THIS BOOK WILL KILL YOU

3_tbright

I manage to keep the tears locked up until I'm back in my room, but as soon as the door's shut they're steaming out of me. I wave my hands to try to cool my face, my sobs sounding more like hiccups. They're short lived, thankfully. I mean, I'm not upset, not really. It's just something like this gets to you, it's a little knife wound in the flesh of your life.

There's a dead girl across town, and she was reading my story.

The tears are like scalding water and I smudge them away, breathing, breathing, burying it all as deep as I can. The room seems hyper real now, like I've chugged a gallon of Red Bull. The sun's too bright, even though the curtain's half shut. I walk to the window to pull the other side over and the cops are there, chatting to each other over the roof of their sedan. Cyrus looks up and waves to me, O'Connell looks back and nods, then they're clambering in and gunning up the street, chased by a tail of exhaust.

"You okay?" mom asks, and I almost shed my skin like a bathrobe. I turn, try to smile even though my cheeks are still wet. Mom sighs, pulls her robe tight. "We can talk about this in a minute, yeah? Just let me rinse off." She waits for me to nod, then disappears, then her head pokes back through the door. "Don't blame yourself," she says, and I don't, but the very fact she said it makes me feel like maybe I should.

I wait for her to go, wait for the squeak of flesh as she climbs back into the tub, wait for Donnie to look through my door, mull something unspoken and walk to his room, then I sit on the bed and text Flint. I write / delete half a dozen times before telling her the truth, that I need to see her now because the cops just questioned me about a dead body. Then I chuck the phone on the quilt and open the laptop.

There's a second, when the screen boots up, where I'm twelve again, sitting at dad's old PC. I'd had the dream again the morning I wrote the story and I almost hadn't made it out. God, it had been so close. She'd been through the door, her arm ten feet long, those brittle fingers searching for my face. I'd seen her teeth, crooked and yellow. They weren't human teeth, they were horse's teeth, hammered into her gums. She'd looked so old, but her acid grin was so bright it was eating through the fabric of the dream.

I'd kicked and punched my way out of it so hard I'd fractured two knuckles on the bedpost. I'd almost not been able to sit down and write. But I'd sat down anyway, my whole left hand numb, and I'd written. I can't even remember why, I just knew I needed to do it. I needed to write about her, because that way it wouldn't just be me any more. That way, the whole world would see her.

The screen flickers, glitches, settles. I can still hear Metallica whining from the headphones and I put them on. Only now I'm thinking of the witch, I'm thinking of her head sliding out from my wardrobe door, that aching, unblinking eye fixed on me.

My skin literally crawls and I shake the headphones off, looking back, looking down, looking up too in case she's crawling along the ceiling. And I'm suddenly angry as well as scared, because that old bitch was long gone, I didn't even think about the story any more. And now she's back, now she's everywhere.

Now I'm going to dream about her, I know it.

I shuffle to the top of the bed so there's nothing behind me but wall, resting the laptop on my thighs. I snap Facebook shut, opening a new tab and loading creeepy.com. I've got messages waiting, but I can't bring myself to see if one of them is from a dead girl. I scroll back through eight stories to my first, to the one I called _witch_.

I was six years old when I first saw the witch.

I look up. The house feels too quiet. I can't even hear Donnie's Xbox, or mom splashing in the bath. All I can hear is the soft hum of the laptop, and my own breaths, too shallow, too fast. I look behind me—just wall, just wall. But that's not true, because there's a fist-width of gap between the velvet headboard and the plaster, enough space for her scarecrow's arm to slide up, joints cracking, enough space to look down and see an eyeball blinking wetly in the dark.