“Go. Away.”
I screamed, jerked Hailey back by her shoulder, and grabbed her hand, dragging her after me down the hill. She resisted, and I pulled again, tugging so hard she squealed in pain. She wrenched her arm away, but she came with me, and that was what mattered.
“What’s going on?” Hailey’s breath was coming fast, her voice pitched higher than I’d ever heard it. “Georgia, what’s happening?”
“We have to get away from the hill.” I didn’t even know what I was saying.
“What is it?” We’d made it to the bottom of the slope. Hailey stopped running. She was holding her arm out of my reach. “Did you get scared?”
“What?” That was when I remembered Hailey thought I was as cool as she was. As far as she knew, I didn’t get scared easily, like those crying girls in our cabin. “I mean, no. It was just—”
“Who is that?” A flashlight beam shone in my face. I wanted to cry out, but I resisted, blocking the light with my hand instead. “Georgia? And Hailey? Are you hurt? What are you doing out of your cabin?”
It was Jenn and Vicky, our counselors. They were both in high school, and they slept in the lodge house at the bottom of the hill. My screaming must’ve woken them up.
“No, we’re not hurt.” Hailey stepped away from me. Now that the counselors were there, she’d stopped looking anxious. She flipped her hair back over her shoulder and pointed at me. “We were coming back from the bathroom, but then Georgia got scared of the dark.”
“I did not!” I couldn’t believe she’d said that. Hadn’t she heard the same sounds I did?
“Was that you screaming, Georgia?” Jenn lowered the flashlight beam, but she frowned and crossed her arms over her chest.
“No.”
“Yeah it was.” Hailey jerked her chin toward me.
By then I couldn’t hear the whispering anymore, and I was starting to feel kind of dumb. I didn’t want to admit to these older girls that I’d heard something in the woods. And I hated the idea that Hailey thought I’d been scared of something stupid. So when Jenn and Vicky tried to ask me more about what had happened, I just shrugged and said I didn’t know.
They gave us a lecture, because it was against the rules to be noisy at night. We tried to tell them we hadn’t been doing anything wrong, but they didn’t believe us. Hailey threatened to call her mom—her mom always got her out of punishments at school—but our phones had been collected the first day of camp and locked away, only to be used if there was a real emergency.
So Vicky said Hailey and I would have to do clean-up duty the next day for lunch and dinner. No one ever wanted clean-up duty because you had to scrub out all the pots and pans. The water in the sinks was smelly, and it made you all smelly, too. And we were only allowed to take showers first thing in the morning.
Hailey was pretty mad at me for that. Even though I tried to tell her it wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t made anything up. I really did hear that . . . whatever it was.
The next day was miserable.
I’d thought maybe Hailey and I would talk and joke around during clean-up duty. That maybe it would even be fun to have some time to hang out, just the two of us.
Instead, she wouldn’t even look at me. And of course we got all gross, just like we’d known we would.
By the time we got back to our cabin that night, I just wanted to sleep. But everyone else, Hailey included, wanted to stay up late telling ghost stories again. I wasn’t in the mood to tell one that night, not after what had happened, so I said I was too tired.
After everyone else had told theirs—the usual stuff about disappearing hitchhikers and escaped prisoners who stalked couples making out in parked cars and whatnot—Hailey started talking in that hushed, steady voice of hers.
“I realized I forgot to tell you all the most important part of my last story,” she began.
“Your grandmother’s story, you mean?” asked Anna. She slept in the bottom bunk under Hailey’s, and she was one of the youngest in our cabin. She was also one of the girls who tended to fall asleep crying after Hailey told her stories. “About the Spirit of Death?”
“Yeah.” Hailey shifted on her bunk. “Right. My grandmother. I forgot to tell you everything last night.”
“What did you leave out?” Sydney asked from the bunk under mine. Hailey and I had both claimed the top bunks near the door on move-in day. They were the two best spots in the whole cabin. Plus, this way we could roll our eyes at each other when one of the other girls was being annoying.
“I already told you it’s impossible to see the Spirit of Death.” Hailey’s voice had lowered all the way into its spooky storytelling mode. “But I forgot the end of the story. I should’ve mentioned that, thanks to the Spirit, there are some people—but only a very few—who do see things sometimes, or hear them. When they’re about to die.”
The skin on the back of my neck prickled.
“It’s very, very rare,” Hailey went on, speaking into the silence that had fallen over the rest of us. “It’s only people the Spirit has specially marked. You see, most people’s deaths are straightforward—they die of old age or illness or car crashes or whatever. But there are also a few people the Spirit has selected to die of a different cause. They’re the people who die of madness.”
It’s just a story, I told myself. No different from the one about the stupid goat-man.
But as Hailey kept talking, her voice felt like icy fingers creeping down my spine.
“Even the mad—or the soon to be mad—can’t see, or hear, the Spirit itself,” she went on. “But the Spirit is tricky. It can make you hear things no one else can. Things that aren’t really there. That’s the first step. Once a person has heard the phantom sounds, their death is only days away, at most. In fact, they might only have hours left to live.”
How many hours had passed since I’d heard the whispers? Twenty, maybe? Twenty-one?
“For the rest of their time on Earth, the Spirit will torment them.” Hailey’s voice had sunk so low we all had to strain to hear. “That’s how the madness grows. The Spirit attacks their senses, one by one, until finally, they’re eager for death. For anything to put an end to their misery.”
Her voice faded into silence.
No one else seemed to have anything more to say after that. We didn’t even dare to shuffle in our sleeping bags.
Quiet filled the room after that.
I lost track of time in the hushed cabin. My eyelids had begun to grow heavy.
How long had it been since Hailey had stopped talking? Ten minutes? An hour?
Had she gone to sleep? Had the others?
It didn’t matter how many times I told myself not to worry. Those icy fingers on my back never loosened their grip, even as my consciousness faded into sleep.
Then I heard something.
It wasn’t words, not at first. Just a low, murmuring sound. Then a voice.
“Do you hear it?”
But it didn’t sound like the voice that had hissed at me the night before on the hill. This voice was fuller. Human.