Plus, it was impossible not to believe what Hailey said. She was one of those people. You could tell just from how she talked—she was so warm, so open, so friendly—that she’d never lied about anything in her entire life.
From the moment we met, I trusted her completely. I looked right into her eyes, and she looked into mine, and— Do you know what it’s like when you meet someone and you just get each other right away? When they always know what you’re thinking, without you having to say a word? When you know it’s safe to tell them all your secrets because they’re going to tell you all of theirs, too?
That’s how things were with Hailey, from the very beginning. I’d never felt it that strongly with anyone before.
That summer, the two of us were together pretty much all the time. We didn’t really hang out with anyone else, at least not during the day. The other girls in our cabin were nice and everything, but they were a little, well . . . They just weren’t as mature as Hailey and me.
Her grandmother’s stories, though. I’m not easy to scare, but the stories Hailey told . . . Well, they made me nervous sometimes.
Because Hailey’s stories were about ghosts. Real ghosts. The kind that hid in dark places and made the whole room turn ice cold. Who could get inside your head and make you see stuff that wasn’t really there.
Hailey’s stories weren’t the kind that made you jump and squeal. They were the kind that clung to your mind all night, even after the flashlight had gone out and you were shivering in your sleeping bag in the quiet darkness.
Her stories didn’t let go of you, not even when you fell asleep. They slipped into your dreams instead. The night after one of Hailey’s stories, you always knew there would be at least one girl crying in her bunk after she thought the rest of us had gone to sleep.
She never got scared herself, though. Not Hailey. She told them all in this low, even voice. You could just tell there was nothing in the whole world that could ever scare her.
Naturally, I didn’t want her to know any of them ever scared me. Everyone at camp knew I was impossible to scare. Plus, I guess I just liked her a lot. I wanted her to think I was cool and sophisticated and all that.
You know how it is when you’re in middle school. All I could think about was making sure Hailey never found out I’d gotten scared. One night, hours after we’d finally finished telling stories, I woke up while it was still dark out because I had to pee. The bathrooms were up on a hill overlooking the campsite, and to get there, you had to leave the cabins and follow a path down through the woods, past the main lodge house, and up the hill where the trees were super old and thick.
The rule was that if you left the cabin at night, you had to take someone with you. So I woke up Hailey, and we put on our shoes and got our flashlights.
Everything was totally normal at first. Usually, we would’ve joked around while we walked, giggling about the other girls in our cabin who’d gotten scared listening to that night’s stories. But Hailey was still really sleepy and didn’t seem to feel like talking, so we were quiet as we followed the path past the lodge house and up the hill. We could hear crickets and birds and stuff. Nothing unusual.
It was pretty out, and I remember looking around that night more than I had before. The path to the bathrooms had basically been cut into the side of the mountain, so the drop-off was steep—that’s why we weren’t allowed to go up there alone in the dark. Sometimes it could be hard to tell where the path ended and the drop-off began, but that night there was a little moonlight, so we could see down past the edge of the path and into the ravine below.
The little valley was thick with leaves. I remember thinking that it didn’t look like it would even hurt that much if you fell. The leaves would cushion you. It might actually be kind of fun. Tumbling down with a nice, soft landing.
But Hailey wasn’t paying attention to the scenery the way I was. Instead, she just trudged along half asleep next to me in her frilly pink pajamas and sneakers, yawning the whole way. Once, when we were almost at the top, I even had to grab her arm to keep her from tripping over a tree root in the dark. She was that out of it. I must have been out of it too because I forgot to let go of her arm until we reached the bathroom door.
There was nothing out of the ordinary about that night, is what I’m saying. Even the story Hailey had told before we’d gone to sleep hadn’t been as scary as usual. It hadn’t even really been a story—just something her grandmother used to talk about from time to time.
Hailey’s grandmother, it turned out, always said that on the day you were born, the Spirit of Death wrote a line in its book. It marked down the date of your birth, and the date of your death, too. Apparently, the Spirit already knew when you’d die, how you’d die—all of it.
When your deathday came around, you could try to outrun the Spirit. You could try to hide from it. You could even try to trick it if you wanted to.
But none of that would matter in the end. Because you were already in the book. The most you could do was make the Spirit of Death angry. And if you made it angry enough, it might decide to take vengeance on you. You could wind up suffering more, and the Spirit might even decide to take someone you cared about ahead of their time.
The moral of the story was: you shouldn’t try to cheat the Spirit of Death. Unless you were superdumb. Because the Spirit could be anywhere—it was invisible, obviously—and it didn’t care about you, not even a little bit. All it cared about was getting its due.
Like I said—not a particularly scary story. It was hard to get worked up about a spirit you couldn’t even see. The satanic goat-man was totally fake, but even he was freakier than some invisible Spirit of Death.
But anyway, that night, we finished in the bathroom and then turned around to come back down the hill. Everything still seemed totally ordinary, until we were halfway to the bottom. That was when the sounds started coming.
I stopped walking.
“Did you hear that?” I asked Hailey.
“Hear what?” Her eyes were alert suddenly. She’d stopped yawning.
The mountain around us was completely silent. Until the sound came again.
It was a voice. A whisper. But it didn’t sound like a person talking.
It was what you might’ve expected to hear if the wind could whisper, or the trees could. As if the whole forest was whispering.
I couldn’t make out the words. Just a low, uneven sound. An empty hiss.
It was coming from just beyond my right shoulder. Even though there was no one on the hill but me and Hailey.
“Who’s doing that?” I spun around. Suddenly, Hailey’s story flashed through my mind. The Spirit of Death.
“Georgia, what’s going on?” Hailey shone her flashlight behind me, down the side of the hill, but there was nothing but trees and dirt and darkness. She stepped closer to the edge, pointing her light down at the fallen leaves. “What is it?”
The whispers came again, right up against my ear. Finally, I could make out two words in all the hissing.