Famous Last Words Read online

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  It was coming from my bedroom door.

  When I heard the next knock, I forced myself to sit up straight and called, “Hello?”

  Maybe it was Jonathan. A lot of what he did was kind of formal and stilted. In theory, he could knock like that. It almost suited him.

  But Jonathan didn’t answer me.

  No one did.

  The three knocks finished, but the sound seemed to hang in the air.

  I went down the short, terrible list of suspects: an intruder — a robber, maybe, or a serial killer. Or a ghost.

  Only … the alarm was on, so that ruled out a human.

  It’s not a ghost, I told myself, because I am done with ghosts.

  But even as I thought the words, I felt my so-called “normal” life slipping out of existence. I’d been fooling myself. Ignorance may be bliss, but at the end of the day it’s still ignorance.

  And my ghost had decided it didn’t want to be ignored any longer.

  I made myself step one foot out of bed. Then the other foot. And I forced my legs, one in front of the other, to walk to the door just as the sound came again:

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  As quietly as I could, I dropped to the floor, pressed my cheek against the polished wood, and peered through the narrow opening.

  I was fully prepared to see a pair of ghastly, rotted feet. Maybe even shriveled undead fingers worming their way under the door toward me …

  But what I saw was red. Not blood — it was solid; it had form. But I couldn’t tell what it was. Maybe a red carpet? I thought of walking the red carpet the night before with Marnie. Maybe this was a dream.

  I sat back and stared at the door until almost a minute had passed since the last set of knocks.

  Okay, Willa. Listen up.

  You are a reasonably intelligent human. You have some emotional issues to work through, sure, but you’ll probably be okay eventually. You’ll finish high school, go to a decent college, get a degree in something, and then enter the world as an adult. You have many choices and opportunities ahead of you. You can do anything you want to do with your life.

  Except for one thing …

  You are NOT opening that door.

  Go back to bed. Go back to bed this instant.

  In slow motion, I rose to my feet and turned away from the door, away from the foolish temptation to prove to myself that I wasn’t going crazy. Everything I’d done so far to prove to myself that I wasn’t crazy just ended up making me feel even crazier.

  I began to walk back to the bed, taking care not to make the merest hint of a sound as I went.

  Behind me, the door opened by itself.

  Don’t turn around. Don’t turn around.

  How exactly, I wondered, does a corpse stand? Would she be leaning on the wall? Would she be held up, dangling in midair, by some supernatural energy? Maybe she lacked the strength to stand, and had dragged herself down the hall … so when I turned to look at her, she’d be lying on the floor, reaching her arms toward me hungrily.

  Maybe she was already following me into the room.

  Maybe she was right behind me.

  At last, the horror of not knowing became greater than the horror of knowing, and I turned around.

  But the room was empty.

  The door was open.

  There was no one there.

  Only a trail of rose petals, red and plush. A solid blanket of them, a foot wide, leading away down the hall and disappearing in the inky darkness.

  I could go wake up Mom and Jonathan, but I knew from the bathtub incident that there was a very decent chance the hall would be perfectly clean when I brought them back upstairs. I could take a photo, or scoop an armful of flowers, but what would that prove? The obvious assumption would be that I had done this myself. For attention, or as a weird prank, or whatever. Face it — “crazy ghost” is never going to be people’s go-to explanation. Not when there’s a teenager in the house to take the blame.

  Leyta’s advice ran through my head:

  You just have to work through it.

  I walked alongside the trail of roses, keeping one hand on the wall, because I needed to feel connected to something solid, something I could be sure actually existed.

  I decided that if the trail led to Jonathan’s office, I wouldn’t follow it inside.

  But it didn’t lead there. It led to the third bedroom, the one directly across from the top of the stairs.

  I stopped about a foot from the door.

  Then I took a step back.

  From the other side of that door came a soft:

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  Before I could take another step back, it came again — a little faster, a little harder:

  Knock-knock-knock!

  I hardly had time to catch my breath before the sound turned furious:

  KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK!!!

  Every corner of my consciousness was scared — scared of whatever was doing this, scared that Mom and Jonathan would wake up — and absolutely terrified of what was waiting for me, beckoning me inside.

  But if I turned back, I would never get up the nerve to come this far again.

  Get through it. That’s all you can do. There are no shortcuts in the flow.

  This is your journey.

  I opened the door.

  This room was a mirror image of my own. The bed was to my right, and the bathroom was to my left. I got the feeling that I’d warped into an alternate universe.

  The trail of petals stopped just inside the door.

  As I crossed the threshold, a headache pierced cleanly through my temples, as if I’d been shot with a poisoned arrow. I pressed my fingers against my eyes, trying to ward it off.

  Then I heard:

  Drip … drip … drip …

  I flipped the light switch and the overhead light came to life — but only after hesitating for a second. Like some force was deciding whether I got to have a light on or not, and it finally took mercy on me.

  I followed the dripping sound to the bathroom, knowing what I would find: the bathtub full to overflowing. A serene surface. And reflected in that surface, the face of the ghost that had wrapped its fate around mine like a boa constrictor.

  So I went in, mainly because I was beginning to realize that I had no choice.

  The light in the bathroom wouldn’t turn on. But all right, no big deal. The window over the bathtub let in pale moonlight, and the light from the bedroom spilled through the door. It wasn’t ideal, but I could still see — enough to glance around and be sure that there wasn’t a corpse, or a murderer.

  Just a ghost.

  I walked over to the tub and looked down at the surface of the water.

  Perfectly smooth and serene, like I’d known it would be.

  “I would really appreciate, at this point,” I said out loud, “some guidance as to why you’ve brought me here.”

  Drip.

  “Awesome,” I said. “Wow, thank you, that is so incredibly useful.”

  Now that I’d found my voice, I couldn’t stop talking. Getting the words out slowed the chaotic whirring in my brain.

  “What we have before us is a bathtub full of water. And I can only imagine that you intend to do another abracadabra thing where I look away and the water’s gone or overflowing or … I don’t know, turned to vanilla pudding, maybe?” I closed my eyes and turned around. “So why don’t you do your little trick and we can get on with things?”

  I counted to five, then spun around.

  The bathtub was not dry.

  But it wasn’t just full of water anymore.

  The water was thick with rose petals. Thousands of them. In fact, it was more like someone had filled the tub with rose petals first and then filled the tiny spaces between them with water.

  “This … sucks,” I whispered. Then I raised my voice slightly. “Hey, newsflash: I am not putting any part of my body into that water.”

  There was, unsurprising
ly, no answer. I stayed a good four feet away, staring at the water in a state of highly uneasy expectancy.

  “Never,” I said. “No body parts. No hands, no feet … I’m not going to duck my head underwater and look for your corpse. So if that’s what you’re hoping for, let it go.”

  Suddenly, the rose petals began to move.

  Something was in the tub.

  And whatever it was, it was coming to the surface.

  I staggered back and ran into the counter, gripping it to keep myself from passing out. Behind me, the bathroom door slammed, shutting me in and eliminating about 80 percent of the light.

  And in the sudden darkness, the water trembled.

  I couldn’t tear my eyes away, anticipating the moment that a hand dripping with decayed flesh would push free of the petals.

  Finally, the petals parted. But what came up between them wasn’t any kind of hand….

  It was a piece of paper.

  I looked around for something I could use to fish it out — a toilet brush or a plunger. But the bathroom was devoid of anything remotely useful.

  I had to know what was on that paper. I knew in my gut that I needed to see it. I also had a feeling that, no matter how hard I tried, the bathroom door wouldn’t open for me unless I followed these ghostly instructions.

  I stepped closer. The page was crumpled, and a corner of it floated up out of the water. If I was careful, I could grab it by that corner and pull it out without even touching a single flower petal.

  The room was dark, but the tub was lit in a slanted rectangle of moonlight. My heart had taken over my whole body, beating so hard I swayed on my feet.

  Slowly, slowly, slowly, I reached my hand down toward the piece of paper.

  I was a foot away. Then ten inches. Eight. Six.

  Four.

  My fingers hovered over my target. The roses in the tub drifted in a slow circle, stirred by some supernatural current.

  I grabbed the exposed corner of the paper and yanked it up so fast that I splashed myself full in the face with water.

  But I got it. And not so much as a single body part had I submerged in the evil haunted bathtub. I’d given the spirit what it wanted….

  Now the door would open and let me out.

  Feeling a thin silver lining of triumph, I sighed and turned to walk out of the bathroom.

  That’s when it hit me. Not a physical thing, but a force, like a powerful burst of wind — my own private tornado. The impact slammed against my torso and propelled me backward, until I lost my footing.

  As my feet came out from under me, the backs of my legs struck something hard and smooth, and before I had time to take a breath deep enough to scream, I plunged backward into the bathtub.

  The rose petals were so soft. It felt as if thousands of gentle fingers were touching my hands and arms and face and throat and feet, and the parts of my back and stomach that were exposed when my pajama top floated around me in the water. My screaming/breathing reflex showed up just late enough that I opened my lips and nearly choked on a mouthful of wet roses. I sprang out of the tub, about four feet straight into the air, miraculously not landing face-first against the corner of the bathroom counter.

  Catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I thought for a second that I was seeing another terrible specter: a girl with matted dark hair, white skin glowing in the dark room, hideous black bruises all over her body like spots of decay.

  But nope, it was just me. Soaking wet and covered in rose petals.

  The door opened without being touched, which was not a comfort. I fought the urge to scream and race down the stairs to Mom’s room, and wake her and Jonathan with my story of what had happened.

  Instead, I forced myself to walk slowly — not calmly, but slowly — toward my open bedroom door. I didn’t bother to avoid the rose petals this time. I shuffled right through them. They clung to my wet skin and covered my feet like moist, flaking socks.

  They seemed as real as anything else you could touch and smell and see. But when I had passed back into my own room, I knew without having to look that they would be gone when I did turn around.

  All that remained to prove anything had happened was the sopping-wet hot mess that was me — and the soggy piece of paper clutched in my right hand.

  Under the bright lights of my bathroom vanity, I managed to uncrumple the page and gently stretch it back to its normal dimensions.

  I’d never seen a screenplay before, but I knew that’s what I was looking at. There were character names and lines of description and action.

  It started in the middle of a scene in which two people were eating dinner.

  One of them was a woman. Her name was Charice.

  And one of them was a man.

  His name was Henry.

  And the last thing on the page was a line of dialogue.

  CHARICE

  This is the kind of dream you don’t wake up from, Henry.

  I managed to hold off until seven o’clock in the morning before texting Wyatt. I figured someone as OCD as he was had to be the early-bird-gets-the-worm type — even on a Sunday.

  I typed Are you up? and leaned against the headboard to watch my phone for his reply. Ironically, that was when the sleep I’d waited all night for decided to sneak up on me. My heavy lids slipped shut as I stared at the darkened screen.

  Then the phone vibrated, startling me back to full awareness.

  Yes. Everything okay?

  I replied: Ha ha ha ha NO.

  Need to talk?

  Yeah, I typed. Where can we meet? Not my house.

  There was a pause, and then his reply came through: Mine?

  I must admit that I was dying of curiosity about the home life that would produce a specimen like Wyatt. Were his parents studiously brilliant, obsessed with research and The Truth? Tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists? Lifelong paint-chip eaters?

  I was about to reply Yes, but I guess I took a little too long, because another pair of messages popped up from Wyatt:

  Promise I’m still not the killer.

  Murderer’s honor.

  At eight o’clock, I slipped on a pair of flip-flops, grabbed my house key, phone, and the monstrosity of a backpack, and set out for Wyatt’s house. I left a note for Mom explaining that I was meeting Marnie, which I knew she’d believe since (as far as she knew) I’d never gone anywhere else.

  The Sheppards’ house was only about a five-minute walk away, and Wyatt was out front when I rounded the corner.

  “What happened?” His eyes darkened with concern when he saw me. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Is that supposed to be a joke?” I asked.

  He looked startled for a second, then realized what he’d said. “Oh,” he said. “No. Sorry. Nice overalls, by the way.”

  I was wearing my softest long-sleeved black T-shirt and Mom’s overalls, with a chunky blue scarf wrapped around my neck — the fashion equivalent of comfort food. Wyatt wore jeans and a red plaid flannel shirt, untucked. His feet were bare. The effect was kind of mountain-mannish, if mountain men wore horn-rimmed glasses.

  Inside, Wyatt’s house was starkly modern, a two-story rectangle made of glass and wood. The whole back wall was made of floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over trees, at precisely the right height so you couldn’t tell you were in a city at all. It felt like being in a tree house, or a cabin somewhere out in the wilderness.

  “This place is cool,” I said. “What do your parents do?”

  “My mom’s an artist,” he said. “My dad’s a … consultant. Are you okay going up to my room?”

  I nodded, and followed him up a set of stairs that didn’t even have a handrail. You could have fallen right off. When we reached the second floor, I found myself facing a wall that was covered in dozens of black-and-white photos of Wyatt at different ages.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “For the record, I’ve asked them to change this,” he said. “But they’re kind of attached to it.�
��

  His bedroom was straight ahead, and I almost hesitated before crossing through the door. But Wyatt went straight toward a leather sofa in the corner of the room and gestured for me to sit. Then he pulled over a bright orange plastic chair for himself.

  I sat cross-legged on the sofa and rested my chin in my hands, staring at the floor. “It’s in my house,” I whispered. “It won’t leave me alone. I think it’s trying to kill me —”

  “Whoa, whoa,” he said. “Slow down. Take a breath. Start at the beginning.”

  I took two deep breaths, but they were that weird jerky kind of breath that happens right before you bust out in epic sobs. Somehow I managed to hold all that in and describe everything that had happened the night before, starting with the knocking and ending with the screenplay.

  “So it is a line from a script.” Wyatt sat back and looked out the windows at the trees.

  “It’s a scene where they’re eating dinner,” I said. “Just like in my vision. It can’t be a coincidence. It has to be another murder.”

  “Okay, yes, that’s what it sounds like.” Wyatt shook his head. “But there are no unsolved murders fitting that profile anywhere in southern California. I checked after we met with Leyta last week.”

  “Then maybe … maybe it hasn’t happened yet.”

  “So now you’re seeing the future?”

  “I don’t know, Wyatt,” I said, practically hissing in aggravation. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. For all I know, none of this is real. I could be strapped to a bed in a mental institution. You could be a figment of my —”

  “I’m not a figment,” he said. “You’re not making this up. You’re not strapped to a bed in a mental ward. You’re here with me.”

  I half laughed and looked up into his wide brown eyes, thinking he was joking. But he seemed perfectly sincere. I sat back and tried to relax. Something about his steady, unflappable presence centered me.

  “Let’s focus on what we know,” Wyatt went on. “There’s a force in your house trying to call your attention to this particular scene, which appears to be from a movie. So the next logical step is to figure out what the movie is.”

  “I brought my laptop.” I unzipped the monstrosity, pulled the computer out of its neoprene sleeve, and set it in my lap. Wyatt leaned closer to look at the screen. I half expected him to try to snatch the computer away so he could apply his superior research skills, but he didn’t.