“There’s someone knocking downstairs,” I say. With my sisters still on FaceTime, I sidle down the darkened stairs. I could turn on the light, but that would just reveal my position to whoever is down there. When I step off on the bottom floor, the lights are off in the video store, with just a scant orange glow near the front window, the streetlamps casting their light through the dirty glass.
“Hello?” I call.
“Oh my God, we’re about to watch her get murdered,” Jemma whispers. “We’re witnesses!”
“I don’t think murderers knock,” I say. “It’s probably some crazy old coot looking for their nightly peanut fix. This place used to be open until ten, and as long as the door was open, it wason the honor system.”
“That’s a horrible way to run a business!”
“I know, Cait. Now shush.”
I shine the flashlight around the room, but it’s mostly empty now, other than piles of wood. All the tall, cheap shelves that used to divide the space are gone, either donated or tossed. There’s not really anywhere to hide, except under the counter or behind one of the closed doors.
When the knock happens again, I jump, and my sisters scream.
“What is it?” Jemma barks.
And I know, but I don’t tell her.
Because for one thing, I don’t want to get that awful choking feeling, and for another, she would think I had lost my mind.
Oh, it’s just the poltergeist in the storage room. No big deal. It just likes stacking chairs and mopping badly, but I don’t think it can open doors.
Yet.
That is what I absolutely do not say.
“Uh, we’re closed!” I call for my sisters’ benefit. “Sorry. Our grand reopening will be on Halloween.”
I’m not shouting at anyone, because there’s no one there, but it seems to work.
“Man, those people are nuts for nuts,” Cait says.
I take one last look at the door to the storage room. The doorknob twitches.
“No!” I say firmly, like I’m talking to a naughty dog.
Cait looks confused. “No?”
“He was shaking the door handle. Guess I need a bigger sign. And speaking of peanuts, do y’all know how that works? Do they come wet or dry, and how long do I boil them? Do I have to wash them first?”
I head back upstairs, and our conversation returns to more mundane topics before we wish each other a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck and end the call. The knocking has stopped—I guess poltergeists respond to firmness—but I’m on edge for the rest of the night. I was so busy asking Shelby about finding spells that I forgot to ask how to get rid of unwanted ghosts. I add that to my to-do list, which seems to constantly grow despite how efficacious I’ve been so far.
As I lie in bed, waiting for the knocking to start up again, I know what has to happen next: I need Hunter to put the upstairs door back on its hinges. I am well aware that the whole point of a ghost is that it’s incorporeal, but I’d feel better with at least two layers of protection between myself and anything that finds its way into the empty store down below. I won’t go in the storage room again, and hopefully that means the poltergeist won’t creep up the stairs and bop me with a mop while I’m asleep.
If Maggie were here, I could ask her about it. How ghosts work, if it was here when she was alive, if it can hurt me, if I can get rid of it.
But Maggie is gone, and I am haunted in more ways than one.
30.
The next morning,I’m up bright and early to visit the bakery for the promisedLost Birdflyers and maybe a chocolate croissant to soothe my fragile nerves. The poltergeist didn’t bother me again last night, but I was constantly expecting to hear knocks in the stairwell or see a folding chair flying at my face. Waiting for something scary to happen is almost worse than it actually happening.
The video store is fine, at least, and—
You know what?
I’m going to stop calling it the video store.
