Haunting the Night

A Past Midnight Novella

Mara Purnhagen

www.miraink.co.uk

Charlotte Silver has been through hell.

Her mom’s in a coma. She may have caused the death of a young man. And now her friend Avery wants her to tackle going to Prom? Not going to happen, even if she is dying to spend some alone time with her boyfriend, Noah. Instead, Charlotte needs to find some answers to a few nagging questions—why was her family attacked? Will her mother survive? And is there a creature from the Other Side coming for her? Soon enough, Charlotte’s search for the truth becomes a race against time. But she may just find the sign she’s been looking for all along….

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

About the Author

Chapter One

I refused to wear a bloodstained dress to Prom. “No way,” I told Avery. “I’m not going.”

“Please, Charlotte,” my best friend implored. “It’s your last chance.”

But I had made up my mind. The event I had spent months looking forward to no longer held any luster. I wasn’t going to my senior prom, and nothing Avery said was going to change my mind. But that didn’t keep her from trying.

“It’s my one and only time as head of the prom committee,” she said. “I’ve put so much work into it. And you’ve helped me a ton. I need you there.”

The only things I had helped with included tossing glitter onto neon posters and agreeing with Avery’s choice of table decorations. “Sorry.” I shook my head. “It’s not gonna happen.”

She sighed and set down the magazine she had been flipping through, startling Dante, her little dog. It was Friday afternoon, and we were hanging out in her room before dinner. It had become part of my new routine to go to her house after school. Dad didn’t return home from the hospital until seven every night, and I didn’t like to stay in my house alone.

“We can get you a new dress, you know.”

I rolled my eyes at the suggestion. Did she really think that was it? That if I bought a new, blood-free dress, everything would be okay? I knew Avery. She was a problem solver and a good friend. She couldn’t possibly believe that a sparkling new gown would fix everything that had happened over the past four weeks.

“I won’t be in town that weekend, anyway,” I said. “I’ve already made plans to visit Annalise in Charleston. I leave on Wednesday.”

Missing three days of school would have been a big deal to my parents at one point. But Dad agreed that I needed a little time away and he’d worked something out with the principal.

“You can go to Charleston anytime! There won’t be another senior Prom.”

She was persistent, but I was stubborn. We had reached an impasse, so I tried to change the subject.

“Thanks for those history notes. I think I did okay on the quiz today.”

Avery snorted. “I don’t understand why they can’t give you a pass on those things. You have enough to think about without having to study for pointless tests.”

But I liked studying. It gave me something to focus on other than my mom. And my teachers had given me a free pass for a few weeks. At first, I couldn’t even hold a pen because of the stitches sewn into my palm. It hurt too much. So I was allowed to take oral exams and given extra credit work. After my hand finally healed, it was back to my regular class work.

I examined my hand now. The jagged pink scars would be unnoticeable to anyone not looking for them. But I noticed them. Every day I saw them, and was reminded of how they got there.

“Hey.” Avery’s voice was soft. “You okay?”

I closed my hand. “I’m fine.”

It was my standard lie, and Avery wasn’t buying it. “It wasn’t your fault. You know that.”

But I didn’t know that, despite my friends and family assuring me of my innocence on a daily basis. My careless mistakes had landed both my parents in the hospital. I had endangered my friends.

And I was the reason why a young man now lay in a coffin.

Avery’s phone rang. She shot me an apologetic glance. “Prom stuff. I have to take this.”

I walked over to her bookshelf while Avery discussed tiaras with her caller. “We settled this. I don’t want anything tacky, and that one is definitely tacky.” There was a pause. “No, I said tasteful. A two-foot crown is not tasteful, and I doubt it’ll sit right on the queen’s head. Go back to our first choice, okay?”

She sighed and hung up. “Sometimes I think we should switch from Prom Committee to Prom Dictatorship.”

I laughed. “All hail Avery, Queen of the Prom.”

She waved her hand. “Please. I withdrew my name from the ballot. I’m not in the running for Prom Queen.”

“Really?” I was surprised. Avery could easily win the votes needed to earn the coveted crown.

“I was Homecoming Queen last year. It wasn’t quite the life-altering thrill I thought it would be, and I doubt Prom will be any different. Someone else should win this title, someone who actually wants it.”

“That’s noble of you.”

“Not really.” She frowned. “Based on the initial votes, Harris Abbott is a shoo-in for Prom King, and there’s no way I’m going to stand next to him on a platform and smile after what he did to you.”

What Harris Abbott had done to me was something I wanted to completely forget. And for the most part, I had. We had dated briefly after New Year’s, until I discovered he already had a girlfriend and was simply using me to help her. Or rather, he was using me to get to my semi-famous ghost-hunting parents. Mom and Dad worked to debunk some of the world’s most famous ghost stories. Their books and TV deals meant that we spent little time living in one place—until last year, when we arrived in South Carolina and I accidentally got a glimpse of the other side.

“Harris doesn’t matter to me anymore,” I told Avery now.

“Good. He shouldn’t.” She shrugged. “Doesn’t mean I want to be anywhere near him, though.”

A glance out the window told me that it was later than I thought. Even though I lived just a short walk up the street, I didn’t want to be outside when it got dark.

“I should go,” I said, standing up. “My dad will be home soon.”

Avery started to say something, but stopped. “Okay. I’ll call you later.”

The sun was setting fast as I hurried up the hill, and even though it was warm outside, I shivered a little. It wasn’t the approaching dark that frightened me. It was the things that could hide within it.

When I first saw the strange shadow, it was crouched across the street. From my view at the living room window, it appeared at first to be a small dog, about the size of Dante but black in color. My heart pounded with the recent memory of Marcus, who had crawled down the street in his possessed state only two weeks earlier. But this was a smaller creature, too little to be a full-grown man. Still, something about it reminded me of Marcus.

I began seeing the shadow every day. My phantom stalker moved with the speed of a wild cat and appeared larger each time I saw it. Sometimes I caught only a glimpse of the thing as it streaked down the street. Other times, it simply sat on the sidewalk. I knew it was there for me, that it was watching me, waiting. But waiting for what? I had no idea, but it terrified me. And that was the main reason I needed to go to Charleston. I had to get away from it. Maybe if I was gone for a few days, the shadow would give up its vigil and leave me alone.

I kept my head down and I approached my house, unwilling to sneak a peek across the street. If the shadow thing was there, I did not want to see it. Focused on unlocking the front door, I didn’t even notice that Noah was sitting on the front porch until he spoke.

“Hey.”

I gasped and dropped the keys. He came over to me, taking my shaky hands in his. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It’s okay. I’m fine.” I smiled, but I knew he could see through it.

“Did you see it again?”

Only Noah knew about the shadow creature. And even though he had never spotted it, he believed that I was truly seeing something. It was nice to have someone trust my words even if they didn’t make sense.

“No, but it’s getting dark,” I said. “It usually makes an appearance right around now.”

Noah picked up my keys and unlocked the front door. “Well, I’m here now. You’re not going to be alone.”

Relief filled me as we went inside. Noah began turning on lights while I dropped my backpack to the floor and took off my shoes. “How long had you been out on the porch?” I asked him.

He turned on a lamp in the dining room and joined me on the sofa. “About a half hour. I stayed after school today and got a ride over. I figured you were at Avery’s.”

“You should have come over.”

He shook his head. “And interrupt girl time? No chance.”

“I could have used you.” I snuggled closer to him and he draped an arm around me. “She’s really pushing the Prom thing.”

“Yeah, she’s been after me, too. She thinks I can convince you to go.”

I looked at him, my eyes immediately finding the small bruise on his neck. I was waiting for it to fade and disappear, but the reminder of the attack we endured four weeks earlier was still there.

“If it matters to you, I’ll go.”

He kissed my forehead. “What matters to me is that you’re okay.”

I reached for the remote and turned on the TV. As I settled back into Noah, I heard his stomach growl. “I forgot about dinner,” I said. “You want to order something?”

“Sure. Anything but pizza.”

I was sick of pizza, as well. Neither my dad nor I were very good in the kitchen, and we ended up eating pizza three times a week. Noah and I decided on Chinese food. He placed the order while I called to check in on Dad.

“I think I’m going to stay here tonight.” His voice was laced with exhaustion. “We’re trying out some new medication and I want to be here.”

“Okay.”

“Shane will be over soon to stay with you. Have you had dinner yet?”

I looked over to the kitchen, where Noah was on the phone. “We’re ordering it now. What about you? Have you eaten?”

I worried about my dad, who seemed to exist solely on coffee and stale sandwiches from the hospital cafeteria. He’d lost weight over the past month. His face was leaner and he always wore a belt now.

“I’ll get something from the vending machine,” Dad said.

“You can’t live on candy bars. I’m going to start packing you a lunch.”

“Sounds good. I have to go, Charlotte. The doctor’s here.”

I hung up, wondering if he’d really heard me. When Noah came back into the room, I told him about my concerns. He agreed that my dad needed to eat better and offered to recruit his mom to help. “She loves cooking for you guys.”

“She’s already done so much for us,” I protested. “I can’t ask her for any more. Besides, I need to take care of my dad. It’s not your mom’s responsibility.”

“And it’s not yours, either.” Noah pulled me into a hug. “You have enough going on as it is. Let people help you. They want to.”

I reluctantly agreed. We watched TV as we waited for our food to arrive, flipping between the news and a comedy special. The doorbell rang while Noah was in the bathroom. I grabbed some money from my purse and opened the door, where I was greeted with a man holding two brown paper bags of food. The scent of garlic chicken made my mouth water. I paid the delivery guy and took the bags, then set them on the hallway table so I could shut the door. When I turned around, the delivery guy was gone.

But the shadow creature was there, sitting across the street.

It was now the size of a German shepherd. My hand felt frozen to the doorknob as I stared at the thing. I could make out two distinctive legs. The shape resembled a man crouching, and although I could not see a clear face, I knew in my terrified gut that it was looking directly at me.

Noah came out of the bathroom. “Smells great,” he said as he approached me. “Charlotte? Are you okay?”

I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t do anything but gaze across the street. The shadow creature was slowly becoming lighter, melting into the night. By the time Noah stood beside me to also look across the street, it was gone.

I let go of the doorknob and stepped back. “It was there,” I whispered. “It was just there.”

Noah stepped onto the porch and scanned up and down the street. Then he came back inside and shut the door. “Come on, let’s eat.”

I nodded, grateful that he didn’t state the obvious: there was nothing there. But it had been there, and at the rate it seemed to be growing, I wondered how much time I had left before it was the size of an elephant. Or maybe it would stop once it took the form of a full-grown man. I didn’t know—and I didn’t want to find out.

I had to get away and leave it behind me. Charleston would be my escape. Next Wednesday could not come soon enough.

Chapter Two

“King me.”

Mills frowned as he tried to make sense of my latest move. “Was that legal?”

I was already collecting my red pieces and preparing for the next game. Mills had tried to teach me chess, but he was very good at the game and had no patience as I struggled to remember which way the knight could move. Also, it bugged him that I called it a horse. He gave up and we stuck to checkers as a way to occupy ourselves as we passed the hours in Mom’s hospital room.

I enjoyed spending time with Mills. He and Annalise had been dating for almost a year, the longest my sister had ever dated anyone. And the more I got to know him, the more I liked him. Annalise usually visited at the same time, but there were times like today when she had school responsibilities that kept her in Charleston. When that happened, Mills came by himself and met me at the hospital. He never complained or acted like he was doing me some huge favor. He was there every Saturday, with or without my sister, and we played games or talked for hours while Mom lay comatose in her bed. It was nice to have something to focus on other than the persistent beeping of Mom’s monitors and the whoosh of her breathing machine.

Checkers was also a way for me to keep my thoughts from wandering to the shadow creature. The sight of it the night before had rattled me throughout dinner with Noah and appeared once in my dreams, where it did nothing more than watch me from my closet. Still, it was enough to frighten me into consciousness. So far, I had only witnessed it outside. Was it about to begin visiting me in my room?

Mills set up his pieces. “I’m keeping an eye on you this time.”

“I don’t cheat! You just can’t stand it that I’m better than you at this.”

He smiled. “I’ve been holding back. Prepare to lose, Charlotte.”

“Bring it.”

He won the next game, but I won the round after that. We were setting up the board for a decisive fourth match when one of Mom’s monitors began beeping too fast. Mills and I immediately turned around. The high-pitched noise was getting worse and a red light flashed on one of the machines.

Mills got up and strode to the call button. Before he could push it, three nurses and a doctor swarmed through the doors.

“You need to wait outside,” said one of the nurses to Mills. He nodded. I couldn’t move, though. Fear kept me frozen to the little table with its waiting checkerboard. Mills put one arm around my shoulders and guided me out of the room, away from the tightly controlled chaos of the medical team working on Mom.

Once we were outside the room, Mills ushered me to the end of the hallway. “Let’s sit down over here, okay?” I slumped into a hard vinyl chair. “I’m going to call your dad and let him know that something’s going on.”

I nodded and wondered what Mills would say. Something was going on, but what? None of the words the nurses had recited to one another made sense to me. I wasn’t even sure they were speaking a real language.

The clock bolted to the wall ticked too loudly. I watched the red minute hand as it clunked its way in a perfect circle. In the corner, Mills was talking on his cell phone.

I hated waiting like this, without knowing what was happening, but it had become a kind of job. As a family, we had decided that Mom shouldn’t be alone all day. We took shifts, with Dad visiting Sunday through Thursday. Shane and Trisha came on Fridays. I came on Saturdays and any day I didn’t have school. We talked to her, reading aloud from magazines and newspapers. But after a while, we did other things, too. Sometimes I worked on schoolwork. Dad often brought books. The point was to be there in case something like this occurred. It was an unspoken agreement between all of us: if the very worst happened, Mom would not be alone.

Mills shut his phone and sat down next to me. “Your dad and Shane are on their way. They should be here in twenty minutes.”

“Good. Thanks.”

“Do you need anything? Are you hungry?”

“No.” I leaned to the side so I could look down the hall. “I want to be here when the doctor comes out.”

“Sure.”

Four minutes passed. “I really hate that clock,” I muttered.

Mills chuckled. “I was thinking the exact same thing. I wish it had a mute button.”

This made me smile. I leaned into him, and he put his arm around me. He knew enough not to say that it was all going to be okay or that he was sure everything was fine. He knew that the only thing I needed was a hug.

After three more minutes, a nurse emerged from Mom’s room. Mills and I stood up.

“The doctor will be with you shortly,” she told us. “Your mother is stable right now.”

Right now. Did that mean she wouldn’t be stable later?

“Thank you,” Mills said. “We’ll wait here.”

The nurse left. I didn’t want to sit down again. Instead, I paced the tiny waiting room.

“We’ll know something soon,” Mills reassured me. “She pulled out of it. That’s positive.”

“Yeah.”

I stared out the row of windows lining the wall, even though the only view it offered was of another wing of the hospital.

“I wish we had a sign,” I said, letting my forehead rest against the glass. “I wish I knew how all of this ended.”

I wasn’t sure that Mills had heard me. Another minute passed before he spoke. “Did I ever tell you about my mom?”

I turned around. “No.” He had told me a few stories about his dad, who had taught him chess, and I knew he had five cousins, all girls. But he had never mentioned his mother.

“She was killed in a car accident when I was ten.”

I moved away from the windows. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

He shrugged. “It’s not something I really talk about. But I’m bringing it up now for a reason.”

Mills waited until I returned to my chair before he began speaking again. “It was hard. We all struggled after she died. It didn’t even seem real to me until right before my eleventh birthday. It hit me that she wouldn’t be there to bake the cake or sing to me or decorate my doorway.” He smiled. “It was this thing she did every year. She always strung streamers around my bedroom door and taped balloons to the wall. It was something I loved, especially the balloons.”

Mills awoke on his birthday, sad but hopeful. He opened his bedroom door, wanting more than anything to see the familiar streamers curled with care, and the bunches of balloons taped to the frame. There was nothing.

His dad tried, he said. There was a chocolate cake served after his favorite dinner and a new bike wrapped in newspaper waiting for him on the back porch. But without his mom, Mill’s birthday was an unhappy one. He went to bed early, desperately wanting the day to be over. It was summer, and the sun hadn’t set yet. Mills sat on his bed, thinking about his mom and wishing that she could be there.

“I wanted a sign,” he said. “Just one thing to help me know that she was okay, that she still loved me and remembered my birthday.” He shook his head. “I know it sounds stupid, but I was eleven, and it meant so much.”

“It doesn’t sound stupid at all,” I said, and I meant it. How can it be stupid to miss someone, to want more than anything to know that they are still around in some way?

“I wanted a sign,” Mills repeated. “I asked for a sign. And I got it.”

He pulled out his wallet. It was made of soft brown leather, worn at the corners where he folded it in half. He opened it as if he was going to retrieve a dollar bill, but instead of pulling out money, he showed me a piece of what looked like a slip of silver foil.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I was staring out my window.” Mills looked at the thing in his hand. “There was a tree outside, so close that its branches used to scrape against the glass.”

It was still light out, he said, but beginning to get dark. His window was open to let in the summer air. He got up and went down the hall to brush his teeth. And when he returned, it was there. Stuck in the branches of the tree was a single balloon.

It was a big, silver Mylar balloon emblazoned with the words Happy Birthday in a rainbow of colors.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Mills said. “It was right there, so close that I could touch it.”

He punched out the window screen and pulled the balloon inside. “I asked for a sign, and I received it. And this—” here he held out the piece of shiny silver “—this is what I keep with me every day, no matter what.”

He let me hold the shard of balloon that he had saved. One side was silver, but the other was printed with a red “B.”

“I keep that with me. The B is to remind me to believe.” He smiled. “I haven’t had even half the experiences with the paranormal that you have, Charlotte. This was my only encounter with something unusual before I met your sister. But I know this is real. I know that my request was answered. And if it can happen for me, it can happen for you, too.”

“But my mother isn’t dead,” I murmured, feeling the slippery surface of the balloon between my fingers.

Mills put his hand over mine. I looked up at him, at his kind eyes sheltered behind thick glasses. “Doesn’t matter. If you need a sign that she’s okay, then you should ask for it.”

I gave him back the piece of balloon and watched as he placed it carefully within the folds of his wallet.

I wanted a sign so badly, an assurance that in the end, everything would be fine. But I didn’t know how to ask for it. Would I even recognize a sign if it was right outside my window? I winced, remembering that the only thing sitting outside my window at night was a dark shadow creature. And it wasn’t giving off positive vibes. Maybe it was a warning that things would not be okay. Maybe it was waiting for me to accept that.

Fast footsteps came down the hallway and we stood, ready for the doctor’s prognosis. I reached for Mill’s hand, glad that he was with me. Perhaps I didn’t need a sign when I had the support of a good friend.

But it would be nice.

Chapter Three

It was the medication. The doctor told me and Mills that they had tried—with Dad’s approval—a new kind of medication and that Mom had experienced “an adverse reaction” to the concoction. She was fine, the doctor assured us, and they would return her to the original drugs. I was relieved and anxious to see her. Minutes later, when Shane and Dad arrived, the diagnosis was repeated. Shane got angry, but Dad was surprisingly calm. “It’s my fault,” he told Shane, and I hung my head because I knew that, in the end, it was really my fault Mom was lying in the hard hospital bed. That guilt hung around my neck like an albatross, weighing me down with every step I took.

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