The doorbell rang. “Well, thought Gabriela, “beasts wouldn’t ring the doorbell, right?” Having reassured herself, she got up and went to the door. She opened it.
“Hi, Gabriela! I decided to come after all.” Gabriela’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, but as she started to mutter, “Oh, …”, Sophie brushed past her as if she were at home. “Well, yes, they will ring the doorbell”, flitted through Gabriela’s mind and she had to suppress a smirk.
“Cinnamon”, mumbled Jared, Gabriela’s little brother, or more precisely her little bother, who was playing with a mechanical baseball game on the rug, his back to the door.
Gabriela turned to Jared and hissed quietly, “I thought we agreed you wouldn’t do that with my friends!”
Even more quietly, to himself, Jared whispered, “But the smell of her perfume is a bit strong.” Jared had an unusually sensitive and accurate nose.
After Xenarthra (“Lavender”, mumbled Jared to himself) and Coco (“Peaches? Really??” from Jared) breezed in the door, Gabriela was relieved. All three so-called friends decided to show up for her party after all. As she was closing the door, it suddenly became darker. A heavy cloud passed in front of the moon. “Odd,” thought Gabriela, slightly worried, “I thought it was supposed to be a clear night.” But then she thought, “Well, it might be even better like this.” And smiled to herself, though a little unsettled.
As they moved into the living room, Gabriela listened to them all chat at once, each the center of her own bubble. “This will work out fine,” thought Gabriela.
She waited for a brief lull, then said loudly, “OK, let’s go to the dining room, I have set up tea and cakes to get us started. They all turned to look at her with raised eyebrows, and Sophie was on the edge of saying something snarky, but Gabriela quickly led the way and droned on about the lovely tea cakes she had specially made for the party, and that there really is no poison in the tea, she promised.
The table was covered by a paper cloth with orange leaves printed on a black background.“Uh, … like, … very, … uh, … Halloween,” Xenarthra said slowly. Four places were set around the table, with name cards in front of each. Orange muffins, pretending to be tea cakes, sat on plates at each setting. Empty black tea cups rested on black saucers beside the plates.
After some shuffling for everyone to get sorted, they all sat down and eyed the tea cakes on their plates suspiciously. As they were looking around,
a ghost entered the room, glided across to the stairs, and went soundlessly up the stairs. All three guests stared with eyes and mouths wide open, unable to utter more than “Uh… uh…uh…”. Gabriela said matter-of-factly, “Oh, that is the Ghost of Mrs. Muir. She lives in the attic.
She is harmless. Don’t pay attention to her, or she might come back.” The three girls gave Gabriela astonished and suspicious looks, but she seemed not to notice.
“But… like, she was holding a trowel?”, said Xenartha a little too loudly.
“That is odd,” mused Gabriela. “Ghosts have no body, I am not sure how she could hold it. Are you sure you saw that? I didn’t. She never had one before.”
“Like, who is she,” asked Coco.
“She used to own this house. She built it with her husband,” answered Gabriela.
“I hate to ask, but, like, what happened to him?” from Sophie.
“Apparently, he was murdered, stabbed, only 2 years after they finished the house, about 12 years ago. She died just last year, before I bought the house. I knew her, she was my piano teacher for years. She was famous in the neighborhood as a gardener.”
Sophie mumbled quietly “Probably, like, with a garden trowel.” Two girl laughed uneasily, the third pretended not to notice.
With a quickly mumbled “Shall I be Mum?”, Gabriela poured out the tea for everyone. The three guests looked uncertainly around until Gabriela picked up her tea and took a swallow, smiling a little too pleasantly. Then they all relaxed a little, and pulled apart their muffins. And that is when
the screaming started.
Tiny black spiders poured out of Xenarthra’s muffin. “Oh, so sorry,” said Gabriela, as she quickly placed a very large pot lid over the muffin and spiders. Sophie looked at Gabriela with eyes very wide and eyebrows almost touching her hair line. “Where did, like, the pot lid …,” she started to ask, but Gabriela quickly called out loudly “Jared, please get the vacuum cleaner! Quickly, please, we have an outbreak of spiders again.”
“Again??” Sophie asked, more to herself than expecting an answer.
Jared got up, well, kind of slowly, and went to the hall closet, picking up something in the kitchen as he went through. As he opened the closet to get the vacuum cleaner, he mumbled, “Why did it have to be spiders?” But he brought the portable vacuum cleaner into the dining room, Gabriela lifted the pot lid, and Jared sucked up all the spiders, and much of the muffin, before any spiders could escape. Then he poured out some borax onto the table and sucked that up, with “That will kill them, no worries.” The girls did not look convinced.
But Coco was rather more worried than was good for her, looking a little green. She had taken a bite of her muffin, and it tasted… metallic, perhaps. “I… uh… don’t feel … like…,” she mumbled as she went looking for the bathroom. “On the other side of the stairs,” Gabriela said.
Coco found the bathroom, but it didn’t help.
The other girls came running, and Coco was huddled on the floor in the doorway, facing away from the bathroom, her face in her hands. The bathroom was decorated with clown wallpaper, the mirror had a big clown face drawn on it, and a life-sized clown doll was sitting on the toilet. Coco had a bad case of Coulrophobia, or intense fear of clowns. Gabriela was almost smiling.
Gabriela bent down and talked softly to Coco, then pulled her up and took her to the other bathroom at the back of the bedroom. She waited there for Coco until they both went back to the table.
As they were sitting down, taking tiny sips of restorative tea, it suddenly became lighter, as the clouds passed from the moon. Then,
they heard the lonely howl of a wolf, and Sophie quickly plugged her ears and sagged to the floor in a curl, softly crying. She was afraid of wolves, deathly afraid. The sky darkened again, and the wind
started howling. “Odd, I didn’t expect that,” thought Gabriela. “But it fits.”
“What is that?” asked the three guests at once.
Gabriela looked genuinely surprised and not a little unsettled. “Uh… I don’t know. There is no one upstairs, must be a window open upstairs…? Jared, did you leave a window open in your bedroom?”
“Of course not,” from the living room. “I never open my windows.”
“Must be the ghost,” said Sophie, trying to laugh, pretending to be brave.
They heard the wind again, and then the thumping, and Gabriela decided she had better shut whatever is open. She started up the stairs, a bit hesitantly, and breathing a bit heavier than usual. Not to be left behind with the spiders, clowns, and wolves, the other three followed closely behind.
They looked in the three bedrooms on the second floor, and nothing was loose or open, and
they heard the thumping above them. So they continued up to the third floor.
“No one ever comes up here, just storage of old musty stuff, but something must have come loose,” Gabriela said, a little stiffly. There was only one door. Gabriela paused with her hand on the doorknob, took a slow, deep breath, and started to open it.
“Isn’t … isn’t this where the ghost lives?” whispered Xenarthra?
The room was dark, and the others stayed well back as Gabriela stepped into the room reaching for the light switch.
They heard her scream, then she fell backwards and lay there, motionless.
Covered in blood.
A blood-covered trowel rolled to the floor beside her. Everyone froze, terrified. The wind stopped, everything, even time, stood as still as death.
“Hey, you eating hot dogs without me?”, Jared whined, as he topped the stairs. Before anyone could recover and stop him, he stepped toward the body and said, “I can smell the … “. He froze, staring at Gabriela, then slowly finished with “…ketchup.”