The Haunted Read online

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  Produced by Alloy Entertainment

  1325 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10019

  First published in the United States of America by Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Alloy Entertainment

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  RAZORBILL & colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  Ebook ISBN 9780451481474

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For my mom, who loves ghost stories

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Three years later . . .

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  Steele House cast a dark shadow over the grass. Its broken windows were like deranged eyes, its sagging porch a weird, lopsided grin.

  Maribeth stared at it, goose bumps crawling up her skin.

  Don’t be a baby, she told herself. It’s just a house.

  But it wasn’t just a house. It was Steele House. Maribeth used to hold her breath whenever she had to walk past the vacant, overgrown yard. But she was nine now, and that was too old to be afraid of a dumb old house.

  Still, she crept along the very edges of the grass, careful not to put even one toe under the shadow the house cast onto the lawn. Babyish or not, she thought if she stepped into the shadow, the house might see her. But this was the fastest way to get home, so she walked fast, not even looking at the house.

  She was almost past the cellar, close to the place where Steele House’s dead, yellow lawn turned into her house’s nice, green lawn, when she heard a small, frightened mew.

  Maribeth froze, a heavy feeling settling in her stomach. She looked at the cellar. That had sounded like a kitten.

  Mew.

  This time the sound was louder and more desperate, as if the kitten had heard her walking past and was calling to her for help. Maribeth chewed on her lip, not sure what she should do. It sounded like the kitty was trapped.

  Just a dumb old house, she told herself again. And then, quickly, before she got too scared, she grabbed for the cellar doors and, grunting, struggled to pull them open.

  No kitten came bounding out. In fact, Maribeth couldn’t see anything in the pitch-black darkness.

  Mew, she heard once more. The sound echoed through the cellar.

  Maribeth crouched down at the top of the stairs and reached her hand into the darkness. She was still wearing her church tights, and dirt smudged up the knees. Her voice shook a little as she called, “Here, kitty, kitty. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  She knew only part of the story of Steele House. Some people died in there a really long time ago, and now no one would live there. Her big brother Kyle and his friends sometimes rode their skateboards past the house and dared each other to throw rocks through the windows while shouting, Who’s afraid of Steele House now, suckers? Only they didn’t say suckers, they said a word Maribeth wasn’t allowed to repeat. But they never went inside. Kyle was too chicken.

  “Kitty?” Maribeth leaned as close to the doorframe as she could without going inside. She could see the top few steps into the cellar, but everything else was dark.

  She braced herself. Just because Kyle was too chicken to go inside didn’t mean she couldn’t. She thought of how impressed he’d be when she told him what she did, and hurried down the stairs before she lost her nerve.

  The air grew very still around her, as though the house was holding its breath.

  Maribeth walked past a wall of shelves filled with old, green bottles, the labels long since worn away, and stopped in front of a wooden trunk with a broken lock. A doll sat on top of the trunk, slumped against the wall. Its eyes had been plucked out of its face, and there were gouges around the empty sockets.

  Maribeth turned away from the doll, eyes straining against the darkness.

  “Kitty?” she called. It smelled like wet jeans and the trailer park dogs and something gone rotten in the garbage, almost like something lived down here. Maribeth held her nose closed with two fingers. Her heart started beating faster.

  Outside, the cellar door rattled in the wind.

  I should go back, she thought. It was cold, and her skin felt itchy and shivery. She could feel something down here with her, something bad. She turned in place, but all she saw were smudged walls, and bottles, and that weird doll.

  Two eyes blinked open.

  “Kitty,” Maribeth whispered, moving toward the eyes. They were shiny and yellow. She lowered herself to her knees and leaned forward.

  The yellow eyes blinked.

  “Come here,” she murmured, reaching out her arm—

  A boy’s voice drifted down the stairs. “Hey? Is someone down there?”

  Maribeth’s heart sputtered. She jerked her hand away and spun around so fast she twisted her ankle. Pain shot up her leg.

  The yellow eyes shifted back into the shadows.

  “Who’s there?” Maribeth shouted, tears tickling her eyes. Her ankle hurt a lot, but the fear was worse. It felt like someone had grabbed hold of her lungs and squeezed. She pressed herself all the way back against the cold cellar wall.

  The stairs creaked. It sounded like someone was walking very slowly down the steps, but Maribeth didn’t see anyone there. A moment later, the scent of cologne wafted through the cellar. Her nose itched. It smelled like the stuff her dad wore on special occasions, like when he took her mom out on a date.

  “What’s your name?” asked the voice. It was a nice voice. It reminded Maribeth of her older brothers.

  “Maribeth Ruiz,” she said, numb. She t
ried to sound more confident than she felt. Where was the voice coming from? For some reason, she looked over at the doll sitting on the trunk. The black eyeholes stared back at her, but the doll’s mouth stayed still.

  “Cool name,” said the voice.

  Fingers curled around Maribeth’s wrist. They were cold and damp, like raw chicken just out of the fridge. Maribeth looked down at the fingers, but there wasn’t anything there. She blinked and there was still nothing there.

  But she could feel them. They pinched her wrist and squeezed the blood from her hand.

  Maribeth shrieked and took a clumsy step backward. Her hurt ankle slid out from beneath her and she hit the floor—hard—the packed earth chilling the skin right through her tights.

  The fingers still held her arm. They twisted it back at an awkward angle so that bright flares of pain pierced Maribeth’s shoulder. She tried to scream, but the sound didn’t make it past her throat. Her lips trembled. The fingers squeezed tighter.

  The cologne scent became sweet and stronger. It clogged Maribeth’s throat, making it harder for her to scream.

  “You’ll pay for what she did,” the voice crooned into her ear.

  Maribeth opened and closed her mouth, lips flopping like a dead fish. A ragged, desperate sound finally clawed up her throat, but the walls were thick, and she knew no one would hear it.

  Outside, the wind blew the cellar door shut.

  Three years later . . .

  CHAPTER

  1

  Hendricks didn’t know what pissed her off more: starting over or becoming a cliché.

  Back at her old school, she’d waged her own private war on clichés. She’d had rules and everything: no burn books or mean-girl comments. No clamoring to be named homecoming queen. No dating the high school quarterback.

  “Good thing I’m not a quarterback,” her ex-boyfriend, Grayson, had said, brow furrowed. “You have anything against soccer players?”

  “Only if you’re the captain of the team,” Hendricks had told him, teasing, and when he’d pouted she’d added, “Hey, I didn’t know you were going to ask me out when I came up with the rules.”

  Which was true. Rule or no rule, everyone knew it was borderline impossible to reject Grayson Meyers. He had a gravity that drew people in. A smile that said trust me, and a deep, throaty voice that made him seem older and more mysterious than he actually was. Of course now, after everything that’d happened, Hendricks couldn’t think about his smile or his voice without feeling a rush of shame.

  Shame that she should’ve known better, should’ve followed her own rules. Shame that, really, all of this was her fault.

  The back seat of her parents’ car felt suddenly hot and airless. Hendricks closed her eyes, pretending she was in her closet back home. She imagined coats rustling against her cheeks, shoes pressing into her legs. The low drone of the car radio and her parents’ murmured voices sounded far away, almost like they were muffled by the other side of a door.

  Breathe, she told herself and her lips parted, air whooshing out. She’d spent most of the last two months hiding in that closet, and it was surprisingly comforting to imagine being there now. She’d always felt safe there. But it was over two hundred miles away. And it didn’t belong to her anymore.

  She opened one eye, head tilted toward the car window. Drearford’s Main Street rushed past her face, blurry beyond the icy glass. People clutched their jackets closed as the wind picked up and whipped through the bare trees.

  “But if we take Metro-North, we should be back around midnight,” her mother was saying from the passenger seat, thumbs tapping her phone screen. “One a.m. at the latest.”

  “Maybe we could stay overnight, just this once. The contractors could always meet us in the morning.” Her father had lowered his voice, like he thought Hendricks might not hear him.

  A pause, and then, “I . . . really wouldn’t feel comfortable with that, yet.” Her mother spoke softly, too, but they were only sitting two feet away. Hendricks felt rather than heard the pause in their conversation, and pictured their eyes flicking to the rearview mirror, casually, like they weren’t checking on her.

  She kept her eyes trained on the window, watching her breath mist the glass.

  Drearford, New York, was one and a half hours north of Manhattan and nearly four hours from Philadelphia. Almost—but not quite—too far to drive in a single night. Population: 12,482. Current weather: twenty-two degrees and gray. Gray like the sky was sucking the life from its surroundings, leaving trees and grass and bodies of water colorless and covered in a thin layer of frost. Philadelphia—where Hendricks had lived until a week ago—was also cold in January, but it was a bright, glittering kind of cold. This place just looked dead.

  Before she could stop herself, Hendricks pictured Grayson drinking from a bottle of stolen MD 20/20, offering it to her.

  “Dare you,” he’d said, one eyebrow going jagged.

  It had been their thing, sort of like an inside joke.

  Dare you to go to the movies with me Friday night.

  Dare you to change your Facebook status to “in a relationship.”

  Dare you dare you dare you.

  Hendricks swallowed. The memories felt like something caught in her throat. She reached into her pocket instinctively, fingers curling around her cell phone. But she didn’t pull it out.

  Clean slate. That’s how her parents sold the move to Drearford. One by one, Hendricks released her fingers, letting the phone settle back into her pocket.

  “Clean slate,” Hendricks whispered. Grayson had mostly stopped calling by now, anyway. Mostly.

  The car pulled to a stop. Hendricks turned her head and saw a building on the other side of the street, hunching low to the ground, like a predator. A few cloudy windows broke up the dirty brick walls, and a flagpole stood directly in front of the main doors, flag flapping like crazy in the vicious wind. Hendricks’s eyes flicked to the left, landing on a sign:

  DREARFORD HIGH SCHOOL, HOME OF THE TIGERS

  Something heavy settled in her gut. The idea of a new high school, new friends, new everything hadn’t felt real until this second. She wanted to throw open the car door and run down the street. Let the wind blow her away.

  Don’t think like that, she told herself, and her eyes moved to the front seat, worried that her parents knew, somehow. She tried to keep the nerves from her voice as she asked, “We’re here?”

  Her mom twisted around to face her. “You know the way back home, right? Two lefts and a right on Maple?”

  Their new house wasn’t even a ten-minute walk from here. Hendricks nodded.

  “There’s money for pizza for dinner, or leftover chicken in the fridge if you feel like something healthier.” Her mother chewed her lower lip. Hendricks knew what was coming. “Are you sure you want to—”

  “Bye.” Hendricks grabbed her backpack and climbed out of the car, door slamming behind her. They’d been over this before. Her mom wanted Hendricks to homeschool until senior year started in the fall. She tried to make it seem like this was for Hendricks’s benefit, that she’d have fun helping them renovate their new house, but really, Hendricks knew her mother just wanted to be able to keep an eye on her at all times. As though that might keep her safe.

  Climbing out of the car, Hendricks felt a sudden pang of guilt. It was her fault they had to start over. They’d all been happy in Philadelphia. A year ago, it never would’ve occurred to any of them to move.

  Clean slate, she told herself again.

  She was halfway up the steps to the school when she heard a noise, then dry leaves rustling. She froze, squinting into the shadows of a large oak tree.

  A boy stood beneath the branches, cigarette pinched between two fingers. He wore the standard outsider uniform: black T-shirt over black jeans tucked into beat-up black combat boots. Curled upper lip. His skin
and hair were both dark. His eyes were even darker.

  He jerked his chin in Hendricks’s direction, then dropped the cigarette butt into the gnarled roots of the overgrown tree and stomped it out, moving back into the shadows. The smell of smoke lingered behind him.

  More clichés, Hendricks thought, mouth twisting. She would’ve hated this place six months ago.

  Now, it felt strangely comforting. At least she knew her role.

  A girl waited inside the school’s glass double doors, arms hugged tight over her chest, shivering in her short skirt and thin tights.

  This must be Portia, Hendricks thought. She’d gotten an email from her last night.

  Hi hi!!! the email had read. My name is Portia Russell and I’ll be your guide to all things Drearford High tomorrow morning. Meet me inside the front doors at 10 a.m. sharp and I’ll give you the lowdown on the cafeteria food to avoid and which teachers are secretly evil. (Kidding kidding!!)

  xo—P

  Hendricks had never been the new girl at school before, so she didn’t have any experience with this, but she’d been expecting a good-girl librarian type. Pretty, but in a virginal way, and more likely to spend her Friday nights studying than partying.

  She’d been only half right. Portia was dressed like a good girl—cardigan, skirt, headband holding back thick, black curls—but Hendricks could see at a glance that she wasn’t one. Her cardigan was a size too small, her skirt a hair too short. Her dark brown skin seemed poreless.

  “Get in here,” Portia said, holding the door open for her. “It’s freezing! Aren’t you dying?” She grabbed Hendricks by the arm and pulled her inside, giving an exaggerated shiver as she tugged the door closed. “The weather has been so gross lately.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Hendricks said, but only because she thought it was shitty to complain about this town when she’d only just moved here.

  “If you say so. You’re from Philly, right? The Walter School?”