text: Thomas felt all the blood in his body rush to his legs. The world went blurry there for a second until he was able to catch his breath again. “Is- is that what I think it is?” he asked with a dry tongue. Thomas jumped when Margret replied to him, “Yeah, that looks like the ghost of Elizabeth Thomas. Murdered in her bedroom forty-seven years ago on Halloween night.” Thomas regained composure once again and averted his gaze to the brunette woman next to him, “Stop doing that!” he said harshly. “How do you always know where I am?” “Don’t act so surprised,” Margret said sharply, “You know why.” The ghastly visage had faded from the top of the stairs when he looked back. A chill ran down his spine like a drop of ice that took over his whole body causing him to shiver violently for half a second. Thomas immediately felt like leaving and forgetting the house, but Margret urged him on. “Don’t worry, none of it is real,” she said cheerily before adding, “well, for the most part.” She winked then stalked to another room. Thomas chose a different route to take instead of following her. Up the stairs, he found that the wallpaper had been rotted and stripped from the walls in many places. The doors leading to three different bedrooms, once a beautiful dark wood, were now scratched and dusty from years of neglect. A loud crash happened from somewhere downstairs. Probably just Margret screwing around in whatever room she was in now. Thomas shook his head and rolled his eyes. Fingers wrapped around the closest doorknob. The smudged metal was cool to the touch. He had to try four times, increasing the muscle behind each push to get the warped wood of the door to open. He coughed. The air in this room was musty. The smell of mold almost completely took over whatever other aromas might have lurked around. “Shit!” he yelled as a squirrel skittered past his right foot out of the room and into the hall. He laughed at himself and looked around the room. A large four-poster bed sat in the middle with the sheets torn back. Thomas wondered if they had sat like that since the night of the murder or if it was done by someone more recent on their investigation of the place. An old-fashioned clock stood atop a dresser, forever stuck at two twenty-six o’clock. Minus the dust and moldy scent, the air in here was dead and there really was not anything of interest to look at. He decided to go to the master bedroom. On his walk through the hall, Thomas heard footsteps and multiple voices downstairs. Just more ghosts he thought to himself, Margret is probably trying to make friends with them. He laughed at the thought of his weird friend sitting in a circle on the floor talking to ghostly figures like a group of elementary school children. He entered the bedroom that the murder supposedly happened in. There was no blood on the relatively small mattress or the floor. A certain disappointment crept inside of him upon viewing the room. Not that Thomas would have enjoyed seeing the dried blood of Elizabeth Thomas (or a ghost again for that matter) but he was hoping to see at least something. “Kind of boring, huh?” Margret asked in his ear. “What the fuck?” Thomas asked in a panic. His heart was beating in his ears. “What’s your deal?” Margret asked, her voice gave off that she was a little hurt by Thomas’ actions. “You can’t keep sneaking up on me like that.” The girl rolled her big green eyes and flashed a friendly smile on her full lips, “Whatever.” The sound of footsteps ascending the stairs interrupted whatever Thomas was going to say next. Margret smiled in excitement, but Thomas felt another wave of fear flash through him. They had pissed off the ghosts of this house somehow and now they were coming to get them. “We have to hide,” Thomas whispered sharply. “Now!” “What? Why?” Margret whispered back. He didn’t reply. As quietly as he could, Thomas snuck into the bedroom’s closet in the far wall and held the door long enough for a reluctant Margret to enter. The footsteps had reached the top of the stairs and the whispered voices of at least three individuals could be heard. Thomas balled himself into a corner of the small closet, he could feel assorted strands of cobwebs brush against his ears and neck as he sat there. His hands shook uncontrollably as he held his knees to his chest. He couldn’t see Margret or hear her next to him, but he attributed that to fear. The mass of footsteps had reached the master bedroom. “You sure he’s here?” A voice whispered. It was one of the most sinister voices Thomas had ever heard. “He is, you can see his footsteps in the dust in the floor,” another whisper replied. “In the closet,” the third one said. A loud alarm blared inside Thomas’ head, it was almost loud enough to make his ears bleed. He looked around, “Margret! Where are you?” he mouthed with a slight voice behind. One of the demons already got her and dragged her to hell! His mind told him. The whispers were right outside of the closet door, but Thomas didn’t listen to them in his attempts to find a crawlspace or vent to crawl into, A beam of light blinded him as the closet door opened, Thomas could only see three vague figures behind the light. “No! Please don’t take me!” Thomas screamed in complete fear, “Oh Lord in heaven, save me please!” He wept and thrashed his arms about. “Tommy, Tommy, it’s us,” a male’s voice came from far away. “Tom, it’s us your friends.” “Get away from me! Margret! Where are you!” Thomas screamed back. “Oh fuck!” A voice said, “He hasn’t taken his medicine today, has he?” “No, it doesn’t appear so,” the figure in front said. “Tom. Tommy, it’s me, Jackson, with Fred and Johnny. We’ve been trying to find you all night.” Thomas remained on the floor crying, he recognized the names but knew it was just the demons or ghosts trying to give him a false sense of security, “Don’t take me,” he whimpered pathetically over and over. “Come on, let’s take him home, but be careful with him. We need to tell his mom that he got away from us during the party after not taking his pills,” the voice that identified himself as Jackson told the other two.” “We also need to tell her that he’s seeing Margret again, he hasn’t talked about her since we were like nine-years-old,” either Fred or Johnny replied. The three of them lifted the sobbing sixteen-year-old off the dusty ground of the closet and carried him out of the house and into Fred’s car. None of them say the actual ghost of Elizabeth Thomas watching over them.