Hailey gasped. Hehadnoticed her tarantula legs!
“Oops,” he said checking his watch. “Gotta go. It doesn’t look good when the team captain’s late for practice.”
“You’re the captain of the hockey team?”
Fin winked at her. “Told you I was good.”
When Hailey got back to her room that night, she found a note on the floor just inside the door. With Fin on her mind, she grabbed it up and tore it open.
Giselle tsk’ed loudly from behind her magazine.
The envelope twitched. Then it bulged. And something that resembled a corpse hand emerged.
Hailey dropped the envelope, and by the time it hit the floor, a rotting arm and part of a shoulder were crawling out of the letter too.
Scared beyond the capacity to scream, Hailey backed away as a decomposing, hair-covered head followed. The corpse said nothing as it pushed in jerky movements with both hands on the floor, wiggling its torso and legs out of the parchment. It yanked its head up and looked Hailey dead in the eyes as it wriggled across the floor.
“Gi—Gi—Giselle!” She finally breathed, wild-eyed and shaking as a horrible, Holly-looking carcass inched closer, scowling and oozing black juices.
Hailey backed up against the window.
“The ghost trap isn’t working!”
“Not a ghost,” said Giselle, uninterested from behind her magazine.
“Wh—what is it?”
It slapped another hand on the floor and hauled its limp body forward.
“Ignore it, Hailey. It’ll go away.”
But it didn’t go away. It crept closer, and Hailey pressed herself against the glass.
“I can’t ignore it… It looks like my sister!” She pulled her legs up and curled into a ball on the window sill.
Giselle got up, stepped around the monster, snatched the parchment off the floor, struck a match, lit the paper, and watched with her hand on her hip as the Holly-corpse ignited, which made it even more awful.
An image of Holly in the casket flashed through Hailey’s mind.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to open a Nasty Gram?” Giselle scolded Hailey as she watched the burning Holly-corpse through her fingers.
The thing spun around, waving its arms wildly, flinging tiny crescents of flame in all directions. One struck the picture hanging above Hailey’s desk.
“No!” Hailey lunged to save it, but the picture had already ignited.
“Give it to me,” Giselle demanded snobbishly, holding out her hand as she rolled her eyes.
“It was the only picture I had of us dancing together,” Hailey said, numb.
Giselle snatched the half-burned photo.
“Don’t—” Hailey stood wide-eyed as the picture healed itself in Giselle’s hand, growing back to a whole image right before her very eyes. Giselle handed it back to Hailey and plopped onto her bed.
Hailey stared at the photo. “What just happened?”
“Oh, sometimes I can fix things,” Giselle said in a bored voice from behind her magazine.
Hailey sat on the edge of her bed. “Who sent that thing to me?” she asked, dragging her sleeve under her nose and sniffing loudly.
