out was terrifying. It was dark under there and doubtlessly full of spiders.

But it was better than being in the middle of a ghost story.

Or being the basis of a future ghost story.

Wade shuddered and tiptoed to the staircase.

With luck, he could get out before the wife came out to look for her husband. He wasn’t sure how long she would wait, but he didn’t want to take any chances. He knew she was supposed to catch her husband in the act, and in Wade’s experience, that never lasted more than a few minutes.

He stepped on a hanging corner of his toga and nearly fell down the stairs, but managed to cling to the railing just in time.

Wade peered into the darkness of the living room and saw no one.

Slowly, slowly, he crossed the floor to the trap door, then leaned down and pulled the iron ring.

It wouldn’t budge.

He pulled again, hard enough to crack the rust on the hinges and force it open with a squeal of protest.

Wade could feel the cold coming from under the house and smell the musk of mold and animals.

He needed to go, but was paralyzed, too scared to climb in.

“Husband?” The woman’s voice in the bedroom just a few feet away scared him so badly he nearly fell in. “Is that you?”

Wade lowered himself immediately into the dark space, and pulled the hatch down over his own head. He had to crawl. There was only about three feet of space between the dirt below and the floor of the cabin.

Soft lines of light illuminated the dirt - moonlight from the windows coming through the cracks in the floor above.

Over his head, he heard the older sister come out of the bedroom, saw the shadows interrupt the lines as she went to the door and opened it.

A scream sent a fresh batch of shivers down Wade’s arms.

A few seconds later, a loud gunshot rang out in the night.

Something in Wade’s head finally clicked and he scrambled for the bit of light he could see around the access panel.

All he had to do was crawl through it and out to the boat. He would row over to Maxwell’s and never come back again.

He smashed through the access panel. It wasn’t really big enough to accommodate a man of his stature and he wound up ripping his sheet on the frame of the crawl space and crawling out in more of a mini-skirt than a toga.

He didn’t give two shits.

Wade just wanted out.

As he reached the edge of the trees, there was a tremendous splash on the cliff side of the island.

The older sister just drowned herself.

At least he wasn’t going to be bumping into her.

Wade sprinted to the canoe he kept on the bank. He grabbed the thing and dragged it to the water’s edge.

But before he could get it floating, something began to happen.

The perfect reflection of the moon on the lake’s surface started to wobble, then something rose up out of the water.

Wade’s jaw dropped open as a bedraggled woman in a torn gown emerged from the blackness, and leveled an accusing finger at him.

“Wade Travers,” she wailed. “I’ve come to see you, Wade.”

“Wh-wh-wh?” he stammered, his blood turning into ice-water at the sound of his name on her lips.

“You interfered with young love,” she moaned.

“N-no,” he shook his head, hands lifting in front of him of their own accord.

“Yes, yes, yes,” she wailed. “Why did you do it? Why did you try to stop true love?”

Anger blossomed in his chest.

“Honey was mine,” he yelled. “I saw her first. I took her out. He had no right.”

Some of Wade’s confidence began to return. And maybe this ghost lady was picking on the wrong guy.

“He interfered in my young love,” he added.

“I killed to avenge my lost love,” the woman moaned. “What did you do to protect your love? Why should I spare you?”

“I threw a giant rock at him,” Wade told her proudly. “And when I saw them together I set her cabin on fire.”

“You killed them?” The ghostly woman sounded interested.

Maybe he could make her understand. He was just like her.

“Well, I tried to kill them,” Wade offered. He wasn’t entirely sure why that plan didn’t work. “And, and, and… I did something else to keep them apart.”

“What was that?” The woman sounded more curious than creepy now.

“I broke up her friends,” he said, very pleased with himself.

“How did you do it?”

“I told Honey that her friend was an undercover reporter,” he said. “And that messed up their friendship and the friend’s relationship with her guy. Which meant that my… love, couldn’t be with the other guy.”

Damn, it was hard to explain. But ghost lady looked like she got it. Her mouth formed a narrow line.

“Please tell me you got that,” the ghost lady shouted in a plain and very modern sounding voice.

Wade was frozen in place as she walked right up to him.

He readied himself for her icy touch, a little stream of urine trickling down his leg.

He was surprised when she went right past him without breaking her stride, pulling something off her head as she went.

A wig? Why would she be wearing…

The moonlight caught her blonde hair and he realized what had happened.

Addy.

The ghost lady was Addy Barnes in a disguise.

“Oh, yeah, I got it alright,” Nikki yelled happily, pointing to her camera as she walked out from between two of the big creepy trees. “It’s going to be hard to turn this footage over to the police, when I just know it would blow up on social media.”

Fuck.

Wade had been tricked.

He felt the rage beginning to boil inside him at the thought. He would teach these dumb bitches to mess with Wade Travers. He looked around for something to use as a weapon.

The paddle to the canoe.

Perfect.

He took one step, and then a hulking figure appeared out of nowhere, directly between him and the canoe.

The muscle-bound lunk who’d stolen Honey from him.

Kitt.

And then one of the others stepped out of the shadows. He wasn’t sure which one. It didn’t matter.

The anger went out of Wade like the air from a slashed tire, and he slumped down to sit on the muddy bank.