Page 21 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

Taptaptap.

None of them had sounded so regular, though. None of them had kept going.

As Hazel put the cap back on her moisturizer, the hair on the back of her arms was standing up, and the skin underneath was beady with goose bumps. She wasn’t sure if the temperature had dropped or if she just expected to feel cold—years of training herself to distinguish between real reactions and psychosomatic ones seemed to have disappeared overnight.

Everything was different from the inside.

Tap.

The sound wasn’t getting any nearer, but it wasn’t going away either, just slowing down. Waiting, Hazel thought. Maybe taunting her, like a kid in a game:come out, come out, wherever you are…

Hazel closed the door of the medicine cabinet and stared into the mirror. Cracks ran out from one of the top corners, a problem that had made it onto her list of things to repair but that she hadn’t thought much about. The mirror let her check her teeth for spinach, and she wasn’t exactly planning to put on eyeliner any time soon.

Now she noticed how the tip of one ran right into her temple, looking like a head wound just before the blood started. She turned, and it went into her eye.

The best response to a creepy coincidence isdefinitelyto stare at it. That will help.

She turned away, crossed to the toilet, and made sure that the lid was down, even though she’d seen it from the mirror, then tweaked the shower curtain so it covered another millimeter of the tub.

Tap tap.

“Bugoff,” Hazel said, but quietly, almost under her breath. She sounded whiny to her own ears and hated it.

The bathroom, like most bathrooms, didn’t offer her much of a weapon selection. She wouldn’t have known how to use most actual weapons anyhow—even after laser surgery, her eyesight had practically gotten her laughed off a shooting range in college—but she missed her knife and its replacement in her bedroom. A toilet plunger made a very bad substitute.

“It’s-a me,” she said to the empty room, and laughed too loudly at her own Nintendo-based joke. Then she slowly opened the door, peering through the crack at the dark hallway until she could glimpse the thing lurking there.

* * *

Hazel, who didn’t run the electric company and wasn’t made of money, turned the lights off whenever she left a room. The hallway was pitch-black except for the tiny sliver of light from the bathroom’s doorway.

A shape crouched at the end opposite Hazel.

She couldn’t see much more than that in the darkness, but it clearly wasn’t a rat. Rats didn’t get as tall as her knees. The outline was wrong, too, as far as Hazel could make out: spindly where it should have been round, round where it should have been long.

Tap tap tap tap.

Without the door to block it, the sound seemed much louder. Part of the shape moved to make it—moved in a slow and purposeful way that Hazel didn’t associate with any wild animal—and then the whole thing settled back into near stillness that somehowpulsed.

Hazel gripped the useless plunger, opened the door an inch wider, and stared at what the light revealed.

It was a hand.

A giant hand, the pinky almost as long as Hazel’s forearm, balanced on the tips of its rotted fingers. The skin was pallid and greenish, the nails black. One had broken off or been peeled back, and the meat underneath swelled up, gray and puffy. It lifted the index finger and tapped it against the floor again as Hazel watched, almost as though it was greeting her.

Come out, come out, wherever you are, except it knew where she was now, so maybe it was a different chant.Red rover, red rover, let Hazel come over…

“Nope,” she said, “absolutely not.”

The hand tapped a final time, then curled its index finger and dragged it toward the palm, making a gelatinous noise against the floor. It left faint grayish trails and a small chunk in one place.

I’ll need more bleach, Hazel thought.Maybe all the bleach. Does linoleum burn?

Now she could see that the fingers were themselves too long for the hand, with too many joints, and that the whole hideous thing ended in a ragged cut just above where a wrist would have been. The flesh around that cut was bruised black, necrotic. Any touch there would sink in to the bone.

The hand beckoned again, losing more of its flesh in the process. It was really a fascinating gesture, Hazel thought, the slow way it curled and uncurled each of the many joints. She wondered how many the thing had. There was no way to tell from her distance and with as little light as she had, but she might get an accurate view if she just took a couple steps out into the hall. Her former fear started to feel silly, like a nightmare that became absurd in the light. Whatever the hand offered couldn’t bethatbad.

One of her feet moved as if under its own will, taking her forward. The hand curled. Hazel felt the call now, a pull against her mind.