Love is Hell. Melissa Marr

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       Five

      AS SOON AS I get home from school, I dump my books on the floor and make a beeline for my computer. I begin by Googling our home address, which is actually all it takes. An article from the Addison Gazette pops up right away.

      It’s all about our house, about how it finally sold—to my parents—after years of sitting on the market. Apparently we’re not the first family to live here since the infamous bloodbath. Two other families inhabited this place, but it didn’t take them long to bolt—six months for the first family, six years for the second. Both claimed that things went bump in the night.

      The article segues into the history of the house, and what happened here twenty years ago. Raina and Craig were right. A seventeen-year-old boy was murdered. His body was found in the bathtub after he’d been hit over the head with a crowbar.

      “Travis Slather,” I whisper, reading the victim’s name aloud. A toxic taste lines the inside of my mouth. I close my eyes, trying to hold it all together, remembering the boy in my dream last night.

      He told me his name was Travis.

      According to the article, Jocelyn, Travis’s mother, was home when it happened, but she’d been badly beaten herself. The police discovered her huddled inside the hallway closet downstairs, barely still alive. I read on, learning tidbits about the killer—that he was indeed the mother’s boyfriend, that he had a criminal record filled with domestic abuse offenses, and that he’s currently serving a life sentence in prison.

      I glance over my shoulder at my room, conjuring up the images from my dream—the Bruins gear and the navy blue bedcovers—knowing somehow that this was his room, which prompts me to search even more.

      I end up navigating to a site called “New England’s Most Haunted Homes.” I scroll down to a picture of my house. It basically looks the same as it does now—same brown color, same wooden steps, same black metal mailbox—except the maple tree in the front is much taller now. And the window on the second floor—the one in my bedroom—is no longer boarded up.

      It seriously gives me chills.

      I try a bunch of other sites, looking for information about ghosts and hauntings, weeding through all the individual posts—from those claiming to have the likes of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and Kurt Cobain taking over their bodies—until I finally find something worthwhile.

      It’s a website that talks about hauntings in general, stating that ghosts who haunt tend to do so because they can’t pass on, because they have some unfinished business to attend to. They cling to people who have some sort of extrasensory insight, relying on them to tie up their loose ends.

      So they can finally rest at last.

      A tight little knot forms in my chest just thinking about it. I mean, aside from that one time with Emma, I’ve never really thought of myself as being or having anything extra-anything, never mind possessing supernatural powers.

      “Brenda?” my dad calls, edging open my bedroom door. “Are you okay? You’ve been in here all afternoon. I thought maybe we could watch the game together.”

      “Why didn’t you guys tell me?” I say, trying my best not to hyperventilate.

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