Page 60 of Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are

Stinging tears blurred my vision as Nate chuckled against the curve of my neck. “Come out, baby. Wherever you are.”

I whirled around, meeting air. Nate was gone.

My horrified gaze drifted across the blood on the walls, the floor, and the bed. Dustin’s crumpled body lay broken by the foot of it.

I stumbled back and collided with the door as my hand flew to my mouth. Stomach churning, I gagged at the stench of iron in my nose, scrambling to locate the handle behind me.

Pushing it down and opening the door, I exited the room. The hallway distorted, swaying on its axis. I pressed forward.

Cruel, vicious laughter echoed from above, ahead, behind, and all around.

Tears began to fall as I descended the stairs. A choked sob ripped from my chest and the paint on my hands smeared the handrail, leaving behind streaks of white and red. I came to a stumbling halt in the living room.

“No. No. No. No.” I ran up to the doorway, where my father lay in a pool of congealed blood on the floor.

As I rolled him over onto his back, I fell on my ass. He was dead. Shot in the head, the left side blown apart with his shotgun.

The same shotgun that was now in my lap.

I threw it to the side with a shriek and scurried back on the threadbare rug. The air reeked of gunpowder, stale air, and cigarettes. I didn’t know how long I had sat there, staring at my father’s corpse.

Seeing him reduced to a pile of blood, brain matter, and piss struck me as odd. He’d always been useless, much like he was now.

The doorbell cut through the silence like a whip.

Nate’s heavy Doc Martens sounded behind me, and a dusting of ashes rained over my head. His presence stirred the darkness inside me, coaxing it out from its hiding place.

“You ready for the Halloween party?”

Climbing to my feet and walking to the door, I ignored his looming shadow. He watched silently as I picked up my overnight bag and shouldered it.

“Whoa,” Evelyn said, her eyes wide as I stepped outside onto the porch, closing and locking the door behind me. “That’s one realistic Halloween costume.”

With a shrug, I set off toward her car, parked on the sidewalk. “I know you said you wanted to come help me pack and do my makeup, but I thought I’d give it a go myself.”

Evelyn laughed uncertainly behind me, following close on my heel. “You look like you stepped out of a slasher movie.”

She rounded the car, and I smirked at her from across the car roof.

“Since I’m stuck in this nightmare, I might as well hunt the wolf. It’s time to write my own narrative.”

Evelyn blinked at me and then disappeared out of view as she slid in behind the steering wheel. I opened the car door and joined her, strapping myself in.

“What exactly does that mean?” she asked. “Write your own narrative?”

My tongue darted out, dragging over my bottom lip, and I watched her pull away from the sidewalk.

She flicked her gaze to the rearview mirror, then looked at me as my house grew smaller in the distance.

“Truth or Dare, Evelyn. If you lie, someone dies tonight. If you choose Dare and fail to complete it, someone dies, too.”

EPILOGUE

MISS. STEELE

Iwalked up the long, winding driveway toward the big brick house towering in front of a backdrop of trees and hills.

A thin layer of snow covered the sprawling lawns surrounding the impressive property. The catalog advertised it as a state-of-the-art psychiatric hospital, and while it treated some of the country's most dangerous patients, it had an eerie atmosphere that could be felt in the air. The kind of creepy evil that slithered up your spine the closer you got to the tall front doors, and no amount of fresh paint or potted plants could remove it. None other than God himself could wipe the sin from this place, and he had long since abandoned it in the hands of the devil.

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