Page 18 of The Escape Plan

Which leaves old Mr. Prenchenko from next door. He’s a wonderful neighbor and a fountain of knowledge about different cultures… but he’s also hard of hearing, and wears hearing aids that I’m sure he takes off to sleep. But I guess I could tap on his window and hope that he’ll wake up and let me inside.

And then… well, in all honesty, I don’t have a clue what my next move would be, but one step at a time.

I take a deep breath, crawl over to what I think is Mr. Prenchenko’s living room window, and tap on the glass.

Chapter Seven

Beckett

Tap,tap, tap.

The tapping noise in my dream gets louder and louder. And then, with a huge gasping breath, I’m jolted awake from the depths of sleep.

I open my eyes and sit straight up in bed…

No, not bed.

I look around the darkened room, and after a moment of discombobulation, still suspended in that dreamlike space between fantasy and reality, I notice how sore my back muscles are.

I’m still on Mr. Prenchenko’s couch—the one I shoved under the living room window this morning, and then drifted to sleep on this afternoon. At some point in the past several hours, I’ve managed to lose my shirt and gain two throw pillows to stuff behind my head.

“Becks, you eejit,” I reprimand myself sleepily. Now, the jet lag is going to take way longer to adjust to. Not to mention that I’m super uncomfortable and I could have been dozing in a comfy bed this entire time.

I’m summoning up the energy to get up and move when the noise comes again.

Tap, tap, tap.

This time, I know it was most definitely not in my dream.

Tap, tap, tap.

It’s coming from the window.What on earth?

“Hello?” I say stupidly as I sit up on the couch.

I turn to look outside and come face to face with… the banshee.

“Ahhhh!” the banshee screams, her ghostly white face and equally ghostly wail sending a chill to my very bones.

“Ahhhh!” the exact same sound leaves my own mouth as my eyes lock onto the bright white face and tangle of black hair crouching before me.

The banshee is famous in Irish mythology. She comes to people at night and screams and wails to warn them of the impending death of a loved one. She’s one of the country’s most famous legends, though I believed it to be a story told to scare children, mostly. And although Callan swore up and down that he heard the banshee screaming the night before Gran died, I was pretty sure that what he actually heard was Aoife screaming at the television because her favorite singer onThe Voicehad just been eliminated from the competition.

Now, I’m not so sure.

I involuntarily jerk backwards and, of course, promptly fall off the couch.

Sprawled on the floor, my heart pounding, I scramble around blindly for my phone. And that’s when I hear…laughter?

Yup. Definitely laughter.

Raucous, side-splitting laughter, in fact.

In none of the spooky stories I’ve been told over the years has the banshee laughed.

I sit up slowly, heart still racing like I’m competing in the Irish Derby, just in time to see the horrendous evil spirit cackling away, doubled over and clutching her stomach.

Only then do I see that she’s wearing a purple tank top.

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